Immortal

35

Saffron Oppenheimer stood unobtrusively beside a small shop selling trinkets on Lincoln Avenue, a grubby baseball cap pulled down low to shield her eyes. She watched the cars flowing lazily through the morning heat flaring off the asphalt, windows down and stereos blaring. Rush hour. Across the street was the plaza, filled with trees and dominated by a large petroglyph, the city’s national historic landmark. The plaza was ringed by structures in the Pueblo, Spanish and Territorial styles, tourists and locals alike bustling past adobe shops with cameras and day sacks on their backs. She kept a particular eye open for squad cars amidst the traffic, ready to take flight at a moment’s notice. The rush hour would ease her escape, letting her outmaneuver the cops and dash into the warren of Santa Fe’s alleys before heading south on the Old Santa Fe trail. Most all cops were either out of shape or downright overweight, having spent their careers sitting in vehicles gorging themselves on donuts, and she had no doubts about her ability to outpace them.

The only man that concerned her was the mysterious Ethan Warner. His tenacity had presented the only real threat she’d encountered so far, apart from the overbearing presence of her grandfather.

The thought of Jeb Oppenheimer coincided almost perfectly with the sight of a nondescript silver Lexus rolling down Main Street. The giveaway was the tinted windows and the unique license plates that betrayed the vehicle as belonging to SkinGen. As the car slid into the sidewalk next to her, a door opened smoothly. The vehicle didn’t stop rolling as Saffron reached out, resting one hand on the roof as she slipped into the vehicle and closed the door.

Three men were sitting inside the vehicle. Two were up front, wearing identical gray suits and emotionless expressions. Bodyguards, one driving and the other watching her in the rear-view mirror. The third man sat beside her in his customary white suit.

‘You’re late,’ she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste at the overbearing smell of the polished leather seats and upholstery.

Jeb Oppenheimer didn’t look at her as he replied. ‘Traffic,’ he said, looking out of the tinted windows. ‘Too many automatons, robotically going to work for people they’ve never even met.’

‘Without people like them,’ Saffron sneered, ‘your company would be impotent.’

Jeb turned to examine her, his piercing gaze appraising and distrustful at the same time.

‘Without my company they would be jobless,’ he countered. ‘The chicken and the egg, my dear, and this time the egg that is SkinGen wins.’

Saffron smiled without warmth. ‘Pity it’s rotten inside.’

‘Do you have the data?’ Jeb snapped.

Saffron shrugged, not looking at him but instead watching the streets pass by outside as the Lexus slowly circled the plaza. Jeb tutted and shook his head, a throaty laugh tumbling breathlessly from between his thin lips.

‘Not this charade again, surely? You have a role to fulfill, my dear, no matter how much it offends you. We all have to meet our targets.’

Saffron finally looked at her grandfather, mastering the revulsion she felt welling up inside.

‘There’s more to life than your damned targets.’

Jeb leaned close to her in his seat.

‘Not for you,’ he whispered. ‘Now pay your dues, before I change my mind.’

Saffron strained against the overwhelming urge to punch the old bastard as hard as she could, pummel him right here and now in the back seat of his disgustingly luxurious car. An image of his ruined, bloodied and bleating face flickered darkly through her mind and she saw him smiling at her.

‘Yes, do it, little Saffy,’ he rattled. ‘Please do it, and then spend the next sixty years rotting in a high-security cell. It would, I can tell you, make life so much easier for your poor old grandpa.’

Saffron caught a sickening waft of peppermints and decay on his breath, and felt her stomach heave. She reached into her pocket and retrieved a small hard drive, tossing it into Jeb’s lap with more force than was necessary. The old man coughed in alarm at the impact, but he still managed to get one hand on the drive.

‘There, that wasn’t so bad now, was it?’

‘Go to hell,’ Saffron snarled. ‘What did you do to Tyler Willis?’

Jeb Oppenheimer handed the hard drive across to one of his bodyguards, who pocketed it without looking at Saffron. The old man leaned back in his seat, examining the tip of his cane.

‘Mister Willis suffered an unfortunate incident,’ he replied, ‘a fatal one.’

Saffron stared at the creature sitting beside her, an inhumane and emotionless shell that had once harbored her grandfather.

‘That’s bullshit and you know it. You’re a murderer.’

Oppenheimer glanced out of the Lexus and gestured to the masses passing by outside.

‘One person’s death is irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. You see all these people, Saffy? They’re out there in their hundreds, thousands and millions. In just a few generations they’ll be gone and all of society’s problems will disappear along with them.’

Saffron’s eyes narrowed as she struggled to comprehend what her grandfather was talking about.

‘That will never happen,’ she said. ‘No matter how you go about it somebody, somewhere will stop you, even if it costs them their own life.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Oppenheimer growled, ‘and your pathetic little friend Willis would no doubt have been one of them. Suffice to say, my dear granddaughter, that I had nothing to do with his untimely passing — it was actually unexpected, indeed infuriating. However, soon his plight and that of millions will be an irrelevance.’

‘You talk like you’re doing the world a favor,’ Saffron muttered, nausea twisting inside her throat. ‘All you’re doing is trying to deny people the right to have children, to have their fair share of the world’s resources, so you can take everything for yourself. You’re not protecting humanity, you’re sacrificing it for your little army of elitist businessmen and politicians.’

‘The needs of the powerful few outweigh the needs of the powerless many,’ Oppenheimer murmured. ‘You will learn that truth one day, my dear, most probably the hard way.’

‘More bullshit,’ Saffron uttered in disgust. ‘You’re basing everything that you’re doing on myths. The entire population of planet Earth could live comfortably in large houses in the state of Texas alone. We live on just one-twentieth of a percent of the world’s available land mass. Half the world’s population has a fertility rate below replacement level: Europe, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Tunisia — the list goes on. Even in religious countries like Iran and Brazil, birth rates are falling despite the ranting of mullahs or priests.’

‘Population alone is not the concern,’ Oppenheimer replied, gesturing to the shopping malls outside, ‘it is consumption.’

‘Then perhaps you should sell off your private jets, your luxury houses and this vehicle,’ Saffron pointed out tartly. ‘The world’s richest half-billion people, about seven percent of the global population, are responsible for half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. But the poorest fifty percent of the population are responsible for just seven percent of emissions. Kind of ironic, don’t you think?’

Oppenheimer ignored her but Saffron kept going.

‘The carbon emissions of just one American today are equivalent to those of about thirty Pakistanis, forty Nigerians or two hundred fifty Ethiopians. It’s us that should leave the planet because of consumption, not others.’

Oppenheimer continued to ignore her, and Saffron shook her head slowly before gesturing for him to command the vehicle pulled into the sidewalk on East San Francisco Street. As the car slowed she looked at her grandfather.

‘They tried this before,’ she said, ‘years ago. Called it eugenics. Nowadays people don’t even talk about it, it was such a sick idea. It was like slave labor and theocracy: they didn’t work because they were inhumane and those who championed them were outcast and reviled.’ She recalled a line she’d heard once at school. ‘Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are forced to relive them.’

Oppenheimer gurgled a laugh that sounded like a clogged drain.

‘I’m doing this for all of the right reasons, my dear, using evolution to control a species that has lost its ability to regulate itself. We’re nothing more than a parasite infecting a diminishing world. Somebody has to bring about a cull…’ He smiled. ‘As humanely as possible, of course.’

The car stopped and Saffron grabbed the door handle, but she hesitated and turned to look at Jeb.

‘Economic Darwinism failed too,’ she said. ‘The survival of the fittest attitude to corporate business ended up being rejected.’

‘It’s worked well enough for me.’ Jeb smirked at her.

‘And for a few very fortunate, very wealthy others,’ Saffron acknowledged. ‘But the problem was that natural evolution is neither predatory nor altruistic — it is in balance. When it was used in a predatory manner, with small numbers of self-serving members seeking power to control and eliminate those less capable, the gene pool became so small that all that remained was a tiny number of elitists all willing to cut the throats of their competitors in order to survive, because they all believed themselves to be the best.’

Saffron opened her door and stepped out, leaning back in to look at her grandfather.

‘In the end only one remained, the strongest of them all, but as that individual was now entirely alone they were worth nothing and collapsed and died, having eradicated their purpose for existing: power over their peers.’ She smiled at him, genuinely this time. ‘I don’t doubt for a moment that you’ll suffer the same fate, dear Grandpa.’

Saffron closed the door behind her, moving swiftly across the street toward the plaza. She strode past the monument, pulling her baseball cap down and vanishing between the trees. As she walked, she could see the silver Lexus moving around the square as it flowed in with the traffic heading toward Albuquerque.

Suddenly the vehicle slowed, and Saffron watched as it pulled into the sidewalk once more alongside a diminutive woman with long black hair. Saffron instantly recognized the woman and watched in amazement as the Lexus door opened and she got in.