Idempotency (47 page)

He waved a hand halfheartedly in front of his face and said, “Dr. Okafor, where the hell are you?” Then he mumbled rhetorically, “Lord, why must I do everything myself around here?”

In his ear, the doctor responded, “I’m less than five minutes away, Reverend.”

“I may not have five minutes, I need you here now!” He didn’t give her a chance to respond before he shut off his BUI.

As he rounded the pulpit, Coglin began to laugh hysterically at the sight of Sindhu dragging her beaten and bloodied body slowly across the tiled floor. The blood leaking out of her shoe was a shinier red than that of the tiles. His laughter turned into another fit of coughing, and his own blood spattered out of his mouth and dribbled onto the blue button-down shirt that was tucked into his tan slacks. He waved the gun at her as he coughed, as if he were asking her to hold on a moment. Coglin’s eyes finally opened again as she was attempting to slide beneath the first row of pews. He immediately fired the gun, hitting the back of the pew. Sindhu froze.

“Enough! Sit,” he growled and waved the gun toward Dylan’s slumped body. “Next to him. Now!”

Sindhu pulled herself onto the pew and slid over a few meters, coming to a stop next to Dylan.

Coglin sat in a pew across the aisle, facing Dylan and Sindhu head-on. His ragged breath twisted its way through a bloody chest and past a set of old, cracked lips, trying desperately to find the light of day,

“It’s funny, you know . . .” Coglin smiled, his gun precariously teetering on his knee. “When you’re young, you think the hard part about getting old will be the pain. You know—getting sick, or battling cancer, or Alzheimer's, or—” He chuckled, but halted himself quickly. “What am I saying? You don’t know. You won’t have to deal with those things.” He unbuttoned the three top buttons on his light-blue button-down shirt. Sweat could be seen wicking its way up his white undershirt.

He continued, “Anyhow. The thing about being old is that nothing is ever new. A hundred years ago people would have kids, and then grandkids, and they’d realize those new moments vicariously through their next of kin. But now? Can’t even do that. Where would we put ’em all? And even if you do have one or two kids, at some point you can’t be part of the family. Would a thirty-year-old really get to participate in the rearing of his great-great-great-great-great-grandchild? No. Children are becoming earth’s last great finite natural resource. They are the new gold standard.

“And so here I sit. An old man with no children. No gold left in his pockets. Coughing. Dying. Dying from one of the few remaining diseases left on earth that can kill a man. I have just a few days left, if that, and the pain—oh, how I welcome the pain!—it’s as close to a new experience as you can get when you’re my age. And yet, I try to persist; I’m trying desperately to have my soul live on in a new body—your friend Dylan there.” He gestured with the gun toward Dylan.

“But why would I want to? God knows I’m not doing it for the opportunity to be inundated with more decades of society’s same-old, same-old. More depravity. More of the same oversexed, ultraviolent, ubiquitous immoralities that plague our decaying culture. No!” His voice, moments before booming, softened to silk as he said, “Yet I do it still. Why, Sindhu? Why?” He drew a deep breath through his nose. “I’ll tell you, Sindhu: I do it for God!” He said this through clenched teeth as he gestured grandly at the church around him. “I do it for humanity. Hell, I even do it for you, Sindhu. For you! I will save even you, the one who threatens me in my darkest hour. I will turn my cheek to you, because God wills it.”

Sindhu responded with venom in her voice. “You’re insane. A relic of fanaticism. You don’t understand suffering. The only way you will help humanity is if you die like your God intends.”

He stood up and walked slowly toward her, the gun waving gently near his hip, and when he spoke, his tone became jovial. “Do you like the place? You’re sitting in an exact replica of Thomas Kirche—or ‘Saint Thomas Church for the less educated. I noted from your résumé that you’ve never studied German. The Thomas Kirche was home to Johann Sebastian Bach.” Coglin sat down next to her, letting out a grunt as the act of sitting relieved his knees from gravity’s unending pull.

He continued, “You at least know who Bach is, right? This was his home. He was the
thomaskantor
—a fancy way of saying ‘music director.’ He also maintained the organ that was here at the time, though that organ is long gone. You’ll note that there are two organs here now.” Coglin waved his hand toward a smaller organ behind them near the transept opposite where Sindhu had entered, then toward the much larger grand organ at the rear of the church. “The smaller organ is the oldest, but was deemed unsuitable for Bach’s masterpieces shortly after it was installed. A fair assessment, if you ask me. The larger organ was built near the turn of the second millennium. It’s not bad—maybe a little tinny.”

The three of them sat on the pew as if they were waiting for a bus. Coglin took a deep breath and looked quizzical. “You know, initially we were going to build a replica of the Church of Saint Titus in Greece, but as it turned out, that church was originally a mosque! Ha! God forbid we worship in the same home as those fanatical lunatics! How could we possibly allow a replica of Muslim mosque? Well, we couldn’t. Not only that, but it was far too humble of a structure. We needed grandiosity—opulence! I needed a structure worthy of the Titus facility.”

Coglin began to laugh, a crackly noise that pained Sindhu’s ears. “Wow, I’m sorry, excuse me. I must be boring you to tears. Let’s move on to more important topics, shall we?”

He rose again, his knees popping, and stood directly in front of Sindhu with his torso just below her eye level. He rubbed the cold barrel of the gun against her cheek, then down her neck. She closed her eyes in disgust and turned her face away. He trailed the gun down her shoulder and her breath hardened. She twisted as he pushed on her back and brought the gun down to the bottom of her shirt. Finally, he grabbed and pulled up her shirt from behind. Animated letters swirled across her back. The letters quickly regained their organized momentum and began raining quickly down her back.

“Did you think you were hiding here? I have my sources within SOP. I knew you were here. Simeon obfuscated your location well, but we knew there was a rat in the sewer somewhere. It was just a matter of time before you showed yourself. Rats always come out to feed at some point.” He looked at her back and said, “You know, Sindhu, your aniToo is the subject of some curiosity on the darkVirts these days. My security team were idiots for not identifying you purely from your aniToo. Did you know you’ve become somewhat of a celebrity since you took out our android at the Pismo slum? Tell me, what’s your aniToo mean?”

Sindhu gritted her teeth. She shifted her head up slightly to meet his gaze, but her eyes could scarcely be seen through the short, sweat-matted dark hair that fell in front of them. “It means that men who rationalize their power through fanatic godliness are compensating for a lack of other talents. And by
men
, I mean you. And by compensating, I mean that you have a very small cock—”

The butt of Coglin’s gun slapped across Sindhu’s chin just as the door to the back of the church flung open. Dr. Okafor came bursting through, three androids accompanying her.

“You will regret having said that, you piece of Indian slum filth.”

Nearly an hour had past since Dr. Okafor had arrived. Coglin had initially busied himself by communicating with Kane, who had begun searching the Laughlin slum for SOP. Coglin was now keeping busy by spiraling closer toward madness or death, whichever came first.

“Doctor,” Coglin nearly spat the word out of his frothing mouth, “what’s the verdict?”

Now sitting on the pew next to Dylan, Dr. Okafor held a small device in her left hand and she slowly rotated it around Dylan’s forehead. In her own BUI, she attempted to distill a myriad of metrics into a coherent, singular Boolean value. Was Dylan still Dylan, or was Dylan now Coglin? The process was, of course, ridiculous. There was no black-and-white answer. Dylan—or whatever pieces were left of him now—would require months of premeditative therapy to be steered properly toward his future psyche, whichever that may be.

The entirety of her actions made Kya Okafor sick to her stomach. How could she have been so blinded by her own ambition to have willingly ruined the soul of this person in front of her, all stemming from the encouragement of the sick old man standing behind her now. It had seemed so simple at the start. She had been lured in by the appeal of like-minded individuals and their charismatic leader. Together, they would heal a sick world.

“Doctor!” Coglin was getting agitated. He stood over her shoulder as if his closeness might help speed along her diagnosis.

She turned slowly, stood, then said, “Reverend, there are nearly one hundred words meaning
love
in the ancient language of Sanskrit, yet in our bastardized version of English we simply love someone or we don’t. You ask me if he is you. Well, there may be parts of you in him, but he is not you.”

The lines on Coglin’s face fell lifeless like a dropped jump rope. “So . . . idempotency . . . has been retained?”

She sighed at Coglin’s clear lack of understanding around the complexity of gray and quickly gave up on offering any subsequent explanations. “Yes, idempotency has been retained.”

“Oh, God.” Coglin began to laugh, and then almost cry. He stumbled backward, the backs of his knees hit the pew behind him, and he slumped into it with a thud. “Oh God, I’m going to die. I’m really going to die. This is it. This—this—is how it ends? This can’t be it. This cannot be how it ends!”

A door swung open wildly, then slammed shut with force behind the group, and Korak Searle came marching down the nave of the church. An arm’s-length behind him, a security officer shouted something about being restrained. Searle ignored him and walked to stand straight in front of the now maniacally laughing Reverend Coglin.

“Reverend, I’ve come to understand what you are doing here, and I will not allow this to continue.”

Coglin laughed even harder at this statement and, in a boisterous voice, mocked Searle. “Oh, you understand what I’m doing here, do you? You will not allow this to continue! Ha! You’re a joke, Searle. I’ve controlled you from the first day we met, and I’m still doing it, even now.”

“Do not test me, Reverend, I have made powerful allies.” Searle spoke with force, and he shot Kya a harried glance as she came up to stand next to him.

Coglin said, “I have powerful allies too, Korak, such as God . . . and this gun here.” He twirled the gun toward Searle’s face, and for the first time, Searle realized he was standing in a precarious place: between a madman and his disenfranchised followers.

“Edward, whatever disagreements we may have in terms of how we get there, our end goals—”

The gun erupted. Searle instinctively crouched at the sudden sound, but Kya Okafor fell awkwardly to the ground.

“I accept your resignation, Doctor.” Coglin’s laugh turned into a blood-soaked hack.

Momentarily stunned, Searle leaped toward Kya. She had fallen face-first, hitting her knees, then flopping forward, her head landing just inches from Coglin’s feet. Gingerly, Kane rolled her over. The bullet had entered her in the lower abdomen. She was alive and could be saved, but the severity of the wound was such that she needed immediate attention.

Searle looked up, already anticipating how he could wrestle the gun free from Coglin, but Coglin, as usual, was a step ahead. He had risen to his feet and had backed up a few paces. He waved the gun, motioning Searle to sit on the pew with Dylan and Sindhu, both of whom had been quiet onlookers.

“Please, Edward, she needs medical—”

“Fuck you, Korak. She needs to die. Hell, maybe we all do at some point. Now sit the fuck down.”

Searle considered his options: The gun was two meters away; Coglin was an old man with old reflexes. He guessed that he would be able to dislodge the gun, even if he did get shot. On the other hand, he was assuming that Coglin was not proficient with an illegal firearm; if he
did
know how to wield the deadly weapon, Searle’s employment might be permanently terminated. He decided to bide his time and sat next to the Indian woman. He wondered who she was, why she was here, and how on earth she had become involved in this tragedy.

Coglin’s coughing was becoming incessant. He staggered to his right and sat down once more, directly opposite the three people whose fate he held in his shaky hand.

“Look at us,” Coglin’s voice crackled and he coughed it away. “Aren’t we a group? A dying old man and his robots; a sheep lost from his flock, choking on his own pedantry; a doctor who can’t save herself; a salesman without a product; and an Indian woman hoping to save the world. I’m not sure who’s more pathetic. Probably me.”

Coglin looked despondently down at his feet and mumbled, almost to himself, “So much pain and suffering over the years, and all for nothing.” He sighed. “How Christlike; even in my final hour, I am persecuted and tested. How dare you judge me.” He looked up, and he quoted scripture with a renewed vigor:

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” He shook his head and began again, his voice rising with his anger: “Do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you.”

Coglin stopped abruptly and motioned toward Sindhu with his gun. Quietly, he said, “You. The Indian girl. You’re boss is my fiery trial. You and your boss, Simeon. The great and powerful Simeon of SOP. Most believe he doesn’t exist. Oh, but I know better. I have faith. He exists and he torments me. He tests me. Over and over. Throughout the past four decades, he has tested me. Always destroying my plans—no, God’s plan!” His voice again rose pastorally into scripture, ”But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

Coglin paused. His head bobbed and his insane eyes flared open as he stated, “It’s true that I may be weak, but with your death, Sindhu, Simeon will feel Christ’s power—my power.” He raised his gun, pointing it directly between her earthly eyes.