IMMORTALITY

This can’t be happening. You were so careful.

The soldiers are storming the house, rifle barrels swinging from side to side, orange goggles glowing like bonfires. You usually call them cockroaches, because of the clawlike gloves and the tubes leading from their black masks to the air purifiers on their chests.

They’ve smashed in the front door, sending walnut-brown fragments of wood skittering into the hallway. The windows have been shredded to razor-sharp glitters of dust that seem to hang in the air much longer than they should. Dozens of holes have been punched in the roof so more troops can abseil in. The helicopter is still overhead, dropping more—you can hear the thundering of its blades, and see the spotlight slicing across the windows.

You were prepared for this. You bought the City’s best security devices and reconstructed them to make them even better. You turned your whole house into an elaborate booby trap, preparing for the day they would come for you.

But this isn’t your house. This is Kyntak’s house, and it was a mess even before ChaoSonic troops showed up. How can you defend it on your own?

Forget the house. Nai needs you. She should still be in her bedroom. Her cot could be knocked over, she could be crushed under their boots. You have to find her, get her out of here before she’s hurt. You try to run down the hall, but there are cockroaches blocking the way. One of them knocks you to the ground with the butt of his rifle. He’s bigger and stronger than you are. Stronger than any man has a right to be.

You scramble back onto your feet, shove him aside. The corridor stretches to an impossible length—no matter how hard you run, the bedroom seems just out of reach. And somehow you know what’s happening in there—a soldier scooping Nai out of her cot, ignoring her thin squeal of protest, and walking slowly back towards the shattered windows.

You round the corner, swinging through the bedroom door with one hand on the door frame. Someone grabs you and shoves you away, but you push right back. The soldier carrying Nai has just disappeared through the window. You run and jump, but as soon as you’re outside you see that it’s a long way to the ground. A freezing wind scrapes your skin as you plummet through the night air, briefly catching the beam of the helicopter’s spotlight.

Thud. Your bones crack, but you feel no pain. There’s a ringing in your ears, and Kyntak’s house vanishes into the darkness. The soldier with Nai has gone, but there’s another—a Vanish trooper. He’s aiming his pistol at your head.

You try to throw yourself at him, but you’ve fallen too hard—it’s like you’re glued to the concrete. The soldier fires once, and a trapdoor opens beneath you. You tumble into the darkness.

Solid ground appears beneath your feet. It’s black and silent here. There’s a ladder leading back up to the light, but it’s twisted; the rungs are straight but the sides spiral around one another as they rise. It looks as if it’s made of bone—you’re not sure you want to climb it. You’re alone right now, but maybe Kyntak is on his way. Nai might be too.

Hiss. The noise is painfully loud. It echoes out of darkness which is steadily becoming brighter. You try to cover your ears with your hands, but there’s a sudden pain in your wrists and you can’t move your arms…

Six woke suddenly, thrashing against his bonds. The copper clamps around his wrists and ankles scraped his already tender skin, and the restraint around his neck choked him. He slumped back against the table, coughing, and squinted into the bright light.

He didn’t need to look around to know where he was. He could see his reflection in the mirrored ceiling. He was wearing orange shorts and an undershirt, and he was clamped to a table. He was in a cell, probably only a few meters away from where he had fallen.

He hadn’t rescued Kyntak, and now they were both doomed.

He scrunched his eyes shut for a moment. No, he told himself. Don’t think like that. You’re alive. You don’t know what they want from you, but they obviously can’t get it once you’re dead. There’s still hope.

The hissing stopped, prompting him to look up. There was a clear plastic hose with a valve on the end attached to the ceiling—providing oxygen, he guessed. They didn’t want to give him an air vent to escape through. But the room couldn’t be completely airtight, or the pressure would be increasing each time there was an oxygen burst, and sooner or later the valve would stop opening.

If there was a way out of here, he’d find it.

The roller-door slid open and two men walked in. One was a Vanish trooper, dressed in the same fatigues that Six had been wearing; he slid the roller-door shut behind them. The other was a large man wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He was smiling broadly.

“Six of Hearts,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”

Six twisted his head from side to side, stretching his aching neck. “Who are you?”

The man rested his hands in his pockets. “They call me Vanish.”

“So you’re on the board of directors?”

Vanish blinked. “I’m sorry?”

Six snorted. “I worked it out. Vanish isn’t one person; it’s an organization, operating as an individual so ChaoSonic doesn’t exterminate it. How else could Vanish have been operating for more than fifty years?”

There was a long silence. Six held Vanish’s gaze. His heart thudded softly in his chest, like a ticking clock.

“Do you know what telomeres are?” Vanish asked finally.

Six frowned. “Scraps of DNA?”

“Close enough. They are strings of DNA at the ends of chromosomes, making sure your cells don’t lose genetic information as the chromosomes are replicated. Every time that happens, the telomeres get a little shorter, and eventually they run out, causing every age-related ailment from wrinkles to cancer.” He paused. “Your telomeres, however, are self-copying.”

Six drummed his fingers against the table, confused by this change of topic. “How?”

“I don’t know!” Vanish shrugged. “Theoretically it should be impossible. But when I acquired the one-armed clone of you and started testing him, it only took a few months to notice that his telomeres weren’t getting any shorter. So I put a microcamera into him and watched it happen. His telomeres were copying themselves right in front of my eyes!” He smiled hungrily. “And I needn’t remind you that you have the same DNA.”

Six stared at him. “So what are you saying?” he asked. “That I’ll always be young?”

“Yes!” Vanish exploded. “You can’t die of old age!” His hands fidgeted excitedly in the air. “Your DNA will never corrupt!” He lowered his voice. “That was Retuni Lerke’s secret gift to you. He never told Methryn Crexe about it—Crexe would have tightened his leash, because he didn’t need soldiers who never got old. But Lerke rigged up your genes so if you stayed away from external danger, you would live forever.”

Six was starting to feel claustrophobic. He was clamped to a table in a sealed room with a raving lunatic. “So you have the same thing?” he asked. “You can’t grow old, so you’ve been a thorn in ChaoSonic’s side for more than fifty years?”

Vanish laughed. “No, not quite the same,” he said. “My genes are very average—but not for long.” He walked over to the side of the table and rolled up Six’s left sleeve, tracing his finger across the line where the clone’s arm had been attached.

Six shivered at his touch. “You’re going to steal my DNA?” he demanded. “But how? Genes are inseparable from the body.”

Vanish rolled the sleeve back down and withdrew his narrow fingers. “Oh, I know that. So I’m going to take your body, too.”

Six’s eyes widened in alarm. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, perhaps Kyntak’s rather than yours. That’s why I was hoping to get both of you, so I could make sure I got the best one. Sure, your genes are the same, but genes aren’t everything. You’re probably fitter than he is—you’ve had a stricter diet and training regime, I’ll bet—but I need to see if the surgery the Lab did on you last year has adversely affected your health.”

“You can’t take my body! That’s impossible!”

Vanish raised an eyebrow. “No, it’s not. My surgeon will remove your cerebral cortex and most of your limbic systems, then replace them with mine. You’ll get a stem cell injection to make sure the neurons remap and the cells bond properly. The parts of your brain that keep your heart beating will be untouched, and we’ll put you on a respirator to keep the lungs going during the surgery. Your sensory systems and motor system will be unchanged, so that I can use your body more easily when I have it. But my hippocampus, my orbitofrontal cortex, my nucleus accumbens, and my amygdala will all be stitched into your skull, so I’ll be able to keep my memories, emotions, thought processes, and feelings, as well as my likes and dislikes. Things will taste different to me, look different, and feel different—but I’ll still be me.”

Six’s heart was racing. It felt like there was a block of ice inside his stomach. “A successful brain transplant has never been done before. You’ll die.”

Vanish smiled. “Do you honestly think I’d risk this if it had never been done before? The whole point is living, after all.” He leaned down close to Six’s face, and Six shrank away from his luminous grey-green eyes. “Forget the fifty years of crime that ChaoSonic knows about. I’m more than a hundred years old; this is my fourteenth body. But I’m sick of all the surgery, the searching for new bodies, and the fear that someday I won’t find one and old age will finally catch up with me. So now I’m going to live forever. In your body.”

One, two, three. Pull! Kyntak howled as the bones in his hand were crushed against the copper clamp. He had concluded that the room was soundproof—he never heard Vanish and his guard coming, and his ears were hypersensitive. This meant that he was free to yell and scream as much as he liked as he mutilated his hand.

His bruised skin stung with the pressure. He could feel the thick copper bending slightly, but that wasn’t what he needed—he knew that the copper would never stretch far enough to let his hand slip through. He needed his bones to become disjointed.

One, two, three. Pull! Pain throbbed through his wrist, and suddenly he couldn’t find the energy to pull anymore. He slumped helplessly against the table, fatigued and miserable. He stared up at his reflection in the ceiling through watering eyes. He hadn’t expected to die like this: pale, bruised, bald, and dressed in mandarin underwear. Statistically it had been more likely for him to be killed by a bullet—a lucky head shot by a ChaoSonic grunt. So many people had fired guns at him in his pitifully short sixteen years that one of them was bound to hit him eventually.

How long had he been in this cell? He hadn’t been fed or given water to drink, and he was still alive despite having had several liters of his blood removed, so that meant less than a week. It felt like longer—like months or years. And how much longer would it be? How long would this psychopath keep him before killing him?

The door rolled aside, and Kyntak laughed weakly. He wondered idly if he was going mad.

Vanish walked in, holding a syringe. The woman stood on Kyntak’s left, pointing a gun at him. “Oh, come on,” Kyntak rasped. “Surely I don’t have any blood left.”

“You wouldn’t think so, given that you haven’t had anything to eat or drink since I brought you in.” Vanish smiled as he jabbed the needle into Kyntak’s vein. “But somehow you keep generating it at a steady rate. My working hypothesis is that you’re able to convert your fat reserves into blood, almost like a backup metabolism.”

“Remind me to send a thank-you note to Retuni Lerke when I get out of here.”

Vanish withdrew the needle from Kyntak’s arm. “Neither you nor Six is getting out of here,” he said. “But I’ll pass on the message to Lerke when I next speak to him.”

Kyntak closed his eyes. “You have Six?”

“Oh, yes. He’s just a few cells down. Speaking to him is fascinating from a nature versus nurture point of view—same DNA, same situation, but he responded quite differently from you when he woke up.”

“He’s going to kill you,” Kyntak whispered faintly.

“He’s not in a position to kill anyone,” Vanish said. “But it’s strange that you should say that. Six has a reputation for restraint when it comes to murder. In fact, he stopped to bandage up one of my soldiers on his way down to this floor.”

Kyntak smiled. “Yep, that’s him. Six the merciful—but not weak. He’s escaped from every cell he was ever put in, shuffled every Code-breaker who so much as looked at him sideways, and broken into half the maximum-security facilities in the City without working up a sweat. It’s true he’s pretty levelheaded. It’d be hard to make him angry enough to kill you. But if you really wanted to, you could.”

He started to laugh, a thin, wheezing chuckle. Vanish’s smile faded slowly as he watched.

Kyntak cleared his throat before continuing. “In fact, you know what I’d do? If I really wanted him out for my blood—not that I would, of course, because he could be the world’s greatest assassin if he tried—but if I was suicidal and wanted to send Six of Hearts completely over the brink, I know exactly what my first move would be.”

There was a long silence. Vanish stared at him.

“I’d kidnap his twin brother!” Kyntak howled, and then he burst out laughing again, a rattling, hysterical cackle. His chest heaved and his throat scraped against the strap around it.

Vanish moved away from the table, the syringe still in his hand. He beckoned to the red-eyed woman. She muttered into her radio and the door slid open. Vanish walked out backward, watching Kyntak with a frown of disbelief, and the door closed.

Kyntak stopped laughing and smiled grimly. There, he thought. Maybe Six and I will die here, and maybe no one will ever know what happened to us. But I’ve had my revenge on our captor—I’ve scared him. He will see our face in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

The loss of blood was making him dizzy. He closed his eyes and rested.

Six was thinking hard. There had to be a way out of this. There was already a way.

He’d reassembled all the new data in his head to get what he finally believed was the complete picture. Vanish had been a criminal many years ago, rich enough to afford a new body to transplant his brain into. Presumably it was a desperate measure. His crime syndicate must have been falling down around him, perhaps because some not-yet-extinct form of law enforcement was closing in on him, but more likely because he’d trodden on the turf of a criminal empire with more manpower. He’d dumped his old body somewhere with most of his brain missing in order to fake his own death. He had probably mutilated it so the surgery wasn’t obvious. He wouldn’t have wanted the people looking for him to know what he had done.

So he starts recruiting again, Six thought. Goes somewhere new. Hires a load of soldiers and at some point begins injecting them with nanomachines. Now he has an elite force: better fighting through chemistry. He changes bodies a few more times, using the technique as a disguise rather than a last resort.

Something clicked in Six’s mind. He remembered the list of senior ChaoSonic officials who had been captured by Vanish, and who had the stolen ChaoSonic information for him after being released. He remembered that there had only been one at any given time. He had assumed that they were coerced into working for Vanish because he had tagged them with his nanomachines, and that he had only needed one at a time because they were so well placed within the company—but now Six had a much more frightening thought. Each and every one might have been Vanish himself. He had started stealing not only bodies, but also identities. He used his assistant/brain surgeon to represent him anywhere he was supposed to be in person. Niskev Pacye was currently filling that position, but there must have been others before her.

Hiss. The valve in the corner opened, releasing some more oxygen into the room. Six ignored it.

So ChaoSonic chokes the vestigial government and rises to power, he thought, continuing his mental timeline. The Takeover. Vanish stays in hiding and keeps sending his soldiers out on missions, but starts stealing exclusively from ChaoSonic because they now have a virtual monopoly on everything. And sooner or later, they notice him and try to hunt him down. Presumably they managed to get one of their own operatives into this force—and that would be why he showed up as a potential buyer for Earle Shuji’s robot army. Robots are more loyal than people.

Anyway. ChaoSonic lures him into a trap and captures him. He scratches on his own face so he can’t be connected to any of his previous crimes, and to make his appearance so memorable that later no one will suspect a normal-looking man of being him. Someone in his team, probably one of Niskev Pacye’s predecessors, takes the initiative and uses the locator in Vanish’s own nanomachines to find him, then storms in with a bunch of troops. They decimate the ChaoSonic forces to send a message, then Vanish changes bodies again, while ChaoSonic searches for a hideously scarred man they’re never going to find.

Fast-forward thirty years, and Vanish is well established. He’s got his new assistant, his own private army, a fistful of credits, and a century of experience. So what made him go to the Lab eight months ago?

Project Falcon? Six thought. Was he interested in replacing his army with a team of super-soldiers, each carrying my designer DNA? It was possible, Six supposed, but this was after they had gone to see Shuji, not before. Wouldn’t Vanish rather be investigating the bot angle? Particularly when one of his troops had betrayed him before: Project Falcon made them strong and fast, but not incorruptible.

Six took a quick breath. Of course! At this point, Vanish no longer treats the body-swapping as a defense against ChaoSonic. He sees it as his defense against age—his road to immortality. Breaking into the Lab was only indirectly linked to Project Falcon. What Vanish really wanted was Chelsea Tridya’s formula! He’d heard about its ability to slow the rate of cell division and mutation, and figured he could enormously extend his own life span without having to switch bodies.

It would have been a ruin when he broke in, Six thought. Sevadonn dead, Crexe and the soldiers gone, Nai taken away by Kyntak and Six. The inside of the tower was smashed and burned. But they didn’t know that the clone was in there, too—Vanish found him and took him. He would have been furious to find the drug missing…but only until he discovered the self-replicating telomeres in the clone.

So he spent the next few months planning a way to get Kyntak and/or Six to his facility. Kidnapped Methryn Crexe as bait…

The thought of never going back to the Deck and leaving his fate a mystery to his friends was bad enough. The idea of letting a madman steal his identity and wear his face for the rest of eternity was far worse.

He tried to flush the image out of his head. This wasn’t helping. He wasn’t going to die. Not here. Not now.

He considered trying to pull his hand through the copper clamp—it might be possible if the bones dislocated or broke. But he could safely assume that Kyntak had tried that, and he had a head start of at least nine hours, depending on how long Six had been unconscious.

Hiss. Six wondered if there was some way he could use the oxygen valve—but he couldn’t think of anything that didn’t involve getting off the table first. Dead end.

The roller-door slid open again. Six looked towards one of the wall mirrors and saw Vanish’s face through the widening gap. He rested his head back down against the pad.

“I haven’t decided which of you to use yet,” Vanish said. A soldier entered with him and stood impassively in the corner. “You’re both very similar from a medical and health standpoint. So I’ve decided to use the opportunity to run a few tests first.”

“Whose body are you wearing now?” Six asked. “Just out of curiosity. Who died so you could wear their face? Another ChaoSonic official?”

“You can’t make me feel guilty.” Vanish laughed. “It’s every man for himself in this City. I was given the intelligence and the tenacity to survive, and I don’t believe it was wrong of me to use them. If I hadn’t started taking bodies, I’d be long dead by now. That makes it justifiable homicide. Call it self-defense, if you like.”

“If you didn’t feel guilty,” Six said, “you wouldn’t feel the need to twist logic into a moral defense of your actions. Inside, you know you’re preparing to kill two innocent people to save your own worthless skin.”

Vanish laughed again. “Worthless? I am the only living link to pre-Takeover times—the City’s oldest person! I’m a national treasure! What have you seen or learned in your sixteen years that gives you more right to live than me?” A syringe appeared in his hand, this one full of a shimmering golden liquid. “If it makes you feel better, think about all the people I won’t have to kill once I’ve taken your body. In a way, you’re saving their lives.”

He jammed the needle into Six’s arm, and Six winced. “Since you asked,” he continued, “I can’t remember the name of this body’s previous owner—I rarely remember their names unless I need their identities. I have it written down somewhere, I think. He was a music teacher. I chose him because he played rugby on the weekends, and I wanted the strength.” He smiled. “I suspect it hasn’t prepared me for a Project Falcon body, though.”

“More nanomachines?” Six asked as Vanish withdrew the needle.

“No. This is accelerant—my own formula. Mostly a mixture of epinephrine, NENB, and mateine. It decreases reaction time and increases strength. You’ve seen it work on my soldiers. It should take about a minute to kick in fully.”

Six’s jaw dropped. Mateine was just caffeine, and epinephrine was basically synthetic adrenaline; neither of them would do him any serious harm. But NENB was a dangerously strong stimulant. “Won’t that also cause brain damage?”

“The possible side effects include dehydration, addiction, paranoia, and exhaustion once it wears off,” Vanish said calmly. “It can also suppress the immune system, but we have ways of combating that. The nanomachines don’t secrete very much into the bloodstream, though, so there’s rarely any permanent damage.”

“But you’re not giving me nanomachines,” Six said. He was already feeling queasy. “You’re giving me a pure dose!”

“Yes,” Vanish said. “I’m hoping that your extraordinary metabolism will give you greater resistance than my soldiers have to the negative effects. But I obviously want to test it before taking your body rather than after, just in case I’m wrong.” He shrugged. “If it kills you, I’ll just take Kyntak’s body instead of yours.”

His voice seemed to be getting slower and deeper. The room was getting brighter. Six’s mouth felt dry.

“I’m going to send in an opponent for you to fight to test your accelerated reflexes,” Vanish said. “It’ll be recorded so that I can watch it later. Then I’ll come back in and examine you for damage.”

He gestured to the guard and the door slid open. Six felt the accelerant course through his veins. Every muscle in his body tingled with energy. He tried to lunge at Vanish, and he felt the copper clamps bend a little. Vanish and his guard walked out the door, but it didn’t slide shut.

Six tried again, bracing his arms against the table and pulling his wrists against the clamps. The table groaned encouragingly, but nothing moved. Six felt his heart palpitate in his chest. The accelerant was making him feel sick. But he knew that was his best chance to escape. The door was open and the soldier he was supposed to fight hadn’t arrived yet.

He tried to pull his legs against the clamps. The sinews in his ankles were crushed against the copper, but the accelerant numbed the pain.

He froze as he heard heavy footsteps outside. Thud, thud, thud. That didn’t sound like a soldier.

Six’s eyes widened as it appeared in the doorway, familiar features shining in the light, silvery eyes gleaming.

“Harry?” he asked.