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  PRAISE FOR AMORTALS

  "Amortals (to paraphrase another sci-fi writer who, in my opinion, has nothing on Matt Forbeck) blew down the walls of my imagination. It then stepped over the smoking rubble, seized me by the throat and kicked my ass."

  – Billy Campbell, star of The 4400

  "It kicks like a mule & whispers sweet nothings in your ear like Mike Tyson in a boxing match."

  – Ben Templesmith

  "Matt Forbeck takes the plausible and pulls out all the stops in this mind-blowing, high concept thriller. It doesn't get any better than this."

  – Jim Lee

  "Matt Forbeck is the writer that other writers aspire to be: his work is unfailingly well-plotted, tightly paced, and imaginatively realized. He juggles humor and pathos with a deftness that defies literary gravity. I'm a huge fan."

  – John Kovalic

  "Matt Forbeck does near-future so well, I think he's been there. Actually, I think he designed it. Then he kicked its ass."

  – Dan Abnett

  Also by Matt Forbeck

  The Marvel Encyclopedia

  More Forbidden Knowledge

  The Complete Idiot's Guide to Drawing Manga

  Mutant Chronicles

  Secret of the Spiritkeeper

  Prophecy of the Dragons

  The Dragons Revealed

  Eberron: Marked for Death

  Eberron: The Road to Death

  Eberron: The Queen of Death

  Guild Wars: Fall of Ascalon

  MATT FORBECK

  Amortals

  ANGRY ROBOT

  A member of the Osprey Group

  Midland House, West Way

  Botley, Oxford

  OX2 0HP UK

  www.angryrobotbooks.com

  Come back

  Copyright © Matt Forbeck 2010

  Matt Forbeck asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  EBook ISBN: 978-0-85766-003-9

  EBook set by ePub Services dot Net

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Dedicated to my wife, Ann, who makes everything worthwhile, and to our kids – Marty, Pat, Nick, Ken, and Helen – who give our lives meaning.

  My deep gratitude goes to the people who were kind enough to offer comments on this book before it went to press, including Aaron Allston, Billy Campbell, Monte Cook, Richard Dansky, Jack Emmert, Richard Knaak, John Kovalic, John Layman, Jim Lee, John Rogers, Scott Sigler, Mike Stackpole, Ben Templesmith, and Jordan Weisman. Also, many thanks to the members of my writers' group, the Alliterates, for many years of words and beers, especially to Troy Denning, Dave Gross, and Johnny Wilson for their feedback.

  Even more thanks to all of my family, friends, and fans who have believed in me for so long, especially my parents. You have my undying gratitude. Special thanks to the fine and faithful people at Angry Robot – to Lee Harris, and most of all to my old friend Marc Gascoigne. No one loves great stories more or treats them better.

  Last but not least, thanks to you who pick up this book and brave its pages. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

  ONE

  Getting killed always gives me the worst hangover. When I was younger, I thought maybe it had something to do with my soul being forced out of my body and then shoved into the next. Even if I couldn't remember it, that sort of trauma had to leave some sort of mark on a person's spirit, right?

  "You ready for this, Agent Dooley?"

  I rubbed my baby-smooth chin and leaned forward in the chair, flexing my fresh legs. The techs at the Amortals Project had shaved my face micro-clean, which I never liked, but it would grow out fast enough. "This isn't the first time I've seen myself die, Patrón."

  The frat-boy-faced man with the slicked-back hair cracked a shadow of his wide smile. His perfect teeth gleamed in the room's dimmed lights. "Right. I saw the documentary about your first time when I was in grade school."

  "The 2132 version is the best," I said, battling a sickening sense of déjà vu. Hadn't we had this conversation the last time? "They went all out for the centennial."

  Patrón snorted. I knew he could look right through my bravado. I didn't want to watch this. No sane man would.

  "That's Director Patrón, by the way," he said. "'Sir' is fine too. You sure your memory's working right?"

  Hoping he'd attribute my failure to feign respect for him to revivification sickness, I ignored him. "Just start the show."

  Patrón blinked. I'd known him nearly as long as I'd known anyone alive. He had a strong stomach. "It's bad, Ronan," he finally said.

  "That doesn't matter," I said. "Does it?"

  Patrón shrugged, then waved his hand, and the thrideo leaped to life. The polarizers in my lens implants kicked in, transforming the blurred images into a 3D mirage that looked sharp enough to cut my pupils.

  In the thrid, a man sat bound to a white plastic chair in the center of a small, gray room made of cinderblock walls. He was tall and trim and dressed in a navy blue suit, a red tie, and a white shirt splashed with crimson. His ankles were cuffed to the legs of the chair with self-constricting ties, and his hands were bound behind him, likely with the same.

  The man had close-cropped, dark-brown hair and a threeday shadow of a beard. He looked young, maybe about thirty, although it was impossible to tell these days. He wore a black blindfold over his eyes, the kind the first-class stewards hand you for overnight flights. Blood trickled down in twin paths from beneath the fabric, framing the rest of his face.

  Despite the blindfold, I knew that face well. It was mine, and I did not look good.

  Another figure stepped into view. This new man wore the kind of clean suit you see in microchip laboratories, complete with the full headgear and the mirrored faceplate, except it was all black. Loose and bulky, it covered him from head to toe like a high-tech burka.

  The new man carried a 9mm semi-automatic Nuzi pistol in his right hand. The safety was already off. He tapped it against his leg before he began to talk.

  "I suppose," the new man said in a voice that had been digitally garbled, "that you're wondering what you're doing here today, Mr Methuselah Dooley." I winced at the nickname. The press had slapped that on me over a hundred years ago, and I'd never been able to shake it.

  The previous version of me – the one about to die in the thrideo – grunted but did not say a word. A trickle of blood escaped from his mouth as he tried to speak. The tongue in my mouth recoiled at the ghost of a traumatic memory I didn't actually have.

  "Don't answer," the man in the black suit said. "This isn't for you. You'll be dead soon. It's for later, for them."

  Patrón glanced at me, but I ignored him. The man in the suit knew exactly what he was doing. We just had to watch to find out what that was.

  I knew I could stop the recording to chat with Patrón if I wanted to. I could rewind it, even watch it dozens of times today. My first time through, though, I wanted
to absorb every bit of it without interruption, to see it as it happened.

  Something inside of me wanted to turn away, to avoid this horrible spectacle. I ignored that impulse.

  The man in the suit snarled, and the man in the chair began to panic. He struggled against the bracelets holding him in place, thrashing about in the chair, straining hard enough to put shining stress lines in the bracelets, even though it only made them bite harder into his flesh. The chair's legs had been bolted to the floor, or it would have gone over for sure. Maybe that's what the man in the chair had been hoping for, although it wouldn't have done him any good.

  I stared at the man in the chair as his struggles abated. The bracelets had cut right through his socks, and blood trickled into his shoes. Unable to get free, he gave up the fight and began to weep.

  Patrón squirmed a bit in his chair. "That sort of behavior unusual for you, Dooley?"

  I ignored the crack. If the man in the chair had wept, it might mean he was trying to tell me something. I'd seen myself die before, several times, and I'd never done anything of the sort.

  The man in black shifted his gun to his left hand, then reached out and slapped the man in the chair with a gloved palm. "Get a hold of yourself, Meth," he said. "You'll disappoint your fans."

  The man in the chair – I couldn't bring myself to call him Ronan or Dooley or even Methuselah – whimpered at this, but the tears ended, and he did not grunt another word. I felt my fists clench. I wanted to jump up and take out the man in black – tear the life from him with my bare hands – then rescue the doomed man. It was too late though. Real as the images seemed, I was watching the past. This had already happened.

  "This is what the Secret Service does for you, eh, Meth?" the man in black said. "Give them your life, and they only ask if they can have another."

  The man in the chair let his head loll back on his shoulders. I wasn't sure he was still alive.

  The man in black leaned forward and whispered something into the other man's ear. The audio leaped up to compensate for the difference in volume. I could hear it through the bone conductors tapped into the base of my skull.

  "And you," the man in black said, "you give it to them."

  The man in the chair flinched at these words, spoken as softly as a promise to a sleeping lover.

  The man in black straightened back up again. "You sicken me," he said. "You're like a dog. All those years serving your country and your President. How much did that cost you? Your wife. Your kid. Your grandchildren. Every last one of your lives."

  The man in the chair slumped over in the chair, his shoulders sagging, his head hanging low. He'd been beaten in every way.

  "You're not even a man," the man in the clean suit said. "You're just a distant echo of the original. A cheap, vat-grown copy. You fade more every time you bounce back into this world. I'd say you'd be nothing soon, but you're already there. Every breath you take subtracts from those the original Ronan Dooley breathed a hundred and fifty years ago."

  The man in the black suit leaned in and brushed the other man's sweat-soaked hair back with the barrel of his gun. The gesture would have seemed tender with just about any other instrument.

  "You think just because you're amortal you're special. That you can't really die. That it doesn't really matter if you do. It's a great set-up, at least for people like you. One body dies, just go to the whole-brain backup and restore it into a clone. You don't even have to remember the pain of death or the fear it brings. You're like an alcoholic who blacks out before beating his wife. In your head, it's like it never happened."

  The man in black knelt down in front of the chair. He swapped his pistol back to his right hand and pressed the tip of his gun against the other man's forehead, then pushed the bleeding man's head up and back until it was level with his own.

  "What you forget," the man with the gun said. "What people like you always forget is that a copy is not the original. It may look, sound, smell, taste, feel, and even act like the original, but that doesn't mean it's the same thing. It's a substitute, a replacement, a simulacrum, a doppelganger."

  I swore I could hear the man sneer as he continued. "People are not digital files recorded in a meat medium. We are flesh and blood, and we are unique. You may be a perfect copy, but you're still a copy. Somewhere, the fleshless bones of the original Ronan Dooley are spinning in his rotted grave."

  The head of the man in the chair pulled back from the pistol for a moment, then lolled to the side. The man with the gun reached out and grabbed the other man by the shoulder and sat him upright again.

  "You're not a man," the man in black said. "You're a ghost made flesh, condemned to haunt this world until the day your number comes up again. Even amortals can only cheat death for so long."

  The man in black stood now and placed the tip of the barrel of his gun against the other man's forehead. "Today's the day," he said. "It's time for your run on this Earth to end."

  Although I'd never seen the thrid before, I knew what happened next. Despite the fact that I was nothing but a ghost to this scene, watching this little drama from behind the veil of time, I reached out my hand to stop it.

  "Aw, no," I heard myself whisper.

  "Good-bye, Ronan 'Methuselah' Dooley," the man in the black suit said. "You won't be missed."

  The gunshot made me jump. The head of the man in the chair kicked back as if it had been smashed with a baseball bat. If the chair hadn't been bolted down, the impact would have knocked him flat. As it was, the bullet blew out the back of his head and painted the wall behind him an angry red.

  The man in the suit stood there and watched the life leak out of his victim. A rivulet of blood ran down from the hole in the dead man's forehead. Far more of it spilled from the back of his skull and onto the floor below, puddling with the fluids already there.

  As the dripping stopped, utter silence fell over the room. Then I heard something come from the man in the suit. It sounding like sniffling.

  When the man next spoke, his voice came low and raw.

  "Good luck," he said. "Whatever you were and wherever you're going, you deserved a lot better than this."

  The man then came around to the side of the dead man and shot him three more times in that side of his head. He did the same on the dead man's other side. By the time he was finished, there wasn't enough left of the dead man's skull to fit into my shoe.

  Then the man stood in front of the corpse and emptied the rest of his clip into it. The body jumped and leaped under the impacts, jerking about as if it shot through with lightning.

  As the echoes of gunfire faded, the body fell still.

  The man with the gun removed the clip from it with practiced ease and tossed it aside. Then he did the same for the gun. Each clattered to a rest across the concrete floor.

  Then the man turned toward the thrideo camera that had recorded the entire event. He leaned into it, and it seemed as if he was staring straight at me.

  I couldn't see his face through the mirrored panel in his mask, though, just the reflections of the twin camera lenses the man had been facing. Staring at them was like looking down the barrels of two guns, one aimed at each of my eyes. For a moment I wondered if they could bark death at me through the screen.

  When the man finally spoke, I nearly jumped out of my seat. I felt like I'd been tossed into a frozen pool and couldn't find the hole in the ice that would let me reach the surface again.

  "No more Ronans," the man in the suit said through his voice scrambler. "Let the man and all his copies rest in peace."

  The thrideo went dark then, and the lights glowed back up. I didn't look at Patrón. I didn't want him to see me shaking.

  "Who did this?" I asked. My voice trembled with anger, frustration, and fear.

  The Secret Service director made a small cough filled with pity and regret. "We were hoping you could tell us."

  CHAPTER TWO

  I wrestled with my whirling emotions as I walked out of the private t
heater and into the headquarters proper of the United States Secret Service. Watching that man murder me – actually violate my body with his gun – made me angrier than I'd ever been. I fought a violent urge to vomit. Had I been someplace more private, I would have given in.

  I wanted to strangle the life out of that killer. I wanted to hear him beg for forgiveness. Then I wanted to tear his head off anyway. And if he was somehow amortal too, I'd find every last genetic sample he might have left behind and napalm, bleach, and nuke it from the planet. I'd erase every last indication that he'd ever existed.