Wired

thoughts so vastly accelerated, the guards’ quickest movements had appeared almost deliberate to him. He had been outnumbered four to one and he knew it hadn’t been a fair fight—for the four guards.

Desh rushed over to Kira. As he was cutting her free three loud, piercing tones emanated from her skull, startling her but having no effect on him.

Perfect, he thought. His timing had been exact. He ordered the sweat to cease pouring from his face and his blood to flow normally, and the color quickly returned to his face. He considered if Kira could assimilate his speech if he sped it up to more closely match his thoughts, but ruled it out: as intelligent as she was, he would need to continue to relegate a portion of his mind to creating a simulacrum of his old self.

“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked. “You’ll need to be sure Sam resets his device by 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Kira nodded defiantly. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.

Desh took her hand and led her through the obstacle course of scattered bodies and up the stairs. Sam had said there were four guards, but Desh wasn’t about to trust this number. He cautiously peered around the door, counting on his enhanced reaction time to get him safely through any ambushes. There were none.

They found themselves in the kitchen. “Wait here,” said Desh.

Before Kira could respond, he rushed off and canvassed the entire house, confirming they were alone, and returned to her a few minutes later. “I want to check the men downstairs for identification. I doubt I’ll find any but it’s worth thirty seconds.”

Desh bounded off and down the stairs, closing the door quietly behind him. He pulled the knife from where he had implanted it in the guard’s chest and checked for the man’s pulse. He was dead. Desh knelt beside the unconscious men, two in the basement and one on the staircase, and slit each of their throats in turn, careful not to get any blood on himself.

He isolated the memory of these murders and created a temporary dead zone in his mind so they would be hidden when he returned to his vastly inferior normal state, ensuring he would not be improperly burdened by them. He knew that the emotional, un-enhanced version of himself would never sanction the murders of helpless men.

This other Desh was an idiot!

The enhanced version had just ensured that when Sam returned, he would get zero information as to how they had escaped. They needed to keep Sam as off-balanced as possible. The more confused he was, the more intimidated by their magical escape artistry, the better chance they would have.

The stakes were simply too high for squeamishness.

37

David Desh rejoined Kira on the first floor. “Did they have any ID?” she asked.

Desh shook his head. “None.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “Good news, though. I found our personal items and cell phones in a kitchen drawer.”

She held out his watch and cell phone and he took them gratefully. “Good work,” he said as he slid his watch back around his wrist.

The fraction of Desh’s mind he had used to set up a simulacrum of his slow self waited patiently for the second-and-a-half he expected to pass before Kira’s next utterance. The rest of his mind continued to race at fantastic speed, following several trains of thought simultaneously. One train of thought involved their escape. He had learned how to hot-wire a car as part of his general “surviving with what was at hand” training, and he isolated these memories and amplified them in case he turned back into a pumpkin before locating a suitable car.

“Let’s get out of here,” suggested Kira. “We have to stop this sick bastard,” she added with determination. “And we don’t have much time.”

Desh computed a number of probabilities almost simultaneously. The probability that homing devices had been planted on them or their retrieved personal items. The probability there was detection equipment at hand. The odds that they would find this equipment if it was here, and the amount of time this could be expected to require. The increased risk they were taking with every second they remained where they were. He input all of these figures into a complex equation that he solved the instant it had been formulated: one course of action was optimal—but just slightly. He transmitted the result to his puppet personality.

Desh held up a hand. “Not just yet. Sam thought escape was impossible, so my gut tells me he didn’t plant homing devices on us. Odds are he put the device in your head just to be on the safe side and for intimidation purposes. But we need to be sure. We’re in a safe house, so there must be bug detection equipment here somewhere. Let’s find it.”

They separated and ransacked the house at breakneck speed, tearing through closets and dumping the contents of drawers onto nearby floors. Only four minutes later, Desh found a case in a bedroom closet containing instruments for detecting both homing and listening devices.

He hurriedly scanned both Kira and himself, along with their phones and other personal items. Everything was clean. He checked carefully around Kira’s bandage for any signals but detected none.

They cautiously exited the house, wishing they had night vision equipment as they made their way through the darkness, punctuated by the lights from other houses in the neighborhood. Several streets over Desh found an old car that was susceptible to being hot-wired and quickly did so, performing the procedure by the dim light of his open cell phone. He was just pulling away from the curb when—like a hundred billion rubber bands snapping back into their original shape—his hyper-intelligence vanished.

Desh gasped out loud as if he had been hit in the stomach.

Kira glanced at him and nodded knowingly. “Welcome back to the world of the feeble-minded.”

He wore an expression of complete disconsolation. “I feel like I’ve just been blinded,” he whispered

She nodded. “Ten minutes from now it will all seem like a dream and you won’t miss it so much.”

Desh searched his memory. Had he retained anything? He was relieved to find that several of the ideas he had had while enhanced were still with him, although the underlying logic he had used to arrive at these concepts was either gone or far beyond his ability to comprehend. Desh forced himself to stop pining for lost brilliance. Time was short.

He gasped again!

He had remembered yet another surprising conclusion reached by his super intelligent alter ego: he was in love with Kira Miller.

“What is it?” asked Kira anxiously.

Desh turned to her. He looked into her dazzling blue eyes, and now that his alter ego had shined a spotlight on his emotions he realized it was true: he was in love. Or infatuated at any rate. His entire being basked in her presence. She was like a drug to which he had become hopelessly addicted without his knowledge or consent. The rewards of breathless intellect were great, but the primitive lizard brain manufactured rewards of its own. “Nothing,” whispered Desh. “Sorry.”

Kira looked puzzled but let the subject drop.

Desh knew he could continue to gaze at her beautiful face forever. She truly was an extraordinary woman. But now was not the time to give into these irrational impulses. Now was the time to focus on one thing only: survival.

Desh tore his eyes away from her and focused on the road. “How’s your head?” he asked worriedly.

“It’s getting better,” she said unconvincingly.

Desh suspected she was lying but decided to leave the subject alone. “It won’t be long before Sam discovers what happened at the safe house and points a satellite this way,” he said. “So in the immediate term, we have to get as far away from this spot as possible.” As if to emphasize his point he stepped hard on the accelerator.

“And the not so immediate term?”

“We need to elevate our game. It’s time for more desperate measures. And for that we need Connelly.”

In response, Kira pulled out her cell phone, the partner to the one she had given Connelly, and flipped it open.

“You’re certain the signal can’t be unscrambled?” said Desh.

“Absolutely positive,” she confirmed. She hit a speed dial button and handed the phone to Desh.