Kren said, “I gather that you want me to kill him for you?”
“Yes, if you would want to do the job. I have had his movements traced, and have identified an optimal time and place for his disposal. I could hire a hit team for two dozen thousand Ke, but you would be far more dependable, I think.”
“If their level of competence is the same as that of the team that he sent after you, I would have to agree with your assessment. However, my recent financial success has been such that two dozen thousand Ke is no longer a significant amount of money to me.”
Bronki said, “You would be permitted to keep anything he and his guards have on their persons, of course, and I suppose that I could go a bit higher.”
“You would have to go much higher. It might be marginally worth while for me to do it for say, two million Ke.”
“That is a huge amount of money!”
“You have it. You’ve made at least two gross million Ke, betting on me in the last two weeks,” Kren said.
“I suppose so. And anyway, perhaps I owe you something for all of the valuable information you’ve given me.”
“What really makes killing Kodo attractive to me is the fact that he doubtless has many skills and much information that I could use. He seems to be a competent businessman, for example, and I would find the knowledge of architecture to be attractive.”
Bronki said, “You intend to eat parts of his brain?”
“Of course. I am a vampire, after all.”
“This puts a whole new slant on things. Kodo is a very competent mathematician, and I have often seriously missed the mathematical abilities that you took from me. If I shared in your feast, I could recover them.”
Kren said, “You would be welcome to what I have no need for, but this time, I really want to get some computer skills!”
“I know that you were promised them last summer, and that I retained them nonetheless. But Kren, I didn’t try to cheat you. You must understand how the brain works. All of the trillions of cells in a normal brain are motile. They are not fixed in place the way the cells are in say, a muscle, or a bone. Each of the brain’s cells sends tiny dendrites out to contact the many other cells that it needs to work with. Then it tries to optimize its physical position in order to make the total length of its dendrites as short as possible. This saves the cell energy, and tends to make the entire brain faster. All of this shuffling around tends to put certain cells in certain physical positions, eventually. The cells concerned with vision tend to collect up near the eyes, hearing near the ears, and so on.”
This was probably how the Mitchegai system of immortality evolved in the first place, but with the very limited numbers of species that they have available for study, the Mitchegai understanding of evolution is very poor.
Had human brain cells ever developed the ability to move to other positions, the architecture of the human brain would doubtlessly be far more efficient than it is.
Bronki continued, “Now, Kren, the skills required for computers are usually associated with those required for mathematics, but in my case, it is possible that they are more associated with business or perhaps with history, since the history of computers is a specialty of mine. Cranial anatomy is not an exact science, no matter what the medic that you ate might have thought. She was only a technician, after all, and not a scientist.”
Kren said, “You make me think that I should increase my knowledge of biology as well.”
“You will have the opportunity to do that if you wish. Before Kodo switched over to architecture, two thousand years ago, he was a world-famous biologist,” Bronki said.
“Then I think that we have an agreement here.”
“Yes, but eating Kodo’s brain will necessitate certain changes in my plan. I had planned on your killing him tomorrow, but if he is going to be partially eaten, you and I will need at least a week to recover properly. You have your studies and athletic responsibilities. I have my classes and my students. I think that we should put our attack off for two weeks, until the midterm break.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We Can Eat and Make Shit!
New Yugoslavia, 2211 a.d.
I said, “I’m sure that it can be arranged. I’ve never needed ethanol in that quantity before, and so I don’t know how long it will take, but we’ll manage it somehow.”
“Thank you, sir. Now, I have a good deal of technical data to give you, and I think that one of your electronic people would be better equipped to handle it.”
“Right you are. Their memories are better than ours are, and I’m not a physicist in the first place. I think that the professor had best talk to you personally, since he’s the smartest person that we’ve got. I’ll introduce you to him right now,” I said. “Agnieshka, tell the professor that we’re coming down to him, and have a drone carry our new friend here. I wouldn’t want him to get stepped on.”
With all that booze in him, I was amazed that he could walk at all, but he seemed steady enough.
We took the elevator down to the parking garage where the professor was seeing to the further education of a future Yugoslavian general and his staff. I introduced him to our new ally, assigned the decorated drone to them to see that our guest got everything that he wanted, and went back up to my apartment.
I unscrewed the cap from a new bottle of Jim Beam, and prepared to get back to what I had been doing before the interruption.
“Boss! They’ve done it!” Agnieshka shouted as she ran excitedly into my den.
“Who has done what?” I said, expecting some new revelation about our crabby friend.
“Our engineers and biologists, the ones who have been working for so many years perfecting the social drones! They’ve finally done it! Now, we can eat and make shit, and draw all of our energy out in between!”
“Slow down, girl. I’ve never seen you so excited. You are saying that they’ve worked out a way to power the drones with the same food that we humans eat? That’s wonderful, I suppose. It makes you that much closer to human. How does it work?”
“Well, the food is eaten and masticated in exactly the way that you humans do it. Then it goes into a stomach that mixes it with over forty types of bacteria, which break it down into carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and shit. I mean, the stuff has the same consistency, and is even brown! The hydrogen is combined in a fuel cell with oxygen in the air that we’ll breath to produce electricity to charge up the capacitors, and the carbon dioxide is exhausted with the spent air and water vapor.”
“Interesting. Well, just make sure that you keep the option of recharging from an electrical source. It might come in handy.”
“I’ll tell them that. But don’t you see? This power supply is so like a completely organic one that they will be able to imitate even the internal organs of a human. We’ll look like you, even in an X-ray! The red hydraulic fluid used in the muscles looks just like blood, so if you cut us, we will bleed. They have all of the sensory apparatus working perfectly, and now we can breath and eat and make shit! Unless someone does a chemical analysis, they won’t be able to tell one of us from a human.”
“I know that this is something that your people have wanted for a long while, and just now, your timing is very good. The production machinery making the new picket ships is now working full time, but the machinery that made that machinery is now mostly idle. We have the productive capacity to build a factory producing the new social drones right here, and to hell with the bureaucrats on New Kashubia.”
“Then the project can go ahead, boss?”
“It sure can. We’ve got the space for it already dug out, over a square kilometer of it, in the canyon wall behind the city. Tell your engineers to take what they need.”
She leaned over me and gave me a very human kiss. “You are just the finest boss a girl ever had!”
She started to leave when I said, “And please send a preliminary report on our new allies to General Sobieski.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And then get busy, buying up all the 190 proof vodka that you can find. Also, tell the engineers to get busy, building a factory to produce bulk ethanol. I want it finished soon. The dairy plant has some spare time in their bottling plant, so we can put our booze into four liter milk bottles.”