Kaleidocide (19 page)

“Bloody hell, Michael,” my friend said, frustrated with me. “I told you we have to do things fast, your life depends on it, and you're gonna have to trust me. There's no other way.” He calmed down, and asked rhetorically again, “Does your nose hurt? Does your head hurt?”

“Actually my head does hurt a little. It reminds me of the feeling I had during the ‘silhouette' incident.”

“When you
didn't
have an implant, but only thought you did.” He shook his head again. “Listen, you can have Min scan your brain if you're gonna worry about this.”

I thought about that for a moment, then said, “No. I'm fine. I'm guess I'm just shaken up by all this. I need some time to process it.”

“That's cool,” he said. “Take your time. But
trust me,
and try to get some sleep. We'll meet the team in the morning when you and Lynn are both awake. And we'll see how good my
Trois
and the Makeover are, and whether she'll be fooled by the double.”

I seriously doubted that would happen. I could never fool Lynn myself, so I didn't think it could be done by someone who was almost me.

 

19

MAKEOVER

I slept a few hours, just enough to meet my body's needs (another ability I still had from my military days), and then stumbled out into the kitchen to check the fridge for some breakfast, even though I knew there was probably nothing in there. I was reminded immediately of Angelee, and how I needed her to shop for me, but the master bedroom was quiet and I wanted to let her and the boy rest as long as they could.

I noticed it was almost 10:00
A.M.
, so I gave up my search of the cabinets and went back into my room. I washed up in the bathroom and called Terrey first, rather than Lynn, because I knew he wanted to have his fun with the double, and I had to admit I myself had a guilty curiosity to see what would happen. Lynn wouldn't be happy with me for being a part of it, but she would recover.

It took me a few minutes to reach my Aussie friend, because he had slept a few hours and was washing up when I called, his military habits exactly mirroring mine. And speaking of mirrors, it took me a minute to realize that I was looking at one when Terrey appeared on my wall screen. He had just finished dressing at the mirror in his room, and was now looking at himself so I could see his face, because he had answered my call in his contacts.

“I know you're not a contacts man,” he said, “but look how natural they are. Nothing to take on and off, and you can see my beautiful face with no obstruction. But for someone who looks like you, I can see why you'd want to cover up some.” He was referring to my preference for glasses over contacts, of course, and we were now having the same conversation that was repeated constantly among people who could afford tech like this.

“Yeah,” I responded, both hearing him and talking to him through his earpiece. “But I have to watch you blink all the time.”

This was the classic criticism of contacts used for such purposes, because the average human being blinks twenty-five times per minute and there was no way to eliminate the effect on the camera function. I had to admit that the blinking effect wasn't really more noticeable than that of normal eyesight, but it was enough to prevent use by law enforcement agencies such as BASS, because of our dependence on complete and accurate video recording in much of our work. The audio recording by glasses was also so much better than even the best contact systems, and many of the latter didn't have audio at all, or had to be augmented through an earpiece like Terrey's. So I was, by necessity, a glasses man. Plus I liked the way I looked in them—it was nice to have a good excuse to wear cool shades at any time—and I liked how no one could see where I was looking when they were darkened.

“And you have to look in the mirror for me to see you,” I added to Terrey. “While I can just take off my glasses and put them down in front of me.”

“Touché,” Terrey said. “But I'm gonna leave mine on. You have a lot more interesting things than me to look at this morning.”

With that he walked out of his room and into the hallways of the BASS base built into the mountain under my house on Stags Leap, which we called “the hill” to distinguish it from “the castle,” our base in the city. Saul Rabin had ordered the complex to be constructed in secret while they were building my house and another for Darien Anthony on the next crest over. He wanted to see if D and I would pass his tests and prove worthy to be his successors, when he passed away from the cancer that was eating him alive. Saul's son Paul, angered by his father's rejection and jealous of us for taking his place, had killed D (along with my daughter Lynette, who happened to be with him) and framed me for the murder. With Saul's help, however, I had turned the tables on Paul and inherited all of BASS, including the house that was built for D, under which was the rest of the mountain base. That part of it was not in use right now, because I had given D's house to Paul's widow and children, and some security concerns involving his teen son kept me from fully confiding in them.

The part of the base under my house was completely functioning, however. It contained state-of-the-art communications and surveillance equipment, research labs, a well-stocked armory, and other peacer supplies. It also had staff housing, an aero hangar bay camouflaged by a huge holo on one side of the hill, and a high-tech infirmary that Min had used to bring me back to life and patch me up after my confrontation with Paul. It was there that Terrey was headed, as I noticed through his lenses that the halls were deserted.

“Pretty quiet in here,” Terrey said, reading my mind, “because I sent all the staff away. We'll just run with my team and Min from now on. You never know who Sun's people may have gotten to.”

“You like the security there, huh?” I asked.

“That's an understatement,” he said breathlessly. “I'm positively orgasmic about it. Triple redundancy on the internal systems, external scanning backed up by the Eye, five coordinated smart missile cannons on the perimeters of the property, S-laser umbrella shields. If the Chinese knew about even half of this, I guarantee that assault team was waiting for you to show up somewhere else, 'cause they would never try to attack you here. What was Rabin planning for when he built this, the next world war?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he thought that some factions might stop at nothing to get the Sabon tech.”

“Hmmm,” Terrey mused. “But the tech and its secrets are spread out in several places, right? Here, the castle, Silicon Valley. Seems to me he wanted to be able to protect a
person.
In fact, at the risk of sounding like a bloody broken record, it seems like it was all set up for a situation like the one we're in.” He had reached the door of the medical suite. “Ah, here we are.”

Inside, sitting on one of the examining tables and surrounded by the triplets, was the double. He was wearing my clothes, or at least a perfect facsimile of them, and he was looking down at the inside of his arm and injecting something into it.

“We're showing him how to take the Makeover I.S.,” one of the
Trois
said, and I knew from what Terrey had told me before that those letters stood for “immunosuppressants.” The Makeover was an elaborate chemical cocktail of modified genes and stem cells synthesized from the subject's skin and muscle that could be programmed and molded like an intelligent form of clay. Introducing it to a human body caused the immune system to panic and go into murder mode on a molecular level. The good news was that ADA, a key protein in the human immune system, was actually prone to meld with the Makeover when it flooded the “infected” areas, but the bad news was that it left the subject with no ADA for his own immune system, and he would therefore not be able to survive even the most basic forms of bacteria. So for the first few weeks, until the body adapted, a synthetic form of ADA had to be added into the body on a regular basis to maintain its health and strength. This was the agent that was a possible cure for AIMS, but could only be afforded by the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Terrey arrived next to the bedside, and I watched through his eyes as the double pressed one tip of a dime-sized triangle to the vein he had located with the help of the triplets. The triangle's air-delivery system opened a microscopic hole from the epidermis to the bloodstream, sending the tiny sphere containing the ADA into it. Then the vacuum it created pulled all the skin and muscle back together so that there was no mark left, or damage done. White collar drug users loved this undetectable delivery system, and often paid more for the triangles than they did for the drugs themselves. Now the double would have to carry a stash of them with him at all times, in a fold on his belt, and shoot up two times a day until the Makeover stabilized and the transformation became permanent.

“What happens if he doesn't take it?” I asked, trying to be nonchalant about how I might feel when the double finally looked up at me.

“He would get very sick,” one of the triplets said, obviously monitoring my audio in that seemingly omniscient way of theirs. “And because of the ADA imbalance, the Makeover would fail and his face and ears would become unstable.”

“It would look like hell,” another of the triplets said, “and feel worse.”

“Well,” I said to the double, “I certainly appreciate you doing this.”

“You're welcome,” the triplet said. “Or were you talking to Mr. Cates?” I then realized that the double couldn't hear me, because my voice was only in the cyberspace between Terrey and his
Trois.
I said yes, and she added, “Say it again … now.”

Suddenly my sitting form appeared on one side of the room, the holographic image coming from the cameras from the netkit in my room. So now I was looking at myself through Terrey's contacts, and my voice was recorded by my net room and broadcast into theirs.

“I appreciate you doing this,” I said again.

As if on cue, the double handed the used triangle to a triplet, and looked up at my figure on the screen. He and I both watched my chin jerk up slightly from the inevitable shock of seeing two of myself, but my first thought after that was that he didn't look as much like me as I thought he would.

“You don't see yourself as often or as accurately as others do,” Terrey said, reading my mind again. “But we're more objective, and we're happy with the likeness.”

“The hair will actually be better,” said a triplet, “when the cut and color aren't so fresh.”

“I'll miss my beard more than anything,” the double spoke for the first time, causing me to knit my brow at the sound of his voice … or my voice.

“Our voices are very different from when we hear them in our own heads,” Terrey explained. “The combined effect of the throat patch and your copied neuropaths will be sufficient to trick most people, if not the best voiceprint systems. But in case of the latter, you can talk through the speakers on his glasses when you're riding with him.”

“Did the Makeover change his eye color, too?” I asked, knowing that the double's eyes had been blue, while mine were green.

“No, we did that the old-fashioned, low-tech way,” Terrey said. “Green contacts.”

“Should we be calling him by his name?” I asked. “From now on?”

“We won't, when we're in his presence. But I don't have a problem with us or you doing it when we're secure online.”

“Won't that be confusing for him?”

“Not enough to cause a problem. He'll be concentrating hard, earning the big bikkies and saving his life, as well as yours. And he's a well-educated man … another coup for us. I think he can handle it.”

“That's right,” I said to the man who looked like me. “What did you teach?”

“Mostly history,” he answered in my slight accent, which must have been the neuropaths at work. “Some literature.”

“Not British, was it?” I said, my mind on the accent and Terrey's comments about uncanny coincidences.

“Some.”

“What's a favorite?” I asked, trying to make a connection with him, but feeling like maybe I shouldn't, for some reason that was still at the back of my mind.

“Oh, I don't know. Tennyson's ‘In Memoriam'?”

“Yeah, good stuff.”

Then we both froze and stared at one another, like twins who realized something at the same time. For me, it related to the thought that had been at the back of my mind, and was now passing to the front. “In Memoriam” was about a dead friend, and this double was a dead man walking. Multiple assassination methods were about to rain down on him in a storm that had taken the life of everyone who had faced it so far. And he would be dying in my place, so I had to try to push aside the natural guilt I felt for this by reminding myself that he had been planning to kill himself already, and that he might possibly survive and become a rich man. Rich, and maybe even healthy.

Terrey cleared his throat. “As much as I would enjoy a poetry recital right now, we have other business to attend to.” He placed his hand on the double's shoulder, which turned out be a symbol of how I was about to go from being inside Terrey to being inside the other man. “While we make our way up to the house to meet the rest of the team, you two can get used to riding together.”

A link appeared at the bottom right of the wall screen, beckoning me to open it. I did, and now found myself looking through the eyes of the double as he followed Terrey and the triplets out of the sickbay. I knew that these “eyes” were more literal than Terrey's, because Jon wasn't wearing cyber contacts. The neuroware in his brain actually allowed me to use his optic nerve in the same way he himself did. I saw exactly what he saw, though without the peripheral vision, because I was looking at a 2D screen right now instead of using the 3D hologram of the entire net room. (I wasn't ready to become that intimate with him yet.)