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Anti-Hero

Page 6

by Jonathan Wood


  Total interface bodyscaping. At least now I know what I’m going to wake up screaming about at four in the morning.

  “And here we are, dudes.” Gran steers the car off the road, and down into a narrow chute with a sign proclaiming PUBLIC PARKING. $23.75.

  We swing down ramp after ramp. The world is lit by strips of moldering yellow neon. Graffiti becomes increasingly inventive.

  “Home, sweet home,” Gran says.

  The parking garage’s bottom floor is inhabited solely by cars covered with dust sheets. Most of the neon strips have gone out, leaving the place shadowy and desolate. The mad bustle of New York suddenly feels very far away.

  Gran pulls into a grimy looking parking spot. I stare out the window, but it’s hard to make anything out through the gloom. I pop my buckle and go to open the door.

  “Wouldn’t do that, dude.”

  And then the bottom falls out of the world.

  10

  There is a flash of light and a grinding of machinery, and then darkness falls again. Darker shadows flick by the windows and the pit in my stomach is still opening.

  I do not… I wouldn’t call it a shriek. But it might be a rather high-pitched gasp. Fortunately for my pride, I am not the only one.

  Then comes a juddering halt, and our movement becomes lateral. I grab the car door as we are shunted sideways, and the car rocks to a halt.

  “Sorry,” says Gran. “Totally should have told you about that. But, you know, this way was more fun.”

  Rather than darkness, the car now sits in a light airy space. There is a clean, space-age sheen to the light gray walls, the broad lights that shed clean blue light. Neat ranks of cars identical to ours sit in the sort of shining rows that seem reserved for Turtle Wax advertisements.

  “Jesus,” Tabitha mutters looking at the volume of other cars as we get out of our own. “Must be tons of you.”

  “Well,” Gran shrugs. “You know, like, we’re a pretty small department.”

  “How many?” I can’t see why they would need fifty of these cars all lined up.

  “This office?” Gran shrugs again. “Erm, maybe, like five hundred of us.”

  Holy shit. Five hundred. This office? They have more than one office? Clyde Xeroxing himself effectively doubled the working staff of MI37.

  Felicity nudges me. I slide my eyes over to look at her. She leans her head up and breathes, “This is so cool.”

  A retina scanner—markedly more shiny than ours—opens a sequence of three steel doors, each one a foot thick or more.

  “Feckin’ ridiculous,” Kayla mutters. “Poncy bastards.”

  The open doors reveal a broad corridor that looks as if it was molded from one continuous piece of gray plastic. Everything has a slightly slippery, modern sheen to it. Stripes of bright orange, blue, green, and yellow are painted down the sides of the wall. Orange branches off down a side corridor, blue down another. In the distance the space seems to open up onto something that is either an aircraft hangar or a genetics laboratory. Men and women in labcoats and stark white hazmat suits bustle back and forth. Clipboards and manila folders are clutched.

  Standing just inside the corridor, beaming widely, is one such clipboard-clutcher. He is a short, slightly overweight man, with a round face, circular spectacles, and dark hair plastered to his pate. A wispy mustache is refusing to grow on his upper lip.

  “Ah,” he breathes as we enter. “Our honored guests. So nice to meet you.” He reaches out, shakes each hand in turn. It is a little like trying to shake hands with a dead fish. “Wanted to extend my welcome. I am Basil Kensington, inter-agency liaison. Really did want to meet you at the airport, but I had an unfortunate incident with a jello in my office that needed resolving.”

  As nonsensical as this is, Agent Gran seems to take this as a cue to look off into space and whistle.

  Mr. Kensington grimaces. “You’ve had the erm… pleasure of Agent Monk’s company.”

  “Monk?” Kayla squints angrily at the little man.

  “He means me,” Gran says.

  “Should feckin’ say so then.” Kayla falls back into line.

  I don’t quite have the nerve to point out that he already did. Meanwhile, Felicity’s look shoots enough daggers in Kayla’s direction that I think we should recruit it and make it a field agent.

  Personally, I’m just shocked by this sudden display of verbosity on Kayla’s part. Normally she’s good for about one death threat a day and that’s it.

  “Yes.” Kensington smiles humorlessly. For some reason he makes me think of a sentient cabbage. “Now, I don’t want to be a pest—”

  That’s clearly untrue.

  “—but there is a little bit of paperwork to cover before you go any further. Really should have been signed earlier on but…” Kensington titters lightly then shoots a death stare in Gran’s direction. Gran keeps on whistling. “It’s all very standard stuff. Basic gag order on discussing what you see here. Confidentiality. Agreement for a brain scrub if you breach contract. Giving you temporary access to—”

  “Wait,” I say. “A brain what?”

  “Oh.” Kensington looks up. “A brain scrub. Typical procedure. A general restructuring of the frontal lobes to redact memories and personality.”

  “Redact personality?” I think I understand, but I’m rather hoping I don’t.

  Kensington nods. “It’s standard procedure.”

  Tabitha takes a breath that is clearly going into her lungs purely to pick up the obscenities she keeps there before being flung back into Kensington’s face.

  Felicity quickly steps in front. “That will be fine, Mr. Kensington.”

  “Deputy Liaison Kensington,” he corrects her.

  Felicity closes her eyes. And I know this is a big deal for her. That she wants this to go well. But we have also been dating long enough for me to recognize the expression she wears when she’s forced to deal with imbeciles that she knows she’s not allowed to kill.

  It’s funny, I don’t remember any of my previous girlfriends having that specific one.

  “Sorry,” she manages, “Deputy Liaison Kensington.” She even manages to avoid leaning on the word “Deputy” too heavily. It really is quite impressive and far more than the man deserves. “We’ll happily sign the agreements.”

  A thought occurs to me. “What about the versions?”

  The way Kensington smiles makes me think it causes him pain. “They will be limited to wireless inaccessible devices only for the duration of their stay in the United States,” he says.

  He contorts his face into another smile. “And then once you’ve signed that and we’ve completed the cavity search—”

  Wait. What now?

  “—then I can give you an office tour. I think you’re going to find everything here vastly superior to anything you’re used to back—”

  I think Tabitha and Kayla are about to get into a race to see who can force feed Kensington his own spleen first, and no amount of diplomatizing by Felicity is going to be able to stop it.

  “Oh.” Gran stops whistling abruptly. “Did Majors track you down, dude?”

  And everything stops for a moment. Everyone wondering what the play is here. Felicity looks to Gran the same way an alcoholic eyes up an unattended whiskey bottle. The tentative chance of salvation.

  Kensington is the first to move. He whirls on Gran. “What?”

  “She was totally looking for you earlier. Meant to mention it, but it just… you know.” He taps his head. “Poof.” He shrugs. “Something about a spot inspection in… Crap, what section was it?”

  Kensington turns a shade of purple that I generally associate with internal organs. He starts to splutter as if something inside him is broken.

  Gran steps forward and retrieves the clipboard from Kensington’s suddenly lifeless fingers. “You know what, dude?” he says companionably. “You go track down Majors, and I’ll sort this all out. Divide and conquer. Be awesome.”

  If looks cou
ld kill, Kensington’s would cause Gran’s liver to burst out his chest and attack him with a knife. The deputy liaison whirls away, hips gyrating wildly.

  Gran watches him for a moment, his whistling briefly resumed. He looks down at the clipboard. “You want to skip this and just see the cool shit?”

  “Yes.” Tabitha is definitive.

  Felicity takes the clipboard with a small sigh. “I’ll just sign for all of us.”

  11

  As we go down the corridor I grow no closer to deciding whether the room at its end is a hangar or a lab. I am staring so intently I almost miss a young woman in a military uniform as she emerges from a corridor.

  “Oh, I’m—” I start to apologize and then I stop short. Something profoundly violent has been done to this woman.

  For the most part she looks perfectly normal. Rather pretty in fact—big eyes, pale skin, a small button of a nose, but a great mass of machinery is jutting out the back of her skull. It looks as if an engine block has been smashed into the pale blonde locks that grace her head.

  “Oh, I am sorry,” she says. A TV-perfect American accent. And then she turns and walks away.

  I stand staring after her. The others pause with me, follow my gaze.

  Gran nudges me. “Dude, your girlfriend is, like, right there.”

  Felicity has started to shake her head. I get the impression this is not quite living up to her expectations. But I’m still too distracted by the girl to reassure her.

  “Is she OK?” I say. I stare at the mass of machinery jutting from the woman’s perfectly coiffured mane.

  Gran looks at me, confused. “What do you mean?”

  I am nonplussed by the question. “I mean,” I say, “the big bits of metal in her head. How the hell did that happen? How did she survive?”

  Gran starts laughing. “Seriously, dude?”

  More nonplussing. “Seriously what?”

  “She’s a class five, man,” Gran says, as if this explains everything.

  I go with, “Erm?”

  Gran claps me on the shoulder. “It’s a categorization thing, dude. Taxonomy of life forms. Internal jargon, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Life form. Taxonomy?” Tabitha looks at Gran sharply. “Human?”

  “Class one.” Gran’s hand indicates us all. Tabitha nods as if that makes sense.

  “So she’s…” I look again after the girl. And she was so… Her skin was so real. I could see pores. I saw her eyes widen, startled when I bumped into her. But she’s, “… not a class one?”

  He gives me the benevolent expression Clyde used to give me before readjusting my sense of reality. “Class two is other higher life forms. Birds, beasts, fish, and all of those groovy things. Class three is what we call, you know, lesser life forms. Bit of a judgmental category. But bacteria, viruses, fungi. Class four is extraterrestrial. I mean, we are called Area 51, so we should have something for them.”

  “Yog-Sothoth,” Tabitha says.

  “Bless you,” I say.

  She flaps a hand at me. “Fictional fungi out of space.”

  I am still clueless.

  “Lovecraft. Horror writer. Thirties.”

  And I am familiar with the man. But… No, I don’t see where we’re going.

  “That would be a class three-four hybrid,” Gran says, because he is, apparently, already better at translating Tabitha-speak than I am.

  “But what about class five?” I demand. Hypotheticals are lovely and all, but we still seem to have failed to get to the point.

  Gran looks at me. “Class five is synthetic. Dude, she has half her mechanical brain sticking out the back of her head. What did you think she was?”

  I look again. The girl is just rounding the corner with a rather attractive swing of her hips. Except she’s a robot. A not-person.

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “I know, man,” says Gran. “Bit creepy the first few times, right?”

  And yes, yes I do know. I brought three of them over here on a computer with me. And compared to that thought… A robot is… Well, yes, it is creepy that someone programmed attractively swinging hips. But at least you can reach out and touch her. I mean, not in a sexual way. Just, I could shake her hand if I wanted to. On the scale of creepy things I deal with, she’s not that much of a blip.

  Tabitha is staring at Gran. I have trouble reading the expression. “The money,” she says. “Where does it come from?”

  Felicity rolls her eyes. Maybe this is the inter-agency equivalent of asking the man how much money he makes on the first date.

  “Legacy of JFK and Reagan,” Gran says.

  For once, that sounds like the beginning of an answer I could actually understand.

  “JFK,” Gran continues, “because he was, like, really oddly obsessed with this idea of boning alien chicks. All sort of weird memos about space condoms. I shit you not. And Reagan because… well honestly, man, I don’t think anyone should have let Nixon try to download his personality into the poor actor in the first place. That shit was bound to degrade eventually. And the whole interfacing issues… Nightmare, man. Total nightmare.”

  Or, alternatively it could be another answer that sends me cross-eyed.

  “Feckin’ ponces,” Kayla says, though exactly who or what she’s addressing, I’m not sure.

  “Dudette,” Gran says to Tabitha, ignoring Kayla, “you think this shit is cool, you should see our mecha.”

  “Mecha?” I ask.

  “Suits,” Tabitha says. “Giant robot battle suits.”

  Holy shit. I really do want to see their mecha.

  “Not a patch on what the Japanese have, though,” Gran says with a shrug.

  “Well,” Tabitha says. “Sasaki-san. They have him. You don’t.”

  I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. But apparently Gran does, because his eyes light up like light bulbs.

  “Exactly, man,” he says, in spite of Tabitha’s fairly obvious gender. “Man, no wonder the tech boys want to talk to you.”

  And Tabitha actually smiles. For the first time since Clyde died, she smiles. She may still be wearing her tinfoil-lined hat, but she smiles.

  SEVERAL MIND-BLOWINGS LATER

  I always found the adage “money doesn’t buy you happiness” to be a basic, decent philosophy for life. A good general guide to the workings of the world. On the other hand, having surveyed Area 51… Well, money does buy you some really cool toys.

  Once we are completely bewildered by super computers, laser guns, digital personality constructs, and other space age awesome, Gran leads us to more familiar territory. It is a sad thing to have to admit to yourself that you find comfort in conference rooms, but when your day job involves monster killing and AIs capable of hacking military drones and throwing them at you, your teenage self can just go suck it.

  “I hate to get all Kensington on you dudes,” Gran says, “but we probably should do some work at some point.”

  Felicity smiles. “More than happy to get down to it.”

  I collapse into an ergonomically curved plastic chair next to a conference table that sprouts from the floor like a particularly useful mushroom. Jet-lag is starting to kick in. Still, I get the feeling that this AI issue is a problem that won’t wait to be slept on.

  “So.” Gran takes a position at the head of the table. “The Area dudes and dudettes are thinking your old co-worker Clyde is all responsible and shit for looting our digital coffers.”

  I remember Clyde discovering his digital self, discovering that he didn’t need to sleep anymore. What would that do to someone? Becoming another type of life form. That slow dawning realization that you are not human anymore. I remember Agent Gran’s story of the Roswell incident. The psychological ramifications of turning someone into meat wallpaper. In some ways Clyde’s transformation was as radical. He was a wooden mask. We all thought of him as a person because someone was wearing him. But he was just a mask. Wallpaper for a man’s face.

  Could that h
ave pushed him over the edge? Could Gran and the rest of the Area 51 team be right? They seem to have the resources to make educated guesses.

  “But,” Gran continues, “having figured out, you know, like the whole suspect numero uno thing, where we’re having a less groovy time is the whole actually-understanding-what-the-hell-he’s-up-to thing.”

  I may be grasping at straws, but it strikes me that if they don’t know what Clyde’s doing then the idea that he’s up to no good is just an assumption. And I’ll concede that raiding the US government’s digital coffers may not be the smartest thing to do, but Clyde always was a voracious reader…

  OK, maybe that’s a stretch too far.

  It’s time for a different tack. Back when I was a police officer, I learned you could find out a lot about the perpetrator by looking at the specific crime committed. What was done. How it was done.

  “What’s the AI taking?” I ask. “What’s it reading?”

  Gran looks at me and shrugs. “Anything, man. Everything.”

  The mental gears churn. Trying to get into the head of the villain. It’s a while since I’ve stretched these muscles. The policeman I used to be is a corpse lying on the ground, and here I am administering the breath of life.

  OK. Clyde. Clyde the bad guy. God, there are so many problems with that. But one of them is that for all his bumbling and absent-minded professor routines, he is frighteningly smart. One doesn’t just bumble one’s way into Cambridge University.

  “He could be purposely trying to cover his tracks,” I say.

  Felicity nods, encouraging. Usually a good sign.

  “But if he’s trying to do that,” I’m thinking out loud, “he needs tracks to cover.” Felicity nods again. “Where did he hit first?” I ask.

  Gran presses a seemingly random spot on the conference table, and a panel slides away to reveal a computer keyboard buried in its surface. I blink in surprise. Then he taps a key and I get to blink a whole number more times as one entire wall reveals itself to be a monitor, coming alive with light.

  He scrolls through files, pulls up a document. There is a large “Top Secret” label at the top. Below is a long list.

 

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