New Alcatraz (Book 2): Golden Dawn

by Grant Pies

  “What the fuck!” Tannyn shouted with a mouthful of blood. His words were garbled. Ash held Ransom back, and Merit knelt near Tannyn to assess his injuries.

  “You were asking for it, Tannyn,” Merit told him while he held Tannyn’s face in his hands and lightly pressed his thumbs around Tannyn’s nose. Tannyn flinched the closer Merit got to the bone. “I think it’s broken,” Merit said.

  “Oh! You think!” Tannyn snapped, wincing with each facial movement.

  Merit wrapped his fingers around the back of Tannyn’s head and placed his thumbs on each side of his crooked nose. In one movement, he pressed on the nose, snapping the bone back into place. Tannyn screamed and jerked his face away from Merit. He fell back down into the snow and covered his face with his single hand and stump. Ash slowly let go of Ransom. The three of them stood and watched Tannyn moan and flail in the snow.

  “You mention Gray or Aurora one more time, and you better pray we find this place, because you’re gonna need two new hands,” Ransom spat.

  He turned and left the rest of the group behind him. Ash followed, and Merit held out a hand to help Tannyn up. The two of them fell into line behind the others. Tannyn winced and felt his nose. He held his handless arm across his chest, walking slowly behind the rest of the group. He didn’t speak for the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER 22

  2075

  GRAY MOUNTAIN, ARIZONA

  “Immortality?” I laughed. The mention of something so ludicrous made me turn away from the large map on the wall. “You mean living forever. Never dying. Never getting hurt, or sick, or old.” Neither Vesa nor Whitman smirked or laughed. Vesa held my stare as steadily as Whitman did.

  “Well, there are different forms of immortality,” Whitman said. His voice neither loud nor quiet. Neither inflected nor monotone. “Immortality doesn’t mean invincibility. And it doesn’t mean a person will not age. But it is, and always has been, the foremost goal of Wayfield Industries. Everyone wants to live forever.”

  I returned to the table, and dropped my body into the chair. I leaned in towards Whitman, resting my elbows on the table.

  “Whitman, you aren’t on the stand here. I am not questioning you as a witness. You can offer more information than I ask of you. In fact, it would be appreciated, and it sure as shit would speed this up. Whatever this is!” The table rattled as I hit my palms against it. Vesa quickly grabbed her coffee mug before it toppled over. Whitman still didn’t flinch. I don’t think he could have, even if he wanted to. “What do you have to do with immortality? What is inside of you?”

  “At first they tried to grow organs in a lab,” Whitman continued at his own pace. His calm tone was starting to sound condescending. “They figured if they could learn to grow a heart or a liver, then they could also grow a brain. They perfected the growth of organs—ˮ

  “Yeah I think we all know about the organ banks and the cloned kidneys. That’s old news,” I said with the hope of speeding up Whitman’s explanation.

  “But that wasn’t a full solution to immortality. They can’t just keep replacing organs. The body as a whole still aged on a cellular level. So they created the nanobots that I know you are also familiar with.”

  He was referring to the research I’d done on his trial, but he didn’t realize I actually injected myself with what I thought were his own nanobots before I left New Alcatraz.

  “The nanobots were like a computer program, but with organic material. They could order a person’s cells to behave in almost any way they wanted. They hoped they could program these nanobots to halt the aging process. But still the brain was the key. The brain deteriorates. We lose memories or senility sets in. The nanobots couldn’t fix that. The body was still too complex. Even with this new organic programming technology, Wayfield could not ‘order’ the entire body to simply not age.” He finally smiled, like the suggestion that the body could be ordered to not age was absurd, while everything else he said was normal.

  “Okay, so they couldn’t be immortal,” I said. “They failed. How do you fit into this? What is so special about the DNA inside of you?”

  “All of these technologies that are now public knowledge were all attempts at immortality. Failed attempts. They failed at pure immortality, so they turned to the next best thing…in their opinion. They distilled a human down to its essence, the ‘soul’ if you believe in that sort of thing. They took cells from the heart, brain, and eyeballs.”

  My heart raced inside my chest at the mention of these organs, but I tried to stay calm and hide any reaction. These were the same organs that could reveal the missing time left in a time traveler’s body. Their ‘dark time.’ They were the same organs I had to remove from my mother’s body to conceal that she stayed in Buford long enough to give birth to me; to hide the fact that my father and I escaped from New Alcatraz.

  “They pulled out this essential organic material, separated it from the physical body, and stored it somewhere safe. Wayfield Industries and the Ministry of Science will store this soul until they find a way to place it in a new physical body. Using whatever technology they invent, they will grow the soul inside the new host body. It will take over. Once perfected, they could do this over and over again making the original donor essentially immortal. Their ‘soul’ would be continually transported into a new physical body. They called this process ‘palingenesis.’”

  The man I saw outside the motel with the gun strapped around his waist entered the room. He stood in the doorway and leaned against the wall. His hand-rolled cigarette still hung in the corner of his mouth.

  “We need to get going. The chip has been installed,” he said. His voice was calm. He was in no rush. Whitman turned and held his index finger in the air.

  He stood and motioned for me to follow him. Vesa stood and poured the final drops of her coffee down her throat, and slammed the mug down onto the table. I looked at her, and she also motioned for me to get up. The man in the doorway turned and walked away ahead of the three of us.

  “I’ll get the car started,” he said. The four of us walked out of the room.

  “Once Wayfield created androids,” he said, “they realized that we could be vessels to carry this genetic material. We could be storage devices, temporary solutions, until something more permanent came along. This technology had no market. Wayfield never sought to make money from this, at least not by selling the technology. It was reserved only for them. The most powerful executives, and the people in the highest positions in the Ministry of Science, all extracted part of their ‘soul.’ They took cells from their heart, brain, and eyes, and parked it in decommissioned androids. They were all like airplanes in a holding pattern waiting for approval to land, waiting for technology to find a way to inject them into a living host. They would be reborn with a new face, a new body, but the same mind. The same memories.”

  We walked into a garage in the back of the motel. Barrels were piled in the corner. Tools lined the walls, and a hydraulic lift that appeared inoperable sat in the middle of the floor. Oil stains and saw dust covered the ground. The gunslinger with the cigarette sat in a boxy sports utility vehicle, with a rack attached to the roof. Guns lay across the roof, and bedding materials sat on top of the guns. A large cylinder that I assumed was filled with water was strapped to the back of the vehicle. The tires were large and looked more durable than typical tires. Whatever parts of the vehicle were actually visible were dented and scratched. Whitman climbed into the back of the car behind the passenger seat, and Vesa sat behind the driver. With no other place to sit, I climbed into the passenger seat.

  The man in the driver seat reached a hand out toward me, and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were still, and a relaxed intensity rested behind his pupils. “Doc,” he said. “So you’re Powell?” I shook his hand. His palms were rough, and his handshake firm. I nodded my head. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “So, in a sense I was truthful during my trial,” Whitman continued once we were all situated in the ca
r. “I wanted to experiment on myself to discover whose DNA I had inside of me. Whose soul they put in me. I wanted to see if someone had parked their DNA inside of me in hopes of a new brain in the future. That part was true. But I lied, Powell. I wanted to discover whose DNA was inside of me because it may have helped us replicate and improve upon what Wayfield started, not because I needed to learn about myself. My experiments were not failures like I testified at trial. I was successful. I pieced the DNA back together. I tested it, and ran it through the national database. I am sorry, but I had to lie to you, and to the jury. If I told the truth, it may have compromised our group. It could have jeopardized what we were working on.”

  The car jerked forward and pulled out of the garage into the expansive desert. The windows were down, and the cool night air rushed into the car and twisted around me. The car bounced as we drove on the open sands of the desert, even further out from civilization than we already were. The longer we drove, the more my present time started to look like New Alcatraz, like we were in our own time machine, and we were watching the millennia pass by. I turned and stared out the open window, and images of my time spent in the future sparked in my mind. In the distance, I could almost see Red, Hamilton, myself, and my father trekking through the sand.

  “So what did you learn from the DNA inside of you?” I asked, breaking a silence that had lasted for a long time. “Whose DNA was it?” I glanced back at Whitman. The car bounced and rattled.

  “James Wayfield’s,” he answered.

  CHAPTER 23

  2075

  80 KILOMETERS NORTHEAST OF

  GRAY MOUNTAIN, ARIZONA

  “The James Wayfield?” I asked and laughed at the absurdity. Whitman grinned. “The ‘died in 2020’ James Wayfield?” I asked again. The wind whipped inside the vehicle, and my hair slapped against my face. Whitman nodded.

  “Dead is a relative term. You know there are jellyfish in the Mediterranean Sea that essentially live forever. Their cells change and transform, but the organism as a whole lives forever. Whenever it needs to regenerate certain cells, it sits at the bottom of the ocean in a blob, and goes into a sleep state of sorts. Once the body has fixed itself, it awakens, turning back into a jellyfish. Inside it is like a new organism, but outwardly it is the same. It never died.”

  The car sped forward deep into the desert. Tall, rounded rock formations jutted out from the ground in clusters. The bottoms of the structures were bright white, but mid-way up they became a dark brown color. The tallest structures had a third layer of white at the very top of them. The changing color of the exposed rock layers showed the progression of earth’s creation.

  “James Wayfield, or anyone else who has undergone the process of palingenesis, is like that jellyfish on the bottom of the ocean floor. Waiting for technology to catch up to their dreams and save them. Resurrect them.”

  The car zigzagged through the smoothed rocks and the tires kicked up bits of sand that streamed through the window. The stars dotting the hazy evening sky blinked and sparkled, like hundreds of eyes watching us, waiting to see what we would do next. The star dust in space, light-years away, waited to form and create new gas clouds, meteors, planets, people. Maybe out there, one of them was made of the same materials that would inevitably circle back around in the universe, and become part of me.

  “Call it a fluke or an accident. Somehow Mr. Wayfield’s DNA was stored inside me. The typical android simply has a generic composite strain of DNA in them to complement the nanobots. It isn’t from one single person, and definitely no one important. Once we realized my DNA was not only from just one person, but James Wayfield, we knew the Ministry of Science and Wayfield were working on something big. Bigger than New Alcatraz. Bigger than time movement.”

  The car stopped and skidded on the sand in front of more tall rock formations with different, distinct layers of color. Doc climbed out of the car, and I followed. Vesa reached in the back and pulled out a messenger bag, struggling slightly to lift it. My feet sunk into the loose sand. Doc walked ahead of the three of us, his hand still resting on the gun strapped around his waist. He walked slowly and methodically, placing one foot firmly in front of the other, like he was constantly tracking a wild animal, or sneaking away from an attacker. We approached the large rocks in front of us, and weaved through narrow canyons. I glanced back, quickly losing sight of our vehicle. All I could see behind me was the twisting pathway carved through the rock.

  “Okay, so Wayfield and the Ministry of Science found a way to pull out the ‘souls’ of the rich and powerful, inserted them into androids, and waited for other scientists to continue their work and create new brains to inject them in, thus becoming ‘immortal’,” I said.

  “In theory,” Whitman answered. He spoke quieter.

  The moonlight reached down into the canyon, shinning on the walls, which looked painted. Shades of orange and blue stretched through the striated rocks in a curved pattern. It looked as if the walls moved with us as we walked through the canyon.

  “My guess is they are very close to discovering how to grow their own genetic material inside of an android body. Not just store it. But the beauty of the Ministry of Science is that it has driven many of the smartest minds away. True intelligence can’t operate under orders or threat of imprisonment. Only the weak-minded work for the Ministry. The others find us...or we find them. Not only that, but our scientists, or their families, have usually been hurt by the North American government in some way. So they are motivated even more to work against the Ministry and Wayfield. They want to beat them to whatever technology Wayfield is racing towards.” Whitman looked over at me as we both struggled to lift our feet from the desert sand. “So with James Wayfield’s DNA, we had a leg up. We had a part of their biggest technological advancement of the century. We knew what their goal was. We could reverse engineer what Wayfield had developed, and then build upon it.”

  “Build upon it how?” I asked.

  Whitman nodded towards Vesa and the bag she carried. “In many ways. For instance, a group of us in Ashton worked on a way to erase the ‘dark time’ present in time travelers’ bodies,” Whitman said.

  “Yeah, but that didn’t work. They were attacked. Stopped before they accomplished anything.” I didn’t realize I had said it until it was out of my mouth. Whitman looked at me. He managed to contort his face to show he was confused. “Um...the maps in the motel. It noted that Ashton was ambushed.”

  Whitman looked in my eyes. I couldn’t tell if he believed me.

  “You’re right,” he said. “They weren’t successful. But we took what they did accomplish and combined it with what we found in my DNA. We were eventually able to program the cells in my body to erase any ‘dark time.’ That will allow many in our group to move through time undetected. Think of the possibilities. Think of how we could go back and stop the Ministry from getting so powerful, or from ever existing at all. They are working on rebuilding the time movement device we lost in Ashton as we speak.”

  My eyes widened at the mention of a cure. Unfortunately, Whitman’s solution wasn’t available to me five years ago.

  “So the DNA in your body right now is programmed to erase dark time?” I asked. I assumed Whitman was smart enough to know that my escape from New Alcatraz made me greatly interested in a cure for dark time. But he didn’t know that it was much more than a way for me to hide from the authorities. It could have been a way for my mom to stay with me after I was born. It would have been a way for us to stay a family.

  “Yes, the DNA in my body does many things. We have made great strides since discovering James Wayfield’s DNA. But mainly we have improved upon the Ministry’s research with this device,” Whitman said. “The Ministry of Science didn’t think big enough. Or maybe they did, but they couldn’t implement their ideas. They were stuck mixing DNA with nanobots, and programming cells to not age. Storing it in some vessel and waiting for other great minds to invent a way to regenerate the stored cells. It sounds advanced
. The technology is new, but the idea is old. It is as old as Project Blue Brain and cryogenics.”

  “So you guys found something new?” I said. The wind whipped through the desert in gusts. I held my hand in front of my face to block the grains of sand from my eyes. Whitman never even flinched.

  “We did. With Wayfield’s DNA and the nanobots, we were able to create a device that can extract and exchange one mind with another instantly. No long needles plunged into your heart or eyes. No waiting time. No injecting your cells into an android. It simply places one mind into another body. Well…at least in theory.”

  “In theory…meaning it doesn’t really work then?” Up until that point, Whitman had me excited and intrigued.

  “That is why we are here, Powell. To test out our device. The machine initially requires a lot of power to charge it, but once it is charged, it should hold the charge for quite some time. This is the only place with enough power that isn’t a government facility. After tonight we should know if this machine works.”

  “And if it does?” I asked. “Don’t get me wrong, the theory would be nothing short of groundbreaking, but what is the end goal? Immortality?”

  “Not immortality. The goal is the same as it’s always been: to stop the Ministry of Science. To infiltrate key departments within the North American government, and dismantle it from the inside out. It would still take years, but this device would let us jump into the body of any government official we could get close to. Swap minds with them. Hijack their position of power.”