The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (17 page)

“What if I want it furnished?” Lane asks as Nicole unlocks the front door with her card.

“Then you’re in luck.” Nicole smiles. “This place was chosen as a demonstration site by an interior design firm. I’m sure something could be negotiated, if you want.”

As they make their way through six thousand square feet of oak, teak, silk, marble, leather, chrome, gold plate, and submicron silicon, Lane thinks of all the other residents nestled
in similar opulence. What do they do every day in a community like this?

Nicole is not shocked when he says he wants to take possession right away. She’s obviously used to dealing with people backed by astronomical sums of money, people cut free from the normal economic restraints. She does one more lobe scan, interacts with her wireless computer, and the house is his.

After she leaves, he goes upstairs to the master bedroom and walks out onto the south-facing deck, with the afternoon light casting a golden glow onto the gentle bubbling of low-slung forest. He leans against the railing and looks at the fields and vineyards rolling off into the distance. To the south, the cerulean sky glows with sun and promise.

He looks down at his hands curled around the tubular railing, which is painted aquamarine in the modernist style. The light plays craftily across the tendons and the veins, and a thin matting of hair sweeps toward the outer side of his palms. Under the brown, freckled hide, the hands are infused with considerable power, and he tightens his grip slightly on the warm metal, just to make sure it hasn’t fled.

Just to make sure it hasn’t gone south without him.

Because in truth, he longs for the comfort of some mythical lower latitude, always brighter than the present circumstance, always warmer. Yet always receding. An impossible journey.

He turns and walks back into the house, shutting the sliding door behind him. Air-conditioning whispers from the venting system. He pauses by a stairway to a lower level of bedrooms and recreation areas. The whispering air shifts from white to pink and seems to carry the pale and distant sounds of children squabbling. A boy and a girl, he would guess. Children he never had. He walks on to the kitchen, where his once possible wife would be. She leans against the big array of tile counter and writes something in a calendar or journal. Her slim hand guides the pen across the page with a grace and articulation that is beyond him. Her flaxen hair is pulled back and held by a turtle-shell barrette, where it bursts into showers of ringlets.

A soft beep cuts through the silence, and Lane turns to a small color monitor on the wall. The security camera has detected a car pulling into the turnaround out front. Its neural circuitry detects the driver getting out and zooms the figure to full frame. A woman, stylishly dressed in loose cottons, with blond hair brushed back to accentuate the streaks of shading.

“Hello. You must be Allen,” the woman chirps as Lane opens the door. She looks at him with a curious combination of naked appraisal and congeniality. Well-kept middle age flows over her even features.

“That’s right,” Lane answers as he steps out onto the porch.

“I was just talking to Nicole and she told me about you. It’s so nice to see a new face
here, and I wanted to welcome you. I’m Virginia Bradford. We live down the road a bit.”

“Well, it’s good to meet you,” Lane replies as he gently shakes her cool hand. “Would you like to come in?” He feels self-conscious in his new role. Social niceties have never come easily to him.

“Oh no,” Virginia replies as she reaches out to pat his wrist. “I just wanted to invite you to a party we’re having tonight. Mostly people from the community. It’s a great way to get acquainted. You will come, won’t you?”

Lane smiles. Her intonation makes it sound like the party would be a catastrophe if he chose not to attend. “I’d be delighted.”

“Oh,
good
! You can take the shuttle. Just say it’s for the Bradfords. We’re starting with drinks about seven.”

“Got it.”

The light is fading as the driverless shuttle cruises into the turnaround and stops at Lane’s front steps. He appraises the vehicle’s design and notes the compromise between luxury and utility as the door slides open for him. Inside, a hidden speaker bids him welcome in a calm, female voice and then requests a lobe scan from a handheld device mounted in the wooden console between a pair of leather seats.

As the shuttle moves down the driveway it confirms his destination and Lane settles back to take in his new neighborhood. He quickly discovers that the vehicle handles itself with amazing efficiency, rivaling the best of human drivers. A logo on one side of the dashboard confirms that it is Malaysian in origin. By the time they pull onto the main road, he has nearly forgotten that a machine is in control and settles back to watch the Feed on the hi-res display. One hundred fifty channels. Each completely different, all entirely the same.

The vehicle ascends a gentle hillside that holds the residential part of Pinecrest. Ironically, no pines are visible. They’ve been replaced with elaborate landscaping cleverly designed to be tended robotically. Terraces of exotic trees, shrubs, and plants mask most of the residences, revealing only a hint of roof or the watchful glow of a security light.

Lane turns off the Feed and takes a moment to review his mission, as jointly defined with Rachel. They know that Johnny has some kind of ominous connection to Mount Tabor, and that he’s been a prime contractor with the Institute for the Study of Genetic Disorders. Lane has discovered that Pinecrest is a popular residence for the Institute’s upper management. Put it all together and Lane was poised to start probing the Institute people’s connections to Mount Tabor.

Lane looks up and realizes the shuttle is stopping in front of the Bradfords’ huge house, a Neo-French mansion with a vaulted porch and windows on the main floor. The car’s video system automatically powers down as the door slides open. A hidden speaker announces, “You
have arrived at the home of Kenneth and Virginia Bradford. Have a pleasant stay.”

Inside, the party buzz hits Lane as he spots Virginia Bradford standing in a strategic position to greet her guests. A shiny black dress clings to her trim body, terminating at just the right spot to highlight a nicely tanned cleavage. She is sipping a drink and speaking to a woman with diamond earrings of sufficient mass to actually stretch her earlobes.

“Allen!” Virginia rushes over and gives him an alcohol-inspired hug while kissing him on the cheek. “I’m so glad you made it!” She hooks his arm and pulls him forward into a spacious living room filled with clusters of people squeezing off party chatter at one another. “Before you get a step farther, I want you to meet my husband, Tom.” Her breast is planted solidly against the back of his elbow as they make their way through the crowd.

Tom turns out to be a man of medium height and age, athletically trim with a graceful motion to his hands as he animates a point of conversation to a flat-bellied woman in a miniskirt and sleeveless top. “Tom, look who’s here! Our latest arrival! This is my husband, Dr. Kenneth Bradford. Tom, this is Allen Durbin.”

“Glad to meet you, Allen,” Dr. Bradford says. “And this is Ashley.” He nods to the miniskirted woman, who has the prerequisite bulge in her deltoids, along with several hundred dollars’ worth of highlighting in her bubble of blond hair.

“Pleased to meet you both,” Lane says as he shakes hands. Virginia has already wandered back to her greeting post.

“So what brings you to Pinecrest?” Tom Bradford asks.

Lane notes a strong hint of forced articulation in the man’s voice, a good sign that he has already had more than enough to drink. “Always wanted to have a place in the Portland area,” Lane replies. “And the timing seemed right. So here I am.”

“What sort of thing do you do?” Ashley asks in a voice that indicates she couldn’t care less.

“I’m an investor,” Lane replies, hoping his cover holds.

“Ah! Stoking the entrepreneurial fires!” Bradford exclaims. “Good for you. I mean, somebody’s got to do it. Right?”

“And what about yourself, doctor? Have you specialized?” Lane asks.

Ashley belts out a guffaw that nearly spills her white wine. Bradford breaks into a deep, rolling chuckle. “As a matter of fact, I have, Allen. I’m a plastic surgeon.”

“And business is good, I take it?”

“In my particular part of the field, it’s very good indeed.”

“And what part is that?”

“Well, you see, I’ve limited my practice to the external genitalia.”

“The external genitalia?” Lane asks, somewhat perplexed.

“He means pretty pussies. And penises, too.” Ashley chimes in before Bradford can answer.

“It was really a business decision,” the doctor offers in a slightly drunken slur. “If you look at the market for standard cosmetic surgery—faces, breasts, butts, that kind of thing—it’s pretty damn crowded. I decided to try something a little further afield, so to speak. Turned out to be a good move.”

“It did?”

“You see, we live in an age with a new sexual aesthetic. Flat stomachs, perfect breasts, taut buttocks, et cetera. And not only in youth—but well into middle age. I mean, what woman wouldn’t want a well-formed set of labia, symmetrical in every way? Or if you’re a man, what about the glans on the penis shaped to perfection?”

“I’d never thought about it, really.”

“Well, you’d be surprised how many have.” Bradford waves his hand out over the crowded living room. “I’d say about half the house here has been through my office at one time or other.”

“And does that include you?” Lane asks Ashley.

“I’ll never tell,” Ashley says with a sly look.

The doctor smiles wryly. “Maybe your facial lips won’t, but your others will.”

Bradford and Ashley burst into laughter while Lane smiles politely. “If you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to get a drink.”

Lane sees the bar set up on the patio, through a set of French doors, and heads in that direction. Along the way, he takes an inventory of the people in the conversational clusters. White teeth, trim bellies, firm jawlines, and thick hair abound. But he senses something else: an undercurrent of malaise that he can’t identify.

He doesn’t figure it out until he reaches the bar, and carefully watches the group closest to him. One of the women gives it away. Her strawberry blond hair is cut short and lightly curled in a way that accentuates a tanned face with strong cheeks and full lips. The chin curves down to a smooth neck with a weighty gold necklace. The whites of the eyes are perfectly clear, and make a great backdrop for the large blue-green irises. But her hands don’t match. One clutches the stem of a martini glass, and Lane sees the ropy veins and rigid tendons, a mild bulge of the knuckles, and the ghostly remnants of liver spots over her tan skin. The woman’s face is forty and her hands are sixty.

With a scotch on the rocks in hand, he circulates back through the room, looking for more evidence to back his observation. He finds it everywhere. More than half of these people are pushing seventy or more chronologically, but physically holding the line at somewhere in their forties. He can only guess at the maze of hormones, plastic surgery, exercise regimens, and organ
replacements that keep them running in place while the clock ticks on.

“Allen!” Virginia closes in on him, and this time he takes a closer look. The flesh about her cheeks and mouth has the vague, lizard-like stretch of plastic surgery. He can’t help but search for telltale scars, but finds none. She grabs his arm and leads him toward a dissolving cluster, where one of the occupants is wandering off toward the bar. “I think maybe you and I ought to have lunch tomorrow,” she purrs.

“Down in the village?” Lane asks as he feels the pressure of her bosom against his arm.

“Actually,” Virginia says, “I was thinking more about your place.”

“I see,” Lane says, with as little commitment as possible.

Fortunately, they reach the cluster before she can respond, and she introduces him to a man of powerful build and big hands and a willowy woman with black hair and pale skin.

“Arnie, Beth, this is Allen Durbin. He’s new here.”

“Mr. Durbin,” Arnie says, along with a handshake that’s surprisingly mild. As Virginia peels off into the crowd, Arnie turns back to a conversation in progress with Beth, leaving Lane time to observe. This time, it’s the ears. The man’s ears have a florid, puffy look of age about them, even though his face appears to be about forty.

“A lung job? You’re sure about that?” Arnie asks Beth.

“Well, that’s what I heard,” Beth says. “She was having a real problem with oxygenation. Down in the seventy percent range, something like that. It was beginning to affect all the tissues, so she really didn’t have a lot of choice.”

“So what was she when they did it? Forty/seventy? Thirty/sixty-five?”

“I think she must have been more around forty-five/eighty. So you can see her problem.”

“Forty-five/eighty? No kidding?”

“That’s what I heard. It would’ve been a terrible waste to lose it all because of her lungs.”

For a moment, Lane is puzzled. Then he gets it. The numbers are physical age first, followed by the chronological age. In Pinecrest, the formula is obviously a familiar part of casual conversation. And the bigger the spread between the two numbers, the better.

“So where do you suppose they did it, Moscow?” Arnie asks Beth.

“That’d be my guess. They’re supposed to have some new technology, something that gets around the pig problem and keeps the prions out. It’s very hush-hush.”

“Have you seen her since they did it?” he asks.

“No, but Gwynn has. Saw her across the room at lunch. In Kuala Lumpur. At the towers.”

“Well, Gwynn’s not doing so bad herself, is she?”

“Absolutely,” Beth agreed. “I’d guess somewhere around thirty-five/seventy.”

“Fantastic.”

“She got lucky. Her bone mass was on the way down, but they recalcified her before it got too bad. Did it in New York, at that clinic up in the Bronx. You know the one I mean?”

It occurs to Lane that the basics of this conversation are being repeated all over this room in cluster after cluster. The manic obsession of people all facing the same demon and warding it off with the same set of bio-amulets and techno-charms. He slips away from Arnie and Beth and drifts toward the periphery of the crowd, a crumbling fortress against the relentless onslaught of aging.