“Okay,” he said, “we can start. Just a couple of words first. What you are going to see I have not stolen.” A pause to let his joke sink in. It didn’t. The word stolen did not invoke any response at all, one way or the other. “I would love to have stolen it for keeps, but then all hell would have broken loose. So I borrowed it. That’s the reason for the rush. Within a couple of hours from now this tape has to be back where it was borrowed from. They deliberately made it nondigital to make it harder to copy. This is strictly a tape of a dress rehearsal that didn’t go perfectly. So why am I showing it? Let’s be frank. I have the most fantastic product in the world, but it is not perfect. Buy now, in its imperfect state, you have the opportunity to modify and improve. You buy him, you get me, too, and I will train anyone you like. I will train others to train trainers. In five years you have a viable unit. In ten you have the beginnings of an army. With me you get the complete program and the opportunity to make it all your own. Wait another couple of years, though-” He held up his hands. “It isn’t a question of money, I know you can afford it. But what would you prefer to be, the second country to get the Bomb, or the fourth, or the tenth? Why not the first? Anyway, I present myself to you tonight as an honest broker. This is what I have, warts and all. And I know there is one thing above all you’ll all be looking for, because you are all professionals in the field. The key, I don’t need to tell you, to this particular kind of product, is the accelerated learning enhancement: ALE. And this is what the echolocation exercise here is really testing. I invite you to take out your timepieces to do a check. I am confident the learning curve will astonish you. Okay.”
At his signal the lights dimmed and a projector began to whirr. And there he was, the Asset himself, perhaps a year or so younger, on the screen, beaming, a tall young blond in mouse-gray open-neck linen shirt, navy pants, and running shoes. He was standing on a stage empty except for a single chair and holding a microphone and cross-referring to people invisible to us. His English was strangely mid-Atlantic, as if he spent a lot of time with a British grandfather. This was a key moment for me, R-a first flash of full enlightenment. The memory is vivid and present as I write.
“Okay,” the Asset says. “I just walk on like this-and what? I make it up? I’ve never done this before, this wasn’t part of the program. What do I do in this type of real-life nonmilitary situation?” His voice is light, buoyant, silky, freshly washed. Kind of preppy, I guess you could say.
A pause. Then a quiet, scholarly kind of American voice says, “You ad-lib. And you learn.”
“What shall I say?”
“At this stage you are telling them who you are.”
“Who I am?” For some reason that raises a laugh somewhere in his audience, which causes him to grin. “Yeah, right. Hey, hello humanity, I am your worst nightmare-how about that?”
“C’mon,” the voice says, “this is sales practice we’re doing here. You’re selling yourself as a product. You knew you’d have to in the end.”
“Oh. Okay. These are ordinary people I’m going to be speaking to in this scenario? I mean, people who don’t know? But they must know something, or there’d be no reason for them to be here-or should I say there?”
A sigh. “Just do your basic public image performance and follow the exercise. It’s gonna be echolocation.”
“But I’ve only just recommenced echolocation after a five-year lapse.”
“That’s the point. How quickly you pick it up. That’s what they’re going to be looking for. Do an intro first, off the bat.”
“Well, here I am,” he says, smiling into the camera. “This is the me show”- another smile-“any questions you have, I’ll be only too happy to answer.” Smile three. “Unless the answer’s classified, of course.” He laughs.
“Who the hell are you?” one of his minders asks, by way of a prompt.
“Classified.” He laughs, showing brilliant teeth. “Okay, since you have the clearance, I guess I can tell you I’m first and foremost a military asset whose activities are top secret. I don’t want to sound pompous, but you guys are pretty much the first civilians to get this close.” He pauses, frowns. I don’t think he was listening to a receiver grafted onto his inner ear, he just looked as if he was. “My locations are top secret. This one is temporary, naturally.”
He smiles, stands straight, tall, flat-stomached, broad-shouldered, beautiful-takes a breath. “First and foremost, let’s avoid the word super, shall we? I’m not made of steel. You pinch me it hurts, you kick me in the genitals I double up in fetal position and howl like a baby-and so far as I know I’m not vulnerable to Kryptonite-ha-ha.” He smiles again. “Anyway, it’s an overused word that sends the wrong message. Enhanced is better, less threatening anyway, but still giving an impression of superiority that alienates ordinary people. To be frank, there was a time when I favored posthuman as a serviceable tag, but it’s been hijacked by the sci-fi community. In the end we at the base have come to favor transhuman, abbreviated to TH-let me ask you, how does that sound? No one here overly disturbed by that? That’s great, I’ll report back. After all, trans something means beyond but not necessarily superior, right? And it’s democratic, too. In our great country, once the technology is in place I personally don’t see any reason why every citizen should not one day acquire at least some of the talents, abilities, and mental enhancement that certain great men have, through a lifetime of effort and sacrifice, made available to the community in the person of, well, myself. There always has to be a first man on the Moon, right? Some may even go beyond what I have achieved. It just isn’t practical or desirable that one person should take every potential all the way. Eidetic memory, speed reading, and calculating-sure, I have some of all that, but you don’t want to get cluttered or unbalanced. I can do ice baths for over an hour, but I can’t compete with Wim Hof, who holds the record of over two hours. I can engage eighty percent of my muscles through brain command, but Dr. Mak Yuree can do ninety-five percent. My team thought long and hard and decided to give the cardiovascular aspect priority, after all we’re talking here about defense of our great country as the original objective. Now, I know it sounds like showing off and I don’t want that, but with sixty percent more red blood cells-well, some of you have seen me fight, right?”
He pauses and remains silent for a minute, then resumes.
“Echolocation: listen.” A few beats pass. “Did you hear me clicking? Probably not, we’ve found ways of taking it out of normal human range, although some children can detect it faintly. What else? I have an excellent visual memory, but we agreed to keep me a grade or two below savant level. When it came to sound, though, well, even before I was selected I loved music, and now I can truthfully say without exaggeration that there is not a tune or musical sound, piece of music from pop to classical that I cannot reproduce at will. Computing power? I’m not quite at Shakuntala Devi’s level-she can do the twenty-third root of a two-hundred-and-one digit number, while poor me can’t go beyond the eighteenth of a hundred-and-fifty-digit number. Even so, I get by. I can speak backward, which is useful in intelligence work, and naturally in military training my ability to go without sleep for five days at a stretch is invaluable.”
“How about sex?” someone in his audience calls out. “Do you fuck? If so, boys or girls?”
He falls into confusion for a moment, but recovers quickly. “You’re just testing, right? I’m afraid that’s, ah-shall we say another program? One I’m not at liberty to discuss at this time?”
“Could you click, please?” the provocative voice says. “Beijing wants to hear you click.”