Farren - Underland

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Contents

For Laura, Craig, and Berry Pfeifer

chapter One

Victor Renquist had rarely encountered a human whose mind had been so drastically reorganized. The word brainwashing, as far as Renquist was aware, had fallen from favor, but in his considered opinion, the young mans brain had not only been washed, but also fluffed and folded. It was neat, malleable, and it followed orders without reflection or question. The young man was conditioned to be the perfect implementer. Original thought had been all but eliminated, and so had all but a permitted modicum of individuality. In another century he might have been called a vassal, a minion, or a bondsman. These days, Renquist supposed, hed be a midlevel bureaucrat, and doomed in the bargain to make never more than a nominal advancement in the power structure. It didnt matter that the power structure he served, or the bureaucratic subdivision in which he performed that service, was one of the most disturbingly sinister human institutions Renquist had encountered since the KGB under Stalin. The young man no longer possessed, if indeed he ever had, enough imagination to postulate ethical questions or entertain doubts as to the morality or even the effectiveness of what he was doing. He had taken the concept of his not to reason why to the extreme of a perverted, near-unthinking pleasure in his own, almost canine obedience. This one would do just about anything his masters suggested, no qualms, no reservations, and with a willing eagerness and a probing attention to detail that Renquist found unhealthy in the extreme.

Victor Renquist, from his unique perspective, had seen this insensitive corporate amorality steadily growing, especially in the United States, since at least the 1970s, and suspected it was a fresh, and probably malignant phase of capitalism. Greed had been declared good, corruption was seen as a virtue of power and practiced with a vindictive glee. Admittedly the young man was an employee of the federal government, but that hardly negated Renquists basic premise. Wasnt the federal government of the United States nothing more than the biggest, most labyrinthine, and certainly the most inefficient, greedy, and corrupt, capitalist corporation on the surface of the Earth? Normally capitalism and its convolutions were of little concern to Renquist, unless they pressed overly close to where he lived. With his almost infinitely extended life span, he had seen belief systems flourish, flower, then wilt and die, or mutate to the point that they became unrecognizable. He had seen nations change flags like dirty underwear. Hed watched regimes and dynasties rise and fall, and even empires totter and collapse. All the way from those long-ago days when Crusaders had fought their way through Turkey to Jerusalem, and when the threat of the Great Khan and his Golden Horde of Mongols had been massing in the East, he followed humanitys murderous folly as the Mamelukes rose to power in Egypt, at the very end of the thirteenth century, and, later, in the eighteenth, Abd al-Wahhab converted the belligerent Saudi tribes to his grimly intractable sect and sowed the theocratic seeds for the deadly flourish of the Al Qaida in the twenty-first. Renquist had ridden the waves of human history and survived, and found it little more than a bubble-stream of circular patterns repeated over. He had long ago come to the conclusion that, in deep reality, the only objective difference in competing social designs was in the color of their flags and the degree of misery they were able to perpetrate.

Not being human, Renquist normally distanced himself as far as possible from the machinations of those who sought to control the mass of humanity. If one human structure became too onerous or out of control, Renquist had always exercised the option to move on. Just at this moment, however, Renquist couldnt move, and he needed to give this young mans mental state some serious consideration. Detachment was impossible since the young man was not only Renquists face-to-face interrogator and the immediate representative of his captors, but he also controlled the powerful laser that was aimed squarely at Victor Renquists right eye.

In my time I have met torturers with more grit and sinew.

The young man was surprised. You see me as a torturer?

From where Im sitting.

Have you been harmed in any way?

Renquist was unable to move his head to look at the young man directly, so he spoke to the dark and unblinking lens of the laser. No, not so far.

Then what makes you think I am your torturer?

You have the look.

The look?

Ive met a lot of torturers and seen a lot of torture.

Indeed?

In my time.

The young man raised a sparse eyebrow. In your time?

Renquist would have gestured to the thick binder the young man held in his hand, except the nylon-and-steel-mesh restraints held him immobile. You have the dossier.

This dossier makes the claim you have lived over nine hundred years.

Renquist was unable even to nod. Nearer to a thousand.

The young man paused and placed a hand lightly to the earpiece of his lightweight headset. He listened with rapt concentration, indicating to Renquist he was hearing more than a communication, and the entire interrogation drama was being choreographed from elsewhere. As far as Renquist could penetrate the conditioned firewalls in the humans mind, he had been told that Renquist was a dangerously psychotic serial murderer under consideration as the fall guy for a termination/suicide mission. The young man had further been instructed that he should maintain and, if need be, cling to that belief in the face of any or all evidence that might contradict the hypothesis. The young mans dossier was a blue loose-leaf binder, with red EYES ONLY stickers and the combined NSA-FEMA logos. It contained the sum total of the data on Renquist that had so far been amassed by the two agencies, but the young man was under the all-enveloping impression that its contents were the collected ravings of a deadly psychotic, the imaginary parameters of a watertight fantasy world created by an advanced and dangerous paranoid schizophrenic. Nothing could force him so much as to entertain the idea that the information contained therein might actually be the truth or some approximation of it. After about thirty seconds of silent attention to the headset, he turned back to Renquist. What makes you think Im a torturer?

The goal is to elicit my cooperation or confession isnt it?

Wed like the truth.

You have the truth. Your problem lies in accepting it.

The room in which Renquist and the young man faced each other was a near-perfect cube with scarlet walls, floor, and ceiling. Without question, its design was the product of some half-witted, but probably very expensive, psychological study. He doubted the hellfire shade of red, or the vaguely disturbing spatial relationships, really had very much effect on humans beyond an intimidating first impression, and on a creature like himself they had no effect at all. If his situation had not been quite so desperately perilous, he might have held the whole process in utter contempt. Only the laser precluded too much hubris. It was no mere pointer or gunsight. This was an industrial-strength instrument that would burn and penetrate, and probably cauterize as it burned. At the touch of the young mans remote, Renquists right eye would be destroyed beyond all reclamation, a nanosecond before the gemstone beam speared the soft tissue of his brain. Victor Renquists brain did have some chance of recovery. Tissue would regenerate with nosferatu cellular alacrity, and complex paths of function would be rerouted according to freshly devised synaptic mapping, but recovery from such massive trauma would take time; time in which he would be effectively helpless, and his human captors could do what they liked with him. They could follow any whim of their choosing from driving an iron stake through his heart if they were in the mood for re-creating the crudely medieval, or cutting him up in some state-of-the-art operating room like a frog in a biology class.