by Sean Platt
“What did he tell you?”
“He said that you hired Altruance the same as you hired me. He said you were planning to double-cross me. I got the MyLife, and he said that Altruance was leading me toward a group of your people, who’d kill me to take it.”
Fiona met Ephraim’s eyes for a long time. Then all of a sudden, she broke into rare laughter. “He said I paid off Altruance?”
Keeping his face stern, Ephraim said, “Yes.”
“Altruance Brown. One of the most famous people in the world, with more money than he could ever spend.”
“He said you had leverage.”
“Okay. This is fun. What kind of leverage? Did I have pictures of him in a sex scandal?”
“He said you had Altruance’s sister.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s what he said.”
Fiona watched Ephraim for twenty or more seconds, awaiting more. Her face slowly turned from amused to gravely sincere. “You believed him?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore. About so many things.”
“These forces I supposedly sent to kill you. They were on the island?”
“He said they were right down the beach.”
“I see. And did you see them?”
Ephraim’s eyes ticked away.
“Uh-huh,” Fiona said. “How did I get them there, Ephraim? Did you consider that little nugget? Did you know that Eden had a battery of anti-aircraft weapons? Did you know there are records of Eden hiring ex-SEALs to run its security?”
Not according to what I saw. If they had SEALs and big guns, how the hell did I get away clean?
“I couldn’t drop a force onto Eden in a million years, Ephraim. If you were thinking straight, you’d see how obvious it was, what Neven was doing. He wanted you to feel boxed-in enough to surrender, and the easiest way to do that was to try and turn you on me. He wanted you to feel like you were on his side, same as your brother.”
“My brother’s clone,” Ephraim corrected.
“And, by all indications, your brother himself.”
“I didn’t see any ‘indications,’” Ephraim said. But wasn’t that a lie? Jonathan had run to Connolly after the UCLA scandal. He’d been Eden’s lead geneticist. There was no evidence of a schism.
“And if that’s not enough for you,” Fiona said after a moment of heavy quiet, “go ahead and call Altruance’s family. I’m sure I can get you through. Talk to his sister. Ask her if she was in my clutches at any time these last few weeks.”
Another five seconds of quiet, then she said, “It’s bullshit, Ephraim. Do you get it? It was all bullshit.”
He ran through all of the permutations, trying to separate logic from emotion. There was only one conclusion worth arriving at.
“Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Fiona gave Ephraim a somewhat sympathetic smile. He needed to change the subject.
“What will you do with it? If you can figure out how the Tomorrow Gene process worked from what I gave you, will you bake it into Riverbed’s research?” Ephraim smiled — a mostly feigned smile that was sincerely working for faith. “Build an artificial island spa?”
“I guess we’ll see,” Fiona said.
Ephraim looked down at the chair. Fiona’s eyes followed his. But instead of asking her if she’d use the therapy on herself to reverse her condition, he asked something tangential, yet related. A softer version of the same inappropriate question.
“You know, if the Tomorrow Gene can cure illnesses and make people younger, I keep wondering why Wallace never used it himself. I saw the MyLife records of his final days. He died old, just like Jonathan’s clone said.”
Fiona’s face registered puzzlement that echoed Ephraim’s own.
“That,” she said, “is what my people can’t quite figure out. Because now that it turns out Wallace is dead, I’d have expected him to use the process on himself, same as you expected. But here’s the thing. The screenshots you sent me and everything from Jonathan’s MyLife teaches us a lot about the process of making clones. It’s enough, with some work, that I could probably start a lab to do it myself. You take the DNA. You create the embryo. You use classic, albeit illegally modified, Precipitous Rise tech to mature the embryo to an adult.”
She paused, and despite his decision to believe Fiona and disbelieve Neven, Ephraim noted the way she described the process. She made it sound so easy — almost as if she’d mastered most of the process already, and had only needed Eden’s clone maturation process to complete the puzzle on the Riverbed side.
“What about the mental part?" Ephraim asked. "Based on what I saw, Eden was able to copy memories from people to clones made of them.”
Fiona made a dismissive face. As if that part of the process were simple. As if Riverbed had already figured it out — better than Eden, perhaps, seeing as Eden couldn’t even get its Jonathan clones to remember their siblings’ birth order correctly.
“Yes,” Fiona said. “But what puzzles us more is the whole ‘rejuvenation’ part of the process. The way Eden was able to make people decades younger. What the Tomorrow Gene was supposed to be.”
“Maybe Jonathan didn’t work on that part of the process,” Ephraim said. “Maybe that’s why there’s nothing about it on his MyLife.”
Fiona raised her eyebrows in something approximating a nod, but in the small gesture, Ephraim saw something else. Doubt, perhaps, not quite alleviated.
The moment was broken when Maria reentered the room. She slipped a thumb drive into a slot on Fiona’s desk, and Fiona immediately began clicking and moving the mouse with her lower lip to navigate through it.
“You asked about Neven. If he died on the island.”
Ephraim nodded.
A new image filled the screen. This shot was about the same as the earlier one, zoomed out to show more of the east. Fiona zoomed in on an area that contained nothing except what looked like a deep-sea drilling platform.
“This chopper—” Fiona moved the mouse to indicate a large X on the grainy image, perched on the platform’s deck. “—was captured by Google not long before our photos were taken. Google doesn’t watch Eden, but they do map the surrounding ocean. And this appears to be a military helicopter approaching from the west. It came from the direction of Eden and landed here. On this uncharted, unregistered platform.”
She zoomed in closer, and the picture sharpened. She could make out two people on the platform’s deck, kicked back in chairs just enough to partially obscure their faces. Even though the sharpened image was far from clear, Ephraim could easily see the big black beard on the man on the right.
“I think Neven got away,” Fiona said, turning her eyes toward Ephraim. “I think this platform was here all along, meant as a convenient point of escape. Almost as if he’d anticipated Eden’s destruction.”
Ephraim was only half-listening, trying to inspect the man in the image beside Neven. Through the blur, it was impossible to say much about him. But just as it was clear that the man on the right had a beard, it was clear that the man on the left had very dark skin. A white man and a black man, lounging in the sun.
Maybe a man he’d seen die. Again.
“Ephraim?” Fiona asked, catching his attention.
“Yes.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t fine at all. His mind spun through the last days of confusion and that floating, drifting, untethered sense returned with all its formal glory. The firm ground beneath him felt suddenly unstable. Was he even here? Or was this just another bullshit memory?
“Ephraim?”
He turned. “You said you could put me in touch with Altruance’s sister. If I wanted to verify that she was okay.”
And if I wanted to verify that her brother hadn’t been in touch. That he was dead, and not in the middle of the ocean right now somehow, on a drilling platform, with Neven.
Altruance would tell her if he was still
alive, wouldn’t he? As close as he’d said they were.
“What’s her name?” Ephraim asked, an itch forming at the back of his skull. “Altruance’s sister — do you happen to know her name?”
Fiona smiled. “It’s a pretty name,” she said, rolling her eyes toward Maria to start the magic of putting them in touch. “Damaris.”
CHAPTER 70
A SEED WELL PLANTED
The deep-ocean platform was more serpentine than Neven remembered, but he’d only been here once, years ago, during its construction. His father had been alive back then, and they’d come together.
That had been before Jonathan’s clone. Before Ephraim. Before all of it.
“I’m tired of sitting in the sun. Let’s move to the shade.”
Jonathan Todd looked up from his chair, rolled his eyes, and said, “White people.” But he stood, walked under the strung canopy, and sat.
“Is it done?” Jonathan asked when they were situated in the shade.
Neven nodded. “I got a ping from the Riverbed server, through the proxy. They plugged in the clone’s MyLife. The virus has activated.”
“That’s not what matters,” Jonathan said. “What matters is that they believe what they’re seeing.”
Neven nodded. “They’ll believe it. Ephraim was conditioned to believe. And as far as I can tell, that conditioning was fully in place.”
“Did he believe you about Fiona Roberson? That she sent Altruance Brown?”
Neven sighed. “He had to make friends with Altruance Brown. Your fucking brother had to make friends with Altruance Fucking Brown.”
“He’s not my brother.”
Neven shrugged. “Hell. I don’t know if he believed me. I doubt I’d believe, in his shoes. If he’d made friends with some random schmoe on the island like we figured, it’d have been easy enough, in the end, for me to turn suspicion on that schmoe. Because Fiona could have bought off Joe Random. But Altruance Fucking Brown? Shit. I doubt it. I gave him a line of crap, but I don’t think he bought it, though I suppose he doesn’t need to believe everything, does he?”
Jonathan was looking off into the ocean, sunglasses on. “No. He only needs the trigger. His conditioning will take care of the rest. As long as he has doubts about Fiona?” He nodded. “Then yes. He’ll do what we need him to do.”
“I hope so. I burned my father’s entire fucking complex for this plan of yours. I hope it works.”
“It’ll work.”
Neven watched Jonathan, trying to feel as certain. Mostly, he did. Ephraim’s conditioning had been strong to start, and they’d pulled every one of his conditioned strings while he was on Eden to make his mental state as fragile as possible before that big, showy final confrontation. Ephraim had been paranoid; they’d made him more so. Ephraim didn’t like to lie; they’d forced him into a string of untruths. Ephraim doubted his memories, and they’d screwed up his faith in a lucid past.
“Besides,” Jonathan said, staring off into the distance. “Your father never wanted to run a spa. The stuff we need was buried in the underground vaults months ago. The surface burned. The bullshit is gone. The PR crap is gone with it. When the smoke clears — literally and figuratively, I guess — we’ll resume below ground and rebuild up top for cover. Then the work can get started again.”
“We’re still missing the most important piece of the puzzle,” Neven said. “Roberson’s piece.”
“Ephraim will get it. Don’t worry.” Jonathan looked over. “You do believe in this, right, Neven?”
“I let Ephraim escape so he could run back with stories to tell about Big Bad Eden, didn’t I? I burned the complex, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but you’re bitching a lot,” Jonathan said. “You do understand that Ephraim needs to believe Eden was destroyed, right? Same as he has to believe Fiona is the reason I’m ‘dead.’”
Jonathan smiled, very much not dead. Neven didn’t reciprocate.
“Convincing him that Fiona ‘killed you’ may take time,” Neven said.
Jonathan rested his head back again, eyes on the ocean. “I know. As long as you feel you planted a seed of doubt, it’ll fester. The conditioning we built into him — and don’t forget, there was a shit-ton of conditioning — will ensure it.”
“Yes.” Neven nodded. “I planted a seed of doubt. A really good one.”
“You mean the bullshit you told him about Altruance working for Fiona?”
Neven shook his head. “I mean Brown’s sister’s name.”
Jonathan looked over, said nothing, then looked back. “That was risky.”
“It’s a crux memory. He thinks he watched his sister die. It forged much of who he is, what he believes, and what he came to stand for as an adult. You saw the tapes of his conversation with the Jonathan clone. He won’t just stand by and let Fiona live once he decides she was responsible for your death. Despite your doubts, we’ve already proven Ephraim could be made to kill. And after killing someone who’s basically ’you,’ killing Fiona will be simple.”
“If he decides she was responsible.”
“He will,” Neven said. “It just has to be his idea; you know that.”
“I know it. The question was whether your mentioning Damaris Brown will somehow make him decide that—”
“Trust me,” Neven said.
Jonathan shrugged again. “I guess I don’t have a choice. I mean, you did burn Wallace’s islands to nothing.”
Neven shifted, finally becoming a little comfortable. “Any of them can be conditioned to do anything. We’ve seen it again and again.”
“True,” said Jonathan, “but in the past, the conditioning and memory manipulation we’ve done haven't gone this deep. He thinks he’s Ephraim. I know we planted suspicions, but shit, Neven. He’s had a lifetime believing he’s my brother, for real.”
“That too,” Neven said, sitting back, “will change.”
The breeze blew. The air smelled of salt.
Footsteps moved in from the side. Jonathan and Neven both looked over to watch the newcomer’s arrival. Then all three men traded glances, holding straight faces until Jonathan laughed.
“You’re talking about me, aren’t you?” said the original Ephraim Todd.
WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Eden has burned.
Every island in the archipelago has gone up in flames.
Thousands are dead, along with the dreams of eternal life for hopefuls around the globe. That light has died, and one man is the target of their ire.
But is Eden really gone forever?
After finding his brother, Ephraim Todd got more than he bargained for. And now he’s fighting for his freedom, along with his sanity. He’s desperate to prove his innocence and show everyone that he isn’t crazy.
But when no one will back up his story, and the very evidence that will prove his innocence has disappeared, Ephraim is forced to take matters into his own hands.
Ephraim must find the one person, or thing, that can prove his innocence, despite the insurmountable odds against him. Can he find the answers before his mind finally cracks and crumbles to nothing?
CLICK HERE TO GET THE EDEN EXPERIMENT
SHIT FROM BRAINS
NOTE: You shouldn’t ever read author’s notes before reading the book, but just in case you’re a rule-breaker, here’s your heads-up that this note contains spoilers. Big ones. You’ve been warned.
The Tomorrow Gene began with two simple mandates.
Because it’s a Realm & Sands book, it had to be “Realm & Sands” in tone, style, and the big questions the story explored. The compound adjective “Realm & Sands,” if you’re new to it, looks a lot like Michael Crichton when it’s on a page or the Nolan brothers when it’s on a screen. We were never just going to write an A to Z story. There’d always be blurred motivations and moral ambiguity. There’d always be depth, even when “straightforward,” technically speaking, might have sold better.
But because The Tomorrow Gene was also t
he first thriller we wrote knowing from the start that it was a thriller (Dead City was a thriller, too, but we didn’t realize that until we finished it), and it had to have those thriller prerequisites in place as well.
Meaning, specifically, that our main character had to live by the rule of ABR: “Always Be Running.”
Because that’s what makes a thriller. You put some poor sap (or saps) in peril, and then you never let them rest. Unless they have a love interest who inevitably dies or is in danger, in which case you’re allowed to let them rest to have sex. But Ephraim doesn’t have a serious (enough) love interest in this book, and so he was pretty much always running. No between-the-sheets time for our hero.
And so “running” was what our story meetings for this book kept coming back to. We have a tendency to let our characters get all thoughtful, and that makes the action slow down. We didn’t want to do that here. ALWAYS BE RUNNING! So Ephraim would get into a situation, realize it was dangerous, and start retreating from it again. That’s what I (Johnny) demanded of Sean and what he demanded of me.
But because our story takes place entirely on a series of islands, there was only so much literal running our protagonist could do. I spent many summer weeks on a small island in Lake Erie (the same island that inspired our book Axis of Aaron), and I know how unsatisfying “fleeing” can be when it’s on an island. “Is he at the co-op? No? Then, quick! Check the liquor store one mile in that direction or the farm down the road!” It’s just not very satisfying because there aren’t many places to go. Ephraim couldn’t run all over Europe like Jason Bourne. He doesn’t even have a legit boat until the very end.
So, we added paranoia. From the very start, we decided that Ephraim would be a really unreliable narrator. That would give the feeling of “running” without him needing to run far all the time. Because really, the “running” in a thriller isn’t about feet on a path or wheels on concrete. It’s about evasion. It’s about fear, and trying to get away from what scares you.
