Hellbound Hearts

by Paul Kane

  “I’m worried. I’m not sure we should keep doing this,” Dan the geek announced. “Something’s not right.” Above them the fluorescent lights blinked, and the vents hissed.

  “I hired you to do this. It’s your job,” Absalom answered.

  Dan was the head animal behaviorist. As Shadow DNA codes were cracked, it was his job to juxtapose them against discrete animal behaviors. So far, he’d discovered that those animals with thin dark matter base clouds were hostile, while those animals with thicker bases tended toward more rational thought.

  Last month, Absalom’s team had finally cracked the chimp code. It made an elegant picture: a double helix surrounded by a spinning cloud of nucleic acid strands thin as cobwebs. On the computer screen, it looked a little like a sandstorm. Not long after Dan began mapping the cloud, and tacking it against these animals’ souls, the chimps had begun to act strangely. Cannibalism. Self-mutilation. Devouring their own offspring when not fed on time.

  “You’re almost done, aren’t you?” Absalom asked.

  Dan wiped his eyes. Tears of indignant rage. “It’s hurting them. It’ll hurt us, too. You need to shut the project down.”

  Absalom took a breath, stared at Dan, hard. Mireille, holding that fat stomach, had voiced the same concern. Anecdotal evidence. Random coincidence. Bad press. Just as easily, it was Stanford’s black hole making the animals nervous, or the radiation from that spill in Alaska.

  He’d put his heart into this project. Sacrificed his wife for it. Fired his closest friend, who’d leaked the animal mania results to the press. He’d given up his health. His eyes were 40/40, and he got so dizzy from all the numbers spinning in his head that when he was alone, he talked to himself. He wasn’t about to stop now, when he was so close. If this thing worked out like he hoped, in another couple of years, he’d have a new body. A new life. A whole new Mireille, if he wanted.

  “Pack your desk,” Absalom said.

  Dan gasped, and began to wail. The sight was ridiculous. “Don’t be a pussy,” Absalom spat, then headed for his lab, his stride fast and furious.

  Coffee was waiting for him at the lab. Black with three sugars, just how he liked it. His desk was perched a few steps above the thirty-man workstation like a throne. Below, the world’s top statisticians and geneticists typed madly, calloused fingers click-clacking. Their faces glowed green from the reflected lights of their computer screens.

  He sighed. Sipped his coffee. At least here, he was happy. He belonged. In truth, he never should have married Mireille. He wasn’t the marrying kind. He’d never been home for dinner, or taken her out for a night on the town. No honeymoon. Then again, that’s no reason to leave in the middle of the night, and steal the Porsche and jewelry. At eight months along, she must have greased herself with Crisco to fit behind that wheel.

  Clack-clack, typing away. The sound was like music. On the large console, percent complete figures ran for each individual sequence. Everybody except Phil was ahead of schedule.

  Absalom’s heart warmed. He picked up the phone and dialed. A mistake, surely. The rash behavior of women. He’d give her another chance. She worked one building away, in public relations. They’d met last year, when he’d discovered the first evidence of Shadow DNA in the brown rat. She’d composed the press release, and coached his staff on how to handle reporters. As soon as the story broke, Winchester was swarmed with media. Stanford, MIT, and every nickel-and-dime pharmaceutical corporation in the country tried to reproduce his team’s findings. None of them succeeded, and so long as the federal order to reveal their methods remained pending in court, they never would. Stanford had screwed up the most egregiously by toying with dark matter electrons. A black hole swallowed their entire astrophysics lab, and now everybody was pointing fingers. Absalom’s photo had been on the cover of the New York Times with the caption “Hero or Traitor?” Through it all, Mireille had been his rock.

  Then again, last week her ex-boyfriend had visited from Boston. His junk-heap Plymouth had been parked in the driveway like it belonged there.

  After the third ring, Mireille’s voice mail picked up. “This is Mireille Vitols. I no longer work at Servitus. Please direct your call to reception.”

  So she’d given notice. She’d planned this. He clenched his fist and imagined her skin peeling from her bones. Even last night, a hot dinner had been waiting for him in the oven, his suits dry-cleaned and filed in his closet like charts. The sneak.

  He hung up the phone just as Phil from the cubicle in the back row stood. “This is suspicious,” Phil said. Phil was convinced that everything was suspicious; he had a severe case of paranoid schizophrenia. A lot of the crazies were good at math.

  Absalom looked at the bottom of his empty cup. “Somebody get me more,” he called, then descended the steps like a king and entered the lab. The series on Phil’s screen wouldn’t stop running, even though there were only 250 million base pairs to quantify—they’d isolated the distinct genes that coded for suppressed memories. But the screen registered 511 million base pairs. It was at 302 million and counting. Adenosine-Thymine, Guyanine-Cytosine: AAAAGGGCCCAAAGT. Like souls possessed, the screen was a series of letters and statistics, running fast as blurs.

  “It’s not looping back from the beginning, is it? What’s it sequencing?” Absalom asked. As he watched, the screen blinked. He thought of Mireille, and the first time he’d reached across her desk and touched her. The kid couldn’t be his. The ex-boyfriend, the kid at the 7-Eleven, the guy at the car wash. Any of them. All of them. He’d seen how they looked at her. He should have fucked her up the ass like he’d always wanted. He should have kicked her in the gut the second she’d shown him that pink stick.

  “I think we found it,” Phil said.

  Absalom took a deep breath. Human Shadow DNA. Yeah, maybe.

  “Run a diagnostic,” Absalom said.

  Just then the lights flickered. He looked around. Suddenly, every interface in the thirty-person lab looked like Phil’s. Sequences fast as runaway trains. Dizzying. Overwhelming. In his mind, Mireille. Then, just as quickly, all the screens went dead.

  Corinna brought him his coffee, then called maintenance. The twenty-person squad ran their diagnostics. Four hours later, the computers were still dark. A virus, the techs agreed. They found an e-mail opened by Absalom’s most recent hire. Its sender was on the “do not trust” list: ExxonMobil. Absalom fired him on the spot. To his credit, unlike Dan, he didn’t cry.

  At five o’clock, Absalom sent everybody home. At eight, the techs left to see if they could trace the root of the virus to the server in the basement, while Absalom worked off his personal computer, which wasn’t connected to the network. Around nine that night, the screens blinked back on. All ran the same code, then blinked off again. He snatched what he could from their memories, then plotted the data on his personal computer.

  The series was more than halfway to completion: 392 million. The plot made a picture that spun and grew: a double helix with small fishing-line filaments that dangled from its phosphate sugars. He zeroed in on the filaments and saw that the letters were all wrong. Full of U’s—RNA, not DNA. And another letter, unknown nucleotide Z.

  His heart caught in his chest, like love at first sight. What was this?

  Then his screen blinked, and he remembered the Peeping Tom that had scared the crap out of him growing up. The guy was arrested for exposing himself in a movie theater, but before that he used to troll the neighborhood, peeking through windows. He waved at Absalom now, like he’d waved at him through his childhood window thirty years ago as Absalom had prepared for bed, naked and climbing into plaid pajama pants. He smiled, only his skin was scored with fishhooks. The lights flickered. His face appeared on every screen. The laptop crashed. Everything went dark.

  Absalom took a jagged breath. What the hell? And then he understood, sneaky Exxon bastards, the virus was airborne.

  Back at the house, a message was waiting on the wall screen television. She looke
d great. Her blonde hair was thicker and wavier than ever, and her cheeks bright as new apples. In the image, she held her engorged stomach, and he imagined that it was dead in her womb.

  “It’s me. I thought I should let you know I’m okay,” she said. “I just think this is best. I’ll call again soon, when I figure out what to do next.” The overhead lightbulb popped and went out. He remembered the double helix, its flagella swimming.

  He turned on the lamp, and for an instant, he really did see her on fire, the child inside her boiling. She didn’t act like he’d expected. She screamed, while beside her, the Peeping Tom rubbed himself raw.

  Then the image righted itself. “I know you’re taking this badly, but please remember that I love you. It’s just, how can you argue with someone who’s never wrong?” she asked as she signed off.

  “Considerate,” he said to the screen, then smashed the damn thing into rubber and silicone bits. He didn’t sleep that night. Instead he researched. For inspiration, he took the fetus down from the fridge and taped it to his chest.

  On his drive to work the next morning, the dipshit on NPR was still talking about the black hole. The whole of Southern California had been evacuated, except for the Hispanics, because there weren’t enough buses. Dipshit’s special guest, a mathematician from MIT, babbled about how playing God opens doors that ought to stay closed. “Honestly, the numbers don’t add up,” he said. “I know this is going to sound strange, but I don’t think this has to do with traditional dark matter. I’m starting to think it’s some kind of symbiotic life-form attached to human DNA that Servitus discovered. And not a peaceful life-form, either.”

  Absalom rolled his eyes. Sure, yeah. Academia screwed up so badly they were going to have to drop an H-bomb, but somehow it was all corporate America’s fault. Funny thing MIT hadn’t announced these suspicions a month ago, when the Fed had been doling out grants.

  “Dark matter, Shadow genes—they’re all connected,” the expert said. “And I guess I’m a Johnny-come-lately, but I think we should have left them alone. I’d advocate that the federal government shut it down. Servitus, the universities, everything. At least until we know more.”

  Absalom autodialed the radio station at the red light between State and Servitus streets. A yellow school bus in front of him opened its doors and picked up a pile of well-adjusted brats. On the other line, an intern with a high-pitched voice asked, “What’s the nature of your call?”

  He was about explain that he worked at Servitus, and nobody here had decimated the state of California. Instead he said, “My wife left me. I think she was a corporate spy. Got my codes and sent a virus through the system. Or maybe she was a Jesus freak. The kid’s not even mine. I’ve been betrayed too many times in my life. I deserve respect. This time I’ll get her back. This time I’m going to kill her.”

  The intern cleared his throat. The school bus moved on. Absalom turned right and entered the complex, where protesters burned the effigy of a fetus. “Save the future!” they chanted.

  “Have you ever had sex?” Absalom asked. He winced as he said it.

  “Uhhh,” the intern said.

  “Yeah. I thought so, you snot-nose fuck. Why am I talking to you?” He hung up.

  At the office, the virus had spread. Not even the coffee machine worked. He spooned grounds into warm water, then swirled them in his mouth. They got the computers back online, but not much had changed. Numbers ran. More tails off helixes, more unexplained codes. “I think God called me last night,” Phil said. “It was very suspicious.”

  Corinna showed up with weeping sores across her skin. “I did it to myself,” she said with puzzlement. “Why do you think I went and wasted perfectly good cigarettes?”

  Behind them, Absalom saw the Peeping Tom light his wife on fire. Did his staff see, too? The multitailed helix swam across the room. It had lost its beauty, and now seemed like a rough beast.

  Maintenance couldn’t get the system operational. Absalom sent everybody home. Plotted the new data to his personal computer. There were 412 million base pairs and counting. This time, the tails surrounding the helix coalesced into an oval like the outline of a face.

  He jabbed his index finger against the screen. “Well, fuck you, too,” he said, then picked up the phone to call Mireille just as the lights flickered, and the line went dead. All the power went out.

  Back at the house, he continued his research. Fetus taped to his chest, he boiled the ingredients over a stove.

  There was another message from Mireille. She was holding her stomach like it hurt. Behind her was a Sears photo print of flowers, and brown wallpaper. Some cheap hotel, he guessed. “My mom lived in LA,” she said. She was frowning, like it was his fault they’d finally set off the nuke. He was reminded of Miss Teschmacher from that Superman movie, who’d also been a dingbat.

  On the drive to the lab the next day, downtown Winchester was in flames. Down low they were blue, then orange, then red. Like the core of the earth was leaking. The NPR dipshit was interviewing a psychic. “Yes, that’s right, the traditional definition of Hell is chaos. A place where logic doesn’t reign. Ask yourself, why is the nature of man so impossible to determine? Why is the universe an unlockable mystery? Dark matter. Shadow DNA. The invisible hands that guide us. We tried to harness that potential, and in doing so, offended God.”

  “So you’re saying we’ve somehow opened a door to Hell?” Dipshit asked.

  “Look around you. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I don’t believe in Hell.”

  “Finally. The man says something smart,” Absalom piped in.

  “That’s fine,” the psychic answered. “Hell persists without your belief. We humans have a darker side, and we’ve unleashed it with Shadow DNA. We are our own rough beasts of Bethlehem, born at last.”

  Next to him in the passenger seat, Absalom’s Peeping Tom waved. The fetus wailed. His college mentor, who’d stolen his research and published it under his own name, hitchhiked by the side of the road, a cleaver wedged deeply into his skull. He’d perfected the art; a perfect thumbs-up.

  This time, no intern answered the line at the station. Just Dipshit. “What is it, caller?”

  “I’m the head scientist at Servitus. We haven’t cracked the code yet for human DNA. Sorry to break it to you.” He thought about the tails. Spindly filaments like those from jellyfish. Perhaps they stung.

  “Well, do you have a response to that?” Dipshit asked the psychic.

  “I don’t think you have any idea what you’re doing, or what you’ve done,” the psychic said.

  Absalom shook his head, disgusted. So did his mentor. At least on this, they’d found common ground. “It is the purview of all great men to build or destroy at their discretion. Evolution happens in leaps, not increments, and the commoners like you have nothing to do with it.”

  “You’re a monster,” the psychic answered.

  “Trenchant,” Absalom answered. “You should carry a sandwich board and protest at my office like the rest of the crazies.” Then he hung up.

  Security was missing at the complex. George and Juan had abandoned their posts. Along the halls, chimps and dogs roamed. Most were bloodied from battle, dragging themselves by their paws. Dan had probably set them loose, like an imbecile.

  In the lab, green-lit screens blazed, all running the same permutations. There were 446 million base pairs out of 511, and counting. What would happen when the sequence finished and the puzzle was solved? He diagrammed the data to a picture again. The helix was buried underneath an oval face and taloned arms shaped like hooks. It reached out through the computer and sliced him.

  He thought he was dreaming when Mireille showed up and bandaged the wound, then wept into the crook of his neck. “It’s ending, I think. And it’s your fault. So why are you the only person I want to be with?” she asked.

  Yes, he’d been certain he was dreaming. That’s why he bound and gagged her. Dragged her to the trunk and shoved her inside, even th
ough, with that belly, he’d had to press down hard to get her to fit. Drove home in the dark. Pulled her out, pinched her nose, made her drink the vitamin C and caffeine brew he’d stewed.

  Peeping Tom watched. He was missing an eye now, and his mouth was sewn shut. The room seemed to blink. Slants of light played chiaroscuro across the walls. The smell was fetid. Mireille surprised him: she screamed.

  He helped her to the couch. Spread her legs while she moaned. The sonogram was taped to his chest underneath his suit, and his sweat broke it in two. Her labor took seven hours. The child was large and she bled. She didn’t curse him like he’d expected. Instead she cried and clung to the dead thing as she, too, took her last breath and expired.

  He didn’t wash the blood from his hands the next morning before leaving for work. Dipshit wasn’t on NPR, either. Just dead air. The laser eye-reader didn’t work, and none of the guards were around, so he crashed the gate.

  In the lab, the numbers were gaining: 508 million. In another hour or so, the sequence would be done. Dark matter, of course. So, yes, this was Shadow DNA. The end of the world, too. He took some consolation in the fact that at least he’d been the author of this thing, and not its victim.

  He plotted the data to a picture. It was a human body. Grotesque and sneering. The tails were tight skin that ended in hooks. Something dripped onto his desk. He realized his nose was bleeding.

  Back home. Drove there fast. Found her corpse. The baby’s too. Not much later, a hole opened in the sky, and he knew the sequence had finished.

  His Peeping Tom grinned like a bogeyman, and he remembered now that his father had blamed him for that visit thirty years ago. You and your books. Of course he came to this house, looking.

  The baby crawled at his knees, dragging its placenta.