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13

THE IMMORTALITY DREAM

“ W ell, that was a shit-show farce,” Nick muttered, throwing himself into the back of the car. “So glad I came along, Quentin. I feel so fucking useful.”

“You were useful,” Black said.

“Right.”

Nick tossed his umbrella to the floor below the driver’s seat, and pulled off the dark sunglasses he wore to protect his vampire eyes. I knew he hated going out during the day––not because those protections didn’t work, more because he tended to get a lot of curious stares, and he’d never fully adjusted to that, not since he’d gotten out of the newborn phase of being a vampire. When we were out at the farmer’s market one day in North Beach, he complained under his breath the whole time that he’d turned into an unwilling performance artist.

For some reason, that hit Angel’s funny bone.

She’d laughed until she cried, and kept bursting out into fresh giggles every so often for the rest of the morning, usually after she’d looked at Nick in his hat and trench coat.

Every now and then I had to remind myself how different he was now.

The Nick we’d known as a human was a summer, sunshine guy.

He went surfing, drank beer, climbed Half Dome at Yosemite, flew to Hawaii to go surfing with his military pals. His clothes had been completely different, his daytime habits and schedule had been totally different, his eating and drinking habits obviously had been different, and that didn’t even get into everything else about him that had changed.

Now, when Nick went surfing, it was in the middle of the night.

And people did stare at Nick, so I sympathized with his irritation.

They stared even apart from his inhumanly pale skin, his glass-like irises when they were visible, and his tendency to wear black gloves, trench coats, heavy sunglasses, hoodies, and an assortment of hats, all while carrying a thick umbrella in seventy-degree weather. The clothes definitely didn’t help, but I suspected they weren’t the main reason so many people struggled to look away from Nick when he passed them in the street.

The clothes did make him look a lot like… well, a vampire.

But even under the crazy get-ups he wore during the day, his actual appearance still garnered the most stares.

They didn’t look at his clothes really; I’d watched.

They looked at his face, his mouth, his body under the clothes.

They tried to see his eyes past his dark glasses.

Nick had always been good-looking, but now his looks had an ethereal quality that made him stand out from the rest of us, even compared to Dalejem, his boyfriend. Maybe it was the inhuman element to his looks, or maybe it was instinctive for people to be aware of him now. Maybe it was because his vampire presence pulled on humans for other reasons.

Either way, people often assumed he was an actor, or someone famous.

He looked younger, with more dramatic features than he’d had as a human.

Those things, coupled with that odd magnetism woven into the transformation itself, made him difficult not to stare at.

I was used to it, so I didn’t stare anymore.

Some of the seers and humans in Black’s company still stared, but most of us who’d known him before he got turned no longer paid much attention. I’d known Nick for decades as a human, so the vampire thing barely registered for me now, other than when I tried to empathize with him as a friend. I knew it was still hard for him.

I noticed how people treated him, of course.

Even the ones who were drawn to him didn’t exactly treat him normally. Something about that allure was obnoxiously compelling. You couldn’t help but notice it. But now it struck me as similar to an animal with a scent meant to attract prey.

I knew he could turn elements of that allure off and on at will, but some of it seemed to be totally outside his awareness, much less his control.

I wondered how it didn’t drive Jem crazy, having to deal with people’s odd reactions to Nick every day and night. I struggled enough with Black. Hell, I struggled all the time with Black. It was infuriating how much I still struggled with Black.

Of course, Black had his own means of compelling people to pay attention to him. He also wasn’t shy about using them, not when he thought they might help him accomplish a particular goal.

“We got what we came for,” Black said, darting me a distinctly cold, hard look. He glanced over his shoulder at Nick as he pressed the button for the ignition.

“Did we?” Nick snorted. “And what was that?”

Black gave me another look, that one even darker.

“I read Wicker.” Black’s eyes shifted back to Nick, their expression blank. “While that woman was hovering over him––”

“She didn’t protect him?” I blurted. “His light, I mean. I thought…”

Nick and Black both looked at me.

Looking between them, I suddenly felt stupid. “I just thought that’s why she was standing there,” I said lamely. “She was definitely sending that message.”

Black’s eyes returned to the windshield.

“No. She didn’t protect him.” He backed the SUV smoothly out of the parking space. “She obviously would have, if she were able. Which is more evidence she’s not a seer.”

I nodded, mostly to myself.

I was trying really hard not to be offended by the fact that Black was obviously angry with me. Was it seriously because I’d been thinking about Nick being a vampire? Because we were so over that now, weren’t we?

I must have thought that too loudly, too.

Next to me, a plume of anger rippled off Black’s aleimi.

I forced myself to ignore it, to put my mental energy on the woman with the blond bob. Black was right about her, of course. I’d assumed she was protecting Wicker because of the way she hovered over him, and because I couldn’t get into her mind. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d been thinking of her like I would a seer, simply because I couldn’t read her.

But she might not have any idea. She might have zero clue that her implant turned her mind into a locked box to a whole other species.

“So, did you decide what you think of her?” I asked Black. “Do you think she knows about us? Does she have any idea what you are? Or that seers exist in general?”

Black shrugged. “If you’re asking purely for my opinion, I would say no, she doesn’t know. She never would’ve put us in a room with Wicker if she knew, or left us alone with Morgan. But I don’t have anything I could call proof.”

I couldn’t argue with his logic.

She’d obviously been livid about what Wicker told us. He was likely being reamed out, even now, or worse.

“So what did you find?” Nick asked, blunt. “You read him, right?”

Black turned slowly, again hiding his hostility towards Nick, but only just.

“I can’t answer that yet,” Black said, pulling his eyes off Nick to glance at me.

“Can’t? Or won’t?” Nick snorted. “Is it about that tech?” Nick waited for Black to answer, and scowled when he didn’t. “I thought you were kind of over the top about that… but you were just trying to keep their minds on it, weren’t you? His, anyway? Wicker’s? You wanted him to think about the tech to make him easier to read?”

Black didn’t answer, not directly.

“Let’s go to Rucker’s house,” he said. Black’s gold eyes returned to the windshield––bright, sharp, reminding me of a great cat. “We’ll see if we can find anything useful there. Then maybe we can go get some lunch.”

I knew what he meant.

That’s when we’d talk about whether it was time to call the police.

I hadn’t actually known Lucian Rucker lived in San Francisco.

From everything I’d read and scanned in headlines and news briefs, I’d assumed his main residence was in New York, or possibly Los Angeles.

Locally, they’d always talked about him as someone “flying into town,” or “staying a week,” or “here for a conference.” It always sounded temporary, like an event, something we should all care about for some reason. I’d never known anyone to have seen him around, either, unlike other local celebrities and CEOs.

Until now, I’d never read or heard a single mention of Lucian Rucker having a significant property in San Francisco, much less that he’d designated it his primary residence. I’d seen photo-filled features about properties he had in other countries, across multiple continents, and a yacht the size of a barge with two helipads and a swimming pool, but nothing about the gated property we were given directions to by Ethan Morgan, his security chief.

I wondered if that was a security issue, as well.

Also, maybe it was premature to assume this particular house was the place he considered “home,” versus some tax designation required for other reasons.

Still, everyone had some “main” dwelling they slept in, didn’t they?

Or was that just something non-billionaires did?

Like Nick, and probably Black, I still couldn’t wrap my mind around why Black had been hired by these people at all, especially given how hostile Gorren seemed. If not to pin a murder on him, or help provide cover while they tried to Frankenstein their boss’s brain chip into a new body, then why were we here?

It didn’t sound like they’d be successful with the chip side of things. Black confirmed that Wicker had been even more skeptical about their success with the chip than he’d told us. Wicker was apparently under a lot of pressure to make it happen anyway; apparently some of Rucker’s big stock holders were in denial about how death worked, and seemed determined to bring Lucian Rucker back to life.

That whole side of things was weird as fuck.

If they had been successful, what then? Was no one supposed to notice when Lucian Rucker showed up at his next event, looking (and likely acting) noticeably different? Even utilizing some kind of cloning technology, he’d inevitably look different in various ways. How they planned to explain that was something I almost wanted to see.

Almost.

Not really.

And how was any of this even theoretically possible? Did they keep a cloned body on ice, ready for just this eventuality? A body perhaps a few decades younger, with a few genetic enhancements compared to the original?

Because that was incredibly fucking disturbing.

Not to mention, I was pretty sure every single part of this was illegal, even beyond whatever they planned to do with Rucker’s original body.

Cloning humans was illegal, wasn’t it?

Black grunted. For the first time since we’d left the parking lot of Prometharis, he gave me a faint smile.

“I think it was pure wishful thinking, doc,” he said in his deep voice. “We’ll have our own geek squad look at it, of course, and I still want to get our hands on one of those chips, but this is pure fantasyland on their part, the idea that they could ‘recreate’ a person this way, much less grant them immortality.”

He snorted in a contemptuous way, his gaze turned inward.

“Reviving that fucker from a primitive mechanical implant and a bunch of stem cells doesn’t strike me as remotely realistic,” he added, matter-of-fact. “Even with the most advanced organic tech, you could never be successful in this… believe me, there are those on Old Earth who tried. Even beyond the fact that humans here don’t understand aleimi and how it functions to keep living bodies alive, they don’t even understand what ‘life’ is, doc, or consciousness, or how the mind works… or self-awareness. They think we’re all just dumb computers, that we run on collections of data and processing. But even a worm isn’t that, much less a seer or a human. Their ignorance and hubris and the sheer childishness of it all makes any success with this kind of tech completely impossible. Any idea that humans would have success with this, even in the distant future, is unlikely in the extreme.”

Black shrugged, his voice flat with that same shrewd certainty.

“It wouldn’t have been successful even in a perfect scenario with highly advanced organic tech, a pristine implant filled with every memory of every experience and feeling and thought Lucian Rucker had since birth,” Black added cynically. “Whatever they cobbled together from that, it would have only a dim, exceedingly superficial relationship to the memory of Lucian Rucker, much less a living, thinking, self-aware version of him. And human memory is shit, anyway. It would be like creating a movie about someone’s life, only stripped of feeling and context and comprehension, and with enormous gaps and fabrications woven in.”

From the back seat, Nick grunted.

I saw him grimace in the rearview mirror, like the very thought of it grossed him out.

As for me, I was definitely leaning towards calling the cops.

Even if Black was right, and they had zero hope of success with their morbid plans, I didn’t want any part of Lucian Rucker or his company.

So far, all we’d seen was extensive evidence tampering, illegal handling of a dead body, obstruction of justice, failure to report a capital crime, and circumstantial evidence of multiple, much worse crimes, most of which I couldn’t label accurately because I wasn’t familiar enough with the penal codes around legal scientific research and experimentation.

If they had a half-dozen clones of Lucian Rucker on ice somewhere, that was another load of crazy I was more than happy to see them get busted for.

I hadn’t even gotten the impression they actually wanted us to find the killer.

In fact, everything they’d done pointed to the opposite.

So yes, I wanted to call the cops on them. I highly doubted anything we saw at Rucker’s house would make me change my vote.

I sincerely hoped Nick and Black’s were feeling the same.

Black surprised me by reaching out and clasping my hand warmly.

I am feeling the same, ilya, he assured me. Absolutely. We go here, we find what we can, maybe get blueprints of this implant and some more information about what it does. Then we call the police, and Angel does her magic with her old friends in the S.F.P.D. Okay? Maybe you can even testify against them in court. Or I can.

I felt the tightness I’d been carrying in my chest for the past hour begin to relax.

Okay, I sent, relieved. That’s great, Black. I agree.

I just want a look at what he’s got at the house before the cops swarm the place, Black added, his mental voice a touch colder, but not towards me. Most of all, I don’t trust Rucker’s people not to destroy and hide documentation and evidence across the board, so I’d like to get there before they can strip the place of whatever fuckery Lucian was up to. For all we know, Prometharis and Rucker Industries have got multiple paid agents in S.F.P.D., or in one or more other government agencies who might help with that. I got a lot off Wicker, but I’m beginning to think Gorren is the mastermind here. There’s a lot Wicker and Morgan don’t know. Without being able to read Gorren, we have to assume the worst.

I felt my chest relax even more.

I agreed with that, too.