by Peter Moore
“Caliban? Can I ask you a personal question?”
He turned back and looked down to me. “You can ask, but it don’t mean I’m gonna answer.”
“Okay, well, I’m wondering, do you remember anything about…before?”
“Before what?”
There was no nice way to phrase it. “Before you became, um, a Phaeton.”
Caliban’s little barrel chest swelled as he took a deep breath. “What, you don’t read the papers? Watch TV? Read books or nothin’? None of us got our memories from before. That’s what we get for messing with things we don’t know about. Ya ain’t heard the preachers saying how it’s our punishment for messin’ with nature? Or the governments say we should leave the big-time science to them, and this is what happens why you try do-it-yourself mutations or go to half-assed hacks promising to do it in a unregulatorialized way? You ain’t heard none of that?”
“Yeah, I did. I was just wondering. Maybe you had some little bits of memory that all those people don’t know about.”
“I got nothing, kid.”
“You don’t remember why you did it?”
“Like I just said, I got nothin’.”
He tucked the envelope inside his long overcoat and turned. There was a grinding sound and an electronic whine from his left knee. The leg started to bow out.
“You need a hand?” I asked.
“I need a leg! Ha. That was good. Get it? ‘You need a hand?’ ‘Nah, I need a leg.’”
“Do you need some help?”
“What, from you?”
I pointed back toward the car. “My friend over there? She has biomechanical-merge abilities. She could probably—”
“I know she’s got biomech merge. Why you think I said I don’t want her too close? She’ll mess my legs up, then what do I got?”
“She won’t. If you need some help, she’ll give it to you.”
He shook his head and tried to take a step. The knee made a buzzing sound.
“How do I know she ain’t gonna shut me down?” Caliban asked.
“I’m telling you, she won’t.”
He took a minute to think it over, switching his gaze between his faulty knee and Layla, who was leaning against the car.
“All right, I guess. But you tell her if she messes with me, she’s gonna have to answer to Mutagion. That’s more trouble than she’ll want to deal with.”
Layla’s mech repair didn’t take long. She gripped the carbon-fiber/steel alloy where Caliban’s shin would be. When she was done, Caliban seemed happy to have his legs functioning again.
He didn’t say a word but left at a fast clip, this time the thock-thock-thock-thock-thock-thock sound balanced.
“There’s some pretty amazing high-tech machinery going on in those legs,” Layla said.
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t trade places with him for all the high-tech stuff in the world.”
He was out of sight in less than thirty seconds.
UNITED STATES, EURASIAN ALLIANCE,
UNIFIED AFRICAN NATIONS, ET AL.
V. DEFENDANT #5958375-ER/00-M
People’s exhibit 211-15b
Original text; nonredacted, reconstructed for court
Disclosures
We changed out of our costumes and stashed them in the car before driving over to my house.
“Have we met?” Mom asked Layla near the front door when we came in. I didn’t think I had erased Mom’s memory of our entire visit when I tapped her mind, but she might have pushed it into her subconscious, which can happen with unattached memories.
“Uh, I’m not sure,” Layla said.
“This is Layla. You probably think you met because you’ve heard me talking about her.”
“Ah, yes.” After closing the front door, Mom asked me, “So, what was it you needed?”
“There’s a book in your study I need to see.”
“That’s all? Well, go ahead in and take whatever you want.”
“I’m not sure where it is. I need you to help me find it.”
“Fine. Come on.”
“I’ll meet you in there. I just want to get Layla settled in.”
“Of course. Make yourself at home.”
“Thank you.”
Mom went down the hall.
When she was out of earshot, Layla asked, “You sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“No, I have to talk to her on my own. Wait for me in there?” I said, pointing to the living room. “You’ll be okay out here?”
“Uh, yeah. I don’t imagine it’ll be too dangerous, sitting on the couch and watching TV.”
“Okay. I’ll be back soon.”
I stopped at the living room doorway before going through and looked back at Layla. She settled onto the couch and held her hand up. The TV set buzzed, then turned on.
Halfway down the hallway I slowed down. I had some questions for Mom about the Phaetons, among other things. And I believed Mom could answer my questions, though the answers might not be anything I wanted to hear. But I still needed to know.
I went in.
“What book was it you wanted?” Mom asked.
I closed the door. “This isn’t about a book. It’s something much more important.”
“Sounds serious,” she said, not sounding a hundred percent sincere to me.
“Oh, it is. Serious as death.” I took a pause, a dramatic pause, to be honest. I had a sense that this could be an important moment in my life. And I had dreams that all this would someday become public, maybe even legendary, part of a bigger story. “You work for GenLab.”
She squinted at me with a wry smile. “I don’t think that’s big news.”
“What’s the Demophon Program?”
“The what?”
“The Demophon Program. Do you work on it?”
“I’m not sure what—”
I didn’t have patience or time. I needed answers, and as much as I didn’t want some of my suspicions to be true, I just wanted to get this done. “Okay, let’s get to it. I assume you don’t know this, and though I never got rated, I think I’m somewhere around a level K telepath.”
A look of genuine surprise came over her face. “A what? Are you…are you sure?”
Yes, I’m totally sure.
She looked like she had just gotten the wind knocked out of her.
“You had to know,” I said out loud. “You studied my DNA.”
“We haven’t been able to map telepathy, or any kind of psi genes. They just don’t show up.”
“So you had no idea.”
Her eyes filled. “None. I thought…I knew everything about your genetic makeup. But I didn’t know this. Of all the powers for you to have, this? Telepathy?” She swallowed and wiped her eyes.
“Okay, we’ll come back to that,” I said. “First, I need to know some other things. It would be better if you just tell me. I’d rather not have to get the information against your will.”
She recoiled a bit, obviously hurt. “I…I don’t even know what to say.”
For a moment, I thought maybe I had gone too far. I didn’t mean to hurt her. But then, there was a lot at stake. I had to stay the course, no matter what. “Well, start by answering my question. Do you work on the Demophon Program?”
“I’m telling you honestly: I don’t even know what Demophon means.”
“Well, we can start with the word itself,” I said. “You might as well sit down. Demophon. From Greek mythology. The goddess Demeter was grateful for a king’s hospitality, so she wanted to repay him by making his son, Demophon, into a god.”
“That’s a pretty good repayment, I’d say,” Mom said with forced humor.
“Yeah, well, it didn’t work out.
She had tried to burn away his mortal soul, but she got interrupted by his mother, and eventually Demophon died.”
“Well, that’s a sad tale, but what does it have to do with my work?”
I reached into my back pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. This document was a copy of the actual decoded translation of the message I’d given Caliban a couple of hours earlier. I handed it to her.
Looking at it, she said, “I’m not sure what this is.”
“You’re lying to me. It’s very clear what it is.”
I heard her swallow. “Well, be that as it may, I’m not clear on why you’re asking me about this.”
“Do you work in the Demophon Program?”
“No.”
“But you know what it is.”
“Not specifics, but yes. I do know vaguely what it’s about.”
I shook my head. “Mom, please don’t do this. Trust me when I say I’m going to find out what I need to know. I’d rather you be honest, but I’ll use my telepathic power if I have to. It’s really up to you. Now, you’re not on any of these teams working in the Demophon Program?”
“What teams?”
I was getting jumpy. This would only lead into bad directions. “Okay, based on my understanding of this document, there are several teams involved with this Demophon Program. The team that kidnaps or recruits or whatever it actually is, the people, the Regulars. Then it’s obviously another team that does the dirty work, messing with these people’s DNA. Once they’ve been changed, it looks like they either die in the process or they get released and then considered enemies. Am I right so far?”
“You’re pretty close.” Mom took a breath and shook her head. “Okay. I’ll tell you what I know. The Kraden Project was successful exactly once. In 1952, the first set of metahumans was created. The Soviet Union and China also succeeded with counterpart programs. That was it. There are theories about why it worked, theories involving everything from weather conditions and nuclear tests—”
“I know about the theories. Let’s move on. The Kraden Project was shut down in 1983. Then what?”
“The experiments continued unofficially. And unsuccessfully.” By this point, she couldn’t meet my eyes. “The Demophon Program started up in 1992 as a way to deal with failed attempts to bind powered genes onto regular DNA. So far, the experiments that go bad either die in the lab, or, if they live, they’re bad mutations with serious problems.”
“Phaetons,” I said.
“Phaetons, yes.”
“It all makes sense now. The first U.S. heroes fought against the Russian heroes, the Chinese, metahumans from all our Communist enemies. Nineteen ninety-one was when the Soviet Union and Communism collapsed. No more common enemies. So let’s just create some. Nineteen ninety-two is the start of the Demophon Program. The failed mutations are called Phaetons. They’re released and used as common enemies for the public to hate or fear, and for the heroes to attack. Is that about it?”
She nodded. “How did you find out about Demophon?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter. What does matter is how you can work with an organization that would do this. How can you be a part of GenLab?”
“Hold on. GenLab is just a contractor. We’re consultants. We work for the government. They’re the ones who set the agenda and run the Demophon…activities.”
“Brad?” Layla called from the living room. “You should see this.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“Yeah, well, I’m telling you: this is something you’ll want to see….”
I told Mom that I would be right back. When I got to the living room, I found out that Layla was wrong: it was something I needed to see, but most definitely not something I wanted to see.
Human-Interest Story
Layla held her hand up toward the TV. “Here, let me rewind it for you,” she said. She had engaged the DVR and now ran it back a bit.
The video was of a reporter standing in the woods. “Local police were alerted by EagleEye that Caliban, a Phaeton affiliated with Mutagion, had been apprehended. During his attempt to escape from EagleEye, Caliban experienced equipment failure with his bionic legs and stumbled into the toxic creek that connects with the Crow’s Point River. Police and medical personnel pronounced Caliban dead on arrival.”
The video showed crime-scene tape stretched between trees and police milling around. In the far background, EagleEye, in his yellow-and-green costume, was giving a statement to local police.
“I fixed the malfunction in his metal leg,” Layla said. “I’m telling you, it was minor, and what I did should have made it run perfectly.”
“Can you roll back the video on this again?”
She put her hand up near the TV, and the recorded news segment played backward.
“Stop! Move forward again. Stop! Right there. Is there some way you can zoom in on the upper left corner?”
“Easy,” she said. She zoomed in and I was right.
“Look right there, on the hill. Those are his prosthetic legs. See anything weird?”
She examined the picture. “You mean other than that each one of them is snapped in two?”
“No, exactly that. You think those carbon-fiber alloys can be broken by a guy who weighs maybe a hundred pounds running on them?”
“Impossible,” she said.
“Right. So somebody else broke them, which is how Caliban ended up facedown in a poisoned river.”
“EagleEye,” she said.
“Maybe.” There was still stuff I needed to talk about with Mom, and I had a feeling that if I didn’t do it on this visit, it could be a good, long time before I would have another chance.
“I need to finish talking to my mom, but we have another problem to deal with right away. Mutagion is going to think that we’d set Caliban up, that this was part of a plan. We have to make sure he knows that’s not what happened.”
“Okay, how are we supposed to reach him without any contact information at all? It’s not exactly as if we can look his number up on the Underweb.”
I had to think for a couple of seconds. I didn’t like that Mom was in the study with all that information I had already given her. I was going to have to finish up with her and probably erase the whole conversation from her mind. “Okay, how’s this? Take my phone. I called Caliban, and he called back. He must’ve had phone conversations with Mutagion. Is there any way you can get a connection to Mutagion by tracing that trail?”
“Hm. Maybe. I can give it a try.”
It took her about a minute to get through. She handed the phone to me. Mutagion has a very distinctive voice.
“You made a big mistake,” he said.
“Before you say anything else,” I said into the phone, “let me tell you—”
“No, it don’t work like that. You took advantage of the fact that Caliban was feebleminded, and you tricked him into meeting you, just to have him murdered.”
“I swear to you, I didn’t trick him. I gave him some information for you. And I’m guessing he got…they got to him before he was able to give it to you.”
“Listen up, you little brat,” Mutagion said. “I don’t believe one damned word you’re saying. This was a setup, plain and simple. And for that, you’re going to pay. Dearly. I would like nothing better than to exact my vengeance immediately, but it seems that the Justice Force and some of their friends are gathering to eliminate the last of the Phaetons. Well, you can rest assured that we are not going down without a fight. I put the word out that this is going to be a last stand. I have plenty of volunteers who’ll fight to take down the so-called heroes. And then, if I’m still alive, I’m coming after you. If I’m not alive, then I’ll make arrangements to have you killed. And failing that, I’ll come back from the depths of hell, and I will find you.”
“I found out some information about Phaetons. About you.”
“This conversation is over,” Mutagion said.
“It’s important.”
“The next time we meet, I’ll watch you take your last breath. Until then…”
“Robert Lathrop.”
“What?”
“That was your name. Robert Lathrop. You were from Dallas, Texas, when the government took you at the age of thirty-four. They turned you into a Phaeton.”
“You have lost your mind, boy.”
“That’s the information I gave to Caliban. The government has been taking citizens and trying to genetically enhance them. Most of the failed experiments die in the lab. The ones who live get their memories erased, and they’re set loose. Common enemies for the public, opponents for the heroes, who can beat them and get better press.”
There was only the sound of raspy breathing from the other end of the phone.
I said, “They did this to you. I’m telling you, you didn’t do this to yourself. Mutagion? Mutagion? Robert?”
There wasn’t even a click when he disconnected us.
DOC
Back in the study, Mom was on her computer. “Perfect,” I said. “I need you to bring something up for me.”
“What else is there to look up? I told you about my—very minimal—involvement with Demophon—”
“Pull up my gene analysis and Blake’s.”
She sat back in her chair and shook her head. “Are you still obsessed with that? I told you—”
“Just please bring them up.”
She gave me a look, then typed into the computer for a while. I wondered how Layla was doing with trying to reach Javier and the others. I told her to tell them to go to places I didn’t know so there would be no chance of torturing me to find out where they were.
“Okay, here they are,” Mom said. The screen was split, with one double helix model on each side, color-coded and annotated for powers. Aside from the one on the left being brightly colored and the one on the right being mostly white, they were identical.
“Look at all those bright powered genes on Blake’s DNA, and, except for that gene for my enhanced intelligence, mine is plain. Why do you think I got telepathy and Blake didn’t?”
