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  Longevity

  S J Hunter

  “I don't usually write reviews, but this book definitely deserves my praise. A great sci-fi thriller which I highly recommend!” Laurie – Amazon Reviewer

  The last thing legendary solo detective Chris McGregor expected was to get a new partner, especially a Longevity Law Enforcement rookie. Now he has two. With Livvy Hutchins, an irrepressible transfer into D.C. LLE, and Louie, a neuro-enhanced dog, he faces the most challenging case of his 75-year career. Together they must work in secret to uncover the dark plans of a wealthy sociopath allied with a doctor of Frankensteinian talents. As always in LLE work, the secret must be kept – or they risk disrupting the knife-edge balance of civilization's opposing idealologies.

  “Technological immortality is the prospect for much longer life spans made possible by scientific advances in a variety of fields: nanotechnology, emergency room procedures, genetics, biological engineering, regenerative medicine, microbiology, and others.” – “Immortality” in Wikipedia

  Longevity Law Enfrocement is a science fiction series for our times, with realistic biotechnology, engaging heroes, and something we all need to ultimately hang onto… humor.

  Working as a veterinarian and a librarian, S. J. Hunter has lived in Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Florida, and many places in between. This is S. J.'s first work of science fiction.

  S J Hunter

  Longevity

  Prologue 2051

  “Seriously? You’ll be incinerated,” the Fire Captain said.

  Chris didn’t stop to reply, but he did squint at the flames licking at the Greater Potomac Reset Institute as he grabbed the firesuit from the supply van. It was a little after 10 PM and the fire was moments from turning the whole building into a gigantic red-orange lantern. Even he had some doubts that he could don the suit quickly enough to get into the clinic, do what he needed to do, and get out safely before it collapsed, but being who he was he kept an eye on the fire and called up half-forgotten dexterity. It had been over 5 years since the Allotment Riots when everyone in Enforcement was so practiced that they could get into a suit in 12 seconds flat or less, but he still found his fingers flying through the pattern of fasteners without conscious thought.

  The Fire Captain, watching Chris work the suit fasteners, apparently decided on a more reasoned approach. “Look, ah… detective. It’s too late. Let it go, and the Arson Squad can figure it out later. What are you looking for, anyway? All the people were out before it started.”

  “I’m from LLE,” Chris said.

  “Ellie Who?”

  “LLE. Longevity Law Enforcement,” Chris said, working expeditiously on the fireboots. Someday, LLE would be around long enough for the acronym to be widely recognized, and he could stop explaining. “Right now I’m not worrying about who started the fire. I’m responsible for anything that might be lying around intact enough to tell us if there is a ‘why,’ even if it hasn’t happened yet,” Chris said. His last words, uttered after he’d closed his faceplate and turned on the oxygen, sounded loud and strangely hollow inside the sealed suit. He headed for the burning clinic.

  “If it’s CCS work, which it usually is in these cases, I can tell you that now,” the Captain shouted after him, “without you having to run into a burning building! They’re whacky Christian fanatics. That’s why.”

  The clinic was on a slab, so Chris could at least count on the floor to be solid, although he could feel the heat through his boots. No time to dwell on it. His suit was supposed to be able to protect him from temperatures in excess of 800 degrees C, but not much above that, which meant that he was in part counting on the fire retardants that were being sprayed liberally onto the structure to negate the effect of any remaining accelerant. Near the hallway that lead to the rooms and the entrance to the reception work space there was an area that was flaring suspiciously, creating beautiful low, smooth, blue and green waves of flames. Somebody had known what they were doing on this one. He made for the front desk, admiring the lovely display from a safe distance.

  Chris vaulted onto the reception desk – very hot – and then immediately into the work area behind it. There were a lot of tablets strewn around, all intact and looking as though they had been left in typical disarray from the regular workflow of a busy molebiol facility. He stacked all of them into one manageable pile on the desk as efficiently as possible, added the Central Unit, then vaulted back up and over. It was hotter yet, which meant the suit was getting dangerously stressed. Vastly relieved to see that no large obstacles of flaming roof or wall had fallen into his path, he grabbed his rescued tablets and headed for the door. He didn’t look back when he heard a loud crash behind him, although he felt the wave of heat through the firesuit.

  When he got out the door, he kept running. That had been easier than he expected, but he wanted to create a respectable gap.

  The Captain was there to greet him 25 meters out. “Hold still, your back is on fire,” he said, patting out flaming debris with a gloved hand. “I hope it was worth it.”

  “I won’t know until I get a chance to compile the contents and check them against open fraud cases. Mainly future cases. LLE is a new unit.”

  The clinic was now totally engulfed and skeletal, on the verge of disintegration. As they paused to watch, there was another tremendous crash, sending out a wave of reverberating heat and brilliant sparks up in a final magnificent burst. They floated for a while in showy currents around the firefighters’ heads and equipment until they gradually faded into dead cinders, renewing the peripheral darkness.

  “Well, if what you did today is any indication, you’re going to have a high turnover in personnel. To job-related fatalities.”

  “I hope not. My wife would not approve,” Chris said. Then he couldn’t resist adding, “She’s due to deliver our first in two weeks.”

  “Congratulations,” the Captain said. “You know, children change things. In your case, the change can’t come a moment too soon.”

  Chris smiled slightly. “I suppose so. Do you have any yourself?”

  “Two. A daughter, thirty-two. And a son, three. Both happy and healthy. My wife and I have been blessed.”

  Chris began peeling off the uncomfortable suit, keeping a satisfied eye on his pile of data sources and already planning what to mine for first. Recent appointments, probably. Any clients approaching their allotment. The staff registry, of course. Perhaps the fire was purely the random work of Children of Christ’s Sacrifice or another fanatical group or individual, but if so they had developed some unexpected expertise in arson. Also, he’d had an informant when he was still working in Major Crimes who had hinted, shortly before disappearing, that CCS was being manipulated by a major source of funding, so their domestic terrorism might actually be targeting specific sites in an effort to destroy records.

  “A guy with way more money than is good for anyone,” the informant had said. “And he’s convinced them – the CCS nutcase brigade – that this new unit, you know, the Longevity Law unit, has been especially created to infiltrate them and put down protesters and protect the rich people who want to live forever. It’s kind of ironic, really. They’re rabid about hating you guys. You can’t talk to those CCS people once they get an idea in their heads. Fused wiring in there.”

  Chris stepped out of the firesuit and picked up his rescued tablets. He was just turning back to the captain to ask for a copy of the Arson Squad’s final report when his comu tickled with an emergency call. He touched his ear to activate the messenger.

  “Highest urgency. St. Claire’s. Incoming vehicular trauma id’d as Karen DeVoe. Recommend immediate…”

  Chris was already moving, dashing past the startled firefighters, gripping the tablets like they still really mattered, and calling instruc
tions to his car while he was 20 meters away. A light rain started as he pulled away from the scene of the fire, and for the first half block he was driving almost blindly because of the ashes smeared across his windshield. He sped up as the scrubbers got them and visibility improved.

  He used his strobe and siren as soon as possible, and every shortcut he knew, but in the end it didn’t matter much. Karen and their baby were both gone long before he reached them. Sometime later in the long hours that passed afterwards in pervasive numbness, he couldn’t really say when, he realized inconsequentially that they died while he was in the burning reset facility.

  Chp. 1 Fifty-six Years Later (Sunday)

  “You can hold that if it makes you feel better but don’t even think about using it unless I tell you to shoot,” Chris said very softly, nodding at the Stinger the rookie had drawn. He also crooked his finger and then pointed to a spot behind him, so that he would be positioned between the rookie and the door.

  The young uniform moved slowly to the side with a puzzled expression, looking from Chris’ face to the Attach’n’smash already sticking to the door lock. “But… a warrant…” he started to say, when Moore, his training officer, interrupted.

  “Numbskull,” he whispered furiously, “don’t ask stupid questions. He’s LLE. They haven’t needed warrants for decades. In the hotlab raids, we follow his lead. And you’re more likely to give one of the docs a heart attack from showing that shooter than you are ever going to have to use it on one.”

  Which was true. This should be an easy one. Chris had been shot at on a regular basis by all kinds of people who didn’t like the job he was doing, or, he preferred to think, the job they mistakenly thought he was doing, but he had never been greeted by armed resistance from a doctor during a raid on a hotlab. The case was very different when he was dealing with guards in a ghetto hotlab staffed by kidnapped personnel. The rookie, Benton, should have realized that he wouldn’t need to go in braced, since none of them had bothered to put on armor. On the other hand, the use of the Attach’n’smash was confusing, making it look like an aggressive raid when really it was just meant to be an especially swift entrance, to forestall destruction of key evidence.

  Thirty years ago with the looming threat of a relapse into the chaos of the Allotment Riots, the politicians realized that LLE was overwhelmed by the scale of their mission and had voted in a lot of official prerogatives to make his job easier. A slew of unofficial ones had been added by tradition over the intervening years. Entering suspect hotlabs by smashing in the doors had been an LLE standard procedure ever since the Laws’ power expanded.

  This raid was almost no exception. The door crashed back on its hinges resoundingly as it reacted to the focused explosion, catching the man inside off guard. Instead of running, however, the man’s first reaction after a split second recovery was to grab the collar on the growling dog standing at his side. As Chris and the two uniforms rapidly filed into the tiny apartment and spread out, the man not only stayed calm but knelt next to the dog in the center of the room and reassured him until he quieted down

  “Dr. Clayton Andrews?” Chris asked. The man nodded unhappily.

  “You know what this is about?” The man nodded again, and Chris went to work. The efficiency, like so many in the city a late 20th century remnant, contained scant furniture, a bank of incubators and one of refrigeration units, filtration apparatus, and no luxuries. There was only the one man present. Chris made a rapid assessment: a minimally equipped hotlab, suitable for research but not functional as a clinic.

  The next step was more tedious, but still necessary. He spent some minutes on a preliminary survey of the memopads and CU address files, trying to find clues as to who was paying Andrews and who worked with him. Experience had taught him to do this prelim in the hotlab before walking out with the suspect and his files. Once word of the arrest hit the street, co-conspirators and linked enterprises tended to melt away.

  “What about my dog?” Andrews asked abruptly after Chris had been at it for a while. “What’s going to happen to my dog?”

  Chris stopped examining files and looked up to see four pairs of eyes focused on him. They were all staring at him as though he had all the answers, which he supposed in this situation he usually did. LLE was his playing field and he’d been at it a long time.

  He stared back at Andrews, who was still crouching by the dog although he was no longer gripping the collar. Chris hated these neuro-enhancement cases, the ones brought to LLE’s attention by anonymous tipsters. The tipsters were almost always jealous colleagues or bitter ex-subordinates, and no doubt some of them were equally guilty but even less scrupulous. Molebiol researchers with no current record of employment in a licensed facility would already have red flags by their names in LLE’s files. Andrews had been flagged. Unfortunately, LLE lacked the personnel to follow up on that basis alone, or even on records showing purchases of standard molebiol equipment and supplies. LLE needed tipsters to show where to concentrate effort, but Chris despised them. The caller who gave up Andrews had said only that he was neuro-enhanced and running a hotlab, he hadn’t said anything about how Andrews was profiting from the enhancement.

  They were all still staring: Andrews, a tall, thin, nondescript man whose forlorn expression was devoid of the belligerence and bravado that most researchers adopted; the two uniforms; and uncannily – or perhaps more accurately, cannily – the dog. He was a beautiful shorthaired mutt, about 30 kilos of pure muscle, with copper-colored coat and eyes and a broad muzzle. The eyes were rimmed with black and were focused intently on Chris, although the dog was sitting in front of Andrews, its ears pricked and angled forward. As with his owner, there was no evident hostility. Chris had a revelation.

  “He’s neuro-enhanced too, isn’t he?”

  Andrews blanched and moved back to sit on a chair against the wall. The dog padded after him. “I understand, I do. You’re just doing your job and I understand that. But please, it’s not his fault. You know it just gives a little boost to cognition and memory even in people. He doesn’t understand any of this. He’s not a freak or a mutant. He’s just a good, smart dog.”

  Feeling the dog’s eyes following his every move, Chris went back to shuffling through the memotabs strewn about the room. Andrews hadn’t even bothered to encrypt or secure anything, as far as Chris could see, but his brief preliminary survey showed nothing that could link the illegal enhancement to any confederates or another location. In that Andrews appeared to have been meticulous. In fact, as far as Chris could tell, the guy was a hermit. Chris’ initial scant enthusiasm for the raid dwindled.

  He raided similar hotlabs all over the city almost every week. All standard procedure. A routine case. Other than the dog.

  What was unusual so far was the doctor’s reaction. When undergoing an LLE raid, some became righteous, some furious, some pleaded. Also, all the evidence Chris had deciphered so far continued to suggest that Andrews hadn’t used his increased brainpower on anything other than further molebiol research. The law was usually lenient in these cases. Andrews could be working towards anything from a brilliant discovery that would benefit the deprived masses, or one that would net him billions in the lucrative black markets. Chris left that to Molebiol Forensics to illuminate. When Forensics received the doctor’s notes and Chris’ report they’d send a team through to confiscate and sort through the lab supplies.

  The penalties were minor compared to most criminal sentences, but catastrophic for a professional. According to the American Association of Medical Practitioners, as always responsive to a populist hot-button, neuro-enhancements and hotlabs with illegal clinical or research activities were ethics violations. According to the federal government, they were crimes of various magnitudes, with penalties somewhat dependent upon how profitable they’d been.

  Chris took the other chair from the worn dinette and placed it a few feet in front of Andrews. As he sat down, he glanced at the uniforms, who backed off obligingly. “Dr.
Andrews,” he said. “You know what happens now, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I lose my license, and the enhancement gets reversed. And I spend a year in jail. I knew what I risked before I began.”

  “And if anyone can show that you profited financially from the neuro-enhancement you get fined proportionally and punitively. That’s for the neuro-enhancement alone,” Chris added. “Now, as far as the hotlab goes, we have other issues. If we find evidence that you did unlicensed resets or enhancements on people, or used controlled cultures and reagents, that would be much more serious.”

  Any researcher with the skills, supplies, and minimal equipment, and a scary minimum of understanding could perform illegal resets and enhancements for a pittance to try to support their research, hoping for some major discovery. The more enterprising researchers even found support from wealthy patrons. Investors, of a sort. Chris understood the unlicensed resets. People got desperate. But he’d never understand those who submitted and even paid for the unlicensed enhancements or volunteered for the research trials. None of them, he supposed, had ever seen or spoken to one of the pitiful victims of a badly fumbled black market molebiol procedure.

  Andrews was shaking his head vigorously. “No, I would never… it was all just my own research. These cultures… There’s nothing dangerous. I swear.”

  “Do you have someone specific you want to go to for the reversal?” Chris asked.

  “No. It doesn’t matter,” Andrews said. “What’s going to happen to my dog? What’ll you do with Louie?”

  Back to the dog. Louie. For a criminal mastermind the doctor was a bit too sanguine about both the jail time and the enhancement reversal, but then perhaps Andrews had more confidence than Chris did in the ability of his fellow molebiologist practitioners to poke and prod his neural circuits safely back to their innate level – hopefully by cautiously reversing the process described in Andrew’s notes. Good reason not to get too clever with encryption. In the reversed cases Chris had been able to follow-up on there was seldom any noticeable diminished capacity, but significant memory loss was common. Which brought them back to the dog.