The Bangkok Asset

38

I sulked. I hate it that I cannot arrest the Asset; it disgusts me that some kind of elitism is already at work regarding transhumans. It enrages me that he can walk around free; this is Bangkok, not Baghdad. I tell you, R, you only have to come from a semifeudal society to develop an extreme aversion to a future where the whole planet will be under the heel of an aristocracy of Enhanced Ones. Take it from the third world: you really don’t want to go down that road, you’ve forgotten what it’s like, cast your mind back, why did your ancestors get on the Mayflower in the first place? Oh, never mind, I know it’s too late. Anyway, I have to see him, don’t I? I replied to his message with a taciturn OK.

In the meantime the results from the swab tests didn’t come. Instead I received a letter from the Trustee for the Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Kentucky who regretted that the Know the Father Corporation, now in receivership, was being investigated by the FBI, who suspected the KTF of fraud, money laundering, blackmail, conspiracy and intimidation within the meaning of the RICO provisions, and employment of unqualified personnel who posed as technicians: in brief, my swabs would not be processed, and it was unlikely I would get my money back.

I could try again, of course, with another DNA tester, but I don’t think I will. What difference would it make? The search for self is a continuum, what closure can an old man in a coma offer? Of course, I’ve known that forever and chose to ignore it up to now: continuums, you never see them until it’s too late.

–

So Jesus Christ arrives to pick me up at the station in the late Sakagorn’s sky-blue Rolls-Royce, with the deceased lawyer’s driver in livery, of course. It seems that the Asset was already living at Sakagorn’s mansion while the lawyer spent most of his time at a luxury apartment a few miles away. Now the Asset, aka Messiah, treats the mansion, the car, and the driver as his own. I am tight-lipped and cool when I get in the back with him; but he’s the Asset, he’s enhanced, a master of moods. He also speaks Thai perfectly. I want to believe he has been studying it for years; the possibility that he might have become fluent in a month or less is too awful to contemplate. But I remember what Sergeant Lotus Bud said: only a couple of weeks ago the Asset had only basic Thai and they had to communicate in Khmer.

At first I refuse to react to his small talk, but when he makes a pun in Thai that turns the driver to Jell-O (puns are a chronic national weakness: hard men collapse in giggles; we’re not as bad as the Cantonese, but we’re close) I find myself seduced. Why not sit back and enjoy the company of a multiple killer who carves up his long-term workmates to intrigue and charm his elder sibling? After all, he’s Superman. Clearly, he approves of my change of mood.

“You see, my dear, you cannot be angry with me for long. That’s what I always wanted, a blood relation who would forgive my foibles. Even Doc Bride could not foresee that. Do you feel the same way, now we have bonded?”

I decide to check his commitment to our blood brotherhood with a forensic question. “Why did you do them in, Jesus? Exactly, why?”

“Ah! You mean-”

“Goldman and Sakagorn. Surely you haven’t forgotten already?”

“Doctor’s orders. They were about to double-cross the Old Man with a secret deal with China-they were scared the Doc was double-crossing them, so they planned to double-cross him: basic intelligence community stuff. They even tried to buy my compliance-a truckload of dough they offered. How dumb can you get? Couldn’t they figure out that the first programming the Old Man inserted in my brain was loyalty to him? I told him what they were up to and he gave the word. You don’t betray your own creator. I’m not sure he was expecting anything so ornate, though, that was all for you. I have the younger sibling’s need to impress the elder.”

I stare at him. “Killing humans means nothing at all to you, does it? Is that because you do not see us as part of your species?”

He thinks about it. “I do believe you are looking at it the wrong way, dear one. Who on earth gives a damn that Goldman and Sakagorn are dead? My vengeance is just. Their families are much better off now, and Sakagorn’s new young mistress is financially independent-he left her millions in his will. Broaden your view somewhat to include, let’s say, all life on earth, except man. Then broaden it further to include all the life in whatever spiritual spheres you believe in, if any. Then broaden it to include ghosts of the dead, if they exist. Then broaden it to include all the extraterrestrials on all the viable planets in all the cosmos-”

“Yes?”

“So, in none of those areas of research will you find anyone or thing who gives a fuck or a fart for human life. That’s it, you see, the last enhancement is the broadest: humans have no use or importance except insofar as they may one day produce transhumans. There’s no other excuse for their confused and pathetic existence. Fecundity in the production of lab rats aside, there’s nothing humans have that the universe wants. The best they can hope for is a global system presided over by THs who will make the earth run smoothly.” He casts me a glance. “If you don’t agree, name one moral advancement by humanity in the past ten thousand years. The social order and moral code of Stone Age man was far more rigorous and demanding than anything today. Neanderthals would consider a modern human as a psychopathic monkey with gadgets.”

The Asset tells the driver to let us out at the hospital entrance, where everyone stares at the sky-blue limo and the irresistible hunk who gets out. I lead him to the lift that takes us to the head department, which is quiet with dimmed lighting. Jack’s two buddies have already been discharged and it seems they left him there in permanent bliss in accordance with their jungle customs. We stand by the bed of our primogenitor. I have no words for the occasion and neither does the Asset, who stares at the old vet in a state of confusion. I think this could be the first time he’s seen him since childhood and is not prepared for the devastation that time has wrought on that body and face. I think, also, he finds it difficult to imagine that he originates from such stock, for it is as Krom foretold: this Asset has entered a phase of rapid change, his responses are faster, more commanding, more godlike by the day.

“This is the Doc’s gift to me, brother. I asked him to arrange it. Our father will be in a state of bliss now until he dies. Are you pleased with me?”

“Ah, yes.”

“Let’s go,” he says, bored after a few minutes.

Back in the limo he tells the driver to take us to the mansion of the late Lord Sakagorn. Now I realize the meeting with our father has tripped some fuse in him; anything from the soft, mediocre, human zone puzzles and disturbs him. Me, for example, I puzzle and disturb him considerably.

“How was I the other night?” he asks. “Not too military, I hope?”

“At the shooting of the HZ? You were perfect, efficient, brilliant, commanding, responsible with terrific leadership.”

“I was sweating it, I can tell you. It would only have needed one more HZ to beat us. No way we could have coped with two or more, they would have torn us apart. I was seriously intimidated. Did you see the teeth on that thing?” He casts me a regretful look. “I’m being frank here, they’re better than me. Stronger, faster, more ruthless. They could beat me to a pulp with one hand tied behind their backs-naturally that was always the sales line the Russians used with the Chinese.”

“You’ve met HZs socially-the enemy?”

“Sure. It’s not like you think. The transhuman community is…eccentric. Sometimes there are mutant conventions in remote places that I attend along with HZs. It’s quite jolly, the HZs play chess all the time.”

“HZs play chess?”

“They’re fanatics, you can’t keep them away from the board. They allow less than one second per move, the games play at lightning speed, and they can hold an intelligent conversation at the same time, except when they get drunk on vodka and start singing. That can really drive you to suicide, when they try to sing-those barbarians didn’t even try to produce vocal cords capable of basic harmony. Their bodies are unbelievably strong, though-they would have won the contract years ago except that the Chinese learned of a serious flaw. They start to go into decline after about five years-and there’s no way of telling exactly when or how. They tried to convince the Chinese that we had the same problem, that’s why they had one impersonate me like that.”

“What do they do with them after five years?”

“Unclear. Probably Polonium has them shot and they salvage the high-tech parts for recycling.”

I take a couple of beats to process the implications. I guess it won’t be long before artificial organs leave the dead bodies automatically and make their way to the nearest depot. “You were really scared that night?”

“Shitless, frankly. How can anyone look on that and still find meaning in life?”

“But you took control perfectly.”

He nods. “That’s the programming, they drummed it into us, the military mind. But I always feel bad after a performance like that. It’s such a violation of higher intelligence, all those straight lines and sharp corners it plants in your skull. Doc Bride warned me about it. We discussed it a lot.”

“You discussed with Dr. Bride the future structure of your mind, your personality?”

“Certainly. I was the building site and the junior architect both. Almost from the start. He warned me, you see, that a clash would come between the stuff he’d crammed into my head and the stuff the military would cram in. But he was sure the chemicals and the inserts would cause an acceleration of development that would lead me to drop the military side eventually and become a world spiritual leader. Play your Gandhi against their Stalin, he advised me.” He smiles. “He said I would have to be Christ to survive.” He shrugs. “He would have preferred Apollo or Zeus or Zoroastrer or Krishna, and frankly so would I, but he felt compelled to take revenge on his mother by manufacturing his own Jesus…Complicated fellow, the Doc. He trained as a Freudian, you know, before he switched to Jung.”

He gives me a smile oozing with kindness, fondness, spiritual goodwill, preparedness to die for me, a fraternal adoration that will last an eternity, an utterly convincing beam of divine love; then he turns it off. “Christ is as good as any, I guess, and there’s very good product recognition. We can build on that. It’s a lot easier than starting from scratch, and I’ll only have to flash a few miracles, just like two thousand years ago, and most of the seven billion suckers on the planet will fall for it.”

“I see. What will you use for corporate identity? Will you stick with the Cross?”

“Oh, no. Just like two thousand years ago, we’ll take a universal symbol, something with total worldwide recognition as had the Cross in its day-and tweak it a bit.”

“What symbol would that be?”

“An S with two vertical strokes, of course.” I gasp. “Shall I tell you why you gasped just then, dear brother? Because at that very moment you saw that our little project is not only possible but inevitable. Indeed, it has already started. Is it not so?”

I shake my head in wonder. “You’re really going to start a new world religion, take over the earth?”

“Depends.” He grins. “I might hate the paperwork. But I’m not going to hang around in the CIA’s program any longer, that’s for sure. I’m bored with it even if there are oodles of dough to be made. They’ll have to find some other mutant to sell to the Chinese. Anyway, like I said, it’s still basically Doctor’s orders. He’s not greedy, all he wants is world dominance before he dies.”

–

We get out at Sakagorn’s mansion and the Asset leads me to the large garden at the back. There is a long covered swing that kids and adults alike might use to relax in the shade. We sit in it together and he plays a game of using one arm to pull and push the double swing to its limits, holding us out almost horizontally for a full five minutes before slowly letting the seat come down again with total control. He gives me a sheepish look.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t show off, should I?”

“Do you need to?”

He gives me the divine smile. “It’s all your fault, for being such a perfect elder sibling, it makes me a little giggly. But we are still not fully bonded, are we? I’m not sure. From time to time you look bewildered, my brother. Sometimes you have an expression on your face that tells me I’m violating some cultural rule of intimacy they never told me about. I wouldn’t know, we didn’t do a lot of love training at the camp. There were tons of torchlight processions down into the depths of the cave, with cannibalism as a kind of ultimate consummation. That was the big event: eating someone else.”

He pauses and rebuilds the adoring smile. “Shall I tell you a secret? I first saw you from a distance some time ago-more than a month. Goldman pointed you out. We were in Soi Cowboy and you were about to enter your mother’s bar. The minute I saw you I knew that you were my brother. I was stunned. I knew you immediately. It was my baptism in the Jordan, that’s when I became the Messiah of this age. After that I couldn’t stop myself, every few days I would slip back to the soi to take pictures of you. I must have taken over a hundred on that iPhone. It was such fun spying on you like that. And then making sure you received the phone-and the Doc’s number in Contacts. I was in agony for days wondering when you’d finally get through to him. The old fool turns his phone off when he wants to think about something. Or when he’s on one of his opium binges. Or when he’s on acid-especially when he’s on acid and…Well, he’s a different man. I expect he struck you as a wonderful, eccentric, brilliant, charming, highly polished old English gent, did he not? Those are merely relics of a personality he used to own, before Angkor. He needs opium to keep up the pretense. Acid reveals the truth.”

The Asset gives a grandfatherly smile and folds his arms over his stomach. “Then, when you did call him, he had to call me right away because I hadn’t told him about you and he didn’t know where you were coming from at all. What a laugh-he was mad as hell, but he forgave me. Poor old Doc. And I was the one who insisted he take you to the camp, because I wanted you to know everything, you are my only living blood relation on this earth, aside from that old guy in the hospital.”

“Tell me about the opium. It’s terribly injurious, especially for a man his age. Why doesn’t he use LSD all the time?”

The Asset gives me a shrewd look, as if I’ve stumbled on an inconvenient truth. “He takes the Spirit only rarely these days. Very rarely. You could even say he uses opium to avoid acid.”

“Why?”

“Because when he’s on LSD his demon takes over completely. That’s really what all this is about, you know.” The Asset lets this bomb drop with a yawn. “He sold his soul to the great demon of Angkor forty years ago on a ten-day acid binge, but he’ll never admit it.” He checks my face. “That doesn’t mean the project won’t succeed. The opposite. With a demon like that backing us, how can we lose? The Khmer spirits are taking over the world again, using the weapon they know best: magic.” He smiles conspiratorially: “It’s quite fun, isn’t it?”

I realize that, outlandish though it seems, this is as sincere as the Asset is able to be. He really means that he is the Messiah. Frankly, R, I am experiencing the original policeman’s hell here: stuck with a perp who won’t stop confessing and no power of arrest.

“But Jesus, you are not Jesus,” I say. “You murder, you intimidate, you mutilate, you hypnotize men into killing their nearest and dearest, you scared my wife half to death, you are a war machine-” I stop, ashamed of my own exasperation.

“Hmm, the military lobby does keep cropping up, doesn’t it? It’s a concession we had to make. The Doc says I’ll grow out of the boy-soldier stuff pretty soon now. I’m sorry I scared your wife, it’s a kind of reflex they taught us.”

“What is?”

“Scaring the shit out of people: psychic dominance, to give it its military title. It’s quite clever, it involves all sorts of subtle factors like standing at a certain distance, control over facial features, total physical superiority, posture, and something you do with your eyes that isn’t mystical but looks it, then you call attention to the very sensitive area around the mark’s navel, which is a terrific fear center-and basically you convince the mark that you have killed many times before and might be about to do so again, which isn’t difficult when it’s true. It’s part of riot-control training. You pick a pack leader and reduce him to a whimpering wreck without even touching him. Very effective.”

“But the killings?”

“Dy yang sia yang,” he says in a perfect Thai accent. Roughly translated: You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs. “If I killed them, it must have been the will of God, mustn’t it? The Doc and I talked about that a lot. ‘Transcend killing by turning it into an art form,’ he advised. ‘Everyone has to die, but not everyone dies in the form of a handcrafted masterpiece-think of your victims as privileged to be killed by you. Above all, the Messiah is an artist.’ ”

“Dr. Christmas Bride said that?”

“Mm, when he was on acid, the old devil.” He gives me a grand smile. “Anyway, I don’t do violence anymore, I’m bored with it.”

“Since when?”

“Since I killed Sakagorn and Goldman. Just one little murder of the right person in the right place at the right time did the trick. What a liberation! My evolution has speeded up, just as the Doc predicted. You must have noticed. In a couple of months I’ll be the type who bursts into tears at the sight of a dead sparrow. But there is one thing I owe you, isn’t there? One more gesture before I slouch over to Bethlehem to be reborn.”

“What’s that?”

“This,” the Asset says, and reaches behind his head to remove his graphene mask. It is a striptease: slowly a wide brow emerges, then eyebrows, then the eyes…He completes the unveiling with a quick pull, and now, finally, I am looking into the face of the devil, who could also be Christ. I cover my mouth. “Oh, no!”

It is simply too much. The poor mind eternally misled by everything thanks to the myth of the normal, the ordinary, is now confronted by the impossible, the extraordinary-and does its best to turn off. I’m holding on to the swing, white-knuckled with stress, wonder, and horror, for it is the face of Dr. Christmas Bride! Not, to be sure, aged eighty-plus, but that Bride of the ancient photo taken with a Kodachrome more than fifty years ago: young, godlike, brilliant, and mad.

“God made me in his own image,” the Asset says, a tad forlorn. “I’ve never shown anyone before, only you and the Doc know. What do you think?”

“How did he do it? Plastic surgery isn’t that advanced. Are you sure that’s not another mask under the mask?”

“Genius always finds a way,” he says, still in that slightly doubtful tone. He shrugs, smiles, and replaces the graphene mask. Just then the doorbell rings.

“Ah!” he says.

We return to the house and he uses a remote to open the front door. Footsteps in the hall.

–

I am able to guess who it is, for the occasion, which is religious, calls for a specific kind of devotee, one whose dedication is blind and therefore absolute.

“Matthew,” the Asset says with a smile. “On time as usual.”

The FBI is not Thai and yet he offers that most perfect expression of local devotion known as the high wai. He raises palms pressed together as high as his forehead and smiles at the Asset with uncritical adoration that seems to say, Kill me if it be your pleasure, I will never know a greater god than you.

Or something like that. It’s a little embarrassing, but also impressive. He gives me the high wai, too, I guess to acknowledge me as God’s half brother. This is heady stuff. I find my imagination channeling what one knows about the origin of churches: a small group of dedicated followers with a message so powerful it redirects humanity. The sort of community, in other words, that pariahs like me never join. The Asset flashes me a look as if he knows what I’m thinking.

“Matthew,” he says and puts an arm around the FBI, “there’s one special little thing I’d like you to do for me, right now. I want you to tell my dearly beloved brother your story-in that succinct lawyer’s way of yours. Just the essential parts. He is a very quick study, essentials only will do.”

I do not think the moment has been rehearsed; it didn’t need to be. Fanatics have only one song to sing, and they don’t need much prompting.

“I was lost,” the FBI confesses. “A man, my father, escapes the corrupt, criminal, despotic, repressive police state of China and lands in the corrupt, criminal, despotic, repressive police state of the USA. What formula for survival does he pass on to his son? It is this: Above all, be impeccable in your hypocrisy, let not a drop of the human seep out of the polythene with which you have packaged yourself. Replace affection with Teflon, love with ambition, fairness with ruthlessness, the milk of human kindness with the acid needed to burn your way to the top. And never let your agony show.”

He pauses and gives a quick glance to the Asset, who nods, smiling.

In a trembling voice the FBI continues: “This was excellent advice. Without it I never would have lasted. But what is the use of lasting? As the spirit was slowly crushed in me, it responded by burning all the hotter. I was sure I would explode. I became fascinated by stories of young men who stockpile firearms before their terrible coming out. I recognized a godseed in me that was violated with every conforming thought or act, that was drowning in the superficial. No matter how much the world rewarded me, I condemned me for the coward and slave I had become. But where was the real message? Who was speaking words of truth? Who had the strength and the vision to show the way out?”

He stops shyly. There is great courage and sensitivity in the way he forces himself to look at me with tears in his eyes. “I once was lost but now I’m found,” he says and turns away.

I see in him what, I suppose, most people would see: a man, no longer exactly young, who has chronically failed to find love. My mind flashes to my darling, if wayward, Chanya. Compared to him, I am lucky.

“See what I mean?” the Asset whispers to me out of the corner of his mouth. “See the hunger that drives him? There are billions burning in silence just like that. Humanity festers in its clingwrap.”

Now the Asset says something to the FBI. The FBI nods, shakes his head to clear it, and smiles at me with evangelical warmth.

“Matthew will take you to see some friends who will help with your initiation,” the Asset says. He turns on his heels and abruptly returns to the garden.

I have become used to sudden changes in my half brother; this is the first time he has been quite so open in his arrogance, like one who perceives that the need for patience and civility is almost over. Like a man whose time has come.

I do not recall consenting to any initiation; nevertheless, I follow the FBI out of the house and sit next to him in the back of the sky-blue Rolls-Royce. The driver knows where to go, and within about ten minutes we arrive at the old Siamese house on stilts in the middle of the jungle of high-rises. During the ride I send SMSs to Chanya and try to call her several times, but as before there is no reply. The first, sly suspicion that the Asset has sent me away from him so that he can abduct her enters my vulnerable heart.

Matthew waits in the limo while I climb the stairs to the front door. I have no doubt all has been arranged and choreographed and that Krom will answer.

The door does open on the first press of the bell, but it is Madame Gloria Ching who opens it. Her eyes stare sightless at the sky while she sniffs me. We wai each other politely and she invites me in.

“You’ve just missed Krom, who popped out on an errand,” she says in those hyper-English tones and adds a smile as she leads me clicking down the corridor.

“I don’t believe you,” I say, mimicking her smile.

The contradiction startles her for a moment, then she relaxes. “Of course, I should remind myself, a detective is not an ordinary human being.” She turns her blind eyes to me and breathes deeply. “You’re right, it was decided that I would have a few words with you first.”

We are in the panoramic back room with all the perfume bottles. As before, I am overwhelmed by the range of aromas that hit me in half a dozen vulnerable and exotic places. It is impossible not to feel high and intrigued in this room, as if a thousand mysteries could be solved through the subtle computations of smell.

Gloria Ching settles herself on the sofa. “I am supposed to simply tell you about myself. I grew up suddenly during the Cultural Revolution, before I was smuggled out of the PRC. I experienced collective barbarism close up. Basically, there has always been and will always be two kinds of humanity. Up to now the civilized have kept the hordes at bay with technology. Now that technology has risen to a different level. We no longer need the masses, they can be replaced by machines. Their riots and revolutions can be put down, we have no need to be intimidated anymore. Let them have their pornography and their football and their TV series while we-the-saved take over. The New Humans are simply those with the civilization and the learning skills to acquire talents that would only destroy the inferior half of our species.” She turns her head to the ceiling. “If I were in your place, I would be thrilled at the chance to get on the program at all. To have the kind of future they are offering you, as brother to the Messiah-you have it made, my friend. You are literally the luckiest man on earth. That’s what they wanted me to tell you. And now I think I hear Krom in the hall.”

Gloria Ching takes me, clicking, to the door and opens it on Krom, who cannot look me in the eye. I follow to her room, which is not at all what I expected: none of the ruthless minimalism of a willful dyke, more like the boudoir of a practiced seducer. All over the room, including the ceiling, the female form is celebrated in oils, watercolors, photographs, and, naturally, lady lamps. The counterpane on the bed is midnight-blue silk; a replica of a primeval mother goddess, with huge breasts, belly, and vagina, hangs on the wall above.

“Chanya was here with you, wasn’t she?” I say. “I can feel it. Where is she? What have you done with her?”

“She’s safe, Sonchai. You’ll see her very soon. You’re nearly there, man. Just one more hurdle to go.”

“What are you talking about?”

She seems about to reply, then changes her mind. “The way we’re doing it, we’re showing you the life stories of different initiates, but you already know mine.”

The room sports a bentwood rocker in a bay window that looks over the garden. I cannot bear to look at her, so I sit in it, staring out at the frangipani trees and the bougainvillea, the pond and the cats all prone around it. She speaks while I stare.

“You know what I was, because you’ve seen so many examples. A trashy dykey piece of female garbage that nobody wanted, a total nonentity like someone dying at the bottom of a well. I think you know what I’m talking about. I think you’ve been there. There’s only one thing that remains when you’re in that state. Just two primeval words that won’t go away: I am. It’s not a lesson you ever forget. I am plus body. My beautiful, young, female body that so loves to be with other female bodies. Basically life is either money or sex, and for me it was a no-brainer. Naturally, I had them give me the sex App soon as I was ready.”

“There’s a sex App?”

She draws a chair up and sits obliquely behind me so that I can feel her breath on the back of my neck.

“Sonchai, it’s not just because you’re a man that you have no idea. Most women don’t realize either.”

“What?”

“What a world of sensuality lies just under a woman’s skin. Thousands of years of male jealousy and dominance have left us stupefied and totally cut off from our own sexual identity, which ought to be so vivid, so life-filled. There are ways of releasing that, my friend, ways for a woman to come out, to wake up to her deep, hungry, life-affirming power.”

“You used some kind of drug on her?”

“Don’t kid yourself, it’s not just a matter of chemicals. It’s something inside so deeply denied…As the song says. You know that much about her. I can help you. That of which I speak is not exclusively homosexual. Even a man can learn how to enhance a woman’s sensuality. I have to give her back to you, anyway. There, I’ve said it. I’m not allowed to keep her. You are the brother of the Messiah, you win. You only have to join us, which you almost have anyway.”

“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.

–

However, by some quirk of dharma I have the medicine to hand-and the cure. I’m racing to the hovel on the back of a motorbike. I promised the jockey triple the usual fare if he can beat the traffic. As a result we spend a lot of the ride on the sidewalk, trying not to knock over pedestrians. When we arrive I tell him to wait while I dash inside to pick up a packet of Marlboro Lights and the rest of that oil Krom gave me. Once back on the bike I tell the jockey to take me to the police station. The plan is to find me a nice subterranean cell where no malevolent vibes can reach me. There I shall avail myself of the power of Buddhist meditation boosted by cannabis. It won’t take more than a couple of joints and some intense breathing exercises. It happened once before on the Green Sash case where we found the head but never located the torso: I totally freaked out, but with the healing herb and the wisdom of the Buddha and the seclusion of the cell I was able to reach the underlying reality of Universal Mind. As for Chanya, don’t worry, she’ll be fine once I’ve got some herb into her; we must not judge her too harshly: empty days weaken all of us, and she does have an adventurous streak.

Now, I don’t want to lead you astray, R, and probably such radical therapy is not for you, but as I explained once before in an evangelical moment, compassion is the cosmological constant of the psyche, just like the speed of light in physics: at the end of the day everything is measured against it. So that’s where I’m headed right now. I’m not being sentimental or religious, it’s simply the only enhancement worth having. There is the slight problem of desolation, though. It’s where the treasure’s buried, and you do have to cross that desert, as the holy man said. Did you ever reach this moment yourself, R, where you take a deep breath and gulp before you bite the last bullet?

–

I am yours in dharma, Sonchai Jitpleecheep.