by Greg Krojac
She was completely relaxed as she walked through the corridors of the complex. She had no reason to be otherwise, for she had made this same journey many times before. Why should this time be any different? She even stopped occasionally to talk to people she recognised, much as a king or queen might when on a walkabout among their people. Everybody was pleased to see her and told her how much they were looking forward to her taking charge of the organisation once again.
She felt secure in the knowledge that she had chosen well. Thomas had been an exemplary servant to the Illuminati until the time came for her to leave Nathan’s ageing body. Once she’d become aware of herself as a Recarn and aware of her previous existences, she’d made it her business to keep track of what was going on whilst she was growing up. She had half a dozen people within the organisation whom she trusted implicitly, three of whom were accompanying her on her walk to the Pindar’s office. She knew that there was still work to be done on the cloning projects but had been assured that the day would soon arrive when a human soul could be transferred into an adult clone and was pleased to know that the projects had moved forward under Thomas’s tenure. Soon The Order would be making billions of dollars, pounds, or whatever currency you like, from the sale of the cloning service to wealthy clients.
The group arrived at the door of the Pindar’s office and an officer of the elite guard rapped on the door, which opened silently. As a clock on the wall struck midday, Érica and her three-man escort walked into the room where a figure of a man was sitting, facing away from her, staring at a painting of Adam Weishaupt. Érica spoke confidently, having been through this process many times before, using the same formal procedural language.
“Good afternoon Thomas McCall. I hereby give you notice, as stated previously in January 2051 that, as of now, I, Érica Maria Santos, formally known as Nathan Robert Smith, assume the office of Pindar of the organisation known as the Illuminati, also known as the Order of New Perfectibilists, also known as The Order. From this day forth I shall exercise my power fairly and justly and will always put the benefit of The Order above that of myself.”
The figure rose from his seat and turned to face Érica.
“Do you now? Well, I’m sorry but I beg to differ.”
Érica was stunned. She looked at the very healthy young man that stood before her – instead of an elderly and sophisticated black man she was looking at a white man with golden hair, sparkling blue eyes and a disturbing amount of arrogance. Marcus smiled.
“Cat got your tongue, has it?”
“How can this be? Who are you? Where’s Thomas?”
“Thomas? Oh, he’s dead my dear. Passed away two years ago. Almost to the day, actually. I’m the Pindar now.”
“How? There are protocols to address the event of an Acting Pindar dying whilst in office, and none of them includes promoting somebody who isn’t sanctioned by myself.”
“Ah, Érica. Or maybe I should call you Nathan. No, you look more like an Érica. You are a very pretty little thing, aren’t you? I wouldn’t mind spending some recreational time getting to know you properly.”
Marcus took time to ogle Érica before continuing.
“But I digress. And I’ve been very rude. I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Marcus Gallagher.”
Marcus lifted a teacup from its saucer and took a sip of the hot beverage.
“How rude of me. Would you like a cuppa, Érica? Or is coffee more your thing, you being Brazilian?”
“I don’t want anything, except my Pindarship.”
Marcus sniffed with an air of contempt. He wasn’t suffering from a cold but simply thought that the dramatic gesture would best convey his contempt.
“Just as well. We’ve run out of coffee. Oh, and about the Pindarship. I’m afraid I can’t give that to you either.”
“You have no right to stop me. Guards, arrest this imposter.”
The guards stood their ground, making no attempt to follow her orders.
“I don’t think they heard you, Érica. Try again.”
Érica repeated the order, and the guards stood still, one of them allowing himself a little smirk. Marcus’s tone was now even more mocking.
“Nope, they definitely didn’t hear you. A little louder maybe? Or perhaps they don’t want to arrest me.”
“These are the Elite Guard. They are loyal to me!”
Marcus tutted.
“Doesn’t look like it, does it?”
He nodded and two guards stepped forward and gripped Érica’s arms tightly. She shouted again.
“They were loyal to me. They’ve always been loyal to me.”
“Loyalty can be bought, Érica. And, as well as a lot of money, I have offered them the next best thing to immortality. I’ve promised them that their souls – at a time of their own choosing – will be transferred into a young healthy clone so that they can continue their lives in the luxury to which they now will become accustomed. Strange to say, they jumped at the chance. Of course, I had to be very selective – if I’d approached non-Recarns, it may have been a little more difficult to get them onside. They wouldn’t have appreciated the gift that I was offering them. But it’s really a pleasant feeling knowing that, upon dying, you can keep your standard of living and all the things that you’ve accumulated during your life, instead of being reincarnated into some random body that could be born into some hellhole on the other side of the world. Contrary to popular belief… it appears that you can take it with you.”
“But my sources told me that the cloning process hadn’t been perfected, yet.”
“Ah yes. Sorry about that. Your sources are – well, they’re my sources really; I told them to tell you that. It’s called disinformation. But the cloning process is a great success. I mean, look at me. Am I not a beautiful specimen?”
Marcus pirouetted once, to give Érica the full view of his body. He glared at Érica.
“Yes, Érica. I’m a clone. It was a great idea you had, this project to transfer our souls, to decide where they end up after our bodies wear out. An even better idea to transfer our souls into clones, so we don’t have to hang around twenty years or so to mature like you just had to. This whole process took only twenty minutes or so. Maybe less. Anyway, totally painless. No, that’s a lie. The whole vacuum, crushing, and boiling thing is pretty disturbing. But look at the result. It’s definitely worth it. You should try it sometime. And when this clone body wears out – or when I feel like a change – I can simply swap it for a new one. No waiting.”
As difficult as it was for Érica to admit, she knew that Thomas McCall had outplayed her.
“What are you going to do? If you’re going to kill me, then just get it over with.”
Marcus shook his head.
“Kill you? Why should I want to do that? If I kill you, you’ll be back here in twenty years or so, like an annoying mosquito. No, Érica. I’m not going to kill you, not as such. We both know that you’d reincarnate and I simply cannot be bothered to go through this rigmarole every couple of decades. No, you’re going to be our house guest, Érica. You’re going to stay here with us for a while, a very long while – forever actually.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
14:40 SATURDAY 8 JUNE 2069
Érica was about to see the fruits of her ambition first hand, although she’d always imagined it would be from a different vantage point. She was being wheeled along the corridor, strapped to the very same trolley that had delivered countless other men and women to their death, including the anonymous teenage girl who had provided the first baby to undergo experimentation, the advertising executive Ami Durand, and Professor Ingram.
She’d been the instigator of research into soul transference and clone creation but had never envisaged that it would be her undoing. In all her incarnations she’d never misjudged anybody as badly as she’d misjudged Thomas. He’d allowed this interloper to take control of her organization. How could she have been so stupid?
The sliding doors of t
he laboratory opened just before the trolley was about to hit them. Érica looked around her and saw the transference equipment, which had undergone a small modification only two hours earlier. Marcus was already in the room, standing tall, looking forward to dealing with the threat that Érica thought she’d brought with her.
“Good afternoon Érica. Let me introduce you to our wonderful apparatus here. This beast directs the soul from a dead person into a new recipient body. Your original idea of course, and for that I thank you. Now, this recipient can be a human or, it can be like me, a clone. You did realise that didn’t you, Érica? I’m not just any old clone who took control of the organisation. No, no, no… I’m Ruth, the plantation slave who was raped in front of her daughter. I’m Simon, the ten-year-old murderer and suicide. I’m Jake, the member of the team that helped bring about the Revelation. I’m Thomas, the man who you put in charge of the Organisation whilst you were busy growing up in Brazil. And now, as you can see, I’m Marcus – your worst nightmare.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, my dear. Normally, we would take a soul and direct it to a new host. Then the new host wakes up, and hey presto! Everybody’s happy. But you, Érica, you will not be entering a new host. Your soul will only make half the journey because instead of a receiver chamber, a sealed capsule has been attached. Your soul will be spending an eternity locked inside that capsule, in a secure vault, where you can do no harm. I believe that this will be the perfect example of what romantics like to call ‘a fate worse than death’. You’ll be my very own genie in a bottle.”
Érica suddenly felt very helpless and very angry. She’d been betrayed by those she’d trusted with her life. She saw no way out. There was no escape. She knew that only her body would die, but for her soul to be locked inside that capsule forever – that was unimaginable.
As the laboratory staff unceremoniously stripped her naked, adding insult to injury. Marcus took a good look at her.
“Sorry about that, my dear, but clothing upsets the calibration of the apparatus. I’m sure you understand. We – I – can’t afford any mistakes.”
Two assistants manhandled her roughly into the donor chamber, and as the transparent lid was about to be closed, Marcus bent over her.
“I would have liked to have cut your throat myself, but that would have meant releasing your soul to the four winds, and I can’t allow that. So you’ll just have to suffer the delights of finding yourself in a vacuum. I know I’ll enjoy watching.”
A lab technician turned on the machine.
Érica looked down at her skin as best she could, given that she was still physically restrained. It began to swell and turn blue as the air was sucked out of her body. She fought for her breath and started to feel very hot as her blood temperature began to increase. Marcus was feeling very pleased with himself.
“I’m impressed Érica. You’re still awake. Normally subjects don’t last this long. Oh, did I speak too soon? I think your lungs are about to give up on you… come on…come on…and…there we go! No more lungs!”
The monitoring technician called out.
“Sir, the soul is leaving the donor body.”
Érica’s soul had left her corpse and set off in search of a new host. But this time there was no recipient body to receive it.
“Sir, it’s in the airlock.”
The airlock door was quickly closed, and air was pumped into the small tube that linked the two incubators in order to seduce the soul towards where a recipient body would normally be waiting
Inside the apparatus, Érica’s soul was darting to and fro in an effort to find a body. An airlock opened and the soul sensed that there was another possible escape route. It hurled itself through an opening that it thought would give it freedom, but instead found itself inside a lead-lined cylinder.
Another button was pushed and within milliseconds a lid clamped shut on the container. Marcus walked over to the equipment and removed the container, itself the size of a small thermos flask, from its cradle.
“Excellent job gentlemen. And, of course, ladies.”
He made his way along the network of corridors, casually tossing the container from hand to hand until he arrived at a large red door. He wasn’t worried about dropping it; there was no way that the container would break, releasing its prisoner. He peered into an optical reader and the door opened. Inside was a heavy steel door with a forty-eight number combination lock. He’d deliberately used the same locking technology to that which had been employed to secure the safe at Maidenhead Thicket in 1990. It was a good memory and he saw it as a bit of an homage to the beginning of his journey towards attaining the power that he now held.
Marcus deftly entered the correct combination sequence and the door swung open. Inside was another smaller safe, more technologically up to date. Marcus placed his palm on the identification plate. There was a click, and the door opened. Marcus took one final look at the vessel imprisoning Érica’s soul.
“Goodbye Érica or should I say, Nathan. This will be your home for the next – well, you know. Forever. May we never meet again.”
He placed the cylinder inside the safe and closed the door. Then he turned around and left the vault, pushing the door shut with his foot, and scrambled the combination. Finally, just before leaving by the red door, he armed the intruder detect-and-destroy system. He stepped through the red door and turned back to watch it automatically close behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
14:45 SATURDAY 15 JUNE 2069
Caitlin settled herself on her chair at the rather cheesily named Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe in Covent Garden. The coffee it sold wasn’t any different to Starbucks or Costa, in fact, it was probably sourced from the same suppliers, but the décor and the frontage of the place was like something out of Dickensian London. The staff were dressed in Victorian dresses and everything about it did its best to whisk its customers away into a world that had existed two hundred years earlier. It was escapist coffee.
Caitlin liked to imagine what it would have been like living in those days, conveniently forgetting the squalor and poverty that many of London’s Victorian citizens had had to suffer. The sanitized version of the age that this coffee shop represented was so successful that often there were long queues for tables and for this reason most customers accompanied their coffee with a pastry or a cake, making the wait outside more worthwhile.
That day was no different; the coffee shop was packed with customers, the only spare seat available being at Caitlin’s table. A balding stockbroker had vacated it thirty seconds earlier but Caitlin knew that the chair wouldn’t be empty for long. A rather good-looking young man with golden hair approached her table and rested his hands on the chair back.
“Excuse me, miss. May I sit at your table?”
Caitlin looked up to see the man smiling effortlessly at her.
“Be my guest.”
The man fixed his piercing blue eyes on her and held out his hand in a gesture of friendship. Caitlin returned the gesture, shaking his hand gently.
“Hi. I’m Caitlin Boone.”
The man smiled again.
“Well, Caitlin Boone. I’m very honoured to meet you. My name is Marcus. Marcus Gallagher.”
#####
BOOK TWO
REVOLUTION
CHAPTER ONE
18:45 Friday 20 September 2069
Caitlin had been looking incredibly happy of late. She seemed to have an eternal smile etched on her face, a smile that seemed like it couldn’t be wiped off, no matter what happened in her life. Her mother, Karen, knew that smile well. She had spent a large part of her life wearing the selfsame smile, a smile that she couldn’t hide even if she tried. It had been an honest smile, a smile that told everyone who saw Karen that she was in love. She had been wearing that smile ever since the day that she had met her husband, Maurice, and it had never left her face except for an agonising period of about ten months when she believed that he had been killed in a car crash. She’d t
hought that she’d never wear that smile again, but when Maurice had turned up – alive – the smile returned in a flash.
Maurice, like so many men, wasn’t so quick to pick up on the signals that his youngest daughter was projecting. He could tell that she was in a good mood but he had no idea why. He wasn’t even overtly bothered why she was happy. That she was happy was good enough for him. Happiness was all that he hoped for either of his daughters. If his daughters were happy, then he was happy.
Karen sat on the edge of Caitlin’s bed watching her daughter get ready for her date that evening. She looked at Caitlin’s reflection in the dressing table mirror.
“You know that your father and I will have to meet this mystery man sometime. Your dad, in particular, is feeling a bit anxious. It’s a father and daughter thing; he sees it as part of his job as a dad to worry when you’re seeing someone. It’s only natural that he wants to meet your boyfriend. And I can tell by your face that you’re getting a bit serious about him too. Don’t forget, I was young once and I know what it’s like to be falling in love. Plus, I want to meet this mystery man too.”
Caitlin turned away from the mirror, sat on the bed alongside her mother, and rested her hairbrush on her lap.
“Who says I’m falling in love?”
“Your mother, that’s who. I’ve been there, darling. I know the signs. And you’re definitely falling in love.”
