by Neil Mcmahon
This morning, Monks was late in serving breakfast.
The bedside clock read 6:44. Outside, the day was brightening, the silver gray of dawn turning to the thin blue of morning.
The bacon smell was real.
He got up and stepped cautiously to a window. There was another car parked in the drive, a small aquamarine Honda, pulled up next to the Bronco. Stephanie’s.
He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. She must have left her San Francisco apartment before 6:00 A.M. She was twenty-two, accustomed for years to dawn swimming practices, with no cell in her body ever tainted by anything unhealthier than a very occasional glass of wine.
He started remembering the events in the ER, then realized that they were confused with a dream: John Smith’s face, flattened into flounderlike distortion, eyes bulging and mouth gulping to speak words that Monks had struggled to understand, but could not.
The rest of the night was coming back now too. He pulled on sweats and waded out to face the brash energy of youth.
Fur swirled around his ankles, the other two cats appearing out of nowhere to join the assault, herding him toward the savory smells from the kitchen. Stephanie was standing over the stove, spatula in hand, looking cheerful.
“Morning, Sunshine,” she said. “I would have fed them, but I know they want it from you.”
Monks divided up a can of Kultured Kat Salmon Feast, a choice perhaps influenced by his dream, and set the bowls down to the music of reproachful yowls. He started sleepwalking automatically into the morning’s next step, making coffee, but then realized his place at the table was set, with fresh orange juice and a steaming cup of French roast. He grudgingly decided that this was not so bad and kissed her cheek.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he said.
She pointed to the day’s San Francisco Chronicle, spread out on the table, open to the business section. The main headline read: WHERE’S LEX? Beneath it was a photo of a man who was a ringer for John Smith, a little younger and a lot cleaner.
Aesir Corporation announced early this morning that Lex Rittenour, principal creator of the REGIS gene-scanning program, will not appear as scheduled to tout his brainchild. Rittenour was slated to be the keynote speaker at a press conference today, topping off the fervor that has accompanied this groundbreaking technology and a massive IPO. Aesir executives declined to comment on his whereabouts.
Rittenour was catapulted to fame at the age of 20 with ViStar, a systems management program that made others obsolete. REGIS, his latest brainchild, has aroused heavy controversy, but the market for REGIS remains strong.
The REGIS IPO will open when trading begins on the New York exchange Friday morning. The 280 million dollars in initial shares are expected to jump from twelve to upwards of fifty dollars per share.
Aesir’s press conference will take place this morning at the San Francisco Marina at 9:00 A.M., Pacific time.
Monks sipped his coffee and recalled what he knew about the REGIS program. Working from a blood sample exposed to biochips, REGIS read the individual’s entire active genome—then compared it to an “ideal,” genetically perfect structure. Any aberration showed up, and any of these which were linked to troublesome genes were identified. As disease-linked gene sites continued to be identified, the program would be updated. Eventually, in theory, a single blood scan would map out all of a person’s damaging genes. This was a hugely more thorough analysis than had been possible until now. And a computer could do it in a matter of minutes.
Proponents called this a giant step, pointing to the huge range of possibilities it opened up: for early diagnosis and treatment of disease, and for prevention of passing on hereditary diseases and birth defects.
Critics challenged the program’s accuracy, charging that existing information was inadequate, with far too many complexities and unknowns, and that it had not even begun to be properly tested.
But REGIS could be used more insidiously, to discriminate in health insurance and employment, and even to stigmatize a genetically inferior caste. Genes might be identified—or claimed—as being responsible not only for disease and birth defects, but for low intelligence, violent behavior, sexual orientation. Individuals might be labeled as unfit to have children, with economic penalties imposed if they did. The name “REGIS” itself, evoking the Latin for “king,” could be seen as an allusion to a master race, with all the specters that raised.
This had gotten another twist.
The term “ideal genome” was being used to mean “free of deleterious genes.” Establishing any such thing at the present was impossible: There was far too much information still unknown. The gaps in the prototype were filled in with projections and educated guesswork, to be updated as new information became available.
But a rumor had surfaced that a particular gene pool of long-lived, healthy individuals had been used in structuring the ideal model. This group happened to come from Iceland. In other words, the REGIS ideal was a tall, blue-eyed blond.
Whether there was any truth to this or it was a fabrication by opponents was not clear. Even if it were true, the point was that Icelanders were a healthy group, not that they were of a particular racial stereotype.
But that did add a potent spice to the brew of controversy.
Stephanie brought a plate of peppery fried spuds, thick bacon cooked to perfect crispness, and scrambled eggs with sharp cheddar cheese grated in.
“This kind of food is very unhealthy,” Monks warned, salivating.
She joined him at the table with a much more modest plateful for herself. “You see?” she said triumphantly, jabbing a finger down on the newspaper photo. “John Smith was Lex Rittenour. They can’t let him be seen in public.”
Monks was slowly assembling his wits. He had to admit, this development gave her theory more whack. Apparently, last night’s war-room strategy at Aesir had gone awry. He debated how much to tell her about all that had happened.
“I saw Dr. Rostanov again last night,” he said.
Stef put down her fork. “Really?”
“She assured me again that the guy was really John Smith. He just looks like Lex.”
Stephanie became subdued, and Monks felt bad. It was a mean trick, forcing her to abandon her theory or call her new idol a liar.
“We can prove it,” she said.
Monks, crunching a mouthful of bacon, paused. “What do you mean?”
“They missed one of the blood samples.”
He remained still, letting the concept settle into his brain.
“I forgot to tell you, I never made it to the lab with them,” she said. “I met the phlebotomist coming up to the ER, and gave them to her. Then, after it was all over, I started thinking, maybe there were extras. So I found her cart. There was one still in the rack.”
“And?”
“I took it.”
“Stephanie. Are you telling me that you stole a blood sample from the hospital?”
“It’s not like anybody else wanted it. Geez.”
“It should have been dealt with officially.”
“Yeah? I remember what happened to you with that radio tape. You and Mom might still be married otherwise.”
Monks doubted that, but chose not to say so. Twelve years earlier, he had been chief of emergency services at the major trauma center of Bayview Hospital, upright husband and father, pillar of the community. Then one night a team of paramedics in the field disobeyed his orders, resulting in the death of an elderly woman. The paramedics were well connected with the sheriff’s department, and within the next twenty-four hours, the tape of the conversation—the only hard evidence of the orders that Monks had given—disappeared from a police evidence room. The paramedics contradicted Monks, and memories of other staff who had been present got fuzzy. Not long after that, Monks was out of a job and a marriage, and into an alcoholic tailspin.
“Where’s the blood?” he said.
Stephanie nodded toward the kitchen. “In the refrige
rator.”
Monks got up to look. There it was, all right, in a Ziploc bag, wedged behind the Tuong Ot sauce—a finger-sized glass tube filled with dark red liquid, sealed and tagged with Mercy Hospital’s official label:
SMITH, JOHN
030601 19:16
MR # 3424659.001
ER / DR. MONKS
“You think we should freeze it?” Stephanie said.
Monks closed the refrigerator door. “I think it will be fine.”
“So, who do we take it to? The FBI?”
Monks sat down again. “Honey—we cut a deal last night. Baird and I. Aesir Corporation offered a very generous donation to the hospital. In return, we agreed not to pursue the matter.”
Her eyes dampened. “You’re kidding.”
“I’ve become a believer in the concept of limited good,” he said. “There’s nothing to be gained by tilting at windmills. But the hospital can use the money.”
“Wow. You can justify anything that way.”
“I don’t claim that it’s noble.”
“Have you heard what they’re saying about that REGIS program?”
“Some of it,” Monks said.
“It’s wildly irresponsible. Everybody at med school thinks so. There’s way too many variables for predicting disease; it’s just going to be used to discriminate against people.”
He blinked. He had never heard her so impassioned. “I’m under the impression that there’s a pro side to the argument,” he said. “Especially as it gets refined over time.”
“Then let them wait until it is refined. That Aesir outfit is a bunch of crooks. They’re trying to make a quick buck, and the world’s going to be stuck with all the damage.”
Monks said gently, “And you think if we could humiliate Lex Rittenour, that would bring it crashing down?”
“They wouldn’t have paid the hospital off if they didn’t think so.”
“It was cheap insurance for them, Stef. They’ve got a lot on their plate right now. This was just another fly buzzing around the room that they didn’t want to deal with.”
She got up and started clearing plates into the sink, avoiding his eyes. Monks’s shoulders slumped. He was familiar with the saying, “No man is a hero to his valet,” and he had long since stopped caring much what the world in general thought of him. But the world in general did not include his daughter.
He tried to imagine being twenty-two again. Bright, bold, outraged at injustice, ready to jump into any fray on the side of righteousness—blithely unaware of the things life had hiding up its alleys to stomp you, of the thousands upon thousands of days to be gotten through, tough enough without inviting trouble.
“I told her we’d like to see her,” Monks said. “Dr. Rostanov.”
She turned back to him quickly, eyes alive again. “You did? What did she say?”
“I think she was interested. Probably never been hit on by a father-daughter team before.”
“That’s not getting you off the hook,” Stephanie said, but Monks could tell that she was pleased. He went to shave, feeling better.
So: A few milliliters of blood in his refrigerator that could conceivably shake confidence in a billion-dollar deal. Said blood having been obtained illegally, and the release of which would very certainly bring down heavy wrath on its discoverers.
In short, it carried considerable power, and Monks caught another echo of the past. There had been a lot of traffic in holy relics during the Middle Ages, many of them organic: body parts of saints, vials of Christ’s blood that would liquefy on Good Friday. They were huge tourist draws. Churches and monasteries were not above manufacturing them, and even purloining them from each other. One tradition held that devotees, risking their own lives, had stolen the still-smoldering bones of Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Templars, from the pyre where King Philip the Fair had had the old knight burned.
By any scientific standard, such beliefs were pure superstition. But Monks could not shake that shadowy feeling that maybe, just maybe, there was something to it.
Monks suggested to Stephanie that she needed some new clothes and prevailed upon her to accept a modest check. He sent her off—still disappointed in him but a little less so—to shop her way home through the malls and boutiques of Marin County.
He spent an hour cutting brush in what he euphemistically called his yard, in the endless defense against the fires that could rip through these dry canyons with a ferocity that was impossible to stop. Maintaining a nonburnable perimeter was about the only chance you had. His house was nothing to brag about, but it meant a lot to him.
He had bought the place twenty-odd years ago, before real estate prices had escalated, as a summer and weekend getaway. There were several acres of redwood, oak, and madrone, isolated from neighbors and far up a narrow road that most wandering traffic missed. The main house was a patchwork of additions tacked onto a cabin originally built in the thirties. Like the Bronco, it was a remnant of divorce, one of the few things he had left after a previous life.
The several outbuildings included a garage that had accumulated junk for the two decades of his ownership. But finally he had cleaned it out and hung a heavy bag. He had never trained formally in boxing. His technique came mainly from watching the Wednesday and Friday night fights in childhood, while the giants of the time—Rocky Marciano, Floyd Patterson, Gene Fullmer, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore—pounded each other with terrifying beauty around that tiny square of canvas. His father, on his knees, would sometimes mock-spar with him between rounds.
But a heavy bag was a fine workout even for an ungraceful man, and it always paid off once he got started. When he was done with chores, he wrapped his hands and put on bag gloves, and set the timer for five three-minute rounds with a minute in between. He started slow, throwing straight, hard left jabs from the shoulder, stepping in with his left foot, making the bag snap. Partway through the round, he started following each jab with a right cross, the right foot catching up to the left, pivoting on the ball to put the body’s full weight behind the punch. In the next round, he worked on the third move in the classic combination, a left hook alternating to the ribs and jaw of his imaginary opponent.
At the end he let it go, hammering as hard as he could with no pretense at defense or style. When he finished he was streaming with sweat, chest aching, breath a shrill whistle.
He had kept his eye on the clock. It was just before 9:00 A.M. He went back inside the house and turned the television on to San Francisco news. He puttered in the kitchen, half-listening to the latest international troubles and warnings of more rolling blackouts, until he heard the announcer say:
“When we come back, we’ll take a look at the major IPO that Lex Rittenour won’t be there to kick off. Stay with us.”
The screen changed and, for a few seconds, showed the San Francisco Marina. Among the yachts and sailboats, standing out like an eagle in a dovecote, a Viking longboat was moored. It was perhaps sixty feet long, with a hull of dark wood and a dragon-head prow painted with fierce eyes and teeth. Monks could just make out the name emblazoned on the bow, in stylized rune-like letters: Mjollnir.
While the TV offered yet another long series of ads for investment opportunities, geriatric medicines, and the-car-you-had-to-have-to-be-fastest-on-the-road, Monks thumbed through a volume of Viking lore and found the name Mjollnir. It was the thunderbolt hammer of the god Thor.
The announcer’s voice came back on. This time, the TV camera swept the Marina Green, a hundred yards inland. Blue-uniformed SFPD police had cordoned off a good-sized crowd of demonstrators. Many were carrying signs. Monks glimpsed a couple.
READ OUR LIPS, NOT OUR GENES NO REGIS
LET’S KEEP HITLER DEAD
Some of the demonstrators were shouting, pressing against the ropes that held them back.
The camera switched to a close-up of the ship’s deck. A podium bristling with microphones was mounted at the bow. In the background, Monks could see Ronald Ty
gard talking on a cell phone. The two bodyguards who had been with him at the hospital were there too, watching the area with the air of Secret Service men. The morning was foggy but all three were wearing bug-eye sunglasses.
Kenneth Bouldin stepped up to the podium and surveyed the group of journalists gathered on the dock below.
“I know you’re all disappointed that Lex Rittenour couldn’t be here today,” Bouldin said, his voice echoing over the microphones. “So are we. Lex is a great man, and I feel very small standing in his shoes. He’s also a very private man, and he’s just not interested in being in the limelight these days. He sends his best wishes to you all.”
Bouldin’s voice became solemn. “We’re here to formally announce the greatest advance in the treatment of illness that has ever been made. I say that knowing full well what an audacious claim it is. The germ theory of medicine, the discovery of antibiotics—these were huge, but they pale in comparison to what REGIS promises.
“Think of it! A simple blood test to identify the whole spectrum of diseases that plague us. Specific treatments developed to target them. A few years from now, if you find out you have cancer, a medicine will be formulated for your individual genetic makeup. You’ll take it home from the drugstore, and in a couple of months, the cancer’s gone.”
Bouldin paused to let it sink in. With his handsome profile, his just-graying hair, his sense of command, he was every bit the chieftain of the ship.
“REGIS embodies a great element of hope,” Bouldin said. “It’s not yet perfect, and I know that there are those who find fault with that. Yet, if we can help to end the suffering of millions, are we right?—do we have the right?—to hold back?
“I hope you’ll join Lex Rittenour, and the rest of us at Aesir, in welcoming this great voyage we’re embarking on, into a future that would have been science fiction only a few years ago. Thank you all.”
Hands shot up from the crowd of journalists, like coiled springs that had been barely contained until a lid popped off. Monks caught bits of the shouted questions.
“Mr. Bouldin, where is Lex Rittenour?—”
