Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (23 page)

“That turn the user into a splatter of pulled pork when they fail.”

“I can fix Raiden. I know I can. The flaw is in the software that stabilizes the capacitor, I was working on a fix when the project was shut down. I was
close,
Mr. Livingston. I believe if I still had access to the right facilities I would have done it by now. But I lack the facilities, because I lack the funds. So I am seeking out a partner with, let us say, an excess of funds.”

“And if the government finds out you're doing this…”

“They will kill me, and everyone I showed Raiden to.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I assure you, I have many bidders waiting, Mr. Livingston.”

“You have many bidders who have fifty million dollars on hand to throw at an illegal weapon project that may not even work?”

“Yes.”

“So you're talking about underground arms dealers, right? Guys who want to buy this up and sell it to third-world dictators and terrorists?”

“I also have Russian mobsters, cartel bosses, Cambodian insurgents, and Sub-Saharan African warlords. And one real estate tycoon who is most well known for showing up pantsless to the groundbreaking ceremony for his own casino. So you must understand, Mr. Livingston, that at this point I am as curious as you. I know what those other men want to use Raiden for. The fact that I don't know what you want it for actually makes me more nervous.”

“Who's to say I don't just want to keep it out of the hands of those other men? Maybe I don't want a world full of flying superterrorists who can rip airliners to pieces with their bare hands.”

“That is a lot to pay for a clean conscience.”

“A clean conscience is expensive, it's the reason most men have to live paycheck to paycheck.”

“So you are saying you're offering to pay me the money to
not
finish my research? Your goal is to bury it?”

“I didn't say that. I'll get you your facility. I'll get you the nano-whatever fabricators. Whatever you need.”

“And when I get it all working, what happens then?”

“That's my business. Who knows, maybe I want to implant all this stuff, put on a cape, and go fight crime.”

 

TWENTY-ONE

The feed went to black and Zoey started to take off the glasses. Armando asked her what the hell was going on, but another video started and she shushed him once more.

The date on this recording was about two months ago. The feed picked up inside a moving car, rolling through downtown Tabula Ra$a. Will Blackwater was behind the wheel, and the camera had started recording him in mid-sentence.

“… I guess a lot of them got moldy in storage, they're all canvas you know, and the Tenth Street warehouse flooded last spring. They're fine, they just smell bad. They'll air out by Halloween.”

Arthur, who once again was unseen behind the camera, said, “And the snow, you get that all lined out?”

“Had to reserve five more machines from a resort in Park City for some obscene amount of money, but yes it's all a go. Echo has the running itemization if you want to check out what this is costing you.”

“Why would I ever want to do that?”

And then, Will did something Zoey had never seen him do in the couple of days she had known him: he smiled. Will cranked the wheel and shifted into park, driving the car the old-fashioned way. They had arrived, but the camera's viewing angle didn't make it clear where they were.

Arthur said, “You do a good job, Will. All of you do. I don't say it enough.”

“Yes, when it comes to party planning, you probably won't find three, four billion people in the world better at it than me.”

“You know what I mean, smart-ass. I appreciate what you guys do, just, day to day.”

There was a silence that Will seemed uncomfortable with. Finally he said, “That's Singh's car, right? Are we waiting for somebody else?”

“Just goin' over the game plan in my head. I need to relax, I didn't do my yoga this morning.”

Will laughed. Some kind of private joke between them.

“Here,” said Arthur, “do the thing with the coin.”

Arthur's hand came into frame, palming the one-sided “lucky” coin Arthur had made a point of leaving to Zoey. Will took it and showed it to the camera, holding it between finger and thumb. He passed his other hand in front of it, and it was gone. He held up both hands like a magician, showing they were empty, the coin nowhere to be found.

“Amazing. Even knowing how you do it, I can't see you do it.”

Will, without cracking a smile, reached down the front of his pants and produced the coin.

Arthur laughed and said, “Jesus, I don't want it back now. That was never part of the trick before, letting it touch your balls. If I'd known that, I'd just given you a regular quarter.” Will kept offering it back and Arthur said, “No, no! It's all yours now.”

“It didn't touch my balls, Art, it was hidden in my hand. That's the trick.”

“Still … I want you to keep it. Seriously.”

Will's face froze. He wasn't touched by this gesture, or amused, or grateful. His eyes were watching Arthur carefully, unblinking. Trying to read the man.

“Art … what's going on?”

“Don't make a big deal of it. The whole lucky coin bit, it was always a silly affectation. I'm not even superstitious, you know that. It was just a conversation starter. I can't even do tricks with it, not like you. You keep it: make up an interesting backstory. Tell girls in bars that you got it off a soldier in Korea or something. Then do that magic trick and you'll hear panties dropping from across the room.”

Another pause. Those blue eyes watching: the brain behind them running through scenarios.

Finally, Will said, “Why don't I come with you?”

“We're not having that conversation again. Singh demanded confidentiality on this thing and I don't want to spook him. As soon as we have a working device we can take to market, trust me, you'll be the first to see a demonstration. As for this, it's probably nothing. He called in a bit of a panic, but Singh panics over everything. He's always paranoid the government is gonna finally come after him.”

“Are they?”

“I'll see you back at the house. And stop worrying. Life's too short.”

The camera tracked with Arthur as he stood up and closed the door of the car—Zoey saw it was Will's Astin Martin—and a warehouse came into view as Arthur turned to face it. Presumably this was the building as it had existed before the mysterious event that turned it into a charred crater. He took several steps toward a back door and dug into his front pocket for a set of keys, but when his hand emerged, it was holding his lucky coin—Will having slipped it back to him at some point, using some bit of sleight of hand. Arthur barked out a laugh. He turned to see the Astin Martin's taillights vanishing around a corner.

The feed cut to black, then a split second later, Zoey thought the glasses were just glasses again—the view was of the bedroom, as seen from right where she was sitting. But there was still a date stamp hovering in the corner, marked as having been recorded ten days ago, and the room was no longer in disarray. She was just watching a feed that had been recorded from the very spot where she was watching it.

Zoey flinched as a hand came up into view, as if she had a phantom limb. The hand was holding Arthur's lucky coin. The other hand came into view and he tried to do Will's magic trick. The coin tumbled into Arthur's lap.

Arthur's voice said, “I hope I've done this right. If I'm heading toward, well, what I think I'm heading to, then there's a better than even chance this will be my last day. And that's okay, because if I do this right, I'll spend this last day saving the world. Granted, I'll be saving it from something I myself unleashed, so you know, don't build any monuments to me for it.” He let out a long breath and said, “All right, no speeches. Let's just do it.”

The view jumped inside a cavernous building, which Zoey assumed was the warehouse she'd previously only seen from the outside. Arthur strolled between rows of tall metal shelves, three stories of bags and boxes and barrels looming overhead. He passed a row of dormant forklifts plugged into wall chargers, before finally arriving at a utility closet full of janitor supplies. He issued a voice command that caused the back wall of the closet to slide open, revealing an elevator. Arthur went down one floor, then down a hall and through a full body scan security airlock—the scanner between a series of steel doors thick enough to blunt a nuclear warhead. This, Zoey realized, was the real warehouse. Everything above it was camouflage.

When the final door rumbled open, Arthur was greeted by a massive bloodstain that covered the concrete floor.

Zoey heard a sigh from Arthur. Saddened by what he was about to see, but not surprised.

He stepped cautiously around the crimson stain and the view panned over to see a toppled wheelchair that was also soaked in blood, tossed against one wall. Arthur found Singh's legs jutting out from behind a crate, then the view panned around again and found Singh's torso sprawled behind a forklift across the room. Arthur moved slowly but deliberately into the room, entering a space full of workbenches and elaborate machines, some of which were the size of houses, one shaped like a big robotic caterpillar. He crossed the room and approached one more doorway, this one standing open. Behind it came the muffled sound of giggling and wet, ripping noises.

Arthur and his camera passed into a long open room that looked like a shooting range. At one end hung four pig carcasses, dangling from meat hooks. Standing among them was a young guy who had his back to them. He was shirtless, with long flowing blond hair, wearing a backward baseball cap and jeans. He bulged with tanned muscles—he looked like he'd borrowed the photoshopped body of a model on a billboard.

Zoey would forever have to live with the fact that this was her first impression of Molech: admiring his rippling back muscles, beach-tan biceps, and a perfect butt under worn jeans. And she was sure this was Molech, mainly because he had the letters M O L E C H tattooed across his back.

In Molech's right hand was another hand. Most of an arm, actually—everything from the elbow up, as if he had severed it from someone's body and carried it around as a keepsake. For a horrified moment Zoey thought he had hacked it off of Singh's corpse, but as the view got closer it became clear that the severed limb was made of rubber, or plastic. A prosthetic. Molech was using it as a weapon—he reached back, shoved the hand through the rib cage of the nearest pig with a crunch of snapping bones. He twisted it around inside and with a series of wet, sucking squishes, pulled the hand out of the ragged wound, which was now clutching a pink and yellow mass of organs in its fist.

Molech laughed uproariously and said, “Dude, this is
orgasmic
!”

He couldn't have been any older than Zoey. There was another man watching him, a bearded black guy who looked a bit older than Molech, but who probably still hadn't seen thirty. Standing around the room were four other musclemen holding shotguns and watching Molech play—there didn't seem to be an ounce of body fat in the room. Molech turned and looked toward Arthur and the camera. He smiled, and swung the prosthetic arm toward the floor, discarding the wad of guts with a wet slap. The fingers flexed on their own, with a mechanical whirr.

“Artie Livingston! As I live and breathe! Dude, I have to shake your hand!”

Molech extended the prosthetic limb toward Arthur, as if to shake with it. The mechanical fingers flexed. Molech giggled.

Arthur declined the shake and said, “I don't believe we've met.”

“Nope, but I bet you've heard of me. They call me Molech.”

“Who's ‘they'?”

Molech gestured toward the black guy with the beard and said, “This is my right-hand man, Black Scott. And don't call me racist, that's the name he gave himself.”

In the background, Black Scott shook his head and silently mouthed, “Nope.”

“Oh, and sorry about your friend back there. It was self-defense, I swear! Dude kept tryin' to run me over in his wheelchair. And by that point, the juice was flowin' and, dude, you just got to ride it out, know what I'm sayin'?”

“Did Singh let you in here?”

Molech used the mechanical hand to scratch his chin and said, “He didn't, the ingrate. And we go way back, too! See, a while back I put in a bid for all his awesome toys, but some rich bastard outbid me! You wouldn't know anything about that, would you? Ha!”

Molech walked over to an empty oil drum, grabbed it with the disembodied hand, and watched as the fingers effortlessly tore a chunk out of the side, the metal squealing as it ripped like construction paper. Molech giggled until he couldn't breathe.

“So, who did let you in?”

“Not everybody on your team is as loyal as you think, Artie. See, there's two ways of keepin' everybody in line, they can be scared of you, or they can be your buddy. Sounds to me like you do it the second way. The problem with that is, they turn on ya the moment you piss 'em off. Me, I run a tight ship. Everybody knows the score—stick with me, you live like a king, you cross me, I put your ass in Hell.”

“So, what can I do for you?”

“You've already done it, my man. You just didn't know it. Though I got to say, you got a way better setup in here than I got. Way more floor space.”

“So … you have your own workshop? Someone leaked the Raiden tech to you. Was it Singh?”

“Dude, I'm so juiced out I can barely think straight. You ever felt it, Artie? You ever felt the juice? Or has it been so long that you don't remember?”

“I suspect you intend to kill me, Molech. But I can tell you now that I think there is more to be gained by keeping me alive. I am a man of means and even if Singh was leaking designs to you, you don't have everything. I don't think you really want to do what you came to do.”