“This is the Doc’s gift to me, brother. I asked him to arrange it. Our father will be in a state of bliss now until he dies. Are you pleased with me?”
“Ah, yes.”
“Let’s go,” he says, bored after a few minutes.
Back in the limo he tells the driver to take us to the mansion of the late Lord Sakagorn. Now I realize the meeting with our father has tripped some fuse in him; anything from the soft, mediocre, human zone puzzles and disturbs him. Me, for example, I puzzle and disturb him considerably.
“How was I the other night?” he asks. “Not too military, I hope?”
“At the shooting of the HZ? You were perfect, efficient, brilliant, commanding, responsible with terrific leadership.”
“I was sweating it, I can tell you. It would only have needed one more HZ to beat us. No way we could have coped with two or more, they would have torn us apart. I was seriously intimidated. Did you see the teeth on that thing?” He casts me a regretful look. “I’m being frank here, they’re better than me. Stronger, faster, more ruthless. They could beat me to a pulp with one hand tied behind their backs-naturally that was always the sales line the Russians used with the Chinese.”
“You’ve met HZs socially-the enemy?”
“Sure. It’s not like you think. The transhuman community is…eccentric. Sometimes there are mutant conventions in remote places that I attend along with HZs. It’s quite jolly, the HZs play chess all the time.”
“HZs play chess?”
“They’re fanatics, you can’t keep them away from the board. They allow less than one second per move, the games play at lightning speed, and they can hold an intelligent conversation at the same time, except when they get drunk on vodka and start singing. That can really drive you to suicide, when they try to sing-those barbarians didn’t even try to produce vocal cords capable of basic harmony. Their bodies are unbelievably strong, though-they would have won the contract years ago except that the Chinese learned of a serious flaw. They start to go into decline after about five years-and there’s no way of telling exactly when or how. They tried to convince the Chinese that we had the same problem, that’s why they had one impersonate me like that.”
“What do they do with them after five years?”
“Unclear. Probably Polonium has them shot and they salvage the high-tech parts for recycling.”
I take a couple of beats to process the implications. I guess it won’t be long before artificial organs leave the dead bodies automatically and make their way to the nearest depot. “You were really scared that night?”
“Shitless, frankly. How can anyone look on that and still find meaning in life?”
“But you took control perfectly.”
He nods. “That’s the programming, they drummed it into us, the military mind. But I always feel bad after a performance like that. It’s such a violation of higher intelligence, all those straight lines and sharp corners it plants in your skull. Doc Bride warned me about it. We discussed it a lot.”
“You discussed with Dr. Bride the future structure of your mind, your personality?”
“Certainly. I was the building site and the junior architect both. Almost from the start. He warned me, you see, that a clash would come between the stuff he’d crammed into my head and the stuff the military would cram in. But he was sure the chemicals and the inserts would cause an acceleration of development that would lead me to drop the military side eventually and become a world spiritual leader. Play your Gandhi against their Stalin, he advised me.” He smiles. “He said I would have to be Christ to survive.” He shrugs. “He would have preferred Apollo or Zeus or Zoroastrer or Krishna, and frankly so would I, but he felt compelled to take revenge on his mother by manufacturing his own Jesus…Complicated fellow, the Doc. He trained as a Freudian, you know, before he switched to Jung.”
He gives me a smile oozing with kindness, fondness, spiritual goodwill, preparedness to die for me, a fraternal adoration that will last an eternity, an utterly convincing beam of divine love; then he turns it off. “Christ is as good as any, I guess, and there’s very good product recognition. We can build on that. It’s a lot easier than starting from scratch, and I’ll only have to flash a few miracles, just like two thousand years ago, and most of the seven billion suckers on the planet will fall for it.”
“I see. What will you use for corporate identity? Will you stick with the Cross?”
“Oh, no. Just like two thousand years ago, we’ll take a universal symbol, something with total worldwide recognition as had the Cross in its day-and tweak it a bit.”
“What symbol would that be?”
“An S with two vertical strokes, of course.” I gasp. “Shall I tell you why you gasped just then, dear brother? Because at that very moment you saw that our little project is not only possible but inevitable. Indeed, it has already started. Is it not so?”
I shake my head in wonder. “You’re really going to start a new world religion, take over the earth?”
“Depends.” He grins. “I might hate the paperwork. But I’m not going to hang around in the CIA’s program any longer, that’s for sure. I’m bored with it even if there are oodles of dough to be made. They’ll have to find some other mutant to sell to the Chinese. Anyway, like I said, it’s still basically Doctor’s orders. He’s not greedy, all he wants is world dominance before he dies.”
–
We get out at Sakagorn’s mansion and the Asset leads me to the large garden at the back. There is a long covered swing that kids and adults alike might use to relax in the shade. We sit in it together and he plays a game of using one arm to pull and push the double swing to its limits, holding us out almost horizontally for a full five minutes before slowly letting the seat come down again with total control. He gives me a sheepish look.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t show off, should I?”
“Do you need to?”
He gives me the divine smile. “It’s all your fault, for being such a perfect elder sibling, it makes me a little giggly. But we are still not fully bonded, are we? I’m not sure. From time to time you look bewildered, my brother. Sometimes you have an expression on your face that tells me I’m violating some cultural rule of intimacy they never told me about. I wouldn’t know, we didn’t do a lot of love training at the camp. There were tons of torchlight processions down into the depths of the cave, with cannibalism as a kind of ultimate consummation. That was the big event: eating someone else.”
He pauses and rebuilds the adoring smile. “Shall I tell you a secret? I first saw you from a distance some time ago-more than a month. Goldman pointed you out. We were in Soi Cowboy and you were about to enter your mother’s bar. The minute I saw you I knew that you were my brother. I was stunned. I knew you immediately. It was my baptism in the Jordan, that’s when I became the Messiah of this age. After that I couldn’t stop myself, every few days I would slip back to the soi to take pictures of you. I must have taken over a hundred on that iPhone. It was such fun spying on you like that. And then making sure you received the phone-and the Doc’s number in Contacts. I was in agony for days wondering when you’d finally get through to him. The old fool turns his phone off when he wants to think about something. Or when he’s on one of his opium binges. Or when he’s on acid-especially when he’s on acid and…Well, he’s a different man. I expect he struck you as a wonderful, eccentric, brilliant, charming, highly polished old English gent, did he not? Those are merely relics of a personality he used to own, before Angkor. He needs opium to keep up the pretense. Acid reveals the truth.”