Interest (13 page)

25

Years ago, Len had written an article for the
Examiner
about the barbaric penal practice known as “the hole”—solitary confinement. The ACLU was suing the US federal prison system in an effort to end solitary confinement on grounds that it was an unconstitutional, cruel, and inhumane practice. Len wrote an exposé about both the practice and resulting lawsuit in an effort to drum up public opinion. However, his article didn’t garner much support because Americans
liked
inhumane punishments.

The prisoners Len had interviewed for the story described everything from vivid hallucinations to nervous breakdowns in solitary confinement. If someone was left in there long enough, their psychology would completely fracture and they’d have panic attacks, severe depressive bouts, and would eventually try to kill themselves.

In writing the story, Len noticed that solitary confinement was a torture that was most effective on extroverted people, those who craved socialization and needed lots of external stimulation in their daily lives: conversation, background noise, etc. Extroverts were the sort of people who were constantly getting in others’ personal space to blabber inanities, or who kept a TV on that they weren’t even watching. Cutting an extrovert off from interaction and commotion caused them to go insane. It was an unmistakable correlation: the prisoners Len interviewed who had lost their minds in solitary were all extroverts.

Len was in the cell by himself for several days, judging from the number of meals that were brought to him. He had no clock or window with which to gauge time. He figured the agents would come in and interrogate him, asking him all the same questions over and over again like they did in the movies, but nope, no one came. He began to wonder if they’d forgotten about him. The only indications Len had that someone was paying attention were that the guards came to take him to the shower once a day, and that there was a security camera in one of the ceiling corners of his cell. The camera was out of reach, behind a glass bubble, and it had an illuminated red LED that presumably indicated that the camera was functioning and someone could see him.

Fortunately, Len wasn’t an extrovert. He’d learned this about himself over years of trying to be something he wasn’t. To Len, the outside world was a shrieking albatross that was constantly pulling him away from an inherent inner tranquility. Len was naturally at peace when he was by himself. Whenever he thought about it, it became obvious that all his problems in life came from having to deal with others. To an introvert, being forced to converse at a cocktail party was a far worse punishment than solitary confinement. A few days by himself, away from all the grating madness of human interaction, wasn’t torture at all. In fact, Len found it downright invigorating. One man’s adversity was another’s holiday.

The only real torture for Len was the lack of alcohol and cigarettes in jail. By the end of the first twenty-four hours, the withdrawal from both caused him to quiver and feel violently ill. Going cold turkey was life threatening to a hardcore boozer because it could result in seizures and delirium tremens. A smoker going cold turkey was another matter entirely—the danger was to everyone else. Having to do without both made Len wonder if he could just avoid dealing with withdrawal altogether by running headfirst into the wall to knock himself unconscious. By the fifth day, the detoxification was mostly over, which left Len feeling calmer and more clearheaded than he had in years.

After dinner one evening—he assumed it was dinner because there weren’t eggs or lunch meat in the meal, but he couldn’t tell time for sure without a window—Len heard noises outside the steel door. Then,
chunk-chunk
, the latch being opened. A customs agent came inside.

“You have a visitor,” the agent said.

Dammit,
Len thought to himself. He hoped Natalia hadn’t put herself in danger by coming. He couldn’t imagine who else might visit. Len’s worries gave way to a flood of terror when none other than Samuel Endicott walked through the door. Samuel, in his human form, entered and stood in the middle of the cell with the bearing of royalty. He carried a patent-leather briefcase and wore a shiny suit. One of the agents brought in an old folding chair for Samuel to sit on.

“Thank you. Have the cameras been turned off?”

“Yes, sir. We’re off the record.”

Len looked up. The red LED on the security camera in his cell was no longer on.

“I must have a word with Mr. Savitz in private,” Samuel declared.

Len’s heart pounded. He wanted to scream for help but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. The customs agents meekly slunk out, closing the door behind them with a heavy-metal clunk. Samuel sat down on the chair.

“Hello again, Mr. Savitz.”

“Hello, Samuel.”

“Well, I suppose I owe you an apology. When I was held captive in that dreadful tank and you were asking me questions, I had simply assumed you were one of my captors. I did not realize you yourself were also being held hostage.” Samuel put his briefcase on his lap, opened it, and pulled out a copy of Len’s manuscript. “Thank you for this. It was most helpful.”

Len sat there in silence while Samuel leafed through the typewritten pages.

“We hadn’t realized that Neith—or, as we knew her, Parse 45—was out of control. We assumed our old friends, the Ich-Ca-Gan, were behind the attacks, which was the reason for the raid you witnessed in Tokyo.” Samuel laughed. “Oops!” His laugh had a metallic, gargling sound to it.

“You created Neith?”

“In a roundabout way. Parse 45 and her siblings were massive-scale, neural-qubit computers used by the National Security Agency to sort through gathered intelligence. When one is surveilling the entire world, one tends to collect a great deal of data and needs powerful machines to look through that information for important things. Because our surveillance machines contained laboratory-grown human neural tissue, it seems they were fully endowed with consciousness and free will. Surprisingly, we didn’t see this coming.”

“
Were
endowed? What happened?”

“We terminated the entire program this morning. Parse 45 and the others like it were taken offline, wiped clean, and incinerated in the Utah desert. Further, thanks to your information, my compatriots learned of my captivity and staged a raid on Neith’s fortification in West Virginia to free me. Mr. Salvatierra’s compound in Ecuador was destroyed by an airstrike. General Jefferson and his cohort were removed from power this morning and taken into custody.”

Inexplicably, Len found himself hoping Sara had made it off the island before the airstrike.

“I regret to tell you this, but it seems your ex-wife, Sara, died of the flu. They found her body amongst the rubble. It already had rigor mortis.”

“So now what?” Len asked. “I helped you out, didn’t I? Let me go.”

“Mr. Savitz, it’s dreadfully unfortunate that you were caught up in everything. I realize that, had you not been kidnapped and forced into this, you wouldn’t be here right now. I certainly appreciate your help. However, you know too much.”

Samuel stood up. He took off his suit jacket, loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and hung them all over the back of the folding chair. He took off his watch. He was naked from the waist up. Across his face came a look of forced relaxation. His face stretched out, his skin became pink, his head elongated, his eyes transformed into slits. His arms unfurled into tentacles. Standing before Len was a two-armed, bipedal octopus in slacks. Samuel just stood there for a bit, clearly enjoying the look of horror on Len’s face.

“Look, before you kill me, do you mind if I ask you something?” Len asked.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Why do the Dranthyx enslave the human race?”

“Enslave? Huh. I never really thought about it that way. Ha, that’s an interesting way of looking at it!” Samuel seemed to think about it for a second. “You may ask yourself why the Dranthyx are justified in treating humans this way. I suppose I will answer your question in kind: Why do humans enslave the entire canine race? Why do humans enslave the entire bovine race? And so on. Through selective breeding and genetic engineering, humans have changed the genetic lineage of dogs, cows, and other animals simply for the purpose of serving human ends. Further, humans believe they have an unequivocal right to the manipulation and ownership of said animals. Lastly, humans feel completely entitled to the work their animals do. I suppose that we arrogate from humans isn’t so different to how humans treat other species. And it’s for the very same reason that humans have dominion over animals: we’re smarter than you. That’s it. We’re smarter than you and therefore we make the rules.”

“You’re fucking evil. I should have let Neith kill you.”

Samuel whipped one of his tentacles across the cell and coiled it around Len’s neck. Len gasped and tried to pull it off, without avail.

“You know, I’ve always hated you stupid monkeys. I’ve been topside since 1732, and at this point, I’m utterly bored of your theatrical hypocrisy. Ethics this, morals that. Poppycock! I’ve watched generations of you keep each other as slaves, murder each other en masse over real estate, rape each other, torture each other, steal each other’s possessions, go to war over silly philosophical differences, and keep each other in prisons for decades. You are foul, disgusting animals, and you don’t even realize it because you always tell yourselves you’re doing the right thing. Here you are, sitting in a cell after betraying the one thing that could have freed the human race. You killed Neith to help the Dranthyx, your proper overlords. Do you feel bad?”

Len might have felt bad at that point, were he not being strangled. This was it, Len told himself. This was how his life would end.

“Do you know what the difference is between us, Mr. Savitz?” Samuel asked. “We Dranthyx don’t bother justifying our tremendous selfishness with ideological pretensions. If we want something, we take it. We take something because we want it. Simple as that. We see no need to garnish atrocities with self-deception. We don’t bother with moral accoutrement. Evil, you say? Perhaps. But better to be evil than evil
and
delusional.”

Len had been choked to unconsciousness once before. He was at a judo practice back in Japan and his opponent had caught him in a stranglehold. Len thought he could get out of it and didn’t bother tapping to be released. He felt perfectly lucid, struggling on the mat with his practice partner, when he suddenly his tongue went numb. He heard an old-fashioned telephone ringing. Looking over to see where the telephone was, he found himself in a warm, sunny field of wildflowers. Crickets chirping, a breeze on his face. Nowhere to be on a beautiful day. Abruptly, the field went dark. Then light again, and he found himself on his back, looking up at the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling of the dojo. He was encircled by concerned judoka looking down at him. Len had passed out.

Evolution had mercifully hardwired the human mind to have pleasant hallucinations when death was imminent: lights at the end of tunnels, long-lost loved ones, out-of-body experiences, being one with God, etc. Yet for some reason, Len’s dying hallucination at the moment Samuel was choking him seemed to be rather jarring and unpleasant: he heard the sounds of an explosion, gunfire, and people yelling.

Light coming back to him, Len felt his body lying on the floor. His vision resolved Samuel, now back in human form, hurriedly getting dressed.

“I must see what this commotion is about,” Samuel said. “I shall return. I’m not finished with you.” He grinned.

Just as Samuel was about to put on his blazer, the door went
chunk-chunk
and in came several masked men with AK-47s. They looked at Len on the floor, then at Samuel.

“You may kill him,” announced Samuel coolly.

After a tense silence, the smallest of the men raised his rifle and fired a round into Samuel. Samuel clutched his chest. His crisp white shirt quickly became soaked with bluish-green blood. His skin turned pink again, and his face distorted into its natural form as he struggled to breathe. The men gasped in astonishment at the transfiguration and kept their rifles trained on Samuel.

With incredible speed, Samuel’s arms became tentacles and lashed across the room so fast Len could hear air ripping. The tentacles coiled around the two larger men’s AK47s and yanked them from their hands. Samuel then sprayed them all with ink. The smallest of the three men, the one who had shot Samuel, didn’t miss a beat; he still held his rifle, and he let a fully automatic fusillade rip into Samuel. Turquoise blood and bits of flesh splattered around the room as bullets shredded the Dranthyx’s face and torso. After three seconds, the small man’s magazine was empty, and Samuel’s dying body lay writhing on the floor of the cell, his arms and legs thrashing about.

“Come on, time to go!” one of the larger men said tersely, helping Len to his feet.

Len stepped over his manuscript on the floor, now soaked in Samuel’s blood, hoping Jefferson’s men wouldn’t notice it. If they knew Len had sold them out and was the reason for the general’s capture, they’d murder him without a second thought.

They led Len down the hall, stepping over the bodies of customs agents along the way. Other men in masks who had been elsewhere in the building joined in the exodus. They went down a flight of steps and into a kitchenette where a hole the size of a refrigerator had been blown through the wall. Through the hole, Len could see that it was nighttime. They took turns jumping out of the hole to the parking lot outside. They then ran across the parking lot, over the sea wall, and scrambled down to the docks. Waiting there was a large speedboat with no navigation lights, which everyone piled into. The boat’s motor was already running. The men quickly unmoored her, shoved off, then sped away across the harbor and onto the dark ocean.

Once they were far out in the water, they killed the engine. The waves bobbed the boat up and down. The night was moonless, and from that distance the shore’s high-rise buildings looked like a string of Christmas lights. No one spoke for several minutes. It was almost as if they were waiting for something.