They were at Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine.
“Have you been here before, Bottom-san?”
Nick shook his head. He didn’t know how Sato could stand speaking and breathing in more of this air. Nick had seen many forensic photos and videos taken from this spot, but he’d never had to come out here in person before.
Originally, the landfill had been a deep ravine that ran north to south for about a mile. Bulldozers had deepened parts, built low tabletop mesas and hills along its edge, and leveled some crude roads from the nearest county road to the fill. On the west side, the tons of garbage dumped there were of the usual twentieth-century urban sort—countless rotting garbage bags, ruined furniture, heaps of rotting cloth and organic materials. Here on the northwest side, there was plenty of that, but from the rim of the chasm to the bottom there were also rotting human corpses—many hundreds of them. Some were wrapped in cloth or plastic shrouds, but most lay open and exposed to the hot September sun. Clouds of seagulls and crows had risen from their feeding sites at the appearance of the dragonfly ’copter and now returned to their dining. One area was reserved for the turkey vultures that circled on thermals above, like aircraft in an approach pattern at DIA, awaiting their turn on the exposed corpses. Many of the corpses at the base of the ravine were mere skeletons, sexlessly clean, gleaming white, with only a few shreds and tatters of flesh left on the exposed ribs or pelvises or leg bones. But the majority of bodies were still flesh-filled, bloated beyond recognition as human, crawling with maggots, and with only obscene glimpses of white bone poking through their fermenting masses.
Nick noticed that many of the medium-old corpses seemed to be moving and twitching on the hillside: a trick of the light due to the movement of the millions of maggots on their surfaces and below. Even the gulls weren’t dining on those bodies.
Every American city had a landfill such as this near its borders now, a third of the way through this glorious twenty-first century. All those reconquista fighters, Cinco de Mayo militia, Aryan Brotherhood gangs, jihadists, neighborhood protection groups, motorcycle gangs, and sometimes the authorities themselves needed such a disposal place if proper urban hygiene was to be observed.
Sato touched Nick’s left arm and urged him closer to the edge.
They hadn’t disarmed him and Nick’s right hand was already raised. If Okada, Ishii, or ta were to raise one of his weapons behind him, Nick was going to throw himself in front of Sato, grab the bigger man while emptying the full clip of his Glock into the security chief’s belly, chest, and face, then roll down into the heaps of corpses, using Sato’s body as a shield while he fired the Glock and then going for the useless little .32 pocket pistol at his ankle to take down the three body-armored ninjas carrying full-auto M4 carbines.
His body was ready to do that. But what Nick was thinking was—Val and Leonard and K.T. will never know what happened to me.
Well, K.T. might. The DPD checked Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine about once a month for corpses of interest. And she might tell his son and father-in-law, if those two didn’t soon join him here.
Which Nick didn’t think was very likely.
Sato put his hand on Nick’s left shoulder and Nick put his hand on the butt of the Glock under his light jacket. The three ninjas shifted close behind him.
“Mukatsuku y na-s desu ka?” said Sato.
Nick had no idea what the words meant. A good-bye, maybe. An ultimatum, maybe. He really didn’t care. His index finger slipped under the Glock’s trigger guard. Everything from this point on would happen in fractions of a second.
“Zehi, Bottom-san. Iko u.” Sato dropped the heavy hand from Nick’s shoulder, wheeled, and led the way back to the dragonfly. Before climbing in after the four Japanese, Nick noticed that the pilot and copilot had put on their oxygen masks to avoid the physically debilitating stench.
WHEREVER THEY WERE HEADED next, they weren’t taking him back to the Six Flags parking lot. Not yet.
Whatever it is, thought Nick, it can’t be as bad as Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine.
As it would turn out, he was wrong.
The dragonfly hurtled west at somewhere above 150 m.p.h., never climbing higher than two or three thousand feet above the unscrolling terrain. They flew over the northern Denver suburbs and followed Highway 36, the Boulder Turnpike, toward the gleaming slabs of the Flatirons.
They were headed to the People’s Republic of Boulder.
Nick felt his phone vibrate. Moving slowly so as not to spook Sato or his ninjas, Nick withdrew the phone from his jacket pocket. It was a text message:—Mr. B—Your two visitors are here and I’ve shown them to your quarters and will watch over them. Chits for the food court and everything. Gunny G.
Nick tried not to show any emotion as he slipped the phone back in his pocket.
The dragonfly passed over Boulder, flying low over the buildings on the CU campus, and then climbed above the foothills and hovered. Nick leaned over and looked down. They were landing in what had been the parking lot at NCAR.
Nick remembered the Anthropogenic Global Warming furor. He was already in his twenties when that hysteria hit its apogee. Now it was just a cautionary tale from the early-century Dark Age of long-range computer modeling. Nick, for one, had looked forward to longer summers, easier winters, and palm trees in Colorado, but the weather the last few decades had been colder and snowier than average and the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming had joined that of Herr Becher’s phlogiston and Soviet Lamarckism evolutionary theory.
One of the first victims of the public’s disgust at the AGW false alarm, combined with disappearing federal budgets, was the group for which the beautiful building growing larger beneath them had been built: NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The architect I. M. Pei had designed this Mesa Lab NCAR center out of sandstone and glass and meant for its stone to age with and blend in with the giant sandstone Flatirons just above the building while the glass reflected the turbulent Colorado skies. It had done so beautifully for almost seventy-five years now, but the atmospheric research people had long since sold the structure—the only structure allowed to be built in the miles of greenbelt separating urban Boulder from the Flatirons and foothills—to some private company.
They landed gently. NCAR—NAKAMURA CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH said the small sign to the right of the entry walkway.
“Mr. Nakamura kept the old initials,” Sato said redundantly as he opened the door.
Damned white of him, thought Nick.
The outer sections of the old laboratory, in the towers and where the broad windows looked out on sky, stone, and brown grasslands, were still offices. But the basement and former courtyard core of the building had been converted into… something else.
They donned green cloth surgical booties and little cloth surgical shower caps in a sort of airlock outside the long, wide underground room. But Nick had already caught a glimpse of what was inside.
The three ninjas stayed in the airlock as Sato escorted Nick into the space. Two medicos or technicians, both wearing full surgical robes and masks as well as the caps and booties, hurried up to say something, but Sato waved a single finger that silenced them. One of them bowed low to Sato.
They walked past tall tanks of Plexiglas or some stronger, clear plastic-glass material. Each tank was filled with a greenish liquid. A score of pipes and tubes snaked into each tank, and half of the tubes connected to the human beings—mostly men, but a few women—who floated in each vat. They were naked except for a sort of diaper from which more tubes came and went. Tubes ran into the men’s and women’s nostrils, and broader tubes were forced down their throats. Other IV drips connected to wrists and arms. Sensors on the figures’ chests and bellies and shaven heads fed data to control boards on the exteriors of the tanks.
“The tubes are for nutrients and other functions, Bottom-san,” Sato said softly, almost whispering, as if they were in a church or shrine. “They receive no oxyg
en in gaseous form. You see, their lungs are actually filled with the liquid. The fluid is a highly oxygenated mixture. The initial immersion is difficult for the subject, if conscious, but the human body—once the lungs are completely filled—soon learns to use the oxygen in the fluid as easily as if he or she were breathing air.”
They moved from tank to tank, walking in single file between the tall containers. Each of the hundreds of tanks was illuminated from the inside and the overall effect in this subterranean chamber was that hushed, almost solemn sense of being in some fantastic aquarium. The only sound came from the quiet machines or the occasional rustle of soft-soled slippers on the tile floor. The laboratory space did have a churchlike hush and reverential feel to it.
“Except for a few cases, in which the subject is being punished,” whispered Sato, “we remove the eardrums, eyeballs, and optic nerves. There is no need for them, you see. They could only be a distraction.”
Nick thought, They’re being punished by not having their eardrums, eyeballs, and optic nerves removed? He feared that this would make sense in a moment.
“What is this?” demanded Nick. “Some sort of sci-fi experiment for long-distance space travel? Are these clones or something? Adapting the human body to live under the oceans? What the fuck is this nightmare?”
They stopped by a tank where a man who looked to be in his early sixties floated amid his Medusa-hair tangle of tubes and microtubes. His eyelids were sutured shut and sunken. He had no external ears and the ear openings had been covered over by grafts of flesh and skin.
“These are the first test subjects,” said Sato. “A few hundred here at NCAR from thousands finishing their testing nationwide. These are the final quality-control check before Flashback-two is distributed in America and elsewhere.”
“F-two?” Nick repeated stupidly.
“Precisely,” said Sato. He set his strong hand on the glass inches from the floating man’s face. Nick noticed that this man’s skin—the skin covering the faces and scalps and bodies of all the figures in all the tanks—was fishbelly-white and as wrinkled as an albino prune.
“They will spend the rest of their lives in flashback happiness,” continued Sato. “Less than two miles from here, people are spending millions of dollars to relive their entire lives under supervised flashback medication at the Naropa Institute. But regular flashback demands that the subject be awakened for several hours out of each twenty-four—to exercise, to eat, to avoid bedsores and other ailments of the permanently immobilized. Their relived lives are constantly being interrupted, the flashback illusion interrupted and violated. But here…”
Sato gestured around.
“Here Mr. Nakamura’s science department has provided full lifetimes’ worth of only the happiest moments, not merely relived as with flashback, but restructured as one’s imagination and fantasies would have them. People here are spending happy futures with loved ones they’ve lost to death. Cripples in real life walk and run here and will for the rest of their F-two lives. Failures in life find success in these tanks, with this drug, and no one is harmed. There is no failure or loss under this kind of flash, Bottom-san. There is no pain under Flashback-two. None at all.”
“It’s real,” mumbled Nick. He meant the drug. After all these years of rumor and myth about F-2, it was here. And real.
“Oh, yes. To these men and women, everything they are dreaming is totally real,” said Sato, misunderstanding Nick’s comment. “The only difference separating life under Flashback-two and what we call ‘real life’ is the wonderful absence of physical pain and painful experiences or memories or emotions for this privileged group.”
“How long do they… live?” asked Nick. His clothes still carried the stink of Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine. He wished he were back there.
“Our best projections, based on a decade of research, suggest a normal span of seventy or eighty years,” said Sato. “Sometimes longer. A full, rich, happy life.”
Nick covered his mouth with his hand. After a moment he removed it and grated, “The penalty in Japan or anywhere else for Nipponese nationals using flashback is death.”
“As it shall remain, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “And that law will continue to be strictly enforced, just as it is in the Global Caliphate.”
Nick shook his head. “You’ll sell this stuff, this F-two…” He broke off when he realized he didn’t know how to end that sentence.
“At a lower price than the original flashback,” Sato said proudly. “F-two will be street priced at a new dollar for forty or fifty hours. Even the homeless will be able to afford it.”
“You can’t give three hundred and forty–some million people each a fish tank to float in,” snarled Nick. “And who’s going to feed the flashing millions? It’s hard enough to do that now.”
“Of course there will be no tanks, Bottom-san. The customer will have to find his or her own flashcave or comfortable, private place in which to go under Flash-two. The tank really is the best option. We imagine that providing such places—perhaps some not so different than NCAR—will be a growth industry in the next few years. We imagine that other nations, ones that do not allow either form of flashback within their own borders, might be helpful in manufacturing such total-immersion tanks for Americans.”
Nick counted cartridges. He had fifteen rounds in the magazine already in the Glock and one more magazine in his jacket pocket. Thirty rounds total. It might take several 9mm rounds to crack one of these tanks, if they were breakable by small-arms fire. The .32 didn’t count since it almost certainly couldn’t smash this type of super-Plexiglas. It might be transparent Kevlar-3, in which case even the Glock would be useless here. He later realized that this probability was the only thing that stopped him.
The two men stood in green-shadowed silence for a long moment: Hideki Sato contemplative, Nick Bottom seething in murderous frustration.
“Why are you showing me this?” asked Nick, staring Sato in the face.
The big security chief smiled slightly. “We have to leave now, Bottom-san, if I am to return you to your vehicle before the hour is up as I promised. Later today, when you speak to Mr. Nakamura, do not forget the possibility of NCAR.”
“I’ll never forget NCAR,” said Nick.
1.17
Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25
WHERE ARE THEY?”
Nick was in the weapons-check airlock and Gunny G. was the only one behind the counter.
“Your son’s gone, Mr. B. And your father-in-law has had some sort of stroke or heart attack,” said the ex-Marine.
“Gone?” shouted Nick. “What do you mean Val’s gone? Where to?”
“We don’t know, Mr. B. He went up and out the skylight and down a rope. I’ll show you.”
“Is Leonard—my father-in-law—alive?”
“Yeah. I brought him to Dr. Tak.”
“Let me in, Gunny. Buzz the door open.”
“I can’t, Mr. B. Not ’til you surrender the two guns you checked out this morning. You know the rules.”
“I know the rules,” said Nick. He came back to the counter and slipped a $50 old-bucks bill across. He was nearing the last of his “advance” from Nakamura.
Gunny G. buzzed the heavy door open.
DR. TAK’S REAL NAME was Sudaret Jatisripitak but everyone in the mall called him Dr. Tak. He’d fled from Thailand during their last “Thai Rak Thai—Thais Love Thais” revolution that had killed a fifth of the nation’s population and found that he could make a decent living, without ever being medically certified in the United States, simply by giving black-market medical care to the few thousand residents of the Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums. Accordingly, Dr. Tak’s cubie was one of the largest in the mall, half of the upstairs part of the former Macy’s department store, and Nick found Leonard asleep in one of the ER cubicles near the entrance to Dr. Tak’s lair.
Nick’s heart leaped in terror when he saw the IV drip and other tubes going into his father-in-law. No, he
wouldn’t be forgetting NCAR any time soon.
Tak, a small man in his seventies but still with short jet-black hair, came into the cubicle, shook hands with Nick, and said, “He will live. Mr. Gunny G. found your father-in-law unconscious in your cubie and I directed he be brought here. I’ve done various diagnostic tests. Professor Fox regained consciousness briefly but he is currently sleeping.”
“What’s wrong with him?” asked Nick. Leonard looked much older to him than the old professor had five years earlier when he’d dropped Val off in L.A. in his care.
“I believe it was an attack of angina brought on by aortic stenosis,” said the old Thai doctor. “The syncopic episode was a result of the pain and lack of oxygen to the heart.”
“What does ‘syncopic episode’ mean, Doc?”
“Fainting. His loss of consciousness.”
“I think I know what angina is, but what’s the… aortic stenosis?”
“Correct, Mr. Bottom. Aortic stenosis is an abnormal narrowing of the aortic valve. At certain times—say, times of great exertion or tension—this narrowing can shut off blood from the left ventricle of the heart. His symptoms were the sudden onset of angina and the fainting.”
“Is it fixable?” Nick asked softly, staring at the sleeping old man’s face. Dara had loved her father. “Will he survive it?”
“Two quite different questions,” said Dr. Tak with a smile. “About four percent of the time, the initial symptom of aortic stenosis is sudden death. Your father-in-law was lucky that his symptoms were limited to angina and loss of consciousness. From my initial tests—and I have good diagnostic equipment here, Mr. Bottom—my first guess is that this was a form of the heart problem called senile calcific aortic stenosis…”
“Senile!” said Nick, shocked.
“Used only in the sense that it occurs naturally in people over sixty-five years of age,” said Dr. Tak. “As one ages, protein collagen of the valve leaflets is destroyed and calcium is deposited on the leaflets. Turbulence then increases, causing thickening and stenosis of the valve, even while mobility is reduced by calcification. Why this progresses to the point of causing aortic stenosis in some patients but not in others is not known. It has in Professor Fox’s case.”