The Body Scout: A Novel

by Lincoln Michel

  When I looked up, there were two of them. Both thick and knobby, like they’d each been whittled out of one gigantic bone. Neanderthals. They were as big and ugly as Coppelius, although their features were more fully formed. Their large eyes glared at me from the shadows of their bulbous brows. They wore gray coveralls. One was a couple inches shorter than the other and his face was red and twisted up like he was about to weep.

  “Is this him? This is the guy?” the shorter Neanderthal said.

  “Calm down, Gerd,” the taller one said. His voice was smooth and deep. He patted his large hand on the man’s shoulders.

  “You two look familiar,” I said. “Like someone I left bleeding out on my carpet.”

  Gerd glared at me and his lips crinkled back. His fists hung at his side, large as melons. “Bastard,” he spat.

  Natasha walked over and put her hand on the man’s other shoulder. Smiled at me. “Yes, Gerd and Hubertus here might look familiar. They are brothers to the late Coppelius. Twins I suppose, depending on your point of view. The scientists who made us only had so much DNA to work with.”

  “Seems they came out better than their brother. Guess they were left in the oven a bit longer.”

  Gerd started to lunge, and Hubertus held him back, speaking in a silky whisper. “He’s not important. Calm down. Coppelius would want us to keep our heads.”

  “Where have you been hiding these two?” I said.

  “Oh, they’ve been here. They subbed in for Coppelius sometimes. We just let the Mouth think there was only one of them around. He’s not the most observant man, you might have noticed.” Natasha smiled. “Now let’s talk about you. No luck with Mr. Julio Julio Zunz?”

  Lila shook in her constraints. Made a sound that didn’t sound like words.

  I turned back to Natasha. Wiped my bloody lips on my stumped shoulder. “Shouldn’t you be at the game?”

  “I told you I didn’t care for baseball. The research side has always been more interesting to me. After all, I am a clone myself. The DNA scrapings of an old fossil injected into a sapien embryo. A miracle maybe. Only one in a hundred of us survive in your kind’s hostile wombs.”

  “They should have left you in a bone in the dirt.”

  “You talk too much. You should listen more,” Hubertus said. He let go of his brother, who stepped forward and gave me a few more blows, slapping with an open hand as stiff as a plank of wood.

  I spat out a tooth. Blood clogged my bionic eye. I looked up again and the short Neanderthal was crying. “Fucking bastard,” he said, his voice wobbling.

  “Okay, that’s enough. All of you be quiet,” Natasha said. She turned. “Setek, how did the first trial go?”

  Setek walked over to the counter and squatted. His metal femurs folded right into the fibulas. He was about my height now and peering into a large white machine. “Let’s see. With the sample NSCs and ependymal cells extracted from the donor’s central canal mixed with the serum and introduced into the sample.” He twisted a few knobs, flipped a switch. The machine buzzed. Setek gasped. Laughed.

  “Well, well, well! It’s melding beautifully. Let’s introduce it to the model.” He filled a syringe and walked over to the Zunz head in the tank. A small tube was already in place at the nape. He slid the needle inside and plunged.

  He returned to the white machine. A minute or two passed. Then he laughed again. “Brilliant. Brilliant.”

  Arocha typed in something and nodded, looking at the data streaming on her screen. “We have to monitor for longer, but the early analysis is promising.”

  “It’s working. I’d stake my life on it. Here.” Setek loaded another small syringe with the green serum and placed it inside a courier drone shaped like a pigeon. “Better get this to the dugout before we have another on-air accident.”

  He handed the drone to the smaller, gently weeping Neanderthal, who carried it out of the room.

  In a corner, I saw a small screen playing the game on mute. Zunz was on deck, taking practice swings.

  So now they had it. His genes and hers to fix them. The code to copy and paste into other codes to make endless clones. They’d used a brown kid from the burrows to experiment with like a lab rat. Now that it worked, they’d sell it to elites in the cloud condos and watch the stock soar. A recipe as American as apple pie.

  “Let Lila go,” I said. “You got what you wanted. You’ve got your fix.”

  “Not quite. Not quite at all. Sorry.” Setek picked up a saw from the table. Powered it up with a high-pitched squeal. “We only extracted a sample, but we need more. We must repeat the tests. Science requires redundancy. She won’t be permanently harmed. You have my word.”

  He walked over to Lila and rapped his knuckles along her spine.

  “We have a few prime spots to extract more NSCs. Perhaps the hippocampus next?”

  Lila was lying still. Her body exhausted from struggling. I didn’t see any tears.

  “I called the cops,” I said, straining against the cuffs. “They’re coming. This whole illegal operation is going to be blown wide open.”

  “You know better than to trust the police to save you,” Natasha said. “This isn’t a rogue operation in your mother’s basement. Monsanto has funding and agreements with the Remaining States government itself. Didn’t you see who was throwing the first pitch today?”

  Setek bent over Lila’s head. With his long metal legs, he looked like a crane deciding which fish in the pond to skewer. His saw squealed.

  Arocha looked back at me with a face I couldn’t parse. Either anger or regret. She held up a finger to her lips.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Kobo, don’t be so worried.” Setek turned off the saw. He picked up a syringe and showed it to me. “See? Anesthesia. We’re not mad scientists here.”

  My eyes darted around the room, desperate for something to save me. My gun had slid beneath a centrifuge on the far wall. Gerd had walked back into the room and was standing with Hubertus somewhere behind me. I wondered if I had the strength to pick up the chair with my handcuffed hand and knock the Neanderthals out. Or at least break their jaws and distract them for long enough to make a desperate dive for the gun. I needed to do something. Anything.

  Setek turned the saw back on. It screamed like a hungry eagle.

  Lila had recovered some strength. She began to shake again.

  “Doctor,” Arocha said, tapping his shoulder. “The other test head. You left it in the incubation room.”

  “So go get it.”

  “I don’t have the code.”

  Setek cursed. Pulled down his mask. “It’s always something.”

  I noticed Arocha type something quickly on her screen. She held up a hand to me, urging me to wait.

  Setek strode to the door. Opened it. Stepped backward.

  Dolores was standing in the doorway, holding what looked like a fishbowl filled with sludge.

  “And you are?” he said, annoyed.

  Dolores looked at me. “Hi, Kobo.”

  Then she hurled the contents of the jar into Setek’s face.

  50

  THE BIG PICTURE

  At first, Setek seemed confused. He stood upright, hair skimming the ceiling. Shook his head. The brown substance was made up of a thousand tiny creatures. They squirmed around his face. He dropped his implement and started slapping at his cheeks with his hands. Dozens of tiny tadpoles fell onto the floor. Others managed to wriggle into his nostrils and lips.

  Then Setek began to gag. Attempted a scream that morphed into a choke.

  Dolores dropped the jar, the remaining contents squirming out onto the floor, and pulled out her gun. Dolores waved it between Natasha and the two brothers, and stepped back as the tadpole creatures slithered toward her feet.

  Arocha pressed herself into the wall, away from the creatures.

  “How interesting,” Natasha said, stepping in front of the brothers to get a better view. “See? You never know what can happen. Life is such a stran
ge journey.”

  The doctor’s face was a painful red. The red of a tomato so ripe it was about to split open. He gasped. Clawed at his throat and cheeks. His thin robotic legs tangled as he crashed over, knocking into the equipment table before sprawling across the floor.

  He wasn’t screaming anymore. He twitched on the tiles. He was on his side, facing me, and I could see the whites of his eyes had become buttery. His veins were black as oil.

  “So,” Dolores said. She stepped forward into the room, dodging the tadpoles. “I got your message.”

  I spat out a little blood. “And you stayed?”

  Dolores cocked her head. “I didn’t have much of a choice. Setek and the Neanderthals arrived when that data was still downloading. Arocha gave me those, said to wait for a signal.” Dolores turned to Natasha. “Unlock him now. If you don’t mind.”

  Natasha didn’t move. A smirk appeared between her knobby cheeks. She breathed in and thumped her chest. “Ah!” she said. “You never know what will happen in life. The twists and the turns. It makes me feel alive.”

  Setek’s metal legs rapped arrhythmically on the floor a few more times. Finally, he was still.

  “Unlock Kobo. Then untie Lila. Unless you want to join the good doctor here.”

  Natasha stood, running a hand across her flat skull. She stepped forward. “Do you know how few Neanderthals there are? The three of us are the only ones alive in the Remaining States. Most of our Russian brethren have been slaughtered. There’s a colony in the mountains of Turkey, one in Romania. But that’s it. Killing us would be slaughtering an endangered species. And for what?”

  The Neanderthal brothers behind me were quiet. Natasha was walking with slow-motion steps, but not toward Dolores. Toward Arocha, who had pulled a syringe out of one of her pockets and held it up defensively. Natasha had her large hands up and open.

  “I’ll go further. Killing me will mean the end of the Neanderthal species. The end. The materials in this laboratory. The neural serum. The bioprinters and growth tanks. We need them.” She gestured over my head at the brothers. “You think we care about baseball players? We have been praying for this for our people. Without it, we will die out a second time. Have you sapiens still not cured your extinction lust? How many species have you killed with your guns and pollution? Millions and millions. You’ve killed so many you have to invent new ones in laboratories to replace them.”

  Dolores looked annoyed but held the gun steady. The apertures of her goggles clicked and spun. “I’ve got nothing against Neanderthals. I’m just looking to take the girl, the man, and the scientist and get out of here. You won’t see us again.”

  There was a faint muffled sound in the distance. Cheers from the stadium. One team or the other scoring a run.

  “You’d probably like me to disable Dr. Arocha’s security collar, then?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Dolores looked at Gerd and Hubertus. “You two just stay there.”

  Natasha reached her thick fingers toward Arocha’s throat. She could have snapped Arocha’s neck as easily as a twig, but instead she hit a sequence on the back of her security collar. It unlocked, split open.

  Arocha pulled it off and flung it clattering into the sink. She stretched her neck. Took a few steps to stand beside Dolores.

  “Next unstrap the girl.”

  Natasha wasn’t looking at Dolores though. She was looking at Arocha. “See? We Neanderthals keep our word.”

  “Okay,” Arocha said. “A deal is a deal.”

  Arocha swung the needle into Dolores’s side, right below the rib cage. “Sorry,” she whispered as she plunged.

  Dolores looked at her, unbelieving. “What?” she said, then, her body shutting down part by part, she collapsed onto the floor.

  Both Lila and I began struggling. Hubertus held me down, fingers digging into my muscles. “Don’t go anywhere yet.”

  “Breathe, Kobo,” Natasha said. “Deep, long breaths. Your kind’s lungs are so small.”

  “It’s only a knockout shot. She’ll be fine in a couple hours,” Arocha said.

  “Dolores was going to rescue you!”

  Arocha pulled down her surgical mask. “Rescue me? She was going to put me to work for another biopharm. Same bullshit, different stadium.”

  Natasha strolled up beside her. “We offered Dr. Julia Arocha here something better. Freedom and a purpose.”

  “You trust the person who kidnapped you?”

  Arocha laughed and looked down at Dolores. “Wasn’t she about to do the same thing for the Sphinxes? Weren’t you trying to do it for the Yankees? Natasha offered me a way to get out. Out of this rat race. Out of the bullshit.”

  Gerd stomped over to Arocha, asking which equipment they needed. Arocha pointed at a half-dozen machines in the room while Hubertus scanned the computers. As they carried out the lab equipment piece by piece, Natasha pulled up a chair and sat between me and Lila.

  “I don’t care about the Mouth or his plans. The Mouth wants to sell bodies as luxury products. Who knows what President Newman wants? To send an endless supply of sapiens to murder other sapiens in his endless wars. They are both small Homo sapiens with small, scared minds.”

  “Well you’ve got a big head,” I said. “What’s your big idea?”

  Natasha furrowed her brow as best she could. Shook her head. “No. Big ideas are what you obsess over. New technologies. New planets to visit and terraform. Larger buildings, more expensive machines, more and bigger and newer products to sell. But what changes? A different brand name is printed on the label. The same people stay in power. Everyone else struggles as much as they did twenty or a hundred or a thousand years before. I’m going to create something new. A new species with a new society.”

  “Too impatient to do it the old-fashioned way? You’ve waited this many millennia already.”

  Even with her uncanny Neanderthal features, I could sense her anger. “Even if our ability to propagate hadn’t been sliced out of us, how could we trust your kind not to murder us again? No. We need to build quickly. We need to defend ourselves. We need bodies. Lots of bodies.”

  “How does a bunch of brain-dead hunks of meat make a society?”

  Natasha tapped the side of my head. “You all feel the need to control the clones. Because of your notions of autonomy and individuality. Your superstitions. We don’t have the same pretensions. We won’t install any neural suppressors in our clones. We’ll let the staining stay. We’ll let them grow into their own people. Even if you duplicate a consciousness, it will become its own individual a millisecond later. If you let it. Together we’ll form a new civilization. A Neanderthal one.”

  “New? I thought you all had been around a long time ago.”

  “You sapiens think far too literally. You cloned me, and my brothers here, but you didn’t clone our identity. We are starting Neanderthals from scratch. Imagine if you cloned a saber-toothed tiger, but there was no mother to show it how to hunt, how to play, how to purr. What would it be? The flesh of a saber-toothed tiger. The teeth and the claws and the fur. But not the species. Not the generations of living, learning, and dying passed down from one tiger to another. This lone tiger would have to invent her tigerness.” Natasha put her hands on her knees, pushed herself up. “As we will invent ourselves.”

  While we talked, Gerd and Hubertus carried equipment out of the room. Then they went downstairs and returned, hugging incubation tanks and grunting as they maneuvered through the door. Racks of vials, cases of samples, portable freezers, centrifuges, gene splicers, cell splitters, and more. They carried each out to the waiting black van. As they did, Arocha began wiping the video files and computers.

  “I do want to thank you, Kobo. You led us to Lila. And without the distractions you provided it would have been harder to escape. Even if I had to instruct both Arocha and Coppelius to nudge you in the right direction when you were getting lost. Here.” She pulled a bytewallet out of the pocket of her dress. Tossed it between my feet. “Consider
it a final payment.”

  I heard the roar of an engine outside. Arocha came and whispered in her ear. She didn’t look my way. Natasha nodded and stood up.

  “You’re not afraid of Monsanto coming after you?” I said.

  “You’ve left enough evidence to incriminate yourself several times over. Your face and Dolores’s are all over our surveillance footage. Coppelius’s corpse is at your apartment. I left extra evidence just in case. The Mouth will think it was you and Pyramid Pharmaceuticals who robbed this lab. For a while at least.”

  She went around behind me and pressed a few buttons on the electronic cuffs.

  Dolores was still on the floor, unmoving. Lila was watching silently. Behind them, the screen showed a white spinning ball flying into the stands. A home run.

  “These will unlock in thirty minutes. I’ve disabled the alarms and surveillance in this area. You should have time to leave.”

  “You’re framing me then letting me get away?”

  “It’s better for both of us if they’re chasing you. So that by the time the Mouth figures out what truly happened, we’ll be long gone.” She ruffled my unkempt hair. “I hope you get away too. I’m rooting for you. You seem like one of the good ones.”

  Natasha walked to the door. She looked thick and young, like the trunk of a tree getting ready for spring. She stretched her limbs, looked around the lab to see if she’d missed anything. Then she strolled out into her future and closed the door.

  51

  THE END GAME

  After I freed Lila, she helped me get Dolores away from any remaining tadpoles. The squirming zootech creatures were already starting to dissolve into little brown puddles. Their life spans brutal and short. Lila squatted to watch them melt. She seemed more interested than disgusted.

  I bundled up a lab coat, put it under Dolores’s sleeping head. Her goggles had been knocked off in the fall. I scooped them up. I watched Dolores sleeping calmly. When I reattached the goggles, they booted back up, clicking and whirring.