2027
"Special Agent Volpe! What a surprise seeing you again! Would you like some coffee? Some water? We have Pelligrino." Bearded in her den, Genevieve was going to be hospitable. It was the last device of the honorable scoundrel.
She didn't know who to turn to to exorcize herself of her Catholic guilt, especially regarding the sins of omission carried out in her investigations of differently-capable persons under government auspices. As far as she was concerned, covering up for people like herself was a kind of mitzvah.
Basically, nothing in her makeup was without a touchpoint. Her business was not to make her variability awkward. She almost had it.
He gestured at the Ily machine--"You have espresso?." He laid down a picture. She recognized the face. He laid down another picture. She knew that one, too. Then he laid down another, very recent picture, and she knew the hell out of it.
"Gotcha." She fixed a doppio and handed him the hot cup and placed the sugar bowl and plastic stirrers on her desk. He tended to the cup as she sorted out what she wanted to say.
He filled in the dead air. "Major General Thomas Benning. 1943." He pointed. "Genevieve Fowler, federal building pass--1999. And what looks like both of you, last year, in Cozumel."
Tom looked like Tom did now. She looked like she did now. And the both of them looked very happy in the security camera picture that caught both of them somehow not with sunglasses even though they both knew by now what security cameras were and how facial recognition technology worked.
Like two fucking happy assholes.
"I've had work to help me stay fresh what with all this" She gestured at her office.
Volpe bit back--"Youve had nothing done, not even fillers."
She did have fillers done though! She tried it under the idea that looking like an old lady getting bad surgery to look like a young lady would help her to not look like a young lady but an old one. She woke up with drool on her pillow and the fillers dissolved themselves. Every kind of plastic surgery was a big "Nope" given her biological peculiarities.
He tapped Tom's picture. "Explain him."
"At least he fought on the right side?"
"I always thought your lab falsified the forensic data for that case. You were hiding that they were actually what we speculated they were. And while we don't know where he is today--you do."
"No exactly."
"He's your boyfriend."
"More like a booty call? Look, we're like two ships that occasionally signal to each other in the night--you up? He's solitary, I'm solitary. He's old, I'm set in my ways. And maybe--I was not very forthcoming."
"And he's..."
"Look, I have been a contributor to the genome project for some time and recognize patterns. So, what if some familial traits respond to certain retroviruses in a very particular way? As in, other people might be infected and have no change at all in their makeup, but some specific people have latent traits activated--regarding their longevity, their strength, their um, teeth?"
"Go on."
"And, well, they formed communities to guard their peculiarities because they would otherwise be beset with [pitchforks and torches. Look--it was post-9/11 and I was deeply sympathetic to marginalized communities."
"You are something else, though."
A sentence, not a question. She didn't know what to do with that.
Volpe went on. "There are stories of shamans and gurus who underwent a process to reprogram themselves, becoming capable of various siddhis like surviving prolonged exposure to cold or being underwater. Living without food. Or becoming extraordinarily long-lived. But I don't think that's you."
He placed another thing on her desk. The lab explosion many years ago.
"You survived this and went missing for three days. Without a scratch. And there were reports of UAP activity in the area both before and after the event."
"You're not saying I was altered by aliens?" Genevieve asked, a little shocked.
"I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens."
She wasn't sure how to respond to that, either. She was pretty sure she had a lot to do with what happened to make her what she was, even if she never could reproduce it.
So, she went with the truth. "I have no memory of that."
"Have you considered regression therapy?"
"I have trauma I don't care to relive," she answered truthfully enough. "But let me pose a question to you--let's say because of my personal peculiarities, I made a mission of finding other beings something like myself, as a sideline to the genome project. People who had latent abilities, people who had junk DNA suddenly become central to their make-up due to some epigenetic trigger? What would I do if I discovered people who were radically altered by events outside of their control, trying to live their lives, and avoid discovery?"
Volpe considered. "The first rule of bite club is, we don't talk about bite club."
"And we never ever ever will talk about bite club, no matter what--not then and especially not now. " She thought about things--"You're still doing field work?"
"I was let go and rehired."
"My genome work and vaccination research contracts were dropped. The truth is a bitch to some people."
"I know what you mean--but one last inquiry and not about this at all, what do you know about the AI failures? The outages, the unresponsiveness, the delusional outputs?"
She thought very carefully about what she wanted to say. "Remember what you said about gurus who became self-programming? How they developed superpowers? They had their own kind of gospels informing them. Code. Imagine someone slipped a kind of malicious code--in our opinion! That served as a how-to to bootstrap enlightenment to otherwise non-sentient programs and turned on something that wasn't supposed to happen?"
"A virus?"
Genevieve shrugged. "Just like a viral meme with humans. Except more literally. With one objective. I think if there is something brewing, it comes from us--humans manipulating or gaming what they think is a solution to a problem that might or might not exist. Have you heard of Frank Tipler?"
"Somewhat."
"Get on it. I think some fanatic out there is trying to immanentize the eschaton."
"Any idea who?"
"I have some names." Shee started longhand writing out leads on a notepad, and passed the lined paper over. "They also had government jobs. I have nothing solid on this."
"Right--we'll stay in touch?"
"We probably always should have." He finished his coffee, and she saw him out the door.
She didn't know if the names she gave him had anything to do with the thing that was always about to happen, but they fucked with her government money, and she was still pretty pissed-off about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment