The Bangkok Asset: A novel (12 page)

T
he address was a condominium in an upscale building on Soi 24, probably the most expensive street in the city outside of the business district at Satorn. According to the property pages of the
Bangkok Post,
units here sell for just under two million dollars. It sounds a lot until you compare similar properties in other capitals. In Bangkok that kind of money buys four thousand square feet of habitable area including maid’s quarters with a plunge pool on the terrace, guards at the gate who cut sharp salutes and click their heels Prussian style, and a house god who lives in a small palace atop a stone column and looks in four directions at once. To judge from the offerings as we passed him on the driveway he was partial to oranges, bananas, and Pepsi-Cola.

I was not entirely surprised to see the two Chinese cameramen from the ministry in the lobby, waiting for us. They had brought a modest movie camera with tripod that they carried into the lift. A woman from reception took us all to the top where the entire floor led to a magnificent entrance with alcove. Just inside the alcove, on either side of the double front door, two burly white men who had to be ex-marines, or serving marines co-opted for the night, stood at ease. They raised machine pistols and politely asked us to wait before coming any closer, then spoke into their shoulder mikes. Goldman appeared at the door with a Chinese woman in a business pants suit who told him that Chu was one of them, that Krom and I had to be let in because we were from Vikorn and the cameramen had to be let in because they were with the “other” ministry. “That camera stays outside with the guards,” Goldman said, then turned to us with a smile.

“Good evening. Please come in.” The tone said,
Quickly, fast now,
but it was to be a gracious soiree: the giant wore a silk paisley smoking jacket, puffed on a cigar, stood by the door like a good host while we trooped in. Then he said to the guards, “That’s it, you see any apes coming out of those lifts, you shoot.” The ex-marines grunted.

I wasn’t expecting rows of seats as in a small movie theater, all pointing toward a back wall with a white screen. It was a long room that lay between us and the blue plunge pool on the other side of glass sliding doors. You couldn’t miss the state-of-the-art sound system or the large photograph of Goldman in a dinner jacket high on a wall. A polished pine staircase led to bedrooms upstairs. Krom took in the sound system while I scanned the framed photographs that took up the length of one wall. I paused at one of the Asset with a racing bicycle and a famous American cyclist who had won the Tour de France. Both he and the Asset wore identical high-tech shirts featuring the Stars and Stripes and looked so happy they might have been in love. Most of the other photos showcased the Asset’s sports achievements: swimming, fencing, karate, and especially cycling. At the far end of the room a blackwood Chinese temple table held cups and trophies; I guessed he came top of the league in all those challenging sports.

The chairs were filled mostly with Chinese, men in gray business suits, with a couple of Chinese women also dressed in monochrome. Sakagorn, in a tuxedo, sat next to one of the HiSo Chinese women who might have been the head of the delegation. Everyone was looking serious but relaxed, polite but not convinced.
Buyers in a buyer’s market
was the impression I took away on my first glance. And now Goldman looked nervous.

“Okay,” he said, “we can start. Just a couple of words first. What you are going to see I have not stolen.” A pause to let his joke sink in. It didn’t. The word
stolen
did not invoke any response at all, one way or the other. “I would love to have stolen it for keeps, but then all hell would have broken loose. So I borrowed it. That’s the reason for the rush. Within a couple of hours from now this tape has to be back where it was borrowed from. They deliberately made it nondigital to make it harder to copy. This is strictly a tape of a dress rehearsal that didn’t go perfectly. So why am I showing it? Let’s be frank. I have the most fantastic product in the world, but it is not perfect. Buy now, in its imperfect state, you have the opportunity to modify and improve. You buy him, you get me, too, and I will train anyone you like. I will train others to train trainers. In five years you have a viable unit. In ten you have the beginnings of an army. With me you get the complete program and the opportunity to make it all your own. Wait another couple of years, though—” He held up his hands. “It isn’t a question of money, I know you can afford it. But what would you prefer to be, the second country to get the Bomb, or the fourth, or the tenth? Why not the first? Anyway, I present myself to you tonight as an honest broker. This is what I have, warts and all. And I know there is one thing above all you’ll all be looking for, because you are all professionals in the field. The key, I don’t need to tell you, to this particular kind of product, is the
accelerated learning enhancement:
ALE. And this is what the echolocation exercise here is really testing. I invite you to take out your timepieces to do a check. I am confident the learning curve will astonish you. Okay.”

At his signal the lights dimmed and a projector began to whirr. And there he was, the Asset himself, perhaps a year or so younger, on the screen, beaming, a tall young blond in mouse-gray open-neck linen shirt, navy pants, and running shoes. He was standing on a stage empty except for a single chair and holding a microphone and cross-referring to people invisible to us. His English was strangely mid-Atlantic, as if he spent a lot of time with a British grandfather. This was a key moment for me, R—a first flash of full enlightenment. The memory is vivid and present as I write.

“Okay,” the Asset says. “I just walk on like this—and what? I make it up? I’ve never done this before, this wasn’t part of the program. What do I do in this type of real-life nonmilitary situation?” His voice is light, buoyant, silky, freshly washed. Kind of preppy, I guess you could say.

A pause. Then a quiet, scholarly kind of American voice says, “You ad-lib. And you learn.”

“What shall I say?”

“At this stage you are telling them who you are.”

“Who I am?” For some reason that raises a laugh somewhere in his audience, which causes him to grin. “Yeah, right. Hey, hello humanity, I am your worst nightmare—how about that?”

“C’mon,” the voice says, “this is sales practice we’re doing here. You’re selling yourself as a product. You knew you’d have to in the end.”

“Oh. Okay. These are ordinary people I’m going to be speaking to in this scenario? I mean, people who don’t know? But they must know something, or there’d be no reason for them to be here—or should I say
there
?”

A sigh. “Just do your basic public image performance and follow the exercise. It’s gonna be echolocation.”

“But I’ve only just recommenced echolocation after a five-year lapse.”

“That’s the point. How quickly you pick it up. That’s what they’re going to be looking for. Do an intro first, off the bat.”

“Well, here I am,” he says, smiling into the camera. “This is the
me
show”— another smile—“any questions you have, I’ll be only too happy to answer.” Smile three. “Unless the answer’s classified, of course.” He laughs.

“Who the hell are you?” one of his minders asks, by way of a prompt.

“Classified.” He laughs, showing brilliant teeth. “Okay, since you have the clearance, I guess I can tell you I’m first and foremost a military asset whose activities are top secret. I don’t want to sound pompous, but you guys are pretty much the first civilians to get this close.” He pauses, frowns. I don’t think he was listening to a receiver grafted onto his inner ear, he just looked as if he was. “My locations are top secret. This one is temporary, naturally.”

He smiles, stands straight, tall, flat-stomached, broad-shouldered, beautiful—takes a breath. “First and foremost, let’s avoid the word
super,
shall we? I’m not made of steel. You pinch me it hurts, you kick me in the genitals I double up in fetal position and howl like a baby—and so far as I know I’m not vulnerable to Kryptonite—ha-ha.” He smiles again. “Anyway, it’s an overused word that sends the wrong message.
Enhanced
is better, less threatening anyway, but still giving an impression of superiority that alienates ordinary people. To be frank, there was a time when I favored
posthuman
as a serviceable tag, but it’s been hijacked by the sci-fi community. In the end we at the base have come to favor
transhuman,
abbreviated to
TH
—let me ask you, how does that sound? No one here overly disturbed by that? That’s great, I’ll report back. After all,
trans
something means beyond but not necessarily
superior,
right? And it’s democratic, too. In our great country, once the technology is in place I personally don’t see any reason why every citizen should not one day acquire at least some of the talents, abilities, and mental enhancement that certain great men have, through a lifetime of effort and sacrifice, made available to the community in the person of, well, myself. There always has to be a first man on the Moon, right? Some may even go beyond what I have achieved. It just isn’t practical or desirable that one person should take every potential all the way. Eidetic memory, speed reading, and calculating—sure, I have some of all that, but you don’t want to get cluttered or unbalanced. I can do ice baths for over an hour, but I can’t compete with Wim Hof, who holds the record of over two hours. I can engage eighty percent of my muscles through brain command, but Dr. Mak Yuree can do ninety-five percent. My team thought long and hard and decided to give the cardiovascular aspect priority, after all we’re talking here about defense of our great country as the original objective. Now, I know it sounds like showing off and I don’t want that, but with sixty percent more red blood cells—well, some of you have seen me fight, right?”

He pauses and remains silent for a minute, then resumes.

“Echolocation: listen.” A few beats pass. “Did you hear me clicking? Probably not, we’ve found ways of taking it out of normal human range, although some children can detect it faintly. What else? I have an excellent visual memory, but we agreed to keep me a grade or two below savant level. When it came to sound, though, well, even before I was selected I loved music, and now I can truthfully say without exaggeration that there is not a tune or musical sound, piece of music from pop to classical that I cannot reproduce at will. Computing power? I’m not quite at Shakuntala Devi’s level—she can do the twenty-third root of a two-hundred-and-one digit number, while poor me can’t go beyond the eighteenth of a hundred-and-fifty-digit number. Even so, I get by. I can speak backward, which is useful in intelligence work, and naturally in military training my ability to go without sleep for five days at a stretch is invaluable.”

“How about sex?” someone in his audience calls out. “Do you fuck? If so, boys or girls?”

He falls into confusion for a moment, but recovers quickly. “You’re just testing, right? I’m afraid that’s, ah—shall we say another program? One I’m not at liberty to discuss at this time?”

“Could you click, please?” the provocative voice says. “Beijing wants to hear you click.”

“Beijing is watching this live? They want me to click? But I thought I’d just made it clear—”

“They say how can they check echolocation if the clicks are inaudible?”

“Okay. Okay. Audible clicks are fine for exhibitions. No use in a fight, though.”

“All you need to do is reduce by an octave or two, bring it into the human range.”

Confusion again on that pinup face. “Ah, okay, look, I haven’t done audible clicks for maybe five years, the whole training was to take them out of the audible range for humans. We did pool training with dolphins—you can’t always hear them click either.” He frowns. “David’s clicks were especially high—I couldn’t hear them until the fifth enhancement.”

“David?”

“He was my friend. We were allowed to play together every Wednesday. I was sad when that particular program came to a satisfactory conclusion.”

“He is your friend but also a dolphin?”

“Was,” the Asset says. “I was so depressed, they had to postpone one of the implants.”

“You have to learn not to press the sentiment button,” a preemptive voice yells. “That’s where they’re going to attack. When you go public everyone is going to want to prove you’re soft and human just like them. Do you want to be just like them?”

“No.”

“So, don’t let it happen.”

“Okay,” the Asset says, nods contritely.

“Were there any other animals in any of the other programs?”

“David was not an animal, he was a wonderful, magical being.”

“Don’t you hate them for destroying him? Was he a threat to the security of the great nation? Did he suffer?”

Bewildered, the Asset sits down on the chair and closes his eyes. The moment passes, he loads another program and stands again. Smiles. “Naturally there will be those who object to the whole idea of transhumanity, but progress cannot be stopped. No doubt there were those who saw the wheel as an invention of the devil, but we need to maintain a perspective. Artificial enhancement of human beings is not new, although we are the only species that practices it. Already there are so many artificial extensions of our senses: hearing aids, false teeth and breasts, buttock implants, tattoos, the motorcar, spectacles, telescopes and Moon landings, fertilizer and GM foods, everything. It may well be true, although I hate to brag, that I am the leading edge in a new phase of this evolution, but as I believe I have already made clear—”

Someone yells a word that must mean
cut.

“We’ve lost Beijing,” someone says.

“You see, isn’t technology wonderful?” the Asset says, triumphant again.

The movie stops abruptly, people in our audience shift around and whisper in Mandarin, then it starts again. Now the Asset in the movie is onstage blindfolded with a thick black band and using his hands to bat back tennis balls that are thrown gently at him. The camera focuses closely on the balls as they reach the Asset in high lopes and the careful way he bats them back in pretty much the direction they came from. There is also a close-up of the band across his eyes.