The Bangkok Asset

35

You work with someone, inevitably you build up a picture of the way they live. So: Krom is a single young dyke who lives in a bedsit somewhere between Ekkamai and On Nut, probably in a modern four-story walk-up on a side street, she is polite but strange with neighbors, she rarely entertains save for one-night stands that take place discreetly so as not to cause outrage; if she has a second bedroom, it is full of cardboard boxes of old clothes and outdated gadgets, on her wall hang posters originating in the lesbian blogosphere, there is a ruthless kind of masculinity in the minimalism, right? Wrong.

To judge from the direction we have taken in her old Toyota, it seems as if she resides in the most expensive part of town, between Ploenchit and Lumpini Park; but not all the land around here has been developed for tall apartment buildings. Throughout the city you still find die-hards, people who like to live in a wooden house on stilts in a generous orchard with plenty of plants, pools, cats and dogs, even monkeys and parrots, while the wall of high-rises rises higher and higher all around.

It is still dark when we arrived at the iron gates. Krom uses a remote handset to open and close them behind us. Safety lights make it possible to discern perhaps a half acre of land with a couple of fish pools, some banyan and frangipani trees, grass that is cut irregularly; a dozen cats’ eyes stare from improbable elevations when we get out of the car. Krom leads me up a wooden stairway and uses an old-style latchkey to enter the house, which is already inhabited and filled with light. Someone is not merely awake, someone is working at this hour.

“It’s late afternoon on the East Coast of America,” Krom explains. “You’ll see.”

We are standing in a corridor. By my calculation the room at the far end must run the width of the house and offer a fine view of the garden with the pools, trees, and cats. It must be like old Siam in that room. Krom leads me to the door, knocks gently: “Can we come in?”

“Come.”

The woman in the far room is tall for a Chinese; perhaps she owns Manchurian genes, for she is around five eleven and slim, about fifty years old in a comfortable silk housecoat, her black hair tied back in a bun. She leans lightly on a shelf next to her hand, holds her head at an angle, waits expectantly; but it is the shelf that now grabs my attention-actually, all the shelves do. The room is a library of perfume bottles, tens of thousands of them, which cram the shelves in colorful sets six deep, like a paperback library. Meanwhile, discreet and intriguing aromas play games with my head. It’s difficult not to feel a happy kind of high in this room, as if the aromas were proxies for love and money.

“I have brought a visitor,” Krom tells the Chinese woman.

“Yes,” she says, “I can smell him well enough from here.” She smiles. “Krom has told me all about you,” she says. Then, when the Chinese woman decides to move and continues to hold her head in a certain way with eyes apparently focused on the ceiling, I realize she is blind. “I’m afraid I have a call from New York in about two minutes,” she says and dips a hand in the pocket of her housecoat to pull out a smart phone to show us.

“I’m sorry,” Krom says. “Shall we leave you alone?”

“No, it’s only business,” she says. “What is your friend’s name again?”

“Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. Detective, this is Madame Gloria Ching-but I call her Yai, because she is almost my mother.”

“There’s no almost about motherhood,” Madame Ching says with a smile, still holding her head at an angle, her unfocused eyes pointing at the ceiling. “And Krom is way ahead of me in most things.”

“Except perfume,” Krom says.

“Yes. Perhaps.” Now her phone rings and she fishes it out of her pocket. “Hello, Gloria Ching speaking.” Her English is perfect, of the kind only taught in expensive Asian private schools.

“She’s the daughter of a PRC cadre,” Krom whispers. “Nothing but the best for her, especially since she was born sightless. Her father was on the Central Committee, he was a kind of minister of defense, but they purged him and he’s been under house arrest for two decades. He still has connections, though, and tons of dough offshore.”

“I’m afraid I’m not so keen, to be honest with you,” Madame Ching is saying to her caller in New York. “He needs to bite the bullet and put in some more skatole for the base notes…No, skatole is civet shit, more precisely, the smell of civet shit…But what it really needs, and I’m generously giving free advice here, is a touch of hyraceum…It’s made from the petrified excrement of the Cape hyrax. It has the power to make perfume intriguing instead of merely pleasant…You see, aroma is like any art, you don’t get anywhere without contrast and depth…I don’t mind the bergamot at all, I think he’s done a fine job with the bright floral theme, and the citrus is very well anchored, it’s just that it lacks intrigue, which is what you need for evening wear…Yes, I’ll talk to him or put it in writing if you like…Well, you want to sell to Asia, you have to do a lot of floral highlights, we’re not so dark and animal as the West, he’s got that right…I’ll have someone send a bill for the consultation before the end of the month…Goodbye.”

Madame Ching closes her phone and clicks in our direction. At first I was not sure I had heard right, or if the middle-aged woman had some eccentricity that caused her to make clicking sounds. It is clear she intends to join us in the sitting area at the other end of the room, and I assumed that Krom would guide her, or she would use a stick. Instead, she keeps up with the hollow-sounding clicks, then walks toward us with perfect assurance. She sits on a chair next to a sofa we are sitting on, smiles in my direction. Krom is staring at me, waiting for a reaction.

“You’ve been enhanced,” I say, because it seemed to be expected. I turn to Krom. I do not say, Gimme the whole story this time or I’ll kill you, I just feel like saying it.

“I was nineteen years old,” Krom says, “and getting ready to die. Look at that picture again.” She goes to a credenza and finds an iPad. “Look at it on the big screen, you’ll see more.” She locates something on the iPad and shows it to me. It is the same portrait as the one she showed me of herself on her phone, but on the iPad it’s huge and easier to study. There is that obvious intelligence in her eyes, but drug abuse of some kind is a given. Another unhappy outsider: lost, utterly lost, and about to fall further into something tragic. There is no direction in that soul, none at all. I look from her to Madame Ching and back.

Krom takes the iPad to examine the photo. “Look at me. Just another third-world girl feeling like a piece of consumer trash waiting to be gobbled up.”

“But you’re not…”

“Not in the same league as the Messiah? No, of course not. Nothing is permanent with us, we need injections every six months.”

“What happened?”

“The PRC learned about Dr. Christmas Bride quite early on, they made contact. In return for a mountain of dough Bride was able to advise them on certain superficial kinds of enhancement that can be acquired in adulthood, without the high risk of implanting circuits in the brain. His research with LSD and its variants enabled him to develop extra sensitivities in certain areas. We call them Apps, like for smart phones. Yai had the olfactory App, didn’t you, Yai?”

“And echolocation. Both changed my life.”

“And it was Yai who they appointed to take care of my initiation, wasn’t it, Yai?”

The Chinese woman sniffs and smiles. “Now you have the Detective’s attention,” she says. “He is emanating aromas of awe. I think he is finally getting it. Don’t stop, whatever you do.”

“It’s just another revolution,” Krom says. “Technology developed in war shocks everyone when it is revealed. Who would have predicted forty years ago that people of the future would spend most of their lives staring at computer screens?”

“But this is different,” I say.

“Yes. This is the big one. We are all supposed to be discreet for the moment, waiting for the tsunami to hit.” She shrugs. “Because that’s what it’s going to be. Quietly, secretly, a few research groups have been working on something that will sweep the world like cell phones, and for the same reason: it’s what we want.”

“Enhanced bodies?”

“For the masses who love to play with themselves. For the elite, something more radical. Enhanced brains, enhanced horizons. New personalities. The most important thing you will ever witness in your life is the transformation of the Asset. He is ready to spread his wings and fly. Bride and Goldman successfully married his human intelligence and his artificial intelligence so that he has reached the moment where his capacity to learn is accelerated way beyond the human. When he told you he was Jesus Christ he was simply stating a truth within the terms of present-day mythology. What was the original Jesus if not an enhanced human? The Bible is full of stories of humans enhanced by God. Change your definition of God…”

The Chinese woman starts to laugh. “Krom is in total awe of Christmas Bride, whom she’s never met. I met him only once, I could smell the devil in him.”

Krom grins. “Yai thinks Bride took revenge on his Catholic mother by turning himself into God. After all, he is the one who produced the Asset, aka the Messiah.”

“Who also happens to be the most efficient killing machine in human form ever produced.”

“No, the HZs are ahead in that.”

“So,” Madame Ching says, “this is a conversation that will take up the whole of this century and the next as well. Are we good or bad, we transhumans?”

“We are inevitable,” Krom says. “End of conversation.” She turns to Madame Ching.

“Transhumans are a highly evolved, creative, and exciting new species with a weakness for sadism,” Gloria Ching says with a smile.

–

The two women filled me in on a few more details. It was dawn before I left them. Madame Ching clicked her way to the door to see me out, and Krom busied herself feeding the cats. All around the garden the gleaming pink walls of giant skyscrapers rose above the quaint old house, but I couldn’t help feeling that this small center of personal enhancement had the edge on the high-rises. The future, surely, was right here. True, nobody knew that yet, but it would not be long. It was hard to take in, as if the world I inhabited was already so out of date as to be irrelevant. Nothing we do today that will not be swept away in a heartbeat, once the story breaks. How do you feel about that yourself, R? Did we miss the yacht, you and I? We are the Old Humans: OHs, already. If we’re lucky, the NHs will find us quaint; otherwise it’s a choice between the reservation and the zoo. Personally, though, I’m kind of drained this merry morning. They are heavy people, those transhumans, very heavy.