She shrugs. “Good question. A lot depends on your half brother, actually.” She smiles. “Like any applied science, once it’s seen to work it can’t be stopped. That’s why I gave in-you can’t fight the future.”
“Which is what?”
“Exactly. That’s the question, isn’t it? Maybe a replay of the fifties when the world and Superman were young and no one in the USA had heard of Vietnam.”
The cab turns into the driveway of Goldman’s apartment building and our conversation ends.
–
Are you familiar with the work of the baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, R? I myself was not and had to fish out my iPhone again to consult the Wiki. It seems he was another Italian murderer, on the run from Rome with a price on his head, literally: anyone who brought his head in a basket to the Pope could expect to receive the reward immediately in gold. In an attempt to express penance by painting his way out of the fix, he did a David with the Head of Goliath in which he features not as the triumphant David but as the head in the basket. For this reason our Asset has given Goldman a false black beard and a long black wig. He must have shaved the head and used strong glue for the wig, because it is hanging by some strands from a bronze statue of-well, you guessed. Where he found a man-size copy of Michelangelo’s David in Bangkok I cannot say. In any event, he was unable to imitate the painting exactly and had to hang the head around David’s neck and so arranged the piece to face us immediately on our opening the front door to Goldman’s apartment. Beheadings are, of course, notorious for the mess they make. The floor is slick with blood pooling in hollows. It is still liquid, though. He must have done Goldman quite recently. Now my iPhone bleeps.
Let us go see our father together, Dear Brother, I would like that and I’m sure he would too. BTW as a professional I do hope you don’t find my work too fussy? I’m feeling just a touch of stage fright.
I show the message to Krom, whose eyes glitter. It must be the drugs she takes that give her a weakness for heroic madness. She shrugs. “Go, you can’t arrest him, he has diplomatic immunity, and anyway the Americans would never allow it, he knows that, he won’t hurt you.”
“But why murder the two people in the world who were closest to him?”
“Ask him when you see him.”
38
I sulked. I hate it that I cannot arrest the Asset; it disgusts me that some kind of elitism is already at work regarding transhumans. It enrages me that he can walk around free; this is Bangkok, not Baghdad. I tell you, R, you only have to come from a semifeudal society to develop an extreme aversion to a future where the whole planet will be under the heel of an aristocracy of Enhanced Ones. Take it from the third world: you really don’t want to go down that road, you’ve forgotten what it’s like, cast your mind back, why did your ancestors get on the Mayflower in the first place? Oh, never mind, I know it’s too late. Anyway, I have to see him, don’t I? I replied to his message with a taciturn OK.
In the meantime the results from the swab tests didn’t come. Instead I received a letter from the Trustee for the Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Kentucky who regretted that the Know the Father Corporation, now in receivership, was being investigated by the FBI, who suspected the KTF of fraud, money laundering, blackmail, conspiracy and intimidation within the meaning of the RICO provisions, and employment of unqualified personnel who posed as technicians: in brief, my swabs would not be processed, and it was unlikely I would get my money back.
I could try again, of course, with another DNA tester, but I don’t think I will. What difference would it make? The search for self is a continuum, what closure can an old man in a coma offer? Of course, I’ve known that forever and chose to ignore it up to now: continuums, you never see them until it’s too late.
–
So Jesus Christ arrives to pick me up at the station in the late Sakagorn’s sky-blue Rolls-Royce, with the deceased lawyer’s driver in livery, of course. It seems that the Asset was already living at Sakagorn’s mansion while the lawyer spent most of his time at a luxury apartment a few miles away. Now the Asset, aka Messiah, treats the mansion, the car, and the driver as his own. I am tight-lipped and cool when I get in the back with him; but he’s the Asset, he’s enhanced, a master of moods. He also speaks Thai perfectly. I want to believe he has been studying it for years; the possibility that he might have become fluent in a month or less is too awful to contemplate. But I remember what Sergeant Lotus Bud said: only a couple of weeks ago the Asset had only basic Thai and they had to communicate in Khmer.
At first I refuse to react to his small talk, but when he makes a pun in Thai that turns the driver to Jell-O (puns are a chronic national weakness: hard men collapse in giggles; we’re not as bad as the Cantonese, but we’re close) I find myself seduced. Why not sit back and enjoy the company of a multiple killer who carves up his long-term workmates to intrigue and charm his elder sibling? After all, he’s Superman. Clearly, he approves of my change of mood.
“You see, my dear, you cannot be angry with me for long. That’s what I always wanted, a blood relation who would forgive my foibles. Even Doc Bride could not foresee that. Do you feel the same way, now we have bonded?”
I decide to check his commitment to our blood brotherhood with a forensic question. “Why did you do them in, Jesus? Exactly, why?”
“Ah! You mean-”
“Goldman and Sakagorn. Surely you haven’t forgotten already?”
“Doctor’s orders. They were about to double-cross the Old Man with a secret deal with China-they were scared the Doc was double-crossing them, so they planned to double-cross him: basic intelligence community stuff. They even tried to buy my compliance-a truckload of dough they offered. How dumb can you get? Couldn’t they figure out that the first programming the Old Man inserted in my brain was loyalty to him? I told him what they were up to and he gave the word. You don’t betray your own creator. I’m not sure he was expecting anything so ornate, though, that was all for you. I have the younger sibling’s need to impress the elder.”
I stare at him. “Killing humans means nothing at all to you, does it? Is that because you do not see us as part of your species?”
He thinks about it. “I do believe you are looking at it the wrong way, dear one. Who on earth gives a damn that Goldman and Sakagorn are dead? My vengeance is just. Their families are much better off now, and Sakagorn’s new young mistress is financially independent-he left her millions in his will. Broaden your view somewhat to include, let’s say, all life on earth, except man. Then broaden it further to include all the life in whatever spiritual spheres you believe in, if any. Then broaden it to include ghosts of the dead, if they exist. Then broaden it to include all the extraterrestrials on all the viable planets in all the cosmos-”
“Yes?”
“So, in none of those areas of research will you find anyone or thing who gives a fuck or a fart for human life. That’s it, you see, the last enhancement is the broadest: humans have no use or importance except insofar as they may one day produce transhumans. There’s no other excuse for their confused and pathetic existence. Fecundity in the production of lab rats aside, there’s nothing humans have that the universe wants. The best they can hope for is a global system presided over by THs who will make the earth run smoothly.” He casts me a glance. “If you don’t agree, name one moral advancement by humanity in the past ten thousand years. The social order and moral code of Stone Age man was far more rigorous and demanding than anything today. Neanderthals would consider a modern human as a psychopathic monkey with gadgets.”
The Asset tells the driver to let us out at the hospital entrance, where everyone stares at the sky-blue limo and the irresistible hunk who gets out. I lead him to the lift that takes us to the head department, which is quiet with dimmed lighting. Jack’s two buddies have already been discharged and it seems they left him there in permanent bliss in accordance with their jungle customs. We stand by the bed of our primogenitor. I have no words for the occasion and neither does the Asset, who stares at the old vet in a state of confusion. I think this could be the first time he’s seen him since childhood and is not prepared for the devastation that time has wrought on that body and face. I think, also, he finds it difficult to imagine that he originates from such stock, for it is as Krom foretold: this Asset has entered a phase of rapid change, his responses are faster, more commanding, more godlike by the day.