The waiter, a young man named Chaz, a Cuban who wore a shiny gold nose ring and spiked hair bleached white on top, came from the kitchens and asked what they would like to drink.
"I"ll have the 2002 Merlot," Damian ordered, then suggested to Asia, "you really should try it."
"Perrier," she said, "in a bottle."
Smart girl. The taste of some common date-rape drugs could be masked by wine.
Damian talked for a bit on other topics- the latest earthquake, her favorite rock band. He watched until her breathing had slowed and deepened, her eyes had closed to slits, and her face had become slightly flushed. She was feeling the effects of his pheromones. He took her hand and asked, "How do you feel about casual s.e.x?"
"I . . . can"t fraternize with other employees," she said.
"No, that rule applies only to people within your own department," he quoted the employee manual. "I"m in Personnel. You"re in Research. We can . . . fraternize."
She shook her head hesitantly. The drug-induced l.u.s.t was fooling with her mind. "I don"t believe in that. s.e.x isn"t meant to be casual. It"s more about . . . bonding than plea sure. Americans fall in love to mate; while the French mate to fall in love. In the end, everyone falls."
Damian chuckled. For a woman who still looked like a child, she showed unexpected maturity.
The waiter brought the drinks, setting one on each side of the candle that guttered in a gla.s.s container in the midst of the table. He offered to pour Asia"s water over ice, but she took her bottle and said, "Excuse me."
With eyes half closed, like a lizard basking in the sun, Damian watched her get up and head for the women"s room, hips swaying seductively as she dodged a waitress. She clutched her drinking water as she elbowed the restroom door open.
This girl has been rufied before, Damian surmised, as he swirled the merlot in his gla.s.s and inhaled its bouquet. Either that, or she"s just very cautious. No matter, there"s plenty of time. . . .
The Appetizer When Asia returned, most of the glitter had been dabbed off of her forehead, and a few strands of her hair were wet. Her eyes had cleared.
She relaxed into her seat, but she did a poor job of maintaining her composure. She had the slightest tremor to her hands, and she stared at him as if she were breaking inside, as if she feared that she would collapse under the weight of his gaze.
"I"m sorry if I made you nervous," Damian apologized. He was sorry. He didn"t enjoy destroying her. This wasn"t his normal a.s.signment at the company. Chancellor Pharmaceuticals could minimize the threat from corporate spyware- the recordings that others tried to make night and day. But the company had to test its employees against more subtle threats, moles that might seduce. Normally, Damien handled weightier matters. Indeed, he a.s.signed flunkies to test the new employees. But there was something about Asia"s heart-shaped face that drew Damian, something in her dossier that . . . called to him. He couldn"t define exactly what he wanted from her.
Lately, since taking the age-regression therapy, he had been going through dramatic physical changes. His face might look thirty, but he even in his youth, he"d never suffered from such an overpowering libido. It almost frightened him.
"It"s all right," Asia said. "I suppose that we should get those kinds of questions out of the way. So if you"re curious, yes, I"m healthy. Yes, I am a virgin. No, I won"t sleep with you to night. I want a . . . permanent relationship."
Damian smiled pleasantly. He could tell just how nervous she was. Good, let her be nervous.
"Well," Damian said, "I suppose I can"t talk you out of being healthy, but perhaps you"ll change your mind on the last two points?"
She reached down and clutched her purse, as if ready to leave the table. "Or not-" he joked. "I like a woman who can hold to a commitment. I"d feel lucky if a woman like you were committed to a man like me."
He toasted her. Her Perrier bottle clicked with his winegla.s.s, and she relaxed into her seat.
Damian stared down at the table, affected embarra.s.sment. "That sounded lame, didn"t it? I suppose a woman like you has heard every line in the book."
"Not really," Asia said. "Men find me intimidating."
Genius, beauty, brains, overwhelming s.e.xuality. Of course men found her intimidating.
"But . . . surely you date all of the time?"
Asia shook her head. "I"m from a small town in Colorado. I didn"t date much." She retreated into her seat again. It was very subtle, as were all of her movements. Another man might have thought that she was stoic, that she did not react at all, but Damian could read her micro-signals.
He apologized, "I don"t mean to pry. I"m just . . . fishing for something to talk about. You don"t want to talk about work. That"s understandable: after all of those warning about corporate spies. I suppose that your instructor brought out the box of surveillance devices?"
He was speaking of course of the hardware they"d found in the compound over the years- voice and audio recorders, taps for phone lines, spyware for computers.
"Oh, my gosh," she said. "I couldn"t believe it. Did you see that little red camera? It looked like an eye, like from that robot in The Terminator!"
"I think that if we took all of those parts, we could build a Terminator," Damian joked. "And you only saw a quarter of the collection."
"Where does it all come from?" she wondered. He was glad that she asked. Talking about s.e.x had made her nervous, more willing to discuss more important forbidden topics.
"Mostly other pharmaceutical firms," Damian replied. "Places with dignified names like Johnson and Johnson, Roche, and GlaxoSmithKline. In an industry that sells a trillion dollars per year, the compet.i.tion is fierce. But not all compet.i.tors are just companies- some are entire countries, places like North Korea and China.
"That red "eye" you mentioned was a thermal-imaging device planted by the Russians. Every human body gives off its own heat signature, and that eye was built to see through walls. Lasers built into the same unit were aimed at the windows, so that they could measure vibrations made when people spoke. They could watch our people and record them at will."
"I suppose that we have our own corporate spies?"
"That would be safe to a.s.sume."
Chaz brought the appetizer- Thai lettuce wraps. There were heaps of spiced chicken lying beside b.u.t.ter lettuce, sprouts, sliced water chestnuts, sweet dipping sauce, and peanut sauce.
"I hope you don"t mind," Damian told Asia. "I ordered while you were gone."
"It smells so good," she said hungrily, then began stuffing a leaf with filling. She picked up her knife and smeared some peanut sauce over it. Damian smiled.
He"d put a single drop of Rohypnol on the knife, in a liquid base.
The Main Course Asia ate her first lettuce wrap quickly, but twelve minutes later her movements began to slow. She fixed another lettuce wrap, blinked at it stupidly. "Eat up," Damian suggested. "They"re the best in Manhattan."
She looked up at him slowly, like a drugged bird in a cage. She hunched her shoulders in, as if the booth was closing around her.
"I don"t like your eyes," she said.
The drug did that to people, released their inhibitions. She was only saying what came to her mind.
"What do you mean?" Damian asked. "I"ve been told that my eyes are one of my finest features."
"I feel . . . I feel like I"ve seen you before," she said, setting her knife down. Her head swayed slightly from side to side, and her breathing was shallow.
"You mean "before" this morning?" Damian asked. "I think I would remember a girl as lovely as you."
"It"s the intelligence in your eyes, the feral brilliance," she said, as if a startling thought had occurred. "You"re like all the other guys at the top echelon at the company. There"s a strange . . . fierceness to you. Your eyes are like a tiger"s."
Damian hissed, surprised by her observation. Many of the top execs had boosted intelligence. A few years back, in the early 2000s, Chancellor Pharmaceuticals had won a military contract that tested ways to boost memory. By creating neurons from stem cells, Chancellor"s technicians learned to transfer clumps of brain cells into the cerebral cortex. Combining this treatment with the administration of growth hormones could coax hundreds of thousands of neuronal connections between each new brain cell.
Though the process had been a success, the military had ordered Chancellor Pharmaceuticals to declare the project a bust. The technology had been secreted away in some government lab. After all, if people knew what the treatment could do, everyone would want it.
But the company had duplicated the process easily enough, and now most of the company"s key personnel had boosted their intelligence. It often raised one"s IQ by 80 points.
Damian had availed himself of the treatment, of course, and his IQ could no longer be measured by conventional means.
"The company recruits only the best and brightest," he suggested. "We like to bind them with "golden handcuffs," and if those fail, we find some other means."
"Security came to my house," Asia confided dazedly, as if she"d forgotten the topic of conversation. "They swept for bugs. They said that they"ve found a lot of bugs lately. They think . . . it has something to do with the project I"m working on."
Damian laughed dismissively and folded his hands, then peered at her like an owl gauging a mouse. He needed to keep her talking for only a moment more. "It"s not your project that they"re interested in. The company is about to announce the release of a new drug, a broad-spectrum anti-inflammatory that treats everything from arthritis to allergies and diabetes, M.S., and Alzheimer"s. It will be bigger than penicillin!"
She opened her mouth in feigned horror that he would speak so openly, here in a nightclub.
"Oh, there"s nothing that "the enemy" can do. The press releases go out Monday morning, and we"re a decade ahead of anyone else."
Such news would indeed astonish the world, but Damian knew that it was a mere smokescreen for greater discoveries.
"I"ve overheard something about that," she said, "but . . . isn"t there a problem with it?" Her voice fell to a whisper. "Liver toxicity?"
Damian"s smile faltered, and he found himself on the defensive. "This could be the Holy Grail of pharmaceuticals."
"But the long-term effects to the liver-"
"Will be studied in the decades to come. The world needs this drug. We need this drug."
The company put billions into R&D every year. For each product that hit the street, dozens flopped. It cost an average of two billion dollars to bring a new treatment to market. Asia had to know the numbers. She knew the game. The company needed a cash cow. Pfizer"s stock was surging, as was Murasaki"s. The world needed a reminder of Chancellor Pharmaceutical"s efficacy.
"Can they push this one through the FDA?" Asia asked. "Isn"t it too early?"
"Half of FDA inspectors once worked for us," Damian said dismissively. "One hand washes the other."
"There are oversight committees-"
"Run by senators and congressmen who eagerly need our company"s support to get reelected," Damian pointed out. "I"m sure that our lobbyists will remind them of that."
Asia"s face fell and she stared at the floor as if into the depths of h.e.l.l. The girl was obviously lost. Most new employees felt this way, until their consciences faded.
Asia looked as if she was about to fall.
"Let"s get you home," Damian said. "It has been a long day."
"What about the rest of dinner? What about the main course?"
"Let"s skip the main course," he suggested, "and go straight to dessert."
She climbed up on wobbly legs, holding the table. Chaz came rushing up. "Is everything all right?" He studied Asia with evident alarm.
"My date isn"t feeling well." Damian stuffed $300 into the waiter"s hand. "Could you hail a taxi?"
Chaz hesitated, as if unsure whether to take the money or call the police. "She"ll be fine," Damian a.s.sured. Chaz nodded conspiratorially and bustled out to the street.
Moments later the two hustled Asia into a cab. Soon the car crawled down the one-way streets, hampered by trucks and other vehicles. Asia leaned up against her door, half asleep, and asked, "Did you drug me?"
Damian didn"t answer.
" "Cause if you drugged me, I"d kill you for it. I hate drugs. There are too d.a.m.ned many of them, coming too d.a.m.ned fast."
"Yet you work for us," he suggested.
"So," she said defiantly, counting down her fingers. "We get this on the market, we make our money, and if things start to go south, we pull the drug before too many people get hurt; and then we rush the next miracle drug onto the streets." By the time she was done counting, she had made a fist. Her face filled with the righteous anger that only the young and truly idealistic can feel. "This doesn"t sound like mankind"s salvation to me-"
"It"s a prescription for success; the same one we"ve used for fifty years," Damian admitted. "We don"t need a new plan for global domination. This one is working fine. Everyone knows about it, but no one dares shut us down. The world demands its drugs. Only we can deliver them."
She turned, head still b.u.t.ted against the car door, and glared at him. "Who do you think the company will sell those drugs to, the ones that make you live forever?" Rohypnol can sometimes make its victims combative, and now she sneered like an angry drunk. "Who are they going to sell them to?" she said. "I"ll tell you- anyone who has the money. Mobsters and drug lords and rock stars; senators that do them dirty little favors, and greedy dictators in Africa who starve children as part of their ethnic cleansing programs? Chinese slavers who sell Thai girls as prost.i.tutes in Malaysia, and Blood Mine owners. Arab princes and billionaires- that"s who will get those drugs: any p.r.i.c.k who can pay!"
"Take it easy," Damian said. "If such drugs did exist, some sort of program would be put in place, some . . . controls."
"I can tell you who won"t get them-" Asia said. "Poor Black women in Haiti who work their fingers to the bone trying to raise their kids. Dads who spend their time coaching basketball to teens."
"I think there would be . . . rewards," Damian said, "for lives well lived."
"Sure," Asia said. "Immortal pontiffs and TV talk-show hosts. Oprah and Jerry Springer forever!" She began to weep.
"What would you suggest?" Damian demanded. "Would you give it to welfare moms who would waste eternity watching soap operas, or derelicts that would spend their time trying to score their next high?
"Look at it this way," Damian pressed. "We"d be giving humanity hope, something to strive for. Life itself might be a gift, but immortality could be earned. For all of history, every animal on this planet has been a slave to its biology. But all of that is about to change. We"re moving into an era where through various biological processes- through drugs and genetic engineering and stem cell migrations- we"ll control our own biology. We"ll reinvent ourselves: eradicate diseases, make ourselves stronger, smarter, faster, more adaptable and durable. Immortal. Imagine if you remembered everything that you saw, everything you heard. Imagine if your mind grasped complex ideas beyond the ken of modern man . . . Imagine that you suddenly could envision the shapes of the proteins that bond in your genome at a molecular level, and had the tools to remake yourself into something better. Imagine all of that, and imagine that you had an eternity to implement these new processes. Who knows what shapes our children might decide to manifest themselves in? One thing is sure, they"ll transform, becoming something better. By taking thought alone, a new species will emerge: h.o.m.o perfectus, the self-perfected ones!"
She peered at him with a look of stricken horror. "And what about the people left behind?"
"With every evolutionary leap," Damian said, "only a few make it. The rest of the monkeys cling to their trees. When the first man went striding across the plains of Africa, he did so alone, and he did not gaze back longingly to the animals peering from the shadows of the bush."
She gaped at him. He could tell that she was thinking of her own single mother, the woman who had scrubbed floors in a hospital at night to put Asia through college.
She slapped his face.
This wasn"t going well.
Damian glanced at the driver, who glared back through the rearview mirror. Damian had more than one drug in his a.r.s.enal. Palms sweaty, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a spray bottle. He misted the pheromones into her face, just as she gasped a breath. In the glare of a streetlight, he saw the iris of her right eye suddenly expand and relax, and she moaned with desire.
Dessert By the time that they reached her apartment, Asia was panting. She stumbled from the cab and he helped her into her brownstone, opening the front door and carrying her up the stairs. Everything in her spoke of her cravings- the slack jaw, the wanton eyes, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s that had become so engorged that they strained at the fabric of her blouse.
The combination of drugs had left her like some animal, mindless with desire, and as Damian opened the door to her apartment, she clung to his neck and kissed him, a smothering kiss that tasted wet and sweet.
"I"m yours," she moaned. "I"m yours. Take me. I"ll be anything you want."
"Even h.o.m.o perfectus?"
She nodded seductively, but all rational thought had fled from her, and Damian had a sudden insight.
That is what he wanted for her. That is what he"d wanted from her. He"d wanted a partner- not a s.e.xual partner, a mate, a woman that he could love as an equal.
She planted her feet and tried to pull, leading him to her bed in a frenzy of desire. When she reached the darkened room, she ripped at her clothes, fumbling in her haste, then fell back onto the bed and lay there.