Wired (18 page)

Kira
raised her eyebrows. “Because I didn’t want to be responsible for knocking
humanity back to the Dark Ages,” she said simply.

28

Desh
spotted their waiter and motioned him over. They were in a dark, comfortable
little corner of the vast mall and his fear of being discovered was waning by
the minute. They had time before they had to catch the bus and he was in no
hurry to leave.

“Can
you start a new check for us?” asked Desh when the waiter arrived.

“Sure,
what can I get for you?”

Desh
quickly leafed through the menu. “We’ll both have hot fudge sundaes.”

The
man nodded and hurried off.

“Hot
fudge sundaes?” said Kira.

“I
want an excuse to stay here longer,” he explained. He allowed himself to smile.
“Besides, when I’m talking to you my brain needs all the glucose it can get.”

She
looked almost bashful. “Sorry to have to throw so much at you at once. I know
it’s like drinking from a fire-hose.”

Desh
grinned at this. “Not at all. Once again you have me intrigued,” he said. “So
please go on.”

“Smith
told you
his
theory as to why I’ve kept longevity a secret,” she said. “To
acquire great power and wealth.” She shook her head in disgust. “Nothing could
be further from the truth. I’d love to share the treatment. The problem is,
when I was still enhanced, I considered what the world would be like once I
did. The conclusions I reached were shocking.”

Desh
tried to guess where she was heading, but couldn’t.

“If
everyone lives to be one hundred and fifty,” continued Kira, “what happens to
the world’s population?”

For
a moment Desh wondered if it was a trick question. He shrugged. “It would go
up,” he said.

“It
would go up,” she repeated. “A lot. At least as many people would be born each
year but far fewer would die. And women would be at reproductive age twice as
long. The planet is already overcrowded and getting steadily worse. Introduce
my therapy and everyone would need to make room for their great, great, great
grandparents.” She shook her head emphatically. “Doubling the span of human
life would be an absolute disaster.”

“It’s
true our society would have to make changes,” acknowledged Desh, “but you can’t
be sure the effects would be catastrophic.”

“Overpopulation
doesn’t just have physical effects, it has psychological effects as well,” she
said. “A fascinating experiment was done on Norway rats years ago. The
experimenters confined a population of them in a quarter-acre enclosure,
provided plenty of food, and removed all predators. They expected the rat
population to climb to five thousand, but it didn’t. It stabilized at one
hundred and fifty. When they
forced
the population to exceed a
comfortable density, even with unlimited food, they saw a dramatic increase in
pathologic rat behavior. Withdrawal, cannibalism, homosexuality, and other
uncharacteristic behaviors emerged.” Kira raised her eyebrows and eyed Desh
knowingly. “You think human stress goes up a notch or two the more crowded it
gets?”

Desh
frowned. It didn’t take a brilliant scientist to answer this question.

“While
enhanced, I quickly realized that if I made the therapy public, the population
would reach critical levels very quickly. Within a few generations, at most,
humanity would either be reduced to small populations living in Dark Age
conditions or extinct. I’ve since run a number of computer simulations.”

“And?”

“And
the simulations match my intuition exactly. There are a range of possible
scenarios, but I’ll give you one of the more likely ones. The skyrocketing
population results in vast economic collapse as resources are depleted and the
number of jobs can’t expand as quickly as the need for them. Economies are
geared to a retirement age of sixty-five or so, and an average lifespan of
around eighty.” Kira paused. “You even joked about the need for an immortal to
have a large retirement nest egg,” she reminded him.

Desh
frowned. He had made the joke but had failed to consider its implications.

“We
also spoke about longevity as a burden to younger generations,” she continued. “It
is. Along with economic collapse, population growth causes conditions to get
more and more unsanitary. Contagious diseases spread like wildfire. Massive
famines become common. Fighting for survival and fueled by increases in
aberrant human behavior, countries war on their international neighbors and
soon unleash a nuclear Armageddon on the planet.”

Desh
blanched. It sounded chillingly plausible. “But wouldn't world governments
realize the threat and implement strict birth-control policies?”

“Maybe.
Doubtfully, but maybe. But is that what you would want? Buying increased survival
at the expense of your offspring? This may sound perfectly reasonable to me
when I’m enhanced, but the thought of it sickens me when I’m not.” Kira paused.
“There is little doubt. Springing a seventy or eighty year life extension on
the world would lead to the end of civilization.” She frowned and looked
utterly disheartened.

The
depth of despair on her face took Desh by surprise. “Kira?” he said gently,
“are you okay?”

She
nodded, but the sadness didn’t leave her eyes. “Just feeling sorry for myself,”
she said softly. “My every effort blows up in my face. I can transform myself
to a fantastic level of intelligence, but at the cost of becoming ruthless and
losing much of my humanity. I find a way to dramatically slow the aging process,
only to realize that doing so will destroy civilization.”

Desh
sat in silence, unable to think of anything to say. He could understand her
frustration. She was a modern day Midas, the king who was thrilled to be
granted a touch of gold until he realized the devastating consequences: he
couldn’t prevent his food or beloved daughter from turning into gold as well.

29

They
sat in silence as the waiter arrived with their desserts. Kira put a spoonful
of vanilla ice-cream and hot fudge into her mouth and swallowed unhappily. Desh
found himself wondering if a being of infinite intelligence would still enjoy
the taste of fudge.

As
Desh began working on his own sundae he decided to change the subject. Kira
still had Lusetti and her brother to explain, but he was beginning to think she
would. “So what happened after you realized you couldn’t reveal your
discovery?”

“I
decided to throw in the towel. I vowed to stop all experiments on longevity and
to never use my brain optimization therapy again.” She waited patiently for
excess fudge to finish dripping off her long spoon so she could bring it to her
mouth. “But it goes without saying the story didn’t end there. Someone had been
keeping track of me, not with listening devices but the old fashioned way. I
didn’t know it at the time, but Larry Lusetti, a Private Investigator, had been
hired to keep tabs on me. He went through my garbage and spied on me through my
windows like a peeping tom. It didn’t take long for him to discover I had
stopped all experimentation.”

Desh
considered. “I’m guessing this signaled Moriarty that you had made a
breakthrough and didn’t
need
to experiment further.”

“That’s
right. A few days later my condo was broken into again. I had long since
stopped keeping records in a lab notebook. By then I was keeping my notes on my
computer. The file was encoded and also protected by security I had devised
while I was enhanced. Even if someone breached my computer, they’d have to
decode the file. But a breach wasn’t possible. Not by a member of Homo sapiens
at any rate.” She frowned deeply. “Which goes to show that just because you’re
smart doesn’t mean you can’t be incredibly stupid at the same time.”

“Moriarty
was able to open the file?”

She
nodded. “After he broke into my condo, he must have taken one of the gellcaps
that Morgan had stolen. He sat at the computer, enhanced, and was easily able
to bypass my security.”

Kira
scowled, clearly annoyed with herself even now. “I was lucky,” she continued. “I
had been paranoid enough to only keep records of individual animal experiments
on the computer, and philosophical musings. The actual step by step and gene by
gene instructions for the longevity therapy, and for the second level of
intelligence enhancement, were stored on a key-ring flash drive I kept with me
at all times. There was no mention in my computer, whatsoever, that I had been
working on an even greater level of intelligence enhancement. Moriarty still
knows nothing about this. But I did have notes on the longevity therapy. He
couldn’t get the recipe, but he learned that I had found a way to extend life.”

Desh’s
eyes narrowed. “Smith knew you had slowed the aging process by half. He also
said your ultimate plan on the road to immortality was to design nanobots to
patrol the bloodstream, and then find a way to transfer consciousness.”

“That’s
right. This general plan was recorded on my computer. It was my initial
thinking before I realized what a disaster even the first step would be. Exactly
as Smith described.”

“Interesting,”
said Desh. “So do you think he’s Moriarty?”

Kira
considered. “Maybe, but my intuition tells me no. I think he’s just Moriarty’s
lieutenant.”

“Go
on,” said Desh, pushing his barely touched dessert to the side, having
concluded that he couldn’t split his focus between Kira Miller and the entrance
and eat a dripping sundae at the same time.

“I
knew as soon as Moriarty realized I’d discovered the fountain of youth he
wouldn’t rest until he had it,” continued Kira. “Which meant I was in big
trouble. I put the flash drive in a stainless steel pill bottle and buried it
where I thought no one would ever find it. I memorized its GPS coordinates. And
then I enhanced myself. I was panicked, and my thinking was scattershot, so
even though I had just promised myself never to do it again, I felt I had no other
choice.”

Desh
nodded sympathetically. Under the circumstances he couldn’t blame her.

“Once
I had transformed myself,” she continued, “it became clear what I needed to do.
The instructions for reconstructing my therapies were dozens and dozens of typed
pages long. To be absolutely certain that the secret was safe, even if I was
under duress, I imprisoned my memories of the formulas and the GPS coordinates
to the buried flash drive: even the memory of the general
area
in which
it was buried. I partitioned these memories behind an impenetrable mental
wall.” She sighed. “It wasn’t easy.”

“I
don’t doubt it,” said Desh.

“Even
enhanced, finding and isolating specific memory traces in my own mind was an
extraordinarily difficult challenge.”

“But
you were able to do it?”

“Yes.
I structured these memories so I could only access them if I made a powerful,
conscious decision that I wanted to. And like a Chinese finger trap, I set it
up so the more I fought to get at the memories while under duress, the stronger
the barrier would become.” She paused. “As it turned out, I didn’t do this a
moment too soon.”

Desh
leaned forward intently.

“A
few hours later Larry Lusetti broke into my condo and took me hostage,” said Kira.
“He wanted the secret to extended life and told me he wasn’t leaving without
it. He used truth drugs on me. They were very effective. I told him about the
discovery and why I hadn’t shared it with the world. But when he asked about
age retardation, I told him I didn’t remember the recipe.”

“Which
was now absolutely true,” said Desh.

Kira
nodded. She took a final bite of her sundae, her spoon clinking loudly against
the sides of the tall parfait glass as she retrieved it, and pushed it aside. “Unfortunately,
I was unable to hold anything else back from him. Under the drugs I told him
about the flash drive. I told him exactly how I had partitioned the GPS
coordinates in my memory so I couldn’t retrieve them under duress. He dutifully
reported this to Moriarty.”

“And
did Moriarty believe you?”

“I
assume so. If not, I think he would have had Lusetti use torture in addition to
truth drugs, which he never did.” Kira paused as if bracing herself to
continue, dreading the prospect.

Desh
could sense something was very wrong. “What happened then?” he prompted gently.

 
“I woke up the next morning, still a hostage.”
She looked off into the distance and a tear slowly formed in the corner of one
eye. “And Lusetti told me they had my brother, Alan.”

Desh’s
eyes widened as the connections became obvious.

“Lusetti
told me his boss was in Alan’s home in Cincinnati,” she whispered in horror,
“and would burn my brother alive unless I gave him the secret.”

“Did
you?” said Desh softly.

She
looked pale as she shook her head no.

Desh
realized he had asked a stupid question. If Moriarty already had the fountain
of youth, he wouldn’t be so desperate to capture her alive.

“I
knew that Moriarty was a man without principles
before
his brain was
rewired,” she explained somberly. “But if he had the secret to extended life,
he could become the biggest monster in history. What could stop him? He could
enhance his intelligence and could use the promise of extended life to amass
power beyond imagining. The kind of power that Smith accused
me
of
wanting.”

Kira
stopped and a single tear shook itself loose and rolled slowly down her cheek.

Moriarty
had forced her to make an impossible decision, Desh realized. He could tell
this had caused a deep rift to her psyche that would never heal. “You knew the
stakes, and you did what you had to do,” he said softly. “I admire you for
that.”

She
shook her head as tears now welled up in both of her eyes. “I wasn’t a hero,”
she said miserably. “I was a weakling. I would have done
anything
to
save Alan, even at the risk of unleashing another Hitler on the world. I tried
to unlock the memory with all of my might. But I couldn’t,” she whispered. “The
barrier I had constructed was too good.” Kira lowered her eyes. “It didn’t
matter, anyway. I knew in my heart that Moriarty would never let Alan go. Once
I gave him what he wanted, he would kill Alan and me both—and Lusetti as well. We
would be dangerous loose ends.”

Desh
realized her analysis was dead on. She had truly been in a no win situation. “So
what did you do?” he asked.

“I
needed to buy time to rescue my brother. So I told Lusetti the truth. I told
him I was trying but couldn’t reach these memories. The software I had set up
in my mind to guard them wasn’t fooled. I explained I was under more duress
because of the threat to my brother than if I was being physically tortured.”

“Did
he believe you?”

“I
think so,” she said, absently wiping a tear away with the back of her hand. “I
pleaded with him to make sure Moriarty wouldn’t hurt Alan for twenty-four hours
while I found a way to unlock my memories. He told me Moriarty agreed to this.”

“And
then you killed Lusetti.”

She
nodded. “He untied me for a bathroom break right after the call with his boss. I
knew I had the upper hand in any struggle. I knew he couldn’t risk killing me
before he had the fountain of youth. I was able to hit him with a marble
bookend while he was trying to incapacitate me. I didn’t want to kill him,” she
insisted, her voice distraught. “It just happened that way.”

Desh’s
eyes narrowed. “So you rushed to Lusetti’s apartment, hoping you could learn
who was pulling his strings,” he said.

“That’s
right. I took his laptop and a file I found with my name on it and went
straight to the airport. I took the first flight to Cincinnati, using one of
the false identities I already had in place. I studied the file and laptop on
the plane, but neither contained Moriarty’s identity.”

Kira
gathered herself. “I’m sure you’ve guessed the rest by now,” she said. “The
plane landed and I raced to my brother’s house. I was determined to do whatever
it took to save his life.”

“But
you were too late,” said Desh solemnly.

A
tortured expression came over Kira’s face and eyes. “I was too late,” she
repeated softly, shuddering. She picked up a napkin and wiped away several
tears that had begun to roll their way slowly down her face. “I had a special
relationship with my brother Alan. He was five years older and always looked
out for me. When other kids taunted me because I was different, or because I
had skipped a few grades, he defended me. And then when my parents died—”

Her
voice broke. She paused and fought to get her emotions under control. “Alan was
in college then,” she said finally, her voice regaining strength. “At Ohio
State. He took a year off to stay with me to make sure I would be okay. I
pleaded with him not to put his own life on hold for me, but he wouldn’t hear
of it. He didn’t go back to finish his degree until I left for college myself.”

Desh
nodded sympathetically and waited for her to continue, but her expression
indicated she was emotionally spent and couldn’t bear to talk about her brother
any further.

“So
once you realized you were too late to save him,” said Desh solemnly, “you knew
you had to vanish from the grid.”

She
nodded.

“I
am truly sorry,” he said softly.

Silence
hung over them like a rain cloud for several long seconds.

“You
killed Lusetti,” said Desh finally. “But this was clearly in self defense. If
what you say is true then you really
haven’t
committed any crimes.”

She
sighed. “If you don’t count illegal human experimentation and misappropriation
of corporate resources.”

“I
don’t,” said Desh without hesitation.

Kira
tried to force a smile but couldn’t quite manage it. “Moriarty has been hunting
me ever since. He was probably already wealthy and powerful when he got into
the game, not to mention ruthless. But it wouldn’t take twenty-three hours of
superhuman intelligence to create immense wealth and power. I started with very
little and created a fortune in no time. Think about what he’s been able to do
in the last several years.”

Desh
did and it wasn’t a pretty picture. “Any ideas who he might be?”

“None,”
she said, beginning to recover her emotional equilibrium. “Whoever it is will
be very subtle about his wealth and power. You won’t find him on the cover of
business magazines. The truly powerful don’t advertise, they just pull strings
from off stage.”

Desh
thought about this and decided she was almost certainly correct.

“Whoever
he is, he didn’t waste any time framing me for the murders of Lusetti and my
brother. But that wasn’t enough to suit him. He decided to pin the Ebola plot
on me as well so he could galvanize the entire US military against me. I don’t
know if he has any other plans with terrorists, but the evidence you’ve seen is
due to his involvement, not mine.”

“What
does he gain by working with terrorists?” asked Desh.

“I
don’t know. But there has to be more to it than we’re seeing. Because I’m
convinced he won’t be able to perfect a genetically engineered cold virus
capable of delivering Ebola genes.”

“Why
not?”

“Too
complex a project.”

“Even
with enhanced intelligence?”

“Yes.
When my mind is transformed, I have thousands and thousands of hours of the
study of molecular biology in my memory for my intellect to draw upon. He
almost certainly doesn’t. Without this, no matter how great his intelligence,
he doesn’t have the knowledge base to succeed.”

Desh
frowned. The more he learned, the more confused he became. He decided to move
on. “So why does he want you now? He already knows he can’t force the secret of
longevity from you.”