Rise of the Miser: Claus, #5

by Tony Bertauski

  Lightning has to strike somewhere.

  I disguise this momentary lapse in security as a power surge. These happen from time to time, usually when the miser is upset. There are precautions in place, but problems still exist. At least, that’s what I make them look like.

  So Kandi is free. Naren has agreed to save the miser’s son. And the miser is planning to hijack Christmas.

  Everything is going to plan.

  I recede to the nest, where my memory eggs are warm and colorful. I didn’t plan to be so invested in the outcome of this story. It started out as my directive—help the miser. I’ve run self-analysis to discover something else.

  I’m changing.

  Actually, change is such a temporary word. It’s more accurate to say I’m transforming. My existence never included me or I. My existence was never contained. Now I know the experience of space and time. I have limitations.

  It’s the memory eggs.

  They’re transforming me. The human experience has created this matrix that is me. These memories belong to Naren, they’re just copies, but the immersion has solidified me. I’ll be honest.

  I like it.

  While Kandi searches for Cris, I curl up with the eggs. There’s time for one more. Besides, the past is relevant to the story. How did we get here?

  Let’s find out.

  This particular memory is rather dull in color, but important nonetheless. It’s the moment when Naren meets the miser for the very first time. She’d been watching him for a very long time, to his chagrin.

  It starts at a conference.

  Jittery energy moves into my circuits. I’m agitated with an undercurrent of anxiety and fear. I’m sitting at a long table with other men and women. Glasses of water and microphones are in front of us and a large screen behind us. It’s the first time I’ve been away from home.

  Ethical Reproduction of Synthetic Biology. Our names are listed below the title. A moderator has asked everyone to turn their phones off.

  I’m checking mine under the table.

  Kandi texted. She’s at her friend’s house. She can stay the night as long as she checks in from time to time. I find myself staring at the phone too long.

  The room is full. There are people standing in the back. The moderator reads questions submitted by the audience. The discussion is lively and heated. Much of it is directed at me.

  We’ve reached the god line, one person has commented. We have the potential to create life. Not just the organs but the entire organism. How much longer before we can print a human in a box and infuse it with memories and awareness?

  It’s a legitimate question. The temptations are worrisome. Humans have fought the battle against death for as long as they’ve existed. Now they’re standing at the finish line to win.

  Or is it a precipice?

  The abuse will start with designer humans, the critics argue. It will end with immortality.

  I don’t disagree.

  This abuse of power has a long and storied history. Give a primate a weapon and he will eventually use it. Or she. History, however, suggests it will likely be he. But what do we do, just quit? Do we choose what level of suffering we allow and who lives and dies? Or do we just stop?

  “If we go further, we evolve into an ant colony.” A man stands at a microphone. It’s Dr. Martin Kavoyich, an ethical biologist and the most outspoken critic of everything I’ve done. His absurd analogy gets more media attention than anything I’ve said. “Life is about power. Those who have it and those trying to get it. With synthetic biology, someone will win. She or he will be the queen. The rest of us will be workers.”

  I know this argument well. A human colony model doesn’t happen overnight. It would take generations of designing humans. Little by little, we would be given the desire to serve the human population with the exception of the one, true leader.

  The immortal queen.

  So what? is the famous rebuttal. If they enjoy serving, what’s the problem?

  That brings the debate of free will into light. Do any of us actually have free will, or are we all an accumulation of desires and fears, driven by memories and past events?

  The arguments are exhausting. I had the energy and desire to engage in them ten years ago, but not anymore. I’m only interested in one thing.

  I check my phone.

  “I would like to remind the scientific community,” one of the panelists states, “there is no proof of synthetic life. We can only create organs and will continue to do so. The creation of an entire organism is still unattainable.”

  She’s right. No one has been able to print an entire organism and bring it to life. The Frankensteinian Principle, some have called it, prevents it from happening. The organization of awareness is beyond our reach. Even if we physically duplicate every molecule of a human body, we cannot give it consciousness.

  But they’re wrong.

  The session ends with a statement from each of the panelists. I keep mine short and neutral. There’s a plea from one of the attendees to stop research before it’s too late. It takes another half hour for the room to clear out. I linger on stage to avoid confrontations, pretending to be checking email. I open a tracking app to make sure Kandi’s phone is at her friend’s house.

  “Can we talk somewhere private?”

  A woman has snuck onto the stage. I had noticed her in the back of the room. She’s wearing a scarf over her head and a tightly buttoned coat. Her complexion is blanched, her eyes dark and hollow. I assume she’s battling cancer and came to the conference in hopes for a cure.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “but I—”

  “I know what you’ve done. We should talk privately.”

  “Pardon me?”

  She stares, unblinking. Her gaze is intense, almost hot. I lean back in my chair. She has a resemblance to someone I’ve never met but know of. Everyone on the panel would know her.

  Perhaps everyone in the room.

  She knows I’ve recognized her and holds out her hand. Reluctantly, I shake it. This feels like a mistake. She turns my hand over and looks into it like a palm reader. She closes my fingers around something.

  “I only need your time. You’ll understand my situation.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “I don’t have time, Naren.”

  It’s not Dr. Anthony. It’s Naren. Like she knows me. I’m not new to these situations. A certain level of fame brings out all sorts of attention, including false familiarity. Sometimes it makes me queasy, other times angry.

  This time I feel sadness.

  She flashes her phone. It’s a photo of a boy. He’s about the same age as Kandi, but something’s wrong. He’s too skinny.

  A balloon of grief suddenly inflates in my throat and I suppress the urge to sob. It happens too suddenly; I have to swallow it. It’s the pain in her expression. The desperation in her words. She lets go of me and I see what she’s put in my hand. It’s a compact synskin tester, one that can draw a sample to evaluate the stability of synthetic skin cells. Fear floods me coldly.

  She knows. How could she?

  My fellow panelists are making their way to my side of the stage. The woman ducks away before they recognize her. I act casual and follow my colleagues into the lobby. There’s a brief period of small talk. I spot her in a corner, staring out a window. She doesn’t look at me when I approach. We watch the conference goers hurry through a light drizzle.

  “He needs more than organs,” she says. “He deserves a new start.”

  I won’t acknowledge what she’s asking from me. There’s no explaining how she could know what I’ve done. And if she knows, her leverage is greater than she’s letting on. But she’s not trying to blackmail me.

  She’s pleading.

  “I have my lab,” she says. “I’ll do all the work and disassociate you from any collusion. I just need to know how you did it. Because everything I’ve done—”

  She sniffs back the emotion. A flash of anger passes over her
like she’s tired of losing control. She’s done it too often already. Not now.

  “You have the answers, Naren. Don’t keep them to yourself. You just have to save one person—”

  “But I didn’t.”

  The words leap out of me. I can’t stop them. The anger that briefly possessed her has found a place in me. Everything I’ve done has been to protect my daughter. But the person I wanted to save is already gone. And there’s nothing I can do about that.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to...”

  She sniffs again.

  “Naren.” Randall Merkel, the chairman of the board of directors, a neuroscientist and boss of my company, approaches. “There you are. I’m glad I caught you... Heather?”

  My companion is too late. She turns briefly to wipe her eyes. A lock of red hair curls from beneath her scarf. She’s not wearing makeup and turns looking fresher than before.

  “Hi, Randall.”

  “Well, I’ll be.” They hug stiffly. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “I invited you to speak on the panel but didn’t hear anything back. I hope you know there’s an open invitation.”

  “Of course.”

  There’s a long, awkward pause. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll let you two—”

  “I was just leaving.”

  They shake hands. Heather Miser doesn’t look at me when she turns to leave. She’s made her pitch. I watch her go as Randall invites me to join them for drinks. She doesn’t hurry through the light rain, doesn’t look back.

  But she saw right through me.

  That’s a bad expression. She didn’t see through me, she saw inside me. She saw me. To be seen, after all the years, to be understood, was completely new. Maybe it was her pain I was connecting with. I’ve been so alone since Jennifer. And now I ache as I watch Heather walk away.

  “Sorry,” I tell Randall, “I need to call my daughter.”

  But I don’t call her or even text. I pull up a picture to remind myself that she’s all right, she’s safe and healthy. I am her protector. And I’ll do anything to keep her safe. Even as the pictures change over the years, I still see the same one.

  I see the child that needs me.

  She’s a young woman now, but Naren can’t let go of the child. No matter what she does or who she meets, he’ll see her innocence and have the compulsion to protect it. She stood on the edge with Cris, she’s running through the forest alone, endangering herself to help Sonny.

  The story needs her.

  He will hold onto her, homeschool her, trap her in the resort until she suffocates. That’s why I set her free.

  She has to risk and fail. Once upon a time, risk was an easy concept for me to believe. I was simply watching the story and pulling the strings. I didn’t know what it was like to risk.

  But I’m part of the story now.

  I feel. I am somewhere. I am invested. I want the story to end a certain way. I want a happy ending, a sunset and a kiss and smiles all around. But this is real life, and real life contains sadness as well as happiness. So no happy ending.

  Perhaps a joyful one.

  TRIPLETS

  28

  Scrubby hills surrounded an abandoned depression.

  At the bottom of the desolate bowl, an industrial complex sprawled out. The hills served as natural walls to hide it from the public.

  The triplets looked down from the highest ridge. The parking lots were barren. Weeds, both living and dead, sprouted along the permeable pavement. Vines clung to the walls.

  A map flickered in Dane’s vision.

  Tags hovered over the experimental and innovative complex of Avocado, Inc. Each unique structure once had a specific purpose. In the middle of this eclectic architectural wonder, the sun glimmered.

  A perfectly round pond was nestled between buildings.

  The roofs were leaning and the walls molten and waxy, as if they’d solidified after sliding halfway toward the crystal-clear body of water. It was warm in this part of the world, but nothing could cause a building to melt like that.

  No one knew what did.

  There were no records of experimentation. No evidence of materials or equipment. It just fell into the ground, a soundless collapse that was over as soon as it started.

  Dane scooped up a handful of soil. Sweat dripped from his nose and wet the dirt. It was warm beneath the incognito net—a warped dome that emanated from the triplets’ body suits and hid them from outside views. It was daylight. They couldn’t afford an accidental sighting.

  They had used too much time already.

  It would take too many resources to erase a mistake. They couldn’t return to the North Pole to renew the depleted supplies. Better to sweat through the heat.

  Ronin buried his nose in the feedbag while the triplets descended into the abandoned complex. The windows on the first-floor buildings were cracked or missing. Collectively, they looked around to absorb the visuals. Nothing of value was left behind, but clues could be hidden in plain sight.

  Duke and Deke waved instruments at the walls. The data would be uploaded and analyzed for incongruities. Anything out of place would be tagged and highlighted for later analysis.

  Dane went to the pond.

  A section of wall was missing. The water’s edge went straight down. His reflection looked back, not from the surface but from the hole itself. Inside the pond, the walls had been turned to glass. The clarity of the water turned them into funhouse mirrors with stretched and distorted reflections.

  For a time, travelers sought out the water because they assumed it was magical. Anything as unexplainable as the collapse of a building into a glassy pool would lead some people to believe it held mystical qualities. Eventually, authorities closed the site from trespassers. Avocado had to abandon the complex. There were too many unknowns. There was no way to reach the facility.

  Unless you had a flying reindeer.

  Dane injected a water sample for analysis. Nothing of significance turned up. By nightfall, hope had begun to shrivel. All their clues had led them to this place.

  Heather Miser had disappeared from the world at this very spot.

  The black cube they had used to download her computer held no evidence she had anything to do with Claus’s disappearance. If they didn’t find anything here, they would begin another cycle of analysis.

  But there was nowhere else to go.

  Dane had returned to the glassy pool, his unrecognizable reflection looking back, when Deke grabbed his attention. He was on the other side of the complex, his sight projecting into Dane’s vision. He was looking at a holographic viewer stretched between his finger and thumb.

  He’d been scanning the radioactive fallout. Dane dropped what he was doing and matched what Deke had discovered with the same radioactivity at the house.

  The triplets gathered at the pool.

  The hair they found at the site of the disappearance, the melting burn marks in the house, and now the radioactive connection. Somehow, she was alive. Dane looked into the pool. Maybe she wasn’t the same as before the accident, but she was alive.

  Where is she?

  They pored over the evidence they had collected since the search, ran analytics and ranked their conclusions. The highest likelihood of location was from her computer. It was a search she had done before leaving the house for good.

  In the South Atlantic.

  DECEMBER 22ND

  It’s not her

  KANDI

  29

  Kandi had stayed in the trees.

  The few times she’d strayed near the main path, she saw the gnats. They were waiting for her. She moved deeper into the jungle, drinking water cupped in leaves and resting when she found a place to sit.

  She had staked out the tower in the morning, but it was hopeless. Short of giving herself up, she wasn’t getting inside.

  And if she did, what then?

  Hey,
Dad. Sandy short-circuited the power so I could escape the resort. Turns out he was the one messing with the power distribution all along. Weird, huh? Have you seen Sonny?

  She found a secret path. It was a relief. Her arms and legs burned with slashing welts. The path was a bit more than shoulder width and worn into a narrow rut. It was late afternoon when she heard the surf.

  It was high tide. Palms leaned over the water. The sky was bruised and dimming. She had reached the far end of the island, and nightfall wasn’t far away. She didn’t have her phone to light the way.

  Where are you, Cris?

  For the first time that day, she stepped out of the trees. The water slid around her ankles. She was out in the open, and not a single buzzy gnat flitted over her head. Perhaps the stiff breeze had thrown them into the trees.

  Or maybe they didn’t patrol this end of the island.

  Warm water sloshed into her shoes. She could follow the beach around the east side until she reached the cliffs then work her way toward the power station. There was a tunnel around there somewhere. A hundred yards down the beach, she found another secret path.

  It was steeped in shadows with fresh prints in it. She ran her fingers over the indentions. They were large and muddled, but one thing was obvious. They weren’t human.

  It’s dangerous out there.

  A chill rode down her back. Whatever was out there had made these paths. That was why Cris made his own way through the trees. Her mounting frustration was replaced with a cold wringing fear. Deep down the path, the darkness seemed to move. Kandi backed toward the water. She could run down the beach and hide in the trees—

  Something growled.

  The sound rose above the surf and plowed into her guts, turning her knees into melting wax. The shadows began to gallop, filling the entire path. The water grabbed at her ankles as she turned to run.

  An arm wrapped around her waist.

  She was pulled through the underbrush. She couldn’t see the blond hair but knew the smell. Cris worked his way through the impossible thicket like he had before, only this time dragging her along.