by Natalie Reid
“Is that really necessary?” Tom asked, stepping a little closer to the Lieutenant who seemed unfazed by the cold and the seeping snow.
Jessie looked over to him, surprised that he had just spoken out to a military officer nearly twice his size.
“She shouldn’t push herself too hard so soon after her operation,” Tom explained, standing his ground.
“It’s alright, Tom,” Jessie cut in. “I’m fine.”
Before the young scientist could dig himself into deeper trouble, she took off through the trees. This time, when she arrived back, she felt the dull throb of fatigue in the back of her throat and limbs. However, it seemed that the tests were not yet over. Caver had her climb one tree, and then jump from one to the next. Then he had her do it again, and made her jump to several different trees once at the top.
By the time she finally made it back down to the floor, it was snowing heavier and she had to concentrate hard on not letting her hands shake from the cold. She had been forced to grip countless branches that were covered in crusted ice, and her hands were now red. She clenched them open and closed behind her back as she stood in front of Carver, waiting for his response.
With her Lieutenant, nothing she did was ever good enough. Eventually, she had come to realize that some things just were the way they were, and she would have to accept the fact that Carver would never warm up to her.
However, when he looked at his tablet and then down to her, saying, “Not good enough,” she couldn’t help but feel exasperated at his harsh opinion of her. She stared past him at a nearby tree and bit the inside of her lip so he wouldn’t see the effect his words had on her.
“What do you mean not good enough?!” Denneck shouted. “That would be good enough for any healthy soldier, let alone one in recovery!”
Carver shot him a fierce look. “But Jessie isn’t a healthy soldier. She’s been exposed to the Bandit. We have to be stricter on her to ensure the safety of the military.”
Jessie tilted her head and lifted her eyes to meet his. She set her jaw in a rigid line and stared up at him. It was the closest act to defiance she had ever come. Carver stared down at her with the same intensity, knowing full well what she was thinking about him.
“You’re going back to BLES,” he told her in unfaltering authority. “You’re to keep up with your exercises each day until I call for another physical.”
“How long will that be, sir,” she asked, trying to keep her voice even, yet not able to shut out the bitterness she felt towards him.
He waited a moment longer before replying, “A month.”
Her heart sunk at his words, and her eyes drifted down to her boots. Denneck looked like he was about to argue, but Jeddick came over to him and clapped a hand on his back.
“I’m freezing. Let’s get back inside,” he suggested.
They began to file back onto the transport ship one by one, but Jessie stood staring at the snow and listening to their footsteps. She couldn’t believe she would have to wait another month to go back. She missed her friends, she missed her old room, and more than anything, she missed flying.
When she finally lifted her head and turned towards the ship, she found that Tom had stayed outside to wait for her. He took a step closer to her, and then reached out for her arms. She blinked at him in confusion, wondering what he was doing. She allowed him to guide her arms in front of her, and he opened up her curled fingers to reveal her raw hands.
Placing his hands over hers, he said, “You’re supposed to keep your hands warm, dummy.”
He had said this last word so quietly that she thought she might have imagined it. Had he actually joked with her? She wanted to make some sort of response, thank him for worrying about her, say anything to keep the conversation going, but her superiors were waiting for them inside the ship. So instead she gave him a brief smile that probably didn’t hide the disappointment that she was feeling, and then slid her hands from his to head inside the ship.
Inside, Tag was looking triumphantly at his tablet. He quickly put it away when Jessie stepped on board. The transport doors closed, and the engine started. She tried to focus on the monotonous hum of the ship instead of what she would need to face in the next month, and probably, if Carver had his way, a few more months after that. However, she was drawn out of her thoughts when a movement in front of her caught her eye.
Tag had shifted around in his seat so quickly that his tablet began to slip off his leg and down to the floor. It was about to crash into the metal of the ship, when Jessie swiftly lunged out and grabbed it.
“Here,” she told him simply, as if there was nothing extraordinary in what she just did.
Tag, however, thought otherwise. He smiled broadly at her, and then looked over at Carver, as if to see if the Lieutenant had witnessed it too. Carver noticed the doctor’s gaze, and Tag gave him a strangely smug look. Carver gruffly turned away and stared out the window. Finally Tag took the tablet from Jessie’s hand, leaving her to wonder about the sanity of the enthusiastic doctor.
Jessie was not the only one that had noticed the strange encounter between the doctor and the Lieutenant. Tom, who had been sitting next to Jessie, watched the whole thing with calculating eyes. He carefully studied his boss during the rest of the flight back to headquarters, wondering what grand scheme he had cooking up inside his head.
It wasn’t until later on that night that Tom finally had a chance to talk with Tag alone and ask him what was going on. He had found him in his laboratory on the sixth floor, engrossed in a magnification of some form of DNA, when Tom stepped inside.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked, announcing his presence.
Tag quickly shut off his computer screen and swung around. Tom narrowed his eyes at him, and took a few steps closer.
“Are you keeping secrets from me?”
Tag shook his head. “No, no, why would you say that?”
Tom stared at him intently, and the older doctor cracked under the weight of his scrutiny. His mouth began to curl up at the edges, and soon he could not suppress the giddy smile that broke out on his face.
“Oh, Tom, I’ve figured it out!” he exclaimed. “I suspected at first, but now I’m certain! I didn’t tell you because of the delicate nature of the thing, but… oh, why should I keep any secrets from you!”
Tag swung back in his chair and pulled the screen back up on his computer. Tom walked over to it and studied the DNA sequence.
“I don’t know if you remember,” Tag began, “but you caught me looking at this very strand the morning after we saved our Jessie. It had reminded me of something, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It nagged at my brain for weeks, but I was sure I could figure it out, even when the question had remained unresolved for almost ten years.”
Tom looked harder at the screen. “You mean, you’ve figured out who Jessie’s father is?”
Tag brought his hands together in a single clap. “Precisely! And you know, I didn’t figure it out until Jessie’s little training session today. But then it was so obvious! It was as if the answer was staring me in the face all along.” He threw his hands up in the air, exclaiming, “I can’t believe it didn’t come to me sooner!”
Tom flinched at the loudness of his boss’s voice, and whispered his next words, hoping that Tag would catch on and mimic him.
“What did you figure out?”
Tag smiled and raised a finger, speaking in a slightly quieter voice, yet still announcing proudly, “The reason that her father’s blood did not appear in the government’s data-base was, quite simply, because it wasn’t there. Well, rather, it was there, it was just changed. Whoever Jessie’s father was had undergone genetic testing so that his DNA was physically altered from its original form—the form that would show up in the government’s data-base. So, when Jessie’s blood was tested, this original form was not enough of a match to show up as her father’s.”
Tag then began typing into the computer, and he brought up
another screen. At the top read the letters: G.A.P.Q.
“This made me remember something that I conducted years ago,” Tag explained, speaking quickly so that his voice could keep up with his train of thought. “This happened before you were even born, Tom. I was an aspiring young scientist that was given control of a military research and development project. G.A.P.Q., Genetically Altered Physical Quickness. What they wanted me to do was to alter the DNA of their soldiers to make them faster, more agile. I worked for several years on that project, giving it everything I could. I went through ten soldiers, yet I could not make one of them faster than they naturally were. Yes, I had successfully altered their DNA, but it seemed to have no physical effect on them.”
His eyes darkened for a moment, before he raised his hand in victory again, and changed the screen on his computer. Now it brought up an image that Tom recognized as Jessie’s DNA profile.
“But now with Jessie, I have the final piece of the puzzle!” He turned around and clasped Tom’s arm, saying, “It does work! My experiments! All my hard work! I just didn’t realize that it wouldn’t take effect until the subsequent generation.”
“Then why haven’t there been other children like her?” Tom asked, not quite believing what he was being told.
Tag waged his finger once more. “Now there’s the kicker! That’s what brings us back to the mystery of who her father is. While Jessie was having her physical, I looked some things up. It turns out that, of all the ten soldiers that volunteered to undergo my testing, nine of them died in combat before they could produce children.”
“And the tenth?” Tom asked, suddenly very keen to hear the answer.
Tag smiled proudly and replied, “He stayed alive and worked his way up the ranks to become a very successful Lieutenant. A Lieutenant, I’d dare say, who doesn’t want his daughter to return back to combat duty, and is trying to use his authority to keep her here in BLES.”
Tom’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open slightly. “Carver was the tenth man?”
“He was my most promising volunteer!” he exclaimed. His eyes cast off to the wall behind Tom, as if remembering back to that time. His expression lit back up again as he added, “And I couldn’t have picked a better mate for him.” He shook his head, remarking, “The genetic pairing that created Jessie is spectacular. She is the offspring of Sarah Forty-one-Thirty-seven, someone with the sharpest memory and highest functioning brain power the government has even seen, and Lieutenant Carver, one of the most athletically fit men alive. That, coupled with the enhancement in genetics leading to superior speed and agility, makes Jessie a modern marvel!” Tag ran a hand through his hair and shook his head again. “It kind of makes you wonder if they had this in mind when they decided to mate.”
Tom’s eyes flashed in anger. “A little thing called human emotion might have also played a factor.”
“I didn’t take you for the romantic sort,” Tag said, glancing back at his assistant.
Tom rubbed at his neck, saying, “Maybe I just don’t like thinking of Jessie as a product of planned genetics. Maybe I’d just like to think of her as a person.”
He started to walk towards the door, ready for this conversation to be over, when a thought drew him back in. “You haven’t told anyone else about this yet, have you?”
Tag shook his head. “Not yet, but isn’t it exciting! I can finally tell people that my experiments worked. I can start making plans to begin testing again, maybe even as soon as—”
Tom stepped further into the room, saying firmly, “You can’t tell anyone about this.”
“What’s that?” Tag asked, blinking his eyes in innocent confusion.
“If you tell people what you’ve discovered, you’re going to ruin a man’s life. The second the government finds out, they’re going to arrest him.”
Tag wrung his hands together and seemed to be battling with something inside of his head. “But, but,” he stuttered like a complaining child. “One life for the enhancement of so many!”
Tom lowered his voice, speaking in a tone he didn’t know himself capable of. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone. Not even Jessie.”
He wrung his hands again, turning them over and over in nervousness.
“Promise me, at least for now,” he added.
Tag bit his lip and reluctantly nodded. Tom let out a silent sigh of relief and walked back wearily to the door. He felt ages older after their conversation. Unfortunately, it was not yet over.
Before he could make it into the hallway, Tag called out, “I erased your transactions from The Eye.”
Tom looked back and stared.
“The extra key you programed,” Tag explained. “I made sure no one could see what you did.”
Tom cleared his throat and asked weakly, “Why did you do that?”
Tag stood up, but didn’t move away from his desk. “I want to keep my assistant. You’re the best one I’ve ever had. Just…promise me I won’t lose you to anything…or anyone.”
Tom stared down at the floor in tired submission. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Chapter 8
Unrestricted Access
Jessie’s arms cut through blue water as she swam the length of the pool. Tom had shown her earlier that this pool was filled with a special type of water that could monitor a body’s physical condition. A little while after Carver had deemed her unfit for service, she had decided to go there. She had hastily put on the full-body wet-suit that monitored her heartbeat and breathing, and had taken lap after lap across the length of the pool. Intermittently she would get out of the water, slap across the floor to the computer monitor at the far end of the room, and check her status. Each time she couldn’t find anything wrong with her numbers. Everything about her appeared to be in top physical condition. She could not understand why Carver had failed her.
It was already dark outside when the large metal doors to the pool room opened up, and Tom stepped inside. Synthetic lights lit up the pool, making it appear a florescent blue. Above her, the ceiling was a series of arched windows that displayed the dim lights of the stars and the brighter lights of the Bandit fighters hovering just above the earth’s ceiling.
“Are you okay?” Tom asked, walking across the tiled floor towards the pool. His footsteps echoed off the walls and made her feel like she was standing inside of a giant bubble. “Someone said that you’ve been in here for over an hour.”
“Oh.” She lifted a hand to her face and rubbed her eye. Suddenly it felt red and dry. “I guess I lost track of the time.”
She swam to the edge of the pool and folded her arms over the surface to give them a rest. Tom glanced worriedly down at his tablet, and then up to the night sky. She wondered if someone had called him over to get her to leave, and if she was keeping him from other patients in the process. Somehow the thought irked her. The most confusing part was that she didn’t know whether it was the fact that she was keeping him from his job that made her displeased, or whether it was the possibility that he had other patients. Maybe she wasn’t even the first pilot he had saved from death.
Tom cleared his throat awkwardly and stuffed a hand inside of his hair. He looked down at her and smiled, as if he didn’t know what else to do.
“You sure you’re okay?”
She let out a nervous chuckle. Her chin rested on her folded arms, and she found herself shaking her head no. “The truth is I don’t want to go to sleep.” She turned herself around so that she was facing the opposite direction. She leaned her elbows on the ledge of the pool for support, and looked up to the windows. “They say it’s the same with every pilot. We go up there knowing that we’re fighting people that used to be exactly like us. When you sign up, day one they tell you that you’re gonna experience all kinds of mental problems. It just never got to me this bad before.”
She let go of the ledge and submerged herself so that her chin floated just above the surface, as if the water was a blanket in which to hide.
She glanc
ed briefly to Tom before saying, “Sometimes I wake up and think that my time here at BLES was just a dream, that I invented you and everything else up as some sort of last ditch effort to hold onto humanity.” She waved her hand in the water in front of her, watching the ripples dance around her fingers. “For a moment I think that I’m really still up in that plane, giving into the Black.”
“The longer you’re here, the better grasp you’ll have on reality,” he offered. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and glanced at the water she had trekked on the floor from the last time she had gotten out.
“Yeah, well, there’s the problem,” she said. “I don’t think I had a very good grasp on reality in the first place.” She sunk a little deeper into the water and placed her back against the rough edge of the pool wall. Looking up to the windows and the stars in the sky, she whispered to herself, “Which night?”
Tom was about to ask her what that meant, when she suddenly asked, “Do you ever feel like you’re missing something, Tom? Like you forgot to do something for years and years, like forgetting half of your name, or leaving a plane engine running.”
“You mean like the Aero Complex?” He adjusted the tablet in his hands and looked down at her quizzically.
“Maybe,” she shrugged. “I don’t know.” Turning around in the water, she tilted her head to face him. “It sounds weird, I know. Everyone I explain it to doesn’t understand, or they pretend they don’t. But it feels as if there’s something out there that relies on me to survive, and I’ve just…forgotten. And whatever it is, is just waiting for me to remember before it dies.”
She laughed and rested her forehead against the pool’s ledge. “Right, well, I’m done. I don’t even think I know what I’m talking about anymore.” She grabbed onto the ledge and hoisted herself out so that she was sitting with her legs still dangling in the water.
“I’m sorry. Does somebody need to use the pool?” she inquired politely.
“What?” He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, no. No, I was just…”
