Ancestor

by Scott Sigler

  “Mister Feely, I need you!” A gruff German accent—the voice a dagger in Tim’s ear. His heart sank as if his parents had just caught him looking at nudie magazines. He turned to see Claus Rhumkorrf, hands on hips, standing in the hallway.

  “Mister Feely! Are you drinking?”

  Tim looked at the empty glass in his hand as if he was surprised to see it there. “What, this? Why, I just found this lying about and I’m being a good citizen. Cleanliness is next to godliness, you know.”

  “We are ready to start implantation,” Rhumkorrf said. “Come with me back to the plane. Now.”

  Rhumkorrf turned and stormed down the hall. Stephanie shrugged and held out her hand, palm up. Tim gave her the glass, then followed Rhumkorrf.

  NOVEMBER 9: THE SUPERSECRET PASSWORD

  COLDING FOLLOWED SARA and Clayton through the mansion’s halls and down a stairwell.

  “Jack Kerouac used to vacation here, ya know,” Clayton said. “I used to drink beers with him all da time.”

  Colding threw Clayton a doubting glance. “You drank with Kerouac?”

  “Ya. Hell of a guy. Farted a lot, though. He could clear out da entire bar when he got going.”

  Colding tried to imagine one of America’s greatest literary figures ripping off a loud one in a bar full of Yoopers, but the picture just wouldn’t register.

  “What about Marilyn Monroe?” Sara asked. “I heard she stayed here. You drink with her, too?”

  “She liked to drink alone mostly, eh? I banged her, though. Nice tits.”

  The utilitarian basement showed far less ornamentation than the two upper floors. There wasn’t a speck of dust on anything. Clayton stopped at a door with a small keypad and punched in 0-0-0-0. A heavy deadbolt clicked open inside the door.

  “Wow,” Sara said. “Pretty crafty password, Clayton.”

  The old man shrugged and walked into a completely modern room, white walls with fluorescent lighting set into a white suspended acoustic-tile ceiling. A row of security monitors sat on one wall, mounted above a white desk that held a familiar-looking computer. The computer screen showed a slowly spinning Genada logo.

  But the desk wasn’t what caught Colding’s attention. What held his eyes and made him instantly nervous was the three-shelved weapons rack that took up the center of the room.

  “This here is Magnus’s toy chest,” Clayton said.

  Colding stared in amazement. He ran his hands along a row of assault rifles: three German Heckler & Koch MP5s, two Beretta AR70s, a British SA80 with a thick nightscope and a triple magazine, four Israeli Uzi nine-millimeters and a pair of Austrian Steyr 69 sniper rifles. Below the rifles hung a rack of Magnus’s favorite handgun, the Beretta 96. Ten of them. Boxes and boxes of magazines and ammo occupied the lower shelves. Two sets of Kevlar bulletproof body armor hung from the end of the rack.

  There were some other supplies: first-aid kits, MREs, four propane canisters with blowtorch nozzles, four lighters and fifteen Ka-Bar knives still in their white cardboard boxes.

  “What is all this?” Sara said, concern heavy in her voice. “Is Magnus going to war or something?”

  Clayton shrugged. “Something ain’t right with that boy.”

  Colding noticed three small, wooden ammo crates on a middle shelf. He felt his stomach do a flip as he gently pulled out the box, opened it and saw the contents. “Demex? Fucking plastic explosives?”

  “And detonators,” Clayton said. “Doesn’t exactly make me happy to have it in my mansion.”

  Colding saw one more thing. On the bottom shelf, a long, black canvas bag. He unzipped it. Inside was a five-foot-long case, painted a drab military green. Four metal latches held the case shut.

  “No way,” Sara said quietly. “Please tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”

  Colding flipped the latches and lifted the lid to reveal a five-foot-long metal tube, blocky on one end, all of it painted olive green. A handle stuck out from the blocky part. In front of the handle, Colding saw a metal rectangle that folded out into an IFF antenna, an acronym for Identify Friend or Foe. A useful feature, considering this weapon could blow just about anything out of the sky.

  “It’s a Stinger missile,” he said.

  “I told you not to tell me,” Sara said. Her voice sounded alarmed, not a surprising reaction for a pilot looking at a plane-killing weapon. “Anyone want to tell me why Magnus needs a surface-to-air missile?”

  Colding didn’t know the answer. He zipped the bag, slid it back into place, then stood and walked over to the desk and its bank of security monitors. The setup was identical to the one they’d left behind on Baffin Island.

  “Clayton, what’s our video coverage like?”

  Clayton walked to the counter and started pushing buttons. A series of views flashed across the screens: the outside of the mansion, the harbor, the ballroom, guest rooms, the kitchen. It surprised Colding to see the ease with which Clayton worked the controls—the old man obviously knew his way around the security systems.

  “Good coverage,” Clayton said. “We even have that crazy infrared crap. We got regular video all over, including everyone’s rooms.”

  “Turn off all room cameras,” Colding said. “Everyone but Jian.”

  He watched as Clayton started flipping switches. “Done,” Clayton said. “Why leave Jian’s active? You like them big-girl peep shows?”

  “I … no, Clayton, I do not like big-girl peep shows. Jian’s tried to kill herself before. She has to be watched at all times. And as soon as we’re done here, please go in her room and remove all glass, any mirrors. Take down the chandelier and put up a simple fixture, nothing she could hang herself from.”

  For once, Clayton didn’t have a smart-ass comment. “I’ll make sure da room is safe,” he said.

  “What about the hangar?” Sara said. “That covered, too?”

  Clayton pushed more buttons. Multiple views of the hangar, both inside and out. He stopped when the screens showed the mammoth C-5. “There’s connections for cameras inside da big plane. Sara, your boys hook those up yet?”

  “If it was on the fly-in checklist, probably.”

  Clayton pushed more buttons. Monitors now showed Alonzo in the C-5 cockpit, Claus and Jian in the second-deck lab and Tim Feely in the veterinary station across the aisle from the crash chairs. Clayton changed the view to show Harold and Cappy walking from cow stall to cow stall, opening the clear plexiglass doors. The press of a button lowered the harnesses, putting the animals’ weight back on their hooves. The Twins led the cows out of the C-5 two at a time.

  “Yep,” Clayton said. “They got it done. That’s all da coverage we got. No wireless, no cell phones, no Internet. Landlines connect to James’s place, Sven’s, my house, da hangar and every room in da mansion has its own extension. Only way to reach da mainland is da secure terminal.” He pointed to the small computer at the end of the desk. It was a duplicate of the one Colding had used at Baffin Island.

  “That calls my son or Manitoba,” Clayton said. “We take care of each other out here, and we’re careful, eh? But anything goes wrong, help is three hours away at best.”

  “I want to see the island tomorrow,” Colding said. “All of it. Will your Hummer take us all over?”

  Clayton shook his head. “No way. A lot of swamp on Black Manitou. But don’t you worry, eh? Me and Da Nuge will show you everything?”

  “The Nuge?”

  Clayton nodded. “Ted Nugent. Da Nuge, eh?”

  “Well then,” Sara said. “Slap my ass and call me Sally. If Deadly Tedly is involved, I’m in.”

  Great. The last thing Colding needed was that woman tagging along again. “Uh, Sara, there’s no need for you to go this time. Just stay here.”

  She shrugged. “Gotta go. It’s the Nuge, man.”

  “That’s right,” Clayton said, smiling his bristly smile. “But no sleeping in, eh? You both have your asses on da front steps at 8:00 A.M., got it?”

  “Got it,” Sara said.
“I have to check in with my crew. Drive me back to the hangar, Clayton?”

  “I’d be dee-lighted, eh? Colding, your room is number twenty-four. See you tomorrow.”

  Colding nodded, barely paying attention to Sara and Clayton as they left him alone in the security room. Whatever a “nuge” was, he’d see soon enough.

  He moved to the weapons, checking the action on each and every one. His mind swam with possibilities, mapping out contingencies. Three hours to the mainland by boat, only there was no boat here. Other than Gary Detweiler and the Paglione brothers, no one knew they were on Black Manitou. No one. But, he reminded himself, that was the way it had to be if they wanted to complete the research, bring the ancestor to life and give hope to millions.

  NOVEMBER 9: ORANGE SPIDERS

  JIAN STUMBLED A little, but Colding’s strong arm held her up. “Mister Colding, I don’t want to go to sleep. We have more work to do.”

  “Still not buying it,” Colding said. “Keep walking, kid, you’re turning in.”

  He led her down the mansion’s hall. She, Rhumkorrf and Tim had finished implantation. Every cow had a blastocyst in its uterus. Those blastocysts would soon implant into the uterine wall, forming an embryo and a placenta. After that, more of her coding would force the embryos to split and form monochorionic-monoamniotic twins. Mister Feely called it the blue-light special of genetics, two for the price of one. Some might even split a third time, creating triplets. All of this, of course, assumed the immune response continued to accept the embryos as self.

  Movement.

  Over there, to her left. Jian looked fast. Nothing. Had that been a streak of orange?

  “Jian,” Colding said. “Are you okay?”

  She stared for a second, but there was nothing there. “Yes. I am fine, Mister Colding.”

  They walked on. Colding was really her only friend, the only true friend she’d had since the government decided she was a seven-year-old genius. That’s when they’d removed her from her home in the mountains, taken her away from her family, put her in special schools.

  It hadn’t taken her long to show even more promise, outstepping her colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At age eleven, she published her first genetics paper. By age thirteen, she was speaking at conferences, and her face was all over the news as the poster child for China’s scientific ascendance.

  Then two things happened. First, she started to see the bad things. Second, she discovered computers.

  At first, those bad things were really just strange things. Shadows at the corners of her vision, things that hid when she looked for them. The visions grew worse. Sometimes they looked like little blue spiders. Sometimes they looked like big orange spiders. Sometimes they crawled on her. And sometimes, they bit her.

  Even when she showed people the marks on her arms, no one believed her. They gave her the drugs. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t. What almost always did help, though, was the computer. Jian was among the first people in the world to truly exploit computers for digitizing gene sequences, to understand that the world of silicon and electrons could mimic the submicroscopic world of DNA. And when she was lost in the code, she saw nothing but the code. No spiders.

  Years had rolled on, some worse than others. Medicines changed. The spiders went away for a while, replaced by green, long-toothed rats, but then the spiders came back and the rats stayed as well. When four-foot purple centipedes joined the spiders and the rats, that was the first time she tried to end it all. People stopped her. Stopped her and put her back to work, but it’s hard to work when the spiders and rats and centipedes are biting you. Eventually, her bosses ceased asking her for work she couldn’t complete. They left her alone to explore her computerized world of four letters: A, C, G and T.

  Somewhere along the way, she wasn’t sure when, she started producing papers again. Most focused on a theory of digitizing the entire mammalian genome, creating a virtual world that would show how species interconnect. There was no real commercial or medical benefit, so her bosses just let her write more papers. If nothing else, her genius showed the glory of the People’s Party.

  And then one day her bosses told her she was leaving. They’d sent her to Danté Paglione and Genada, to work with Claus Rhumkorrf. Keep playing with the computers, they told her, if this works, they will build statues of you.

  She started with the human experiments, putting her computer-created genomes inside the wombs of volunteers who really didn’t know what was going on. Jian had known it was wrong, but when you can’t sleep because there are a dozen hairy spiders crawling on your face, right and wrong don’t matter all that much.

  Those experiments had ended badly. Some of the results were even worse than the spiders and rats and centipedes. Jian tried hard to forget those results.

  Then Danté hired Tim Feely and P. J. Colding. Colding made Genada stop the human experiments. He made Rhumkorrf prescribe new medicine for Jian.

  And the spiders went away.

  “This is your room,” Colding said. “Do you like it?”

  She touched the maroon wallpaper, feeling the texture of the velvet patterns. A plastic light fixture looked out of place on the high ceiling, as if another fixture had just been removed. A beautiful, wooden, four-post bed awaited her, its thick white comforter calling to her like a lover.

  Most important of all, of course, was another seven-monitor computer desk. Just like the one in the C-5, just like the one back on Baffin Island. Danté understood. He always made sure Jian could work no matter where she was.

  “This used to be a hangout for the rich and famous,” Colding said. “That’s what you’ll be soon. Rich and famous.”

  Jian sighed as she crawled onto the mattress, marveling at the softness of the thick down comforter. She laid her head on the pillow. Colding pulled the comforter up around her shoulders.

  She looked up at Colding. “You like Sara, don’t you?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it.

  “Mister Colding, she is very nice. You should date her.”

  “But I can’t date, Jian. I mean, my wife died only …” His voice trailed off.

  “Over three years ago,” Jian said, finishing his sentence for him. “That’s a long time, Mister Colding.”

  “Three years,” Colding said quietly, as if trying the words on for size.

  “You go see Sara right now. You go to her room, talk.”

  She waved him away and was already asleep before he made it out the door.

  NOVEMBER 9: THIS IS MY WEAPON, THIS IS MY GUN

  A KNOCK AT her door. Sara’s pulse quickened. Maybe it was P. J. Peej. Come to give her a proper apology. She wanted to hate him, but riding with him in the Hummer had been a mistake. It made her remember why she’d wanted him in the first place, two years ago.

  A glance at the clock showed 11:15 P.M. She quickly checked herself in the room’s full-length mirror. According to Stephanie, Marilyn had been a frequent visitor to Black Manitou, always stayed in Room 17 and had used this very mirror many times. But Marilyn probably hadn’t had bags under her eyes, or worn a rumpled flight suit or been all dirty and sweaty from a long flight.

  What did it matter? Sara wasn’t going to sleep with Colding. She could control her hormones. Colding was a user, and that was that. She wasn’t interested in his brown eyes. Or the way he kissed.

  Knock it off, idiot. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, go fuck yourself.

  She took a deep breath, then walked to the door and opened it … to see the leering face of Andy Crosthwaite.

  “Hiya, toots. Still wanna confiscate my gun?”

  Sara felt a combination of revulsion and disappointment.

  “Andy, it’s time for bed.”

  “Exactly,” he said, and started to slide through the half-open door.

  Sara Purinam hadn’t risen to the top of a man’s world without learning a thing or three. She blocked the door with her body. The motion brought their two bodies to
gether, so close they could have kissed. Andy’s leering smile widened.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

  “Last warning, Andy. You should walk away.”

  He laughed in her face.

  Sara brought her knee up fast, catching Andy square in the nuts. She could have done it much harder, but she only wanted to stun him a little, not put him in the infirmary. He let out a little whuff and half doubled over. She put a hand on his head and pushed. He stumbled back two steps, enough for her to shut the door and lock it.

  She peeked through the peephole. Andy stared at the door. He wasn’t leering anymore. Now he looked like someone who might bomb a government building for shits and giggles. Even through a locked door, Sara felt a small flutter of fear.

  Then Andy stood and smiled. He knew she was looking. He turned and walked down the hallway, right hand still on his testicles.

  NOVEMBER 9: BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL

  Implantation +0 Days

  AS THE GENADA staff slept, the experimental creatures moved to the next stage. Inside each of the fifty cows, the implanted blastocysts had floated through the void of the uterus until they brushed softly against the uterine wall.

  At the contact point, cells rapidly changed into trophoblasts. The specialized trophoblast cells divided, penetrating the uterine wall, almost like anchors diving into the soft seafloor. The process was common to all mammals—except no mammal, not even the smallest mouse, went through the process that fast. Trophoblasts linked up with the cow’s cells to begin creation of the placenta, and also spread around the rest of the blastocyst to create the amniotic sac, a membrane that would surround the embryos and contain a fluid to protect its contents from shocks and bumps.

  Less than three hours after that delicate landing, another set of cells distanced itself from the trophoblast. This set of cells, the embryoblast, would become the ancestor itself. When the embryoblast separated, a piece of Jian’s coding caused it to cleave in half. Inside the amniotic sacs, halves quickly started developing into individuals.