Sole Survivor

by Dean Koontz

  ATX-12-23. She is four years old, catatonic, and incontinent. She waits in her crib, in her own wastes until her nurse changes her, and she never complains. ATX-12-23 has never spoken a single word or uttered any sound whatsoever. As an infant, she never cried. She cannot walk. She sits motionlessly, staring into the middle distance, sometimes drooling. Her muscles are partially atrophied even though she is given manipulated exercise three times a week. If her face were ever enlivened by expression, she might be beautiful, but the unrelieved slackness of her features gives her a chilling aspect. Cameras cover every inch of her room and record around the clock, which might seem to be a waste of videotape—except that from time to time, inanimate objects around ATX-12-23 become animated. Rubber balls of various colors levitate and spin in the air, float from wall to wall or circle the child’s head for ten or twenty minutes at a time. Window blinds raise and lower without a hand touching them. Lights dim and flare, the digital clock speeds through the hours, and a teddy bear that she has never touched sometimes walks around the room on its stubby legs as if it contains the mechanical system that would allow it to do so.

  Now come here, down to the second floor, to the third room east of the elevators, where lives a five-year-old male, KSB-22-09, who is neither physically nor mentally impaired. Indeed, he is an active redheaded boy with a genius-level IQ. He loves to learn, receives extensive tutoring daily, and is currently educated to a ninth-grade equivalent. He has numerous toys, books, and movies on video, and he participates in supervised play sessions with the other orphans, because it is deemed essential by the project architects that all subjects with normal mental faculties and full physical abilities be raised in as social an atmosphere as possible, given the limitations of the Institute. Sometimes when he tries hard (and sometimes when he is not trying at all), KSB-22-09 is able to make small objects—pencils, ball bearings, paper clips, thus far nothing larger than a glass of water—vanish. Simply vanish. He sends them elsewhere, into what he calls “The All Dark.” He is not able to bring them back and cannot explain what The All Dark may be—though he does not like the place. He must be sedated to sleep, because he frequently suffers vivid nightmares in which he uncontrollably sends himself, piece by piece, into The All Dark—first a thumb, and then a toe, and then his left foot, a tooth and another tooth, one eye gone from a suddenly empty socket, and then an ear. Lately, KSB-22-09 is experiencing memory lapses and spells of paranoia, which are thought to be related to the long-term use of the sedative that he receives before bed each night.

  Of the forty-eight orphans residing at the Institute, only seven exhibit any paranormal powers. The other forty-one, however, are not regarded as failures. Each of the seven successes first revealed his or her talent at a different age—one as young as eleven months, one as old as five. Consequently, the possibility remains that many of the forty-one will blossom in years to come—perhaps not until they experience the dramatic changes in body chemistry related to puberty. Eventually, of course, those subjects who age without revealing any valuable talent will have to be removed from the program, as even Project 99’s resources are not infinite. The project’s architects have not yet determined the optimum point of termination.

  Although the steering wheel was hard under his hands and slick with his cold sweat, although the sound of the engine was familiar, although the freeway was solid under the spinning tires, Joe felt as if he had crossed into another dimension as treacherously amorphous and inimical to reason as the surreal landscapes in Salvador Dalí’s paintings.

  As his horror grew, he interrupted Rose: “This place you’re describing is Hell. You… you couldn’t have been part of anything like this. You’re not that kind of person.”

  “Aren’t I?”

  “No.”

  Her voice grew thinner as she talked, as though the strength supporting her had been the secrets she kept, and as she revealed them one by one, her vitality ebbed as it had for Samson lock by lock. In her increasing weariness was a sweet relief like that dispensed in a confessional, a weakness that she seemed to embrace—but that was nonetheless colored by a gray wash of despair. “If I’m not that kind of person now…I must have been then.”

  “But how? Why? Why would you want to be involved with these…these atrocities?”

  “Pride. To prove that I was as good as they thought I was, good enough to take on this unprecedented challenge. Excitement. The thrill of being involved with a program even better funded than the Manhattan Project. Why did the people who invented the atomic bomb work on it…knowing what they were making? Because others, elsewhere in the world, will do it if we don’t…so maybe we have to do it to save ourselves from them?”

  “Save ourselves by selling our souls?” he asked.

  “There’s no defense I can offer that should ever exonerate me,” Rose said. “But it is true that when I signed on, there was no consensus that we would carry the experiments this far, that we would apply what we learned with such…zeal. We entered into the creation of the children in stages…down a slippery slope. We intended to monitor the first one just through the second trimester of the fetal stage—and, after all, we don’t consider a fetus to be an actual human being. So it wasn’t like we were experimenting on a person. And when we brought one of them to full term…there were intriguing anomalies in its EEG graphs, strangeness in its brainwave patterns that might have indicated heretofore unknown cerebral function. So we had to keep it alive to see…to see what we had achieved, to see if maybe we had moved evolution forward a giant step.”

  “Jesus.”

  Though he had first met this woman only thirty-six hours ago, his feelings for her had been rich and intense, ranging from virtual adoration to fear and now to repulsion. Yet from his repulsion came pity, because for the first time he saw in her one of the many cloves of human weakness that, in other forms, were so ripe in himself.

  “Fairly early on,” she said, “I did want out. So I was invited for a private chat with the project director, who made it clear to me that there was no quitting now. This had become a job with lifetime tenure. Even to attempt to leave Project 99 is to commit suicide—and to put the lives of your loved ones at risk as well.”

  “But couldn’t you have gone to the press, broken the story wide open, shut them down?”

  “Probably not without physical evidence, and all I had was what was in my head. Anyway, a couple of my colleagues had the idea that they could bring it all down, I think. One of them suffered a timely stroke. The other was shot three times in the head by a mugger—who was never caught. For a while…I was so depressed I considered killing myself and saving them the trouble. But then…along came CCY-21-21….”

  First, born a year ahead of CCY-21-21 was male subject SSW-89-58. He exhibits prodigious talents in every regard and his story is of importance to you because of your own recent experiences with people who eviscerate themselves and set themselves afire—and because of your losses in Colorado.

  By the time he is forty-two months old, SSW-89-58 possesses the language skills of the average first-year college student and is able to read a three-hundred-page volume in one to three hours, depending on the complexity of the text. Higher math comes to him as easily as eating ice cream, as do foreign languages from French to Japanese. His physical development proceeds at an accelerated rate as well, and by the time he is four, he stands as tall and is as proportionately developed as the average seven-year-old. Paranormal talents are anticipated, but researchers are surprised by 89-58’s great breadth of more ordinary genius—which includes the ability to play any piece of piano music after hearing it once—and by his physical precocity, for which no genetic selection has been made.

  When 89-58 begins to exhibit paranormal abilities, he proves to be phenomenally endowed. His first startling achievement is remote viewing. As a game, he describes to researchers the rooms in their own homes, where he has never visited. He walks them through tours of museums to which he has never been admitted. When he is
shown a photograph of a Wyoming mountain in which is buried a top-secret Strategic Air Command defense center, he describes in accurate detail the missile-status display boards in the war room. He is considered an espionage asset of incalculable value—until, fortunately by degrees, he discovers that he is able to step into a human mind as easily as he steps into distant rooms. He takes mental control of his primary handler, makes the man undress, and sends him through the halls of the orphanage, crowing like a rooster. When SSW-89-58 relinquishes control of the handler and what he’s done is discovered, he is punished severely. He resents the punishment, resents it deeply. That night he conducts a remote viewing of the handler’s home and enters the handler’s mind at a distance of forty-six miles. Using the handler’s body, he brutally murders the man’s wife and daughter, and then he walks the handler through suicide.

  Following this episode, SSW-89-58 is subdued by the use of a massive dose of tranquilizers administered by a dart gun. Two employees of Project 99 perish in the process.

  Thereafter, for a period of eighteen days, he is maintained in a drug-induced coma while a team of scientists designs and oversees the urgent construction of a suitable habitat for their prize—one which will sustain his life but assure that he remains controlled. A faction of the staff suggests immediate termination of SSW-89-58, but this advice is considered and rejected. Every endeavor is at some point troubled by pessimists.

  Here, now, come into the security room in the southeast corner of the first floor of the orphanage. In this place—if you were an employee—you must present yourself for the scrutiny of three guards, because this post is never manned by fewer, regardless of the hour. You must place your right hand on a scanner that will identify you by your fingerprints. You must peer into a retina scanner as well, which will compare your retinal patterns to those recorded in the scan taken when you first accepted employment.

  From here you descend in an elevator past five subterranean levels, where much of the work of Project 99 is conducted. You are interested, however, in the sixth and lowest level, where you walk to the end of a long corridor and through a gray metal door. You stand in a plain room with simple institutional furnishings, with three security men, none of whom is interested in you. These men work six-hour shifts to ensure that they remain alert not only to what is happening in this room and the next but to nuances in one another’s behavior.

  One wall of this room features a large window that looks into the adjoining chamber. Frequently you will see Dr. Louis Blom or Dr. Keith Ramlock—or both—at work beyond this glass, for they are the designers of SSW-89-58 and oversee the exploration and the utilization of his gifts. When neither Dr. Blom nor Dr. Ramlock is present, at least three other members of their immediate staff are in attendance.

  SSW-89-58 is never left unsupervised.

  They were transitioning from Interstate 210 to Interstate 10 when Rose interrupted herself to say, “Joe, could you find an exit with a service station? I need to use a rest room.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just need…a rest room. I hate to waste the time. I want to get to Big Bear as quick as we can. But I don’t want to wet my pants, either. No hurry. Just somewhere in the next few miles, okay?”

  “All right.”

  She conducted him, once more, on her version of a remote viewing of Project 99 outside Manassas.

  Onward, please, through the connecting door and into the final space, where stands the elaborate containment vessel in which 89-58 now lives and, barring any unforeseen and calamitous developments, in which he will spend the rest of his unnatural life. This is a tank that somewhat resembles the iron lungs which, in more primitive decades, were used to sustain victims of polio. Nestled like a pecan in its shell, 89-58 is entirely enclosed, pressed between the mattress-soft halves of a lubricated body mold that restricts all movement, including even the movement of each finger, limiting him to facial expressions and twitches—which no one can see anyway. He is supplied with bottled air directly through a nose clip from tanks outside the containment vessel. Likewise, he is pierced by redundant intravenous-drip lines, one in each arm and one in his left thigh, through which he receives life-sustaining nourishment, a balance of fluids, and a variety of drugs as his handlers see fit to administer them. He is permanently catheterized for the efficient elimination of waste. If any of these IV drips or other lifelines works loose or otherwise fails, an insistent alarm immediately alerts the handlers, and in spite of the existence of redundant systems, repairs are undertaken without delay.

  The researchers and their assistants conduct conversations as necessary with 89-58 through a speakerphone. The clamshell body mold in which he lies inside the steel tank is equipped with audio feed to both of his ears and a microphone over his mouth. The staff is able to reduce 89-58’s words to a background whisper whenever they wish, but he does not enjoy an equivalent privilege to tune them out. A clever video feed allows images to be transmitted by glass fiber to a pair of lenses fitted to 89-58’s sockets; consequently, he can be shown photographs—and if necessary the geographical coordinates—of buildings and places in which he is required to conduct remote viewings. Sometimes he is shown photographs of individuals against whom it is desired that he take one form of action or another.

  During a remote viewing, 89-58 describes in vivid detail what he sees in whatever far place they have sent him, and he dutifully answers questions that his handlers put to him. By monitoring his heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, brainwaves, eyelid movements, and changes in the electrical conductivity of his skin, they are able to detect a lie with better than ninety-nine-percent accuracy. Furthermore, they test him from time to time by remoting him to places on which extensive, reliable intelligence has already been gathered; his answers are subsequently compared to the material currently in file.

  He has been known to be a bad boy. He is not trusted.

  When 89-58 is instructed to enter the mind of a specific person and either eliminate that individual or use him to eliminate another—which is most often a foreign national—the assignment is referred to as a “wet mission.” This term is used partly because blood is spilled but largely because 89-58 is plunged not into the comparative dryness of faraway rooms but into the murky depths of a human mind. As he conducts a wet mission, 89-58 describes it to Dr. Blom or Dr. Ramlock, at least one of whom is always present during the event. After numerous such missions, Blom and Ramlock and their associates are adept at identifying deception even before the polygraph signals trouble.

  For his handlers, video displays of electrical activity in 89-58’s brain clearly define the activity in which he is engaged at every moment. When he is only remote viewing, the patterns are radically different from those that arise when he is engaged in wet work. If he is assigned only to observe some distant place and, while viewing, disobediently occupies the mind of someone in that remote location, either as an act of rebellion or sheerly for sport, this is known at once to his handlers.

  If SSW-89-58 refuses an instruction, exceeds the parameters of an assignment, or exhibits any other signs of rebellion, he can be punished in numerous ways. Electrical contacts in the body mold—and in his catheter—can be activated to deliver painful shocks to selected tender points head to foot or over his entire skin surface. Piercing electronic squeals at excruciating volume may be blasted into his ears. Disgusting odors are easily introduced with his air supply. A variety of drugs are available to precipitate painful and terrifying physiological symptoms—such as violent muscle spasms and inflamed nerve sheaths—which pose no danger to the life of this valuable asset. Inducing claustrophobic panic by cutting off his air supply is also a simple but effective disciplinary technique.

  If he is obedient, 89-58 can be rewarded in one of five ways. Although he receives his primary nutrients—carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, minerals—through IV drips, a feeding tube can be extruded from the body mold and between his lips, to allow him to enjoy tasty liquids, from
Coca-Cola to apple juice to chocolate milk. Second, because he is a piano prodigy and takes great pleasure from music, he can be rewarded with anything from the Beatles to Beethoven. Third, entire movies can be transmitted to the lenses over his eyes—and from such an intimate perspective, he seems to be virtually in the middle of the cinematic experience. Fourth, he can receive mood-elevating drugs that make him as happy, in some ways, as any boy in the world. Fifth, and best of all, he is sometimes allowed to go remote viewing in places that he would like to experience, and during these glorious expeditions, guided by his own interests, he knows freedom—or as much of it as he can imagine.

  Routinely, no fewer than three staff monitor the containment vessel and its occupant, because 89-58 can control only one mind at a time. If any of the three were to turn suddenly violent or exhibit any unusual behavior, either of the other two could, with the flip of a switch, administer sufficient sedatives through the intravenous feeds to drop 89-58 into a virtually instant, deep, and powerless sleep. In the unlikely event that this should fail, a doomsday button follows the sedative with a lethal dose of nerve toxin that kills in three to five seconds.

  The three guards on the other side of the observation window have similar buttons available for use at their discretion.

  SSW-89-58 is not able to read minds. He is not a telepath. He can only repress the personality of the person he inhabits and take control of the physical plant. There is disagreement among the staff of Project 99 as to whether 89-58’s lack of telepathic ability is a disappointment or a blessing.

  Furthermore, when sent on a wet mission, he must know where his target is located before being able to invade its mind. He cannot search at will across the populations of the world but must be guided by his handlers, who first locate his prey. Once shown an image of the building or vehicle in which the target can be found—and when that place is geographically sited in his mind—he can act.

  Thus far, he is also limited to the walls of that structure and cannot effectively pursue a wanted mind beyond the boundaries that are initially established. No one knows why this limitation should exist, though theories abound. Perhaps it is because the invisible psychic self, being only a wave energy of some type, responds to open spaces in much the manner of heat contained in a hot stone placed in a cold room: It radiates outward, dissipating, dispersing itself, and cannot be conserved in a coherent form. He is able to practice remote viewing of outdoor locations—but only for short periods of time. This shortcoming frustrates 89-58’s handlers, but they believe and hope that his abilities in this regard may improve with time.

  If you can bear to watch, the containment vessel is opened twice each week to allow the handlers to clean their asset. He is without fail deeply sedated for this procedure—and remains connected to the doomsday button. He is given a thorough sponge bath, irritations of the skin are treated, the minimal solid waste that he produces is evacuated from the bowel, teeth are cleaned, eyes are examined for infection and then are flushed with antibiotic, and other maintenance is performed. Although 89-58 receives daily low-voltage electrical stimulation of his muscles to ensure a minimal life-sustaining mass, he resembles one of the starving children of any third-world country racked by drought and evil politics. He is as pale as any job on a mortician’s table, withered, with elfin bones grown thin from lack of use; and when unconsciously he curls his feeble fingers around the hands of ministering attendants, his grip is no stronger than that of a cradled newborn baby struggling to hold fast to its mother’s thumb.

  Sometimes, in this profound sedation, he murmurs wordlessly but forlornly, mewls, and even weeps, as if adrift in a soft sad dream.

  At the Shell station, only three vehicles were at the self-service pumps. Tending to their cars, the motorists squinted and ducked their heads to keep wind-blown grit out of their eyes.

  The lighting was as bright as that on a movie set, and though Joe and Rose were not being sought by the type of police agency that would distribute their photographs to local television news programs, Joe preferred to stay out of the glare. He parked along the side of the building, near the rest rooms, where huddled shadows survived.

  Joe was in emotional turmoil, felt slashed across the heart, because now he knew the exact cause of the catastrophic crash, knew the murderer’s identity and the twisted details. The knowledge was like a scalpel that pared off what thin scabs had formed over his pain. His grief felt fresh, the loss more recent than it really was.

  He switched off the engine and sat speechless.

  “I don’t understand how the hell they found out I was on that flight,” Rose said. “I’d taken such precautions…. But I knew when he remote-viewed the passenger cabin, looking for us, because there was an odd dimming of lights, a problem with my wristwatch, a vague sense of a presence—signs I’d learned to read.”

  “I’ve met a National Transportation Safety Board investigator who’s heard the tape from the cockpit voice recorder, before it was destroyed in a convenient sound-lab fire. This boy was inside the captain’s head, Rose. I don’t understand…Why didn’t he take out just you?”

  “He had to get us both, that was his assignment, me and the girl—and while he could’ve nailed me without any problem, it wouldn’t have been easy with her.”

  Utterly baffled, Joe said, “Nina? Why would they have been interested in her then? She was just another passenger, wasn’t she? I thought they were after her later because… well, because she survived with you.”

  Rose would not meet his eyes. “Get me the key to the women’s rest room, Joe. Will you, please? Let me have a minute here. I’ll tell you the rest of it on the way to Big Bear.”

  He went into the sales room and got the key from the cashier. By the time he returned to the Ford, Rose had gotten out. She was leaning against a front fender, back turned and shoulders hunched to the whistling Santa Ana wind. Her left arm was curled against her breast, and her hand was still shaking. With her right hand, she pulled the lapels of her blazer together, as though the warm August wind felt cold to her.

  “Would you unlock the door for me?” she asked.

  He went to the women’s room. By the time he unlocked the door and switched on the light, Rose had arrived at his side.

  “I’ll be quick,” she promised, and slipped past him.

  He had a glimpse of her face in that brightness, just before the door fell shut. She didn’t look good.

  Instead of returning to the car, Joe leaned against the wall of the building, beside the lavatory door, to wait for her.

  According to nurses in asylums and psychiatric wards, a greater number of their most disturbed patients responded to the Santa Ana winds than ever reacted to the sight of a full moon beyond a barred window. It wasn’t simply the baleful sound, like the cries of an unearthly hunter and the unearthly beasts that it pursued; it was also the subliminal alkaline scent of the desert and a queer electrical charge, different from those that other—less dry—winds imparted to the air.

  Joe could understand why Rose might have pulled her blazer shut and huddled into it. This night had both the moon and the Santa Ana wind to spark a voodoo current in the spine—and a parentless boy without a name, who lived in a coffin of steel and moved invisible through a world of potential victims oblivious to him.

  Are we recording?

  The boy had known about the cockpit voice recorder—and he’d left a cry for help on it.

  One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom. One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock. They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.

  Whatever else he was—sociopathic, psychotic, homicidal—he was also a child. A beast, an abomination, a terror, but also a child. He had not asked to be born, and if he was evil, they had made him so by failing to teach him any human values, by treating him as mere ordnance, by rewarding him for murder. Beast he was, but a pitiable beast, lost and alone, wandering in a maze of misery.

  Pitiable but formida
ble. And still out there. Waiting to be told where he could find Rose Tucker. And Nina.

  This is fun.