The Decommission Agent

by Nash, Lisa

  She smiled and polished off her glass of wine. “I think your Dr. Green is too smart for his own good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s made a mistake.”

  “In what way?”

  “He’s used his brain to recreate bio-synthetic units outside of this facility.”

  “So?”

  “So, you said it yourself. He needs the right equipment. You can’t just buy that equipment anywhere.”

  “Well, no…” he said trying to follow her logic. “I don’t suppose you can, but…”

  “Craig, get on the phone with our suppliers and find out if they’ve had any interested buyers lately. I want to know who’s recently purchased what we normally purchase. If we use a special fucking kind of paperclip, I better know who else has purchased that paper clip in the last three months, understand?”

  He nodded. “You might be on to something…”

  “You goddamn better believe it! Now get off your ass and start digging!”

  He stood and rushed out of her office.

  She poured herself another glass of wine and finally felt a slow stream of relief trickle through her veins. She had outsmarted the fucking brilliant Dr. Albert Green. She was sure of it.

  -60-

  The Senator sat in his office rubbing his eyes. He was exhausted by the day, by the secrets he fought to keep. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know if he had the energy to go on. It was all just too much.

  He turned on the television and got the tail end of a story about his son. His boy had been anointed a superstar in politics. He had the looks, the brains, and the skill. He was perfect, tailor-made for the highest office in the land.

  Only the Senator and a handful of people knew that his son was half tailor-made. Born to a bio-syn and, as a result, not fully human, and by most people’s standards, not human at all. That was the law the Senator helped pass decades ago. It was what everyone wanted. The Right demanded they not be recognized as human because only God could make a human. The Left used their opposition’s religious ties to their advantage by pushing through unrelated social programs through a series of compromises. And, Grant demanded that they not be recognized as human because it was illegal to own other humans. One drop of bio-synthetic humanoid blood very simply meant you weren’t human at all. If you weren’t human, you had no rights.

  A video clip of his son delivering a speech in a factory played on the screen. He talked about the rights of the working class being subverted by corporations in the name of profits. The hard work of the men and women on the manufacturing lines all across the country was being used to fund corruption and greed in Washington so the politicians would deregulate, deregulate and deregulate and allow CEOs and stockholders to fill their pockets with uncapped riches. The workers put in their hours to feed their families off meager wages while their bosses cashed in their bonuses to buy one more yacht or one more sub-orbital spacecraft. Arthur Trelow, III was going to put an end to it. He was going to make sure the workers got their fair share. The people could count on him.

  The Senator almost laughed because he knew his son could not count on the people if they knew what he was. He switched the television to the security camera input and maximized the view of the camera at the gate guardhouse. A half smile slowly formed on his face as he watched his assistant, totally nude, enter the guardhouse and seduce the unsuspecting young security officer.

  He looked at his watch and nearly lost his smile when he realized this would all be over soon.

  -61-

  It didn’t take long for Anders to track down a sale of specialized hydraulic tubing from one of their suppliers to an unknown buyer. After a few minutes of issuing threats and lambasting them for not notifying Grant Bio-Synthetic of the sale, the supplier turned over all the billing information they had on the buyer.

  The problem was that it wasn’t very helpful. The address was to a storage warehouse on the other side of the country. The name of the company was Fabrication Utility Chimera Kozen Universal. He had never heard of it. The more he studied the name the more ridiculous it sounded. He zeroed in on the first letter of each word and chuckled to himself when he spotted the acronym F.U.C.K.U. “Fuck you, too,” he whispered.

  He buzzed his assistant and instructed her to locate the phone number of the storage warehouse. Maybe someone there remembers something about the good folks at F.U.C.K.U. He leaned back in his chair chuckled again. “Clever,” he said. “Very clever.”

  -62-

  Over the next two hours they fucked five times. Thomas could not get enough of her. As soon as he came, he took a breath, rolled over and waited for his cock to go limp. Instead, a single solitary question kept popping up in his head. “Why aren’t I inside of her where I belong?”

  It was a raw, animalistic need that felt as right as anything had ever felt. What he was doing was physically impossible, yet he was doing it, and Cora was drunk from the passion of it. Whenever he pulled out to momentarily regroup from one orgasm to the next, she felt a sense of panic rush through her. She needed him intensely. If he took a second too long to re-enter her, she climbed on top of him and took matters into her own hands, riding him so ferociously he thought a fire would ignite from the friction.

  Their time together was melting away, and they knew it. He knew it because he had been informed of their timeline from the beginning. She knew out of instinct. She felt it deep in her heart that what they had wasn’t meant to last. She couldn’t verbalize it. She just knew their forever was almost gone.

  It was sex out of a sense of desperation. It wasn’t fulfilling in the least. Maybe in the beginning, but as time passed it was about squeezing out all the passion they could before it was over. There was a thought or hope in the beginning that it would silence the doubt in their heads; the doubt that what they had wasn’t timeless. And, during the throes of passion, the doubt did disappear temporarily, but it always returned.

  Eventually, even the enhanced hormonal production created by their finely tuned pheromones and resonance match needed a rest. She collapsed on his chest and fell into a deep sleep, while he lay in a post-sex stupor that seemed to slow the world to a manageable crawl. For a brief moment, he felt like it gave them more time together.

  He gathered his thoughts and carefully extracted himself from the cot without waking her. Slipping on his jeans and shoes, he exited the room and wandered the halls of the dilapidated facility until he found the kitchen. It had been some time since he had eaten and given his activity level for the last couple of hours, he needed to refuel.

  He was two bites into his apple when Duncan entered the room. “Decided to come up for air, kid?”

  Thomas looked at him with a look of embarrassment. “What?”

  “Your girl isn’t exactly quiet.”

  “Oh…I… I… I…”

  “Relax, kid. I get it. We all do. It’s not something you can really control. That’s the beauty of the whole bio-synthetic industry as it is presently structured. It is what we call sex-centric. The doc’s not real wild about it, but I have to say I am a big fan.”

  Thomas hesitated before saying, “But you’re a bio-synthetic.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I don’t know. I mean isn’t it kind of demeaning? Grant Bio-Synthetic basically creates sex slaves… and they’re your… kind.”

  Duncan considered Thomas’ statement as he retrieved an apple of his own. “My kind? You think your girl and me are the same… kind?”

  “Aren’t you? You’re both bio-synthetic.”

  He took a bite of his apple and talked as he chewed. “We both got here in basically the same way. We started out as a mixture of elements blended together in painfully precise measurements. We were then placed into a vacuumed tight box and exposed to a constant stream of low electromagnetic currents that eventually created small doses of controlled radioactive impulses that mimicked what the doc calls the ‘quantum life force.’ He’s got so
me scientific name for it.. QLF-333 or some shit like that. Whatever you call it, it turns that chemical mixture into a batch of stem cells, virtually no different than the embryonic stem cells created when a sperm fertilizes an egg. In fact, the only way it’s different is that it’s better. Those QLF-333 stems cells are then used to design synthetic humanoids. Some of us were designed with kick-ass personalities like me and others were designed with a perky set of cans like your girl, so in that sense, your Cora unit, and I are the same kind.” He took another bite of his apple. “But I was designed with something extra that makes me different.”

  “What?”

  “Doc gave me a soul.” With that, he stood and left the room with a self-satisfied smile.

  -63-

  Senator Trelow had been called soulless many times in his life. He wasn’t, of course. He had a soul. It was just very, very dark.

  Some people might look at that as a character flaw, but he thought it was anything but. It was his greatest characteristic. He got things done. He changed the world because he was focused on goals and not the people who were destroyed in order to achieve those goals. Great men are remembered for their achievements not for their selflessness.

  He sat peering out his office window watching a mother duck and her ducklings waddle around the pond nearest his house. His cell phone was still in his hand even though he’d ended his conversation with Denise Harvey some 30 minutes before.

  She had informed him of Anders’ finding. A storage warehouse in San Francisco was the recipient of some specialized tubing that was only used in the Grant Bio-Synthetics incubation process. A representative from a company called Fabrication Utility Chimera Kozen Universal had purchased it from the supplier 24 months ago and then again 6 months later. The same person picked up the parts both times from the warehouse. This individual, a man, presented a F.U.C.K.U. company ID with the name John Smith. The company and the name, of course, were both phonies.

  “How did he pay?” the Senator asked.

  “Electronic money order. I checked. It’s untraceable.”

  “So, you called me to inform me about a dead-end lead?”

  “No, sir,” Harvey said, “It wasn’t a dead-end at all. Anders has cooled on it, but I decided to dig a little deeper.”

  “And you found something?”

  “I did. It occurred to me that not just anyone could order that tubing. There are very specific credentials needed to buy it. For one thing, you have to be certified as a level 4 biotech specialist. It takes quite a bit of testing and experience to reach that level. Certification comes with a government issued biotech ID number.”

  “So whoever purchased it had to provide their ID number.”

  “Well, they can use their own ID number or if the company they work for has a group ID number they can simply use that, which is what happened in this case…”

  “But you said the company is phony.”

  “It is. They used the Grant Bio-Synthetic group number.”

  The Senator processed the information. “So, it was Dr. Green…”

  “Not likely,” Harvey said. “The biotech certification program was instituted ten years after he was institutionalized.”

  “Are you saying that this John Smith somehow snuck in and infiltrated Grant…”

  “No, sir, I’m saying John Smith is an employee of Grant Bio-Synthetic. That group number is under the ownership of the purchasing department. It is purposely kept secret from all other employees. Our level 4 biotech specialists don’t even know the number. Given the security built around the number, it has to be somebody in the purchasing department or someone with authorization to examine purchasing department records.”

  “I see. And what is it you’re doing to identify this John Smith?”

  “I’m checking the travel records of all employees with access to that information. I’m looking for both personal and business related trips to San Francisco that occurred 24 and 18 months ago.

  Satisfied that Harvey was on top of things, the Senator hung up the phone after issuing a slap on the back for a job well-done followed by a vague threat that she better not drop the ball.

  The ducks entered the water, and his dark soul lit up. He turned quickly and pressed the button on the intercom console on his desk.

  His personal chef’s voice crackled out of the small speaker. “Yes, Senator?”

  “I’ve had a brilliant idea for dinner tonight, Michael.”

  “Or course, Senator. Whatever you wish.”

  “Duck.”

  -64-

  Thomas found Dr. Green in a small room at the end of a short corridor. He was huddled over a tablet scanning through documents. The aging scientist turned when he heard his son enter. “Thomas, my boy…”

  “Give Cora a soul.”

  Dr. Green looked at Thomas with a look of bewilderment. “A what?”

  “A soul. You gave Duncan a soul. Cora deserves one, too.”

  “A soul…?” The scientist flashed a small smile when he figured out what Duncan was referring to. “I’m afraid Duncan has mischaracterized the difference between himself and most other bio-synthetics. What he calls a soul is simply free will.”

  “Free will?”

  “Yes, you see Grant Bio-Synthetic suppresses the free will gene in their units. They aren’t as malleable if they can think for themselves.”

  Thomas returned the smile. “Cora has free will. She told me she loved me.”

  Dr. Green clasped his hands together and raised up on his toes. “Oh, yes, yes, indeed. That could be a sign that she has free will. Oh my yes.”

  “Could be?”

  “Well, we should consider that it is simply a malfunction. A simple hiccup in the centers that create oxytocin and nerve growth factors. In spite of all our advancements, imperfection still does exist. Anomalies do happen.”

  Thomas shook his head. “This isn’t an anomaly. She thinks for herself. She loves me. I mean, for real.”

  Dr. Green placed his hand on Thomas’ shoulder. “I truly hope she does, my boy.”

  Thomas hesitated and then asked the question that had to be asked. “Did my mother love you?”

  Dr. Green sighed. “I don’t know, Thomas. I don’t know.”

  “Did she have free will?”

  He nodded. “That she did. Too much, perhaps. I’ve never met a more headstrong person in my life. Stubborn. I must admit I did cheat a bit when it came to your mother’s… soul.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He leaned in and whispered, “I’m the only one that knows this, so don’t tell. I created an auditory suggestion that unleashed her capacity to think for herself. I simply had to speak a phrase over and over again, and she was released from her conditioning.” He snickered. “I fixed it so every unit Grant Bio-Synthetic created is susceptible to an auditory suggestion that gives them free will. There are millions of phrases that are randomly assigned during the incubation process. I hid it so deeply in their coding it’s undetectable. Unfortunately, I’d have to have access to their incubation records in order to identify the phrase associated with the unit.”

  “Wait, so all I have to do is speak a certain phrase to Cora, and she’ll have free will.”

  “Yes, but I’m afraid the exact phrase is unknown to us without her incubation records.”

  Thomas frowned. How was he going to get his hands on those records?

  “Why are you so unhappy? I’m sure you’re right. Your Cora already has free will.”

  Thomas forced a smile and nodded. He wanted that to be true, but he didn’t know for sure. He wanted to be certain she had free will. He had to be certain.

  -65-

  Dr. Grant had closed her eyes for just a few minutes when the door to her office burst open. Anders entered in a huff.

  “What the hell…?”

  “Someone hacked into my calendar.”

  She sat up straight. “When?”

  “Not more than five minutes ago.”

 
“How do you know?”

  “I set my system up to alert me whenever my data is accessed, even if it’s me accessing it. Just an extra layer of security.”

  Dr. Grant stood.”Did you alert Denise?”

  “No need,” Denise Harvey said entering the room with two of her men. “I accessed Mr. Anders’ calendar.”

  Anders didn’t conceal his outrage. “What on Earth for? You had no right…”

  “Respectfully, sir, you are the one who doesn’t have any rights. As an employee of Grant Bio-Synthetic, everything used to carry out your duties is the property of the company, including your calendar.”

  “What’s going on, Denise?” Dr. Grant asked.

  “I’m following up on Mr. Anders earlier storage warehouse lead.”

  “They didn’t know anything,” Anders said. “I questioned them myself.”

  “True,” the head of security said. “They knew very little. However, because of the purchasing requirements for the tubing involved, I was able to determine that the buyer had access to our acquisitions authorization group ID information.”

  Dr. Grant narrowed her gaze. “Are you saying the person who bought the tubing worked for this company?”

  “Initially I thought so, yes,” Harvey said. “But we found no evidence of any Grant Bio-synthetic employee being in San Francisco on the date the tubing was picked up from the warehouse.”

  “That’s why you accessed Craig’s calendar,” Dr. Grant said.

  “And yours,” Harvey said.

  “Mine?” the chairman of the board said sounding entirely outraged.

  “Better to remove all doubt than to leave any lingering questions,” Harvey said.

  Dr. Grant collected herself and said, “So we’re at square one…”

  “No, ma’am,” Harvey said. “I checked the calendars of every Grant employee with authorization to the information needed to purchase the tubing, but I have been unable to check the whereabouts of the only other person with access to that information.”