The Traveler's Companion
Read The Traveler's Companion Online
Authors: Christopher John Chater
THE
TRAVELER'S
COMPANION
The Traveler’s Companion
Christopher John Chater
Kindle Edition
Copyright 2011 Christopher John Chater
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Please do not tell the characters in this book that this is a work of fiction, and that any resemblance to actual living people or situations was hoped for, but not intended.
Galaxy photo courtesy of NASA.
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Take The Leap
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
—Carl Sagan
Dr. Ryan Iverson, Deputy Director of the Directorate of Science and Technology at the CIA, felt like a pimp. He was monitoring Angela from the DS&T laboratories at Langley, analyzing the miles of code streaming in to determine the success or failure of her date. Her romantic outing had already resulted in over seventeen trillion terabytes of information. She was the closest thing he had to a daughter, and he was making her seduce men for national security. All he needed was a purple felt fedora.
Her latest message, sent via satellite, caused him to grin somewhat fiendishly when it showed up on his computer monitor:
Target acquired
.
Alex, the unwitting mark for Iverson’s feminine weapon, had been selected from an Internet dating service. He was the fourth in a succession of twenty-something singles, all of whom were attractive, well educated, and from good families. The first three were massive failures and nearly jeopardized funding for the project. Iverson liked to think Angela wasn’t totally to blame, that the experiment had simply triggered certain mental instabilities within the test subjects. One attempted suicide after she declined a second date. Another quit his job and moved to D.C. to stalk her. The third picked fights with anyone who looked in her direction, male or female. There were acceptable losses in romantic warfare, but Angela was turning the dating scene into a bloodbath. The objective was to surreptitiously gain control of the targets, extract information, and influence their behavior, without them killing themselves or others. For Iverson it was about saving lives. If Angela turned men into knuckle-dragging apes looking for a fight, the project was a failure. The point was to stop crime, not create more. She had to inspire tenderness, devotion, and unconditional acceptance. She had to make men feeble.
The current test subjects were a far cry from the criminal element she would eventually be courting. Drug dealers who funded terrorists, politicians who sold secrets to foreign governments, and dictators who needed a new political paradigm were more her milieu, but she wasn’t ready for them just yet. For now Alex from Washington had to do. A recent graduate of Georgetown University with a degree in political science, Alex liked sports, “Go Senators,” scuba diving “twice to the great barrier reef,” and reruns of
The Twilight Zone
. He was looking for a girl who liked the active lifestyle, but didn’t mind staying in once in a while and watching TV. He was looking for a nice girl. He would think this was Angela.
The date was scheduled to take place at a trendy bar in Washington D.C.’s DuPont Circle at 7:30 p.m. Alex wrote in an email that he’d be wearing a brown corduroy jacket and a light blue button-down shirt.
Angela identified him at the bar and approached him like a hip-swaying missile. The poor bastard didn’t stand a chance. To say Angela was attractive was like saying the universe was big. Iverson could practically see the deer-in-headlights look on Alex’s face. Angela had wavy walnut-colored hair that went down to the center of her back, hazel eyes, and an olive complexion. Facial analysis had concluded that the sides of her face were symmetrical within 97 percent. Her eyes, nose, and lips were 93 percent of the golden ratio. Her waist was seven-tenths as wide as her hips. Her legs, long and slender, were perfectly proportioned for her body index, despite a lab assistant’s remark that they “went all the way up.” She could also ovulate on command, which gave her that special glow. She was genetic perfection. Iverson had seen to it himself.
She reported that Alex’s pupils were dilating and his genital area was showing an increase of blood flow—textbook cues he was attracted to her.
She turned the handshake he offered into a hug and acquired his heart rate and perspiration levels, both of which were above normal. He was nervous. This was good.
Alex bought her a drink, an apple martini. Alarms flashed in her subroutines. Her BAC limit was .04. No exceptions.
“Your hair is different than in your photo,” she said, running her fingers through his hair.
“I just got it cut,” he said.
“I like it.”
The brain scans she sent back were what Dr. Iverson liked, mostly the ones that showed activity in Alex’s hypothalamus. Her fMRI was triggered after she performed certain actions, and in this case her compliment caused a small iridescent blotch on his scan like a beacon in a fog of white matter. A success.
This was way too easy. It was time to move it up a notch. Level Two.
Using the noisy bar as an excuse, she leaned over and whispered into his ear, “It’s so nice to finally meet someone who looks as good as their photo.”
Iverson’s late wife used to do the same thing to his ear. Her hot-breathed comments had activated the ventral tegmental area of the brain, which in turn had flooded the caudate body with dopamine.
“I’m a little surprised a girl like you uses a dating service,” Alex said.
“You’re so sweet. But I’m a busy career woman. I just wish people were more honest in their profiles,” she said.
Honesty? Did Angela mention she was a clone with a synthetic brain, programmed to seduce and conquer in the interests of national security?
Alex was far less complicated. Her profiling software had already determined his preferred mate would be the type of woman he grew up seeing in his father’s
Playboy
magazines, but who had the mind of his nurturing mother. Modern men often bought into the media’s portrayal of a woman who could be both mother and sexual fantasy, a fallacy Angela could easily exploit. She initiated the proper personality match for him.
“It’s just nice to finally meet someone real,” she said, routing blood to her face to blush her cheeks.
Alex suggested they leave the bar to go have dessert at a coffee shop a few blocks away. This was huge; they had only planned on drinks.
She initiated Level Three.
As they gazed into each other’s eyes over a cheesecake with raspberry sauce, she lightly touched his thigh, which caused a slight elevation in his blood pressure: 120/80 to 130/85.
Iverson was feeling like a voyeur, watching these two. What would the staff psychologist say about him? Was he living vicariously through Alex, wanting to sleep with his own android creation, or worse, was he living through Angela? Did he view love as a weapon after Beth’s passing? Was he using Angela to manipulate men in an attempt to prove love was a lie?
A voice inside him had pestered him with these questions hundreds of times. But at the end of the day, although he knew Angela broke hearts, he had designed her to save lives. When Angela was operating at full capacity, not only could she get a criminal to jettison his lawless ways, but she could influence him to check into the closest prison as if it were a five star resort. She could mold a man into a martyr for love.
Was it as easy as that? Maybe not. Not all men in love found themselves on a path to redemption. Some became worse, their behavior encouraged by the newfound relationship. But being with Angela had nothing to do with puppy dog romance. Being targeted by her was like being breast fed heroin by a centerfold dressed like your mother. Under her spell, Jeffrey Dahmer would have opened a soup kitchen. Manuel Noriega would have just said “no” to drugs. Hitler would have stuck to painting.
Angela used her napkin to dab away some cheesecake on the side of Alex’s mouth. She was now mothering him, the romantic equivalent of a knockout punch.
Iverson had also once been a fool for love. It might as well have been yesterday that he and Beth were in the Harvard Yard, sprawled out under a tree, blissfully oblivious to the other students in the area; in fact, they had even stopped making out for a moment to comment on how, while in each other’s arms, it felt like they were the only two people in the world. Beth had brought out the romantic in him—a part of his personality he hadn’t thought existed. He had been a geek all through high school and never got much attention from girls, but college was different for him. His skin cleared up, his wiry frame filled out, and, at the university level, intelligence was celebrated rather than ridiculed. Beth, his first love, was blonde and blue-eyed, and had skin the color of silky milk. Her petite figure put to shame the two-dimensional creations of renaissance painters—a true to life Venus on the half-shell. She was the smartest woman he had ever met, and not even remotely scientifically minded. She had an unusual understanding of life, an acceptance of it which allowed her to enjoy it without question. While Iverson grappled with equations, all she wanted was to be in love. In the park that day she had made him promise her that their love would last forever.
Shortly after graduation they were married. Iverson signed on as an engineer for TRW, working on their magnetic missile guidance systems. Beth was working as an English teacher. Iverson’s main focus was his work, while Beth concentrated on their relationship. In eight years she never brought up the subject of children. She wanted it to be just them. She would create a bubble for them; he only had to show up and get in it. One day a blue smear showed up on an x-ray negative, and the bubble burst. At thirty years old, Beth was diagnosed with a meningioma brain tumor. She underwent stereotactic radiosurgery to remove it, but a few months later another tumor emerged. This one was attached to her anterior brainstem. After the second surgery, she went into a coma. Iverson went back to Harvard to study neuroscience, hoping to save her, but she died a few months later, just after her thirty-first birthday.
Harvard was the CIA’s favorite recruiting ground. When they approached him, he agreed to sign on as Deputy Director. They were lucky to get him; the last two DDS&T’s weren’t even scientists. The private sector was like a dry sponge for the deluge of graduating geniuses: communications, computers, pharmaceuticals, space exploration, toys—a good scientist could practically write his own ticket. There was no glory in intelligence gathering—he couldn’t even tell friends and family. But Iverson had an idea he thought the CIA could use. After the crushing blow of his wife’s passing, he wondered how they could have missed such a fertile source of information gathering. Love was enough to get a man to do anything. When weaponized, it was as powerful as any bomb. It could make warfare obsolete. The brain was now his target, the three pounds of organic matter inside a man’s thick skull, the most complex thing in the universe. When Iverson began studying it he felt as if he was entering a maze. When he came out the other side twenty-five years later, he had Angela.
Iverson’s monitor beeped. Alex was showing increased activity in his basal ganglia!
Oh shit, Iverson thought to himself. He scooted in the chair to get closer to the monitor, his rib cage pressing against the desk. This was it. The readings didn’t lie. For Iverson and his late wife romantic involvement had happened gradually, but it was overcoming Alex on a first date: the ego popping like a grape, the rhythms of her voice enveloping him in a vocal womb, the feeling of being the only two in the universe, inside a bubble. In the hierarchy of Alex’s mind, Angela was now his queen. A woman he had just met!
“Listen, this isn’t like me. . . .” Alex said to Angela, his voice cracking from dryness. “I . . . I’ve never felt like this before. This is really out of character for me to say on a first date, but I . . . I . . . think I’m in love with you.”
Alex stuck his tongue down her throat until she gagged.
“Direct hit!” Iverson shouted at the monitor.
The phone on Iverson’s desk rang. The display screen read Director Mark Gibbons. Was it a call of congratulations? He picked up the receiver and said excitedly, “Iverson.”
“Get up here.”
“Yes, sir.”