by Ted Kosmatka
“Such as?”
“Inexplicable,” Baskov said. “Disquieting. Disturbing.”
Silas nodded. “I’d say those fit pretty well.”
“None of those are words the commission likes to hear in association with its investment in this project.”
“Nor would I.”
“Is it healthy?”
“Vigorously,” Silas said.
“That’s a good sign.”
“For now.”
“Do you foresee any problems, any reason why it may not be able to compete?”
“All I do see are problems. As to whether or not it can compete, I have no idea. We’re going to have to get the blood results back before we can even speculate if it’s going to survive the week.”
“Why is that?”
“I can’t even begin to guess what sort of immunity haplotype it might have. A common cold might kill it.”
“A common cold? That’s rather unlikely, isn’t it?”
“Sir, I have no way of knowing whether it’s likely or not.”
“You’ve never had a problem with disease susceptibility before.”
“Exactly. I’ve also never had a problem accessing the template protocols.” Silas let a challenge slip through the cracks of his expression.
Baskov noticed it in an instant and turned the tables. “I sense a climate of animosity here,” he said, as a smile spread across the lower portion of his face. His voice rose a subtle, questioning octave. “Do you have a problem with me, Dr. Williams?”
The directness of the question took Silas aback. He toyed with the idea of meeting it head-on, but then decided to change tacks slightly. His job as program head was nearly as much a political appointment as it was a scientific one, and although he hated that aspect of the job, he’d learned a few things about diplomacy during his years in the position. Meeting something like the commission head-on was a good way to get a broken head.
“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Baskov,” Silas said. “I’ve overseen the Helix arm of Olympic Development for twelve years. In that time, how many gold medals has the United States brought home in the gladiator competition?”
“Three,” Baskov said. His brows furrowed. He wasn’t a man used to answering questions.
“Three; that’s right. Three games, three wins. They were my designs that brought home those medals. Designs, not just the cytological grunt work. Your commission fought against me this time. I want to know why.” That question had burned in his gut for all the months he’d watched the surrogate’s distended belly grow.
Baskov sighed. “This event is different from the others; I shouldn’t have to tell you that. There are factors involved that you aren’t aware of.”
“Make me aware, then.”
“Most of the other Olympic events haven’t changed much in the last hundred years. The marathon is still twenty-six miles, and will still be twenty-six miles when you and I are long dead. But the gladiator event is about change.”
“I thought it was about winning.”
“That above all. But it’s about showcasing a country’s technological advancement. We have to use the newest, best tools at our disposal. It’s not like the hundred-yard dash, where you take the fastest guy you happen to have, push him onto the track, and hope for the best.”
“I doubt Olympic running coaches would appreciate that oversimplification.”
“I doubt I give a damn what they would or wouldn’t appreciate. The gladiator event is more than a test of simple foot speed.”
“And it’s more than some VR sim,” Silas snapped back.
“Yes, it is. But that doesn’t change the fact that Chandler’s computer is capable of design specs that you can’t touch. There’s only one rule in this event: no human DNA. That’s it. That leaves a hell of a lot of room to play, and we weren’t taking advantage of it. Ours was a business decision, nothing more. Nothing less. It wasn’t meant as a reflection on you.”
“If it were a reflection on me, then I could understand it. But my designs have a history of success to back them up. We won. We’ve always won.”
“And the endorsements that go with it, I know. The commission is very thankful for that. You’re a huge part of why the United States has dominated the field. But it could have gone either way last time. You know that.”
Silas remained silent. He remembered the blood. He remembered the swing of guts in the sawdust. The U.S. gladiator had outlived its competitor by forty-seven seconds. The difference between gold and silver.
“I’m not sure that you fully appreciate the pressure that the program is under right now,” Baskov said. “We can’t afford to lose. While you’ve spent all your time sequestered away in your personal little laboratory retreat here, the rest of the program has had to exist in the real world. Or have you forgotten?”
“No.”
“I think you have. The gladiator event is a bloody business—that’s why it’s so popular and why it’s always under attack. The activists have a powerful lobby in Congress this time around, and they’re pushing for a new vote.”
“And they won’t get it.”
“No, they won’t. Not this time. But public opinion is an unpredictable thing. Success has buoyed it up till now, and the commission was informed that we must continue to be successful if the gladiator event is to remain part of the Olympics. We do not have any other option.”
Informed by whom? Silas wondered.
“This competition is not going to be as simple and straightforward as the last,” Baskov continued. “Our sources tell us that China’s contestant will be very formidable. Let’s just say that when we compared your designs to what we know we’ll be up against, your ideas came up lacking. You couldn’t have won with the codes you had in the scrollers.”
“How could you know—”
“You couldn’t have won,” Baskov interrupted. “Our decision wasn’t made lightly.”
Silas’s face drained of expression as he considered the man sitting before him. He wanted to grab him by the lapels, pull him off his feet, and shake him. He wanted to yell in his face, What have you done?
But he thought again of broken heads, and by slow degrees managed to put his anger in a place he could shut down. In controlled, clipped words, he said, “I understand. Perhaps I don’t have all the information, but I’m still program head. We still have problems that need to be dealt with.”
“I’ve heard. We’ve been aware of the problems. Your reports during the last several months didn’t fall on deaf ears.”
“Then why hasn’t the commission acted?”
“We just decided to wait and see what happened.”
“Would you like to see … what’s happened?”
“I was waiting for you to ask.”
THEY SHUFFLED slowly down the narrow corridor, with Silas consciously shortening his strides to accommodate Baskov’s hobbling gait. He wondered at the anticipation the older man must be feeling. Hell, he was feeling it, too, and he’d already seen the organism, inspected it, held it. The newborn was the most beautifully perfect thing Silas had ever seen.
Baskov broke the silence between them as they turned a corner. “The commission is very troubled by the description we received. It isn’t really humanoid, is it?”
“Maybe. Not really.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“When you see it, you’ll understand.”
“And what about the hands?”
“What about them?”
“Does it really have … well, hands? I mean … it doesn’t have paws or hooves or something like the others?”
Silas suppressed the urge to laugh. Let the cocky old son of a bitch sweat a little. “I’d have to call them hands. They aren’t like ours, but they’re hands.” His bitter humor abated somewhat. “The similarities are mostly superficial, though.”
“Are you going to have trouble proving no human DNA was used in the design?”
Silas looked down at the o
ld man. For a moment, he felt his temper rise again. He took a deep breath. With the competition less than a year away, it was a little late to be asking that question now. “Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” he said. “Chandler’s masterpiece didn’t provide us with any sort of explanation for the data in the scrollers, just raw code. I assumed that since you chose his design over mine, you would have some sort of idea what you were getting. You need to ask him. My reports are accurate, and if you read them, you—”
“We read them; we just weren’t sure if we could believe them.”
Silas mulled over several responses to the older man’s statement, but since most of them involved the end of his career and quite possibly his incarceration for battery, he decided to say nothing at all. For the first time, he considered the possibility that the head of the Olympic Commission might be utterly irrational in some aspects of his thinking. Power did that to men sometimes.
They stepped through a set of steel doors and followed the narrow hall around the corner. “I want to remind you that the sponsor dinner is still on for tomorrow night. I need you to be there,” Baskov said.
“I’ll send Dr. Nelson.”
“You’ll be there in person. We need to quell the rumors that have already begun to fly. Image is money in this business. The delegation will leave from the complex at six o’clock.”
Rumors?
They came to a second set of steel doors. A large yellow sign read:
ATTENTION
BADGED PERSONNEL ONLY
BEYOND THIS POINT
Silas carded them through, and Baskov stopped short, blinking against the white brightness of the nursery. A stout, flame-haired man sat against a console near the far wall. There were no windows, but a large glass chamber boxed in the center of the room.
“How’s it doing?” Silas asked the redhead.
“Just fine,” Keith answered. “Been sleeping like a baby for an hour now. Come to show off your little creation?”
“Not mine,” Silas said. “This is Chandler’s handiwork.”
They peered in. The crib was large, and behind the chromed bars, a loosely swaddled shape twisted and bobbed within a cocoon of pink blankets.
“Looks like it’s awake now,” Silas said.
“Probably hungry again,” Keith replied. “You wouldn’t believe how much it loves to eat.”
Silas checked the paper printout of the infant’s eating habits, then turned back to Baskov. “The chamber is a walk-in incubator. The system has autonomic control of everything from temperature to humidity to oxygen-sat levels.”
Baskov nodded, shifting his weight for a clearer view.
“Want to get a closer look?” Silas asked.
“Of course.”
They donned sterile masks and gowns, and stretched latex gloves over their hands. “Just a temporary precaution,” Silas said.
“For us, or it?”
“It.”
Baskov nodded. “Why are we calling it an ‘it,’ anyway? It’s male, right?”
“No, female by the external genitalia. Or lack thereof.”
With a soft hiss, the door to the inner chamber opened and they stepped through. The air was warmer, wetter. Silas could feel the heat of the lights on the bridge of his nose above the mask. He bent and reached his hands through the bars and into the crib. Baskov hovered just to his side. The covers peeled back from the writhing form.
Silas heard a sudden intake of air near his shoulder.
“My God” was all Baskov could manage.
The newborn was on its back, four stocky limbs pedaling the air. Once again, Silas struggled to wrap his mind around what he was seeing. There was nothing to compare it to, so his brain had to work from scratch, filling in all the pieces, seeing everything at once.
The newborn was hairless, and most of its skin was a deep, obsidian black, slightly reflective in the warm glare of the heat lamps, as though covered with a shiny coat of gloss. Only its hands and forearms were different. It was roughly the size of a three-year-old human toddler. Wide shoulders tapered into long, thick arms that now bunched and stretched toward the bars. Below the elbow, the skin color shifted to deep red. Its blood-colored hands clenched in the air, the needle tips of talons just beginning to erupt from the ends of the long, hooked fingers. The rear legs were raptor monstrosities, jointed in some complicated way, with splayed feet that corded with muscle and sinew just below the surface of its skin.
Two enormous gray eyes shone out of the brilliant blackness of its face and raked across the two men looking down. Silas could almost feel the weight of the alien gaze. The lower jaw was enormously wide and jutting, built for power. A grossly bossed cranial vault spread wide over the pulled-out face, capped by two soft semicircular flaps of ear cartilage.
It opened its mouth, mewling the same strange cry that Silas had heard the night before. Even the inside of its mouth was midnight black.
“This is beyond …” Baskov began.
“Yes, that’s a perfect way to describe it.”
Baskov began to reach a gloved hand toward the newborn but then apparently thought better of it. “This is beyond the reach of what I thought we were able to do,” he finished.
“It is. We cannot do this,” Silas said.
The two men locked eyes.
“How?” Baskov asked.
“You’re asking the wrong guy, remember? I’m the builder, not the designer.”
“Does it seem to be put together well? Are those legs supposed to look like that?”
“Well, everything is symmetrical on the exterior, so that’s a good sign. But you haven’t seen the really interesting thing yet.” Silas leaned through the bars and grabbed the newborn under the upper arms. It struggled, but he was able to flip it over onto its stomach.
“What are those?” Baskov whispered.
“We’re not totally sure, but the X-ray data indicate they’re probably immature wing structures of some sort.”
“Wings? Are you telling me this thing has wings?”
Silas shrugged his answer.
“They’re not functional, are they?”
“I don’t see how they could be. Flight is probably the single most difficult form of locomotion from a design standpoint, and this thing certainly doesn’t look like it was built along avian lines. The bones are huge, strong.”
“But why even try? There isn’t really room to fly in the arena.” Baskov bent closer. “And those big ears are a liability. The eyes, too.”
“Now you understand my frustration with your chosen designer. We need to talk to him.”
Baskov’s expression faded from wonder to irritation. “Chandler isn’t as easy to reach as he used to be.”
“Where is he?”
“Where isn’t the problem. He just isn’t easy to reach anymore.”
AFTER WALKING Baskov back to the lobby, Silas returned to the nursery and sent Keith home for the night. He stood alone at the side of the crib, silently watching the baby breathe. It was a baby. Big as a newborn calf but just as underdeveloped and fragile as any human newborn. He extended a hand through the bars and stroked the infant’s back. It lay on its tummy, legs drawn up, bottom stuck in the air.
It’s beautiful.
But then, almost all life is beautiful at this stage. Pure innocence combined with complete selfishness. Its only function was to take from those around it so that it could live and grow, while remaining completely unaware of the effort involved in meeting its needs.
Silas closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of the creature. He felt himself relax a little. His sister hinted once that she thought he’d become a geneticist to create something that was a part of him. She was wrong. That was why people have children.
He wanted to create something better than himself. Better than any man could be. Something a little closer to perfect. But he had always failed. His creations were monsters compared to this. They were just animal Frankensteins that acted out impulses society w
ouldn’t allow men to indulge in.
But he’d come close once. Teddy. Ursus theodorus had been loving, gentle, and even intelligent, after a fashion. That last quality had cost the first prototype its life. It had been too intelligent. Some people got nervous. The board of directors had had its say, and late one evening, he’d been forced to place the little creature on a table and inject it with enough animal tranquilizer to stop its breathing. He’d stood back with ice in his gut while his creation died.
The next series of Teddys were dumber and better suited the board, but it wasn’t the same for Silas. He’d lost his stomach for pet manufacture. When the position at the Olympic Commission became available, he’d jumped at it. If he was going to watch his successes die, he would know to expect it from the outset. No more surprises.
But this was a surprise.
But not my surprise. Not my baby this time.
Chandler was deranged. There was no doubting that. And this was his creation. Silas fought back a surge of begrudging admiration for the man. In all Silas’s years as a geneticist, he’d never even come close to developing a creature like the one that lay before him now.
He shoved the feelings to the side, letting the anger take its place. Chandler knew nothing about genetics. He knew nothing about life. All he knew was computers. And his computer had been the true creator, after all.
This perfect little life form that lay snoring on the other side of the bars had been created by an organized composite of wires, chips, and screens. Somehow, all this beauty, all this perfection, had come from a machine.
CHAPTER TWO
Evan Chandler leaned his significant mass against the wall near the window, picking sores into his face with absentminded fingers. The fluorescent lights hummed softly in the background, providing a subtle soundtrack to the visions in his head. His eyes focused inward on some distant dimly lit horizon. For Evan, that horizon had been growing ever darker over the last several months.
A sudden clap of thunder brought his consciousness swimming to the surface like some strange, stunted leviathan. With an expression approaching surprise, he looked out into the desolation of the early evening. Rain dribbled its way down the glass. God, he hated storms.
