The Bangkok Asset: A novel (31 page)

“But why is everyone so keen on me, Krom? I’m flattered. Why is it so damn important that I become one of you?”

“Your genes, Sonchai. I don’t know the details. It seems all your father’s kids at the camp were unusually gifted. After he met you, Dr. Bride confirmed that you seemed to have those characteristics, that same kind of genius.”

We let quite a few beats pass, then Krom coughs and starts to talk again.

“Face it, Sonchai,” Krom says. “Chanya is all you’ve got, man, the only real relationship in the world, your only anchor. Would you even be able to sleep tonight if you went home without her? Or tomorrow? Or the next night?”

I let that hang, refusing to respond.

“It’s all over for the nonenhanced, Sonchai. You’re an elitist yourself at some level. You’re certainly a lot smarter than average, and you detest most of modern culture. Even without enhancement you’re all too alert to the pathetic state of the world—the imminent squalor of war and economic disruption that the sad seven billion homunculi are going to live through during the next few centuries: you’ve seen that. You
want
a superbrain, a superbody, membership of the new race of humans who really will reach the stars—admit it, you do, don’t you?”

“I don’t give a damn about any of that, I want to see Chanya,” I say. “I want to hear her tell me how she feels, what she wants to do.”

“Okay,” Krom says. “Okay.”

She stands and I stand with her. At the front door she seems deflated, as if some superior power, which happens to be male, is about to take her favorite doll away. I check the limo, which has not moved in the drive.

In the back of the Rolls, Matthew speaks so softly to the driver I cannot hear the name of our destination. I’m not entirely surprised when we wind up back at Sakagorn’s mansion. Matthew has his own key. There is no one around when he lets us in and takes me up to a room at the top of the house. He nods at the closed door, turns and leaves. I knock. A familiar voice says
Come in.
I enter.

“You’re okay?” I blurt.

Chanya is standing by a window from which she must have turned when I entered. She holds up both wrists. “Look, no handcuffs. I’m free to come and go. No kidnapping. No coercion. Nobody has molested me. I can walk out of this house anytime I like.” She steps forward and we embrace. I hold her tight, she puts up with it.

“Then let’s do that,” I cry in a sudden flash of hope. As if life is ever that simple. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

She sighs. “What would that solve? Wouldn’t we be back in some state of constant denial? We need to sort this out, Sonchai.”

“Sort what out?”

She holds both my hands and stares into my eyes. “Darling, you are our ticket out of this. I can’t believe how fortunate I am to be married to you. The opportunity being offered is just totally mind-blowing.”

“What opportunity?”

She wrings her hands. “I can’t believe it. They’re offering you the world and you pretend not to understand. How perverse can you be?”

“Let me get it straight, you want me to have their implants?”

“Why not? It’s the way the world is going. There will be the enhanced and the slaves. They’re offering you the ultimate enhancement, the God implant. I don’t fully understand, but the difference it would make to us, Sonchai! From a life of squalid pettiness to governors of the universe.”

“They’ve drugged you, they must have done. This isn’t you talking.”

“But this
is
me. I just dumped my liberal left-wing conscience with all its bullshit. It’s time, Sonchai, it’s high time. We did our best. As it happens we are smarter than the rest and don’t deserve to rot with the masses. We are just not second-class people. Let’s be real here.”

“What you’re actually saying is you can’t love me if I don’t become a mutant?”

Our voices have been rising and my last remark was almost a shriek. It caught us both off balance. The
M
word in particular carries quite a kick.

She glares at me, her lower lip trembling. “Then I’ll have the implants myself. They’ve offered. I don’t have your talent, your genes, the operation could kill me or send me to a mental hospital, but I’m willing to give it a try, anything to get off this dirty, stunted, petty, squalid, empty level we live on.”

We are a bloody, glaring couple now, fresh out of words to yell. In the silence I see that she has expressed her base values as a human being—and for me the disappointment is distilled bitterness. Without a hint of drama I turn, leave the room, and close the door behind me. Depression hits.

At the top of the double staircase I look down on the polished marble of the ground floor and the two figures who have appeared there. They are waiting near the bottom of the staircase, too polite to look up. I descend slowly. Very slowly. This is the dead point, after all, the evisceration. I am quite sure I have nothing left with which to resist. No soul’s night gets any darker than this. I hardly have the strength to walk.

They wait until I’ve reached the last step before locking eyes with me. I surmise from the way they examine me that they are deeply interested in my mental state. Have they gone too far in presenting me with grim truths about life on earth and the future of man? Or not far enough? The transfusion of one form of consciousness with another is a delicate task, apparently. They step back to assess me for a moment, then point to three armchairs set together in the middle of the hall. Dr. Christmas Bride, with that extraordinarily mobile face that endlessly processes every human thought and emotion from Adam to Mickey Mouse, is wearing a cream tropical two-piece suit with white flannel shirt and a lemon silk cravat.

He says in that charming Brahmin accent, “Sonchai, my dear fellow, how wonderful to see you again. Have you been well?” His handshake is warm while mine is limp. “Shall we make ourselves comfortable?”

We sit in a circle of three. I have no idea why I am playing their game now, except that I’m too empty to think.

Up close to the Doc, I become aware that this is not quite the same charming old Brit I spent time with in the jungle. I suspect him of ascending to level seven.

“The Spirit rules,” Dr. Christmas Bride says in a solemn voice, as if saying grace.

“Amen,” the Asset says. I don’t know if Bride is on LSD or not; I am certain, though, that the demon of Angkor has taken him over.

The Doctor smiles faintly while he takes out a packet of Camel cigarettes, fits one to his ivory holder, and lights up. “We are all truly sorry that your final initiation should involve heartache, but that’s the way it is for everyone in the end. To be entirely free we must all break—and break utterly—from the endless torments of biology.” He stares into space. “You think you love your wife, but you are advanced enough to be aware of the illusion. What does woman mean to you? A false promise that with enough groveling and emotional dependence you will, somehow, acquire intermittent rights of readmission to amniotic bliss. Do I need to tell you that the price is your freedom and your manhood? You are very smart, but even you have a problem relinquishing that fallacy.” He stops, nods at something invisible, then starts again. “Our path is merciful, however. You can have her back—is that not so?”

The question is addressed to the Asset.

“You can have everything you want, dear one—practically everything at all. Money, enhancements, fame, longevity, that woman or some other woman. For the enhanced shall inherit the earth—is that not so, Father?”

Bride nods.

“So why me?”

“Your genes,” Bride says.

“Because Jesus Christ is my half brother?”

“Sort of,” Christmas Bride says with a smile. “You see, he alone survived of all the original…ah…”

“Lab rats?”

He coughs. “If you will. But the point is the genes. He and all your half siblings were uniquely gifted with regard to the program.”

“But you killed all the others by pushing them too far?”

“Brother, they were incredibly smart,” the Asset says. “Way ahead of all the others. Our father’s genes must have something special they haven’t been able to locate yet.”

“So, why—”

“Adolescence,” Bride says, taking a toke on the Camel. “You may think me a brute, but I assure you I did all I could. Mid- to late teens is inherently unstable—I took every possible precaution. Don’t you think I wanted them to live more than anything in the world? Your brothers and sisters were all brilliant, like you, and in much the same way, a speed of apprehension that one can enhance with the most modest of surgical inserts. They possessed a latent talent that the others could not come close to. Of course, it is deeply regrettable they could not carry those gifts through to adulthood—the transition from prodigy to mastery is notoriously difficult, only five percent make it in any profession.”

“So why would I—”

“Because you have the stability of a grown man. You could pass the program with flying colors, you’re so clever and amazing,” the Asset says.

All the time I feel the intensity of their combined psychic focus, like a steel band tightening around my skull. When I cease to respond, we sit in silence for a minute, then the Asset leaves his throne to stand behind my chair and embrace me. I twist around and he gives me a big dopey smile that would be pathetic on anyone less sinister.

“I understand your reluctance, brother,” he says. “Do you know I have my doubts, too? And I’m changing, changing, changing. You wouldn’t believe the worlds upon worlds that open up, once the ALE kicks into high gear. I do believe I’m entering the realm of the divine. I’m receiving visions of flawless four-dimensional symmetry, it’s like living inside perfect crystals, gateways to a higher heaven. I really don’t think I want the job anymore—I mean the Messiah thing. Too much admin.” He sighs. “But karma is karma, is it not?” He caresses my head and chucks my cheek. “We could ramp you up into Buddhahood in a year, isn’t that so, Doc?”

Bride smiles and nods. “It’s just a case of tweaking the inserts.”

It is difficult to convey the effect the Asset is having on my head while he stands behind me. He is very charming in this mood, and quite comical with his crack about
too much admin,
but it’s the dynamic disconnect that somehow penetrates to the medulla oblongata. I am being seduced by a killer clown, a sociopathic god on the Greek model who must win not because he is good but because he is of a higher order of being: quite irresistible. All the while he is smiling and teasing there is a relentless will bending my mind. I cannot help remembering that moment in the tennis ball video when he turned demonic with an ugly expression on his face before he mastered the game. And he is invisibly supported by the others, including Chanya, who form a kind of chorus in my head, adding their silent wills to his. I remember the young man in the boat at the beginning of all this: a Thai boy who killed his mother under just such relentless pressure. Now the Asset stands in front of me and fixes his gaze on the area of my navel and I’m racking my brains for a way out of here.

Too late I become aware of a force even greater than the Asset’s. Bride is also staring at me. As I succumb I am aware of what you might call the backdrop against which all this is playing out. I remember the words of the late Lord Sakagorn on the subject of Angkor:
That huge dark rotting Wat the size of a city block, those hideous stone pyramids like Aztec architecture, that sinister little shrine right in the middle, the whole atmosphere of the thing.

I see that sinister shrine at the top of the steep stairs, and there, filling the corbeled vault—how shall I put it? The
Beast
himself, there is no other word for it.

“You want me to be…Who? Saint Paul? John the Baptist?”

I stare at the Asset, who smiles. “Anyone you like. The electrical circuits in the left and right lobes are tiny, you can hardly see them, they’re about the size of a fingernail. Admit it, dear one, you do want to be enhanced, don’t you?”

Now, between you and me, R, he has a point. I’m wondering what I’m going to do with the rest of my life without Chanya, and I have to confess I wouldn’t mind some of those Apps. Would you? To stroll around confident that you could beat the hell out of any ten thugs who crossed your path: that would be basic and I wouldn’t say no, but it’s the others that are so intriguing. Suppose you could understand all the calculations that prove
e
=
mc
²
in five minutes just by following the logic? Suppose you could learn an Asian language to fluency level in a month? Then there’s the enhanced sex App: create eager sex slaves with every erection, that would be worth the inserts, don’t you think? And there’s the total makeover of the personality: from timid urban paranoid to strutting world conqueror in no time at all. I bet there’s a synaesthetic App, too, that would let you experience music in terms of color and even as direct sensual experience. (Would it be fun to automatically ejaculate at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth? I’m not sure but I’m willing to give it a try.)

“Sure,” I say. “But I don’t want to be a sociopath.”

The word takes them by surprise.

“I’m afraid you don’t really have a choice, my friend,” Bride says. “Not because we will coerce you—frankly, that is not possible, only a willing recruit could succeed in the program. But because you alone are qualified to save the world. Or, at least, that part of it that remains when the dust has settled on the catastrophes to come.”

My jaw drops. Silence. They wait, confident of my final capitulation.

I wish I could claim credit for some brilliant scam by which I escaped their psychic bullying, but as you know, R, I’m always honest with you, and I hope you’re not too disappointed when I confess I invoked an imperative no culture can afford to ignore.

“Excuse me, I have to use the bathroom,” I say, and slip out the back way that Krom showed me when Sakagorn was still in the bath.

Now, R, I cannot claim that I am unaffected by the extreme bullying to which I have been subjected. I am, frankly, terrified that I will succumb in due course, as Chanya has. Their argument is backed up by the evidence, that is the problem. The Asset really does exist, such beings really will be all too common in the future, the ordinary man and woman can look forward to a life of politically correct slavery, a feudalism as rigid as the Hindu caste system, while the THs lord it over us like barons on horseback from the Dark Ages. And I really could be one of them. Come to think of it, I do believe I’d be pretty good. I mean, I’d try to be fair, humane, make sure nobody whips the slaves too hard (under my stewardship everyone would have a roof over their heads, hot and cold running water, plenty of food and fuel to keep warm, TV so long as they’re obedient and work work work)…I would only have to sacrifice my humanity at a time when no one values it anyway. Somewhere, however, there is a deeper truth, I know there is, I simply don’t seem able to reach it right now.