The Bar Code Rebellion

by Suzanne Weyn

  Propeace12 Release

  Vagus Nerve Stimulator Release

  Vagus Nerve Stimulator Intensified Release

  BC12 Virus Release

  Program Activation Dates

  “My mother was addicted to Propeace just before she died,” Kayla recalled. Mrs. Reed had taken the powerful tranquilizer with increasing frequency after Kayla’s father died, and many days she’d seemed like a zombie wandering around in a trance.

  “What’s a vagus nerve stimulator?” Jack asked.

  “I did some research when I saw this link and discovered that back in 1997 a company came out with a device to help patients who had epilepsy. It was surgically implanted in the upper chest, and its wires were threaded through the patient’s neck to send timed electrical pulses to stimulate the vagus nerve leading to the brain. In 2006 it was approved for treating patients with severe depression.”

  “Did it work?” Kayla asked.

  “Yes and no. Some people liked it and claimed they felt better. Other patients felt no difference and complained that it put a quiver or a rumble in their voices. It was discontinued in 2022 after gene therapy cured epilepsy and they came out with the new genetic antidepressant drugs.”

  “Let’s get into the link and see what our pals at Global-1 are up to,” Jack suggested.

  “Can’t,” Allyson told him. “My handheld won’t open these links. They have yet another level of eye scan security on them.”

  “Can the superinfometric computers handle it?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Allyson replied. “I don’t know if they can break through an eye scan. Even if we could get them to open the files, it would be tricky to do it without everyone else in the laboratory seeing.”

  “What happens there at night?” he asked.

  “I have a key, but it would be suspicious if I used it in the middle of the night. Security would inform Dr. Gold, and I’d have to explain.”

  They walked together down to the Caltech campus. Along the way, Jack told Allyson about the secret algorithms he was trying to uncover. She agreed that Helen of Troy might be able to locate the codes, but they had to tell it where to look first. The supercomputer was accessing such a high volume of information that even if it did feed the algorithm codes to them they might not be able to sift through the mass of data in time to realize they’d received the codes. “We have to narrow and isolate its search,” Allyson said.

  They reached the building where Allyson did her research in Dr. Gold’s facility. She walked in alone and spoke to the guard at the front desk, claiming to have left an important book upstairs. He said he would like to let her in and would even go with her, but he was alone for the rest of the week since the other guard, his partner, was out sick. His being alone meant he couldn’t leave the front desk.

  Out of luck, Kayla, Jack, and Allyson went back to the apartment without much conversation, each seeming wrapped in a private concern. Kayla guessed Jack was working on getting them into that building the following night. Maybe Allyson was going over the information she had, trying to make sense of it. She might even be thinking about the question Jack had posed to her — how to find the secret bar code algorithms.

  Kayla knew what was absorbing her mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about the G-1 project Allyson had stumbled upon titled: Production of Identical Sextuplet Humans During the First Cell Cycle of Nuclear DNA Transfer.

  Kathryn Marie Reed had had a child called KM-1-6.

  Sextuplets?

  It was nearly two in the morning when Allyson used the remote to shut the wide-screen TV that hung flat against the wall. “That is too banged out,” she said as the screen went black. The public service announcement that featured the Kayla look-alike, the one claiming to be Kayla, had just been on. “It’s obviously a digital fake.”

  “Maybe,” Kayla allowed. “That’s what Mfumbe thought, too.”

  In an overstuffed chair in a corner, Jack mumbled in his sleep and flung his hand over the arm of the chair.

  “Why do you say maybe?” Allyson asked as she rummaged in her freezer until she produced a quart of chocolate ice cream and then stuck two spoons into it. She brought it back to the futon couch and offered Kayla one of the spoons. Kayla gratefully accepted it.

  She told Allyson about meeting Kara and Kendra, and of her vision of the palm reader with hands so much like her own.

  “Have you opened the link about the sextuplets?” she asked Allyson.

  Allyson immediately realized what Kayla was thinking and sat there a moment, spoon still in her mouth, pondering it. “Let’s look now,” she said, going for her handheld computer on a nearby table.

  With Kayla watching over her shoulder, she activated the link. Quickly, they began reading. Kayla didn’t understand much of what she saw. It talked about how DNA was the molecular basis of genes and how DNA fragments containing genes could be copied in a host cell, usually a bacterium. The genetic makeup of the resulting cloned cells was called a cell line and was identical to the original cell. Then it went on to talk about somatic cells and germ cells. She read phrases such as: Mammalian differences are achieved by systematic changes in gene expression brought about by interactions between the nucleus and the changing cytoplasmic environment, which eluded her completely.

  After a few minutes more of reading text that was mostly incomprehensible to her, Kayla stopped, bewildered. Allyson read on before she finally lifted her head and stared at Kayla. “You know what this all comes down to, don’t you?” she asked.

  Kayla shook her head. “I’m not exactly sure,” she admitted.

  “Cloning.”

  Kayla stared back at her as the meaning of this sank in. “But there’s no reason to think this has anything to do with me, right?”

  “I read ahead and I found something interesting,” Allyson said. “Was anyone in your family named Kathryn Marie Reed?”

  Kayla’s eyes darted to the bottom of the screen. As with the nanobiotechnology section, there were additional links marked HIGHLY CLASSIFIED. They named different experiments and gave the names of the people involved in them. She scanned them rapid-fire until she came to the line that stopped her cold:

  Genetic Enhancement/Manipulation Program: Donor Kathryn Marie Reed

  Ocean waves crashed into the nearby shore. A full moon illuminated the scene in wavering silver light. Kayla was walking along the beach when she saw a dark, moving line approaching.

  A line of people was walking toward the water. Their hair was on fire. But they didn’t seem to care. They stared straight ahead, progressing steadily toward the waves.

  Mfumbe was in the line, the top of his head ablaze, his eyes fixed blankly ahead. Kayla ran to him but he didn’t recognize her. “It’s me,” she cried, shaking his arm as if to wake him from his trance. “Don’t you know me?”

  He turned and she saw that Kara and Kendra were behind him in the line. Farther back, a third figure and fourth figure had her form and hair, but their faces were a blur.

  The line passed her by as they walked into the ocean, quickly disappearing between the silvered waves. Mfumbe was up to his shoulders, about to disappear below the water, too. Crashing through the surf, she grabbed his arm. “Stop!” she shouted.

  For a moment he seemed to recognize her. “Kayl-l-l-a?” The line of drowning figures echoed his words. “Kayl-l-l-a!” The drawn out, repeated l spread across the moving ocean until it was amplified into a wild, wind-borne ululation.

  The line continued on into the sea. Mfumbe was in water up to his chin now. She had to swim to reach him. “Stop!” she screamed as she splashed through the churning water. “Stop! All of you, stop!”

  “Kayla, wake up! Wake up!” Her eyes snapped open and she gazed up at Jack sitting beside her on the futon couch, his face silver with the moonlight coming in through the window. “You were dreaming and yelling ‘stop’ in your sleep.”

  With a shudder, she sat up and remembered the dream. It had been so frightening. Tears sp
rang to her eyes.

  He put his arm around her, pulling her closer. She rested her head on his chest.

  It felt so safe to have his arms around her, so good. But she was glad Allyson was asleep on the pullout sofa just yards away, preventing anything further from happening … for now.

  “How far is Los Angeles from here?” Kayla asked Allyson in the morning.

  “Just twelve miles,” Allyson replied from the kitchen, where she was buttering toast for their breakfast. “Why?”

  “My grandmother died in a psychiatric institution there. I thought I’d go search around and see what I can find out about her.”

  “It’s a big city,” Allyson cautioned.

  Jack picked up Allyson’s handheld computer. “Maybe I can save some legwork by running a few preliminary searches,” he said, stretching out on the futon and beginning to input information.

  Kayla joined Allyson at the table. “I was hoping you and Jack could come to the facility with me today,” Allyson said. “Together we might be able to figure out a way to get the infometric computers to open those subfiles. We could search for the secret bar code algorithms, too.”

  “Final level!” Jack burst out triumphantly, swinging around and off the futon. “I found your grandmother! What a hacker genius I am!”

  “If you say so yourself,” Allyson teased.

  “I do say it,” he said, unabashedly proud. His search had connected the name Kathryn Reed to a private psychiatric facility in Los Angeles. It had once been called St. Francis Clinic but was then taken over by Global-1 and renamed the GlobalHelix Mental Health Center.

  By cracking their security code, he’d entered a subfile that gave him an index of former patients in which he found Kathryn Reed’s name. “It looks as though she was in and out of there a number of times between 2007 and 2015,” he reported, reading the information on the screen.

  “What does it say about her mental illness?”

  Jack looked up from the computer with a puzzled expression. “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean?” Kayla asked.

  “It says she was admitted to the center for treatment of schizophrenia, but everything in this file has to do with her DNA.” He continued to read rapidly, his eyes darting across the screen. “It says she donated genetic material for ‘cellular experimentation.’”

  Allyson joined Jack on the futon and read the screen with him, her expression becoming increasingly troubled.

  “Tell me,” Kayla pressed anxiously.

  “I don’t think your grandmother really was schizophrenic,” Allyson said. “To me, it looks like that was just a cover story to conceal the real reason she was there.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Kayla, I don’t know how to say this,” Allyson said. “So I’ll just come out with it. It looks like you’re a clone of your grandmother. She was selling her genetic material to Global-1 for a cloning project.”

  “Which means she’s not actually your grandmother,” Jack added gently. “Your great-grandmother would be your mother. Kathryn Marie Reed is your … twin, I suppose.”

  Allyson nodded. “Twins — or triplets or quadruplets or quintuplets — are the closest thing in nature to clones.”

  “But clones have no father?” Kayla asked, barely speaking through her shock.

  “Genetically speaking, your great-grandfather provided the male component in your creation. Kathryn Reed’s father is also your biological father. They replicated Kathryn’s DNA however many times.”

  “Six times,” Kayla said slowly, remembering the name of Kathryn Reed’s child as it was listed in her file.

  KM-1-6.

  Saying she needed a little time alone, Kayla left the apartment and began to walk. She had so much to think about.

  A clone. She was an identical genetic copy of someone else — of Kathryn Marie Reed.

  So much made sense now. Kara. Kendra. The palm reader. The smiling, bar-code-loving Kayla on the TV. Kayla herself. And the one Kendra had said was dead — KM-6.

  This had so many meanings for her. Her parents were not her parents. It meant her father was her older brother, in a way. No — it made her his aunt, his mother’s sister. At least it meant they were related.

  She laughed, darkly remembering how everyone had always commented that she resembled her father but was the exact image of her late grandmother. No kidding!

  She did some calculating. Kathryn Reed would have been forty-nine years old in 2008, the year Kayla was born. A little old to give birth but not impossible, though maybe she hadn’t given birth. The embryos might have been implanted in different mothers.

  Kayla had once had pictures of her mother sitting in a hospital bed holding her as a newborn. And she’d seen pictures of her mother when she was pregnant. So her mother, Ashley Reed, must have been carrying her own mother-in-law’s clone.

  Why had they done it? Was it for money? Her father had worked for the FBI. What if it was part of some government experiment?

  Kayla recalled something that made her stop walking, stunned by the realization. The night before, the file Allyson had showed them had listed Kathryn Reed as a participant in the Genetic Enhancement/Manipulation Program.

  Enhancement and manipulation.

  There were six clones, and GlobalHelix had done something to change their genes.

  Kendra in all her ranting madness had talked about an increasing level of enhanced powers. When she had been in the G-1 Pediatric Rehabilitation Center she’d glimpsed her own GlobalHelix file. Is that what she’d learned — that each cloned embryo had been enhanced at an increasingly intensified level? Enhanced how?

  They had to get the infometric computers to open the subfiles. They needed to know what other experiments GlobalHelix was doing with nanobiotechnology. And she needed to learn exactly what they had done to her genes.

  She hurried back to Allyson’s apartment, eager to talk with her friends about what she’d been thinking. She had to impress upon them the urgency of opening those subfiles.

  Running up the stairs, she found Jack and Allyson huddled over a pad at the kitchen table. Allyson was drawing a map or floor plan of some kind. “We’ve figured out a way to get into the research facility,” Jack told her. “I went by the facility and got a look at the work schedule. The night guard is still scheduled to work alone, so we’ve got to do it tonight.”

  “Hey, come here, check this,” Allyson called to them. While Jack went over the planned break-in with Kayla, Allyson had flipped on the TV. Something she was watching had her leaning forward on the futon, riveted.

  Jack and Kayla joined her and they, too, were instantly fascinated. They were watching the CNN5 channel, which was all news, twenty-four hours a day.

  Kayla was on the screen — but it was the fake Kayla from the billboards. She was as neatly turned out as ever in a bright pink sweater, matching short skirt, and high boots. Her bobbed hair shone and bounced as if she were in a shampoo commercial. Her silver lipstick and matching eye shadow were perfect.

  Zekeal Morrelle stood beside her, appearing as handsome and confident as ever. Kayla wondered why he kept the eye patch. Surely Global-1 could have provided him with a new eye. He probably just likes the way it looks, she thought disdainfully.

  She didn’t think about him for long, though. She was more interested in the smiling young woman beside him — her clone, or one of them, anyway. Although identical to her in so many ways, this girl seemed completely different, so conventional and so docile. She was working on the Tattoo Gen Public Murals Program, so she probably had the same artistic ability as Kayla, Kendra, and Kara. Kayla figured the palm-reader clone would have it, too.

  Yet despite their sameness, the lives they’d led had made them so different. With a chill, Kayla also remembered the Gene Enhancement/Manipulation Program file. Had GlobalHelix also had a hand in making them different?

  Zekeal and the clone were talking to a crowd, though their voices weren’t yet audible. The voice-over
announcer spoke cheerily, “Tattoo Gen has sent two of its most high-profile and popular spokespeople on a cross-country book tour to promote their new book, The Bar Code Way to Happiness. In it, Zekeal Morrelle tells the fascinating story of his time as an undercover agent for Tattoo Gen. But what is perhaps most appealing here is the emergence of a love story between Zekeal and bar code resister Kayla Marie Reed. Kayla was fleeing police and headed to the Adirondack Mountains to join other resisters when Zekeal went in search of her and convinced her to come home and get the bar code tattoo.”

  Kayla once again was struck with the eerie sensation that she was looking at what her own life could have been if it had taken an alternate path. It was true that Zekeal had come to the mountains to try to persuade her to return with him and get the bar code tattoo. But in real life, she had refused. She’d run and hid from him until he gave up trying to find her.

  What she was seeing now was what would have happened if she had given in to him.

  “I wonder if that girl even knows she’s a clone,” Jack said.

  “She knows,” Kayla replied. “She talks about things that happened to me, not to her. Tattoo Gen has recruited her to play this part.”

  The voice-over stopped and the camera closed in on Zekeal and the fake Kayla Marie Reed. Zekeal began promoting the book as a biography and as a guide to achieving a sense of belonging in society by being bar-coded.

  The reporters in the audience began to ask questions. Zekeal answered them all smoothly until someone addressed one to the fake Kayla: “Kayla, do you feel you were wrong to give up your principles for love?”

  “What’s she going to say to that?” Allyson asked. She clicked the RECORD button on the remote. “I’m saving this,” she said.

  “I don’t … uh, that’s not what I did. I …” Fake Kayla rubbed her eye, which appeared to be irritated. Flustered, she looked to Zekeal for help.