She led me to the grand dining room. I sat robotically, expecting Bidi to join or alight on the credenza or drift toward the kitchen and come back with bubbly. But Bidi walked to a different door and air kissed somebody and Jeffrey came in, dressed more casually than I had ever seen him in something like tennis wear. He was wearing white socks.

“What do you like for breakfast,” he asked, taking the seat at the opposite end of the table, and I almost burst out laughing but dug my nails into my thighs instead.

“Don’t worry about her.” He nodded toward the door. “She’s on the liquid diet.”

“Frappuccinos?” I needed my Haki bag. I needed a drink.

Jeffrey chuckled gamely. “Something like that.”

“The eggs are really good,” Jeffrey said when the meal was served. “It’s balut. Filipino street food.”

“It looks like a regular soft-boiled egg,” I said, sipping water, desperate for a Bloody Mary.

“Mm,” he said, correcting me, pointing all the way over the table at my egg in a cup with his spoon. “Tap it open—go ahead— and, as you’ll see, there’s a two-to-three-week-old embryo in there.”

“I think I refuse to believe that,” I said, unwavering spoon above the shell.

“But you’d eat it, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe just this once.”

Jeffrey smiled, cracking into his regular soft-boiled egg. “There’s no such thing as just this once.” He looked up at me and talk ed between slurps. “Did you see your dad?”

“It’s got everything. Lesbians, transgenders, mid-life crises. Puppeteering. Immortality.” He shrugged. “All of my favorite things.”

I swallowed. I coughed. “Not yet. No.”

“Mm.” Behind his lips he probed something out of his teeth with his tongue. “He had to go early this morning.”

“What does he do,” I asked.

Jeffrey nodded appreciatively. “Well, at the moment he’s serving his country.”

“Which one?”

“This one,” he said, moving on to bacon, chewing loudly. “Are you crazy? Never mind. Don’t answer that. Your dad is helping some friends of mine on a very important problem.”

“Is that why somebody wants to kill him?"

Jeffrey interrupted himself from his coffee. “Oh dear. I certainly hope not.”

“Is the government involved?”

“Which one,” he sighed, smiling again. After poking around at a few remnants he plopped his napkin on top. “Do you like Halloween?”

“This is getting creepy.”

Peter Gietl

“Ghislaine and I were going to go this year as Catherine Keener and John Malkovich, but she’s staying at Bad Morals a few more weeks. Anyway, they’re the co-stars of this new film called Being John Malkovich. Have you seen it?”

“I don’t remember the last time I was in a movie theater,” I said, brushing away the thought of Max in the glare of Archenemy: Jeffrey, Jeffrey has the islands…

“Well you should.” Jeffrey rang a small bell. “It’s the perfect Halloween movie.”

“Is it about a psychopath?”

“No, it’s about a costume. A man sells tickets to get inside another man’s head.”

“What’s it like in there?”

“It’s fucked up,” Jeffrey yelled brightly, leaning forward into his plate. “It’s got everything. Lesbians, transgenders, mid-life crises. Puppeteering. Immortality.” He shrugged. “All of my favorite things.” He impatiently waved over the waiter, who poured a small draft of some kind of elixir into a little shot glass. “There’s a gimmick where when the person turns 44, that’s when the other person is able to take command of their body. How old do you think I am?” He lifted the shot to his lips.

“I want to know about the problem,” I said. “That my father’s—”

“I’m telling you about the problem. Who hired you again? Do you understand what it means that you’re sitting here eating delicacies in my dining room?”

“I’m hoping to find that out,” I said, forcing myself to crunch through a strip, now cold, over cooked bacon.

“My friends,” waving the plates away, finished with the elixir, “can do what Catherine Keener and John Malkovich do, in that movie. Only instead of somebody’s head, they do it to a network of computers.”

FBI, I thought. FBI, CIA, NSA. Institute for Advanced Study.

“I know. Impressive. Have you ever heard of something by the name of Moonlight Maze?" Waving me off before I could answer. “Of course you haven’t. Until a few years ago nobody had, because it didn’t exist. But today, forty of the most powerful dorks in America are trying to figure out where it came from.”

“Because it’s bad for the country.”

“Bad? It’s what they do to Malkovich in the movie.”

“To America’s computers.”

“Yes,” he whined, exasperated. “Some of them.”

“Including your friends’?”

“No, not including my friends. Not until this year.”

“And that’s the problem.”

“No, not necessarily.”

“But it is a problem.”

“That’s what your dad is trying to find out.”

“Why him?”

Jeffrey pushed back from the table, jabbing one knee up so he could cross one leg over the other knee. He pushed his sock down to his ankle, scratching his hairy leg.

“Robert Kling knows about some files I keep secure on a network outside the United States.”

“Files other people might be looking at.”

“Mm—are definitely looking at.”

“Because you want them to? Or—”

“Because I don’t want them to.” He sniffed. “Interesting conundrum, isn’t it.”

“Do your friends know you keep these files?”

“I have to imagine they assume so, yes. Otherwise the human race is even dumb er than I thought. And to make matters worse,” he said into the palm of his hand, cupping his chin, “our intelligence agencies want to stick their dicks into everything.” He lifted the hand impotently. “‘Moonlight Mile.’ They have no idea what they’re dealing with.”

A silence fell.

In a panic I realized he was deciding whether or not he was finished.

I took a breath and jumped.

“A friend of mine said I should talk to you about the test tube thing.”

His eyebrows bobbed up. “Test tube?”

“Yes, um…” Urging him on with a little wince. “I wondered if it might be related to the super geniuses project at all. Super hotties, super empaths..." I sheepishly grinned. “All the times at your parties that was the only idea that seemed, like, worth a shit.”

But he was eyeing me skeptically now. “Well, I had this idea I could impregnate 200 women of the highest intellectual caliber. Hot women. Young, well adjusted. Unspoiled. Good eggs.” He prodded his soft-boiled, smiling. “It wouldn’t be just me, of course, other selected people would do it too.”

“To create a race of super geniuses.” The smile went neutral. “Is that something that would be of interest to you?”

“Excuse me for saying so if this is inappropriate, but it seems like you have all the unspoiled girls in the world. It seems like you have them coming out of your ass.”

“Well, that is inappropriate.” He straightened himself in his chair. “But let’s get one thing straight. It’s me they have coming out of their ass,” and then he started laughing—a real, dumb, sick, idiot laugh.

“I’m a little surprised it hasn’t gotten you into trouble,” I said. “I’ve heard—”

“Yeah, yeah.” He was back to slouching again. “I don’t want to hear about that.” He frowned. “You want to know why? Is that it? Would that make you feel better about helping me out today?”

“Allowing that I haven’t agreed to help you in any way, at any time? Sure.”

He ran his tongue over his teeth, stretching his face into a long scowl. “Because fuck them, that’s why.”

“The girls?”

“The cops! Fuck the police. The assholes who write all these laws. They’re the evil ones. They take the most beautiful, natural thing in the world and they criminalize it. They make it illegal.”

“You sound like a really bitter person.”

“I’m a humble person,” he corrected. “What you have to understand is this is humility.” He gestured around the room, taking in the house. “I don’t steal. I don’t kill. I don’t play with the lives of whole cities and countries like they’re all an ant farm. I help people.” He fussed with his napkin ring. “I ask for something very modest and natural and basic in return. I pay for it. And they give me what I pay for openly, willingly. They’re not going out getting fucked up and doing things out of their mind they regret. I live in a civilization. It works. It’s a stable, healthy arrangement.”

Peter Gietl

“I bet I’m the oldest female to sit in this chair," I said.

“I care for these girls for most of their lives. I take care of them, financially, physically, psychologically. Without me they would be nothing,” he objected. “Lost, a waste, nothing. Victims of… them.”

“The people who make the laws. The cops.”

“They make us all victims. It’s what they want. I’m a victim. You’re a victim.”

“If only there was some way to make them come around.”

“I’m working on that.”

A headache was blooming at the base of my skull. “How much are you paying America’s most powerful dorks to help you?”

He was panting slightly. Scratching at his neck.

“I’m not paying them.”

“Okay.”

“I’m buying them. I need to buy them out. They want to take away the one thing that gives us power.”

“Sex?”

“Death. They think death is a problem to be solved.”

“Death isn’t a problem?”

“Absolutely not. It’s the answer to everything.”

“You think humans have to be mortal? That’s why youth is so, um, precious?”

“No no no.” He waved a finger at me. “Death isn’t human at all. It’s divine.” He sat back, waiting for this to sink in. “Immortality isn’t a godlike power. Lucifer is immortal, is he a god? Gods dispense life and death. There’s only one thing that keeps life strong enough to reproduce itself, and that’s death. Dying and killing.” He was standing now. Hunched forward, knuckles planted on the edge of the table. “The Bible says we’re created in the image of God. We kill and we die. We’re godlike right now. If nobody dies, that’s over. Who wants that? Dummies. Stupid intellectuals. That’s not progress. That’s the end of progress. Of human achievement. It’s ridiculous.”

He backed off, roving slightly in the di rection of the closest window.

“Okay.” I took the chance to scoot back from the table. “But the Bible says thou shall not kill. God kills. And doesn’t die.”

“He doesn’t? Have you ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth? Of course God kills and dies. It’s in every myth, every origin story that points beyond itself, to us. No death, no dying, no gods, including us. We turn into rocks.” He paced to the window, gazing up into the scrim. “You ever feed a giant tortoise? They’re like four hundred years old. They’re like, barely living rocks. You can see it. You can watch them turning into boulders. No spirit. No soul. No life. They don’t kill. They barely even die.”

He turned back to gaze through to the kitchen. “These scientists? These so-called geniuses? They want to turn us into rocks.”

I was easing up onto my feet now too. “But they say we can live forever by uploading our consciousness into the internet. By being John Malkovich.”

“You’re not using the analogy correctly, but to your point, no—that’s bullshit. They don’t believe that. It’s a trick. What they really want is for us to turn into computers. Totally different. No bodies, no souls—no killing, no eating, no fucking. Just rocks. Racks of servers just sitting there in climate-controlled subbasements with the lights always on. Hardware—that’s their immortality. It’s not living up in the clouds above Mount Olympus. It’s sitting underground in cold storage forever. It’s dragon’s gold without any dragon. A useless, forgotten hoard.”

He was moving around the table now.

“What about functional immortality then,” I asked, skirting the opposite way toward the kitchen, as slowly as I could go without him closing distance. “I sat through the presentations. The Santa Fe guys said we can extend our lives four hundred years without aging. We wouldn’t be like giant turtles, we’d be like—”

“Vampires?” He flung his arms apart, flapping like bats. “Yes, correct. Black blood pumping in our veins. Vampires are alive, this is true. Don’t give me any ‘undead’ shit. Vampires live and shit like everyone else and if they don’t eat what they need to live they die. And what do they have to do to eat? Kill!” he yelled, rounding the far corner. “People—have—to die. This is what makes us the image of God. This is why life’s worth living. It’s what makes us possible.”

Now I was leading him. “So what’s your answer? I mean, you’re not stopping science. You’re not shutting it down, you’re keeping it alive. Well fed. What are you going to do, invite them all to a banquet and kill them all?”

“I thought about that.” He propped his forearms at head level on either side of the frame of the doorway. “But I realized that would be inefficient and foolish. Solving this problem by taking away our intellects instead of guiding them isn’t good enough for me. It’s not good enough for humanity. So I took the only higher path. Higher for them and me.”

“What,” I asked, sliding a bottle of Krug from the fridge. “You teach them to kill?”

“No, no.” He swung open a cupboard for two crystal flutes. “Is that what you really think about me? No, Kayley, these fucking dorkwads are incapable of killing. They’re averse to it. There’s only one thing they can do well enough to advance human life, and, let me assure you, they line up around the block at every one of my properties for the opportunity to do it.”

“Reproduce,” I said coldly, letting him top my glass. “Sexually.” “No. Not reproduce. Fuck.” He paused, sipping. “Teenagers, specifically. Everyone on all of my properties is contractually required to leave all reproduction to me.”

We stood there for a small moment.

“Car’s waiting,” he said. “Change your clothes. See you at Teterboro.”

James Poulos is the Founder and Editorial Director of Frontier and Return at Blaze Media, and is the host of Zero Hour on BlazeTV. He is the author of Human Forever, The Art of Being Free, and the forthcoming Let the Golden Age Begin.