Apocalypse blues x-1

by Walter Greatshell

  "What is this?" I asked, voice cracking.

  "Isn't it fabulous?" There was sarcasm in her tone. "Welcome to the Vegas of the North."

  "Vegas?"

  "That's what it was intended to be: Nunavut International-the world's biggest casino. Commandeered and delivered here by the happy minions of MoCo."

  "How did all these people survive?"

  "They're friends, family, valued employees, and honored guests of Mogul."

  "What does that mean?"

  The doctor leaned down beside me so I could see her. She was a strikingly tall older woman with a pink complexion and a flaxen flattop, an aging Amazon uncowed by time. Around her forehead was a hammered-gold band with a silver bauble.

  Her green eyes bored into mine as she said, "Mogul is an old boys' club, a group of very powerful men who pooled their resources to bring all this here, and they call the shots-that's all there is to it. We couldn't exist without them. But most of them don't feel comfortable in here, rubbing elbows with the commoners, so they delegate from their planes outside. If they want something, we jump, but otherwise we're on our own. You do what's expected, and nobody bothers you."

  "But this is incredible. All these people…" I could see little kids playing jump rope. For a minute, I was too overwhelmed to speak.

  "Yes, it looks like a carnival," said Langhorne. "Some folks think they've died and gone to Disneyland. But it isn't, I can assure you. It's survival of the fittest around here, and you have to be very careful whose toes you step on. Mogul executives and family members are top of the heap; below that it's a free-for-all for power and privilege. I should tell you that as a teenage girl, you already have enemies here. You're a threat."

  "But I can't get Agent X. I have a problem with my-"

  She cut me off. "That's not what I mean. You're a sexual threat. A lot of power here comes from sexual patronage, and some of these dames can be very jealous of the attention of their Mogul patrons, especially if they're married to them. They've gotten to like being queen of the roost, and won't appreciate competing against a teenybopper like you-not again. They thought those days were over."

  "I would never-"

  "And speaking of Agent X, you can get it, I'm sorry to have to tell you. That's what I really need to talk to you about, Louise. We have been able to eliminate the risk of infection in here only through some very stringent safety protocols. It can be startling to a newcomer, but it is essential to our survival-and yours." She unclasped her headband. The gold part came away, leaving the teardrop-shaped metal knob stuck in the middle of her forehead. It had tiny rivets in it.

  "What's that?" I said, recoiling.

  "Don't let it scare you. It may look weird, but it's nothing more than a simple electrode and a GPS transceiver. It monitors basic life signs and triggers a security alert if your blood-oxygen level takes a dive. It's only because of these little devices that we can live together here without fear."

  I suddenly noticed that all the people below had the same shiny amulets on their foreheads, including the double-Dutch girls. "Oh my God," I said.

  "It's so everyone can be sure of everyone else at a glance. This is too important to leave up to individual choice. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. That's also why they're fixed in place permanently, so they can't be tampered with or removed."

  "Permanently? How?"

  "They're seated on surgical-steel posts that penetrate the scalp and are actually drilled into the cranium. I know that sounds bad, but it's actually a very safe office procedure. A few days on painkillers, and you'll never know it's there."

  "I don't care! I don't want it!"

  The doctor nodded understandingly. "That's a perfectly normal reaction," she said. "But you'll get used to it." She unfastened my right wrist, and I slowly brought my hand up to my brow.

  Stomach whirlpooling, I thought, No way…

  But it was. It was there already, a foreign lump as smooth and hard as horn. The flesh around it felt Novocained. "No, uh-uh," I said, struggling to clear my head of lingering haze. This had to be a nightmare. "Get it off!" The thing held fast, wouldn't budge. "Get it the hell off, now!"

  "Hey, just think of it as a body piercing," Dr. Langhorne said, restraining me. "Some people think it's kind of cool: a tribal accessory."

  "Where are the others? Mr. Albemarle! Julian!" I cried.

  "Your friends have been moved to their orientation sites, where they'll each eventually be assigned a 'guardian.' They're going through the same period of adjustment you are. We all have. And speaking of periods-"

  "Can't I stay with them? Please!"

  "No. You're different. They're just drones, but you are something special. We know about you, Lulu. We've been told some very interesting things and would like to find out if they're true."

  "You mean like I'm immune to Xombies? That's just junk Mr. Cowper made up!"

  "Oh, I know. We examined you thoroughly. There's nothing physically extraordinary about you. In fact, I seriously doubt you have chromosomal primary amenorrhea, as has been reported to me."

  "Of course I do! Why do you think I don't have a period?"

  "I'll tell you. The reason you don't have a period is that you are suffering from prolonged malnutrition. It's affected your physical development."

  "That's because we've been starving for a month!"

  "Not you. You've been eating well, and thank goodness. I'm not talking about the last month, but the years before that. I'm talking about your old life. You're obviously in recovery now, but there are lasting effects of an extended bout of anorexic behavior-possibly going back to puberty. I suspect that the shock treatment of Agent X saved your life. You were a terminal case, I think."

  "That's not true!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing-the bitch was out of her mind!

  "I think it is. I think Agent X is the best thing that ever happened to you. That's all right-you're not alone. It's been my experience that many Agent X survivors are people who felt alienated in their previous life and found a new sense of purpose afterward. Anyone too attached to the past doesn't make it."

  "That's sick! You're sick!"

  "I'm not sick, and neither are you. In fact, I think you're well enough to take a little trip with me. There's someone in our clinic here you might be interested to see. I know he's very interested in seeing you."

  "Mr. Cowper? Oh my God, please-" I almost toppled the chair over.

  "Whoa! Cool your jets, kid. Just sit back and leave the driving to us."

  Leaving my restraints on, Dr. Langhorne rolled me down a ramp to the stadium floor. I was dizzy at first, nauseated, but as we moved, things settled down. I ached to pry that metal knot off my head.

  Beneath the Oz-like pseudocity was a real tent city, several thousand people bivouacked on nonskid rubber matting amid soaring backdrops of pyramids and Alps. What was funny was that the different nationalities seemed to have segregated themselves according to their cultural symbols: French was being spoken under the fake Eiffel Tower, and Japanese under Mount Fuji. I didn't get the feeling there was a lot of mingling going on, and there certainly seemed to be a concerted effort by everyone to ignore me. The older women especially looked snooty and unfriendly. One thing I found reassuring was that there were no guns in sight, no soldiers.

  Speaking into my ear as she pushed, the doctor said, "Lulu, I'm going to confide something to you now that you're going to find hard to believe, but which I think will help you understand your role here. Would it surprise you to hear that Agent X was man-made?"

  I couldn't honestly say I was surprised. We had talked about it often enough on the boat-that the whole thing was probably the result of germ warfare or bioterrorism or some stupid lab accident. So what? I thought bitterly. What the hell difference did it make now?

  "I told you before that Mogul was a boys' club," she said. "An extremely exclusive boys' club. Its purpose was to preserve the perquisites of great wealth for its members. What do you suppose is the biggest
obstacle to their continued wealth and power, the thing that galls them above everything else?"

  "Agent X, obviously."

  "No. This is something that's been around much longer. Caesars and pharaohs have tried to get around it since the beginning of time, creating religious empires and anointing themselves gods, but in this matter there's never been any real difference between a king and the average jerk in the street."

  "Death?" I scoffed.

  "Yes, death, of course. Death and taxes. Doesn't it make sense that these tycoons would do what they could to erect a tax shelter? That's what Mogul is. It was discreetly founded to pursue so-called 'life-extension technologies.'"

  I would have laughed if I hadn't been so miserable. "Oh, right."

  "It's true."

  "When did all this begin?"

  "Back in the eighties."

  "And somehow this never made the news?"

  "It wasn't a publicly traded company. Just an obscure private research foundation doing longevity studies. They were a dime a dozen."

  "So Agent X was supposed to be some kind of Fountain of Youth?"

  "We've always tried to avoid the stigma of putting it in quite those words, but yes."

  "And you were part of it, I suppose?"

  "Every doctor here was part of it. I had been doing proteome work for Brown University when I was approached by a man named Uri Miska. He was a Nobel Laureate for his work on the AIDS vaccine, and he came to me with a very interesting proposal involving synthetic DNA. Have you ever heard of something called the Mandelbrot Set?" I shrugged, and she said, "It's a simple mathematical equation-z equals z squared plus c-which produces a fractal structure of infinite complexity. Here, this is what it looks like."

  She showed me her laminated ID card, which hung by an alligator clamp from her smock. On the reverse side was an outline of a kidney shape fused to a sphere, with crystalline fronds sprouting from all sides. It resembled a weird snow-flake or a fuzzy seated Buddha.

  "You can't tell from this," she said, "but if you could zoom in on any part of this structure, you would find that it expands into an endless series of organic patterns, seemingly random, but all incorporating smaller and smaller versions of this same basic shape, literally to infinity. Do you know what it is you're looking at, Lulu?"

  "Not really."

  "It's the face of God."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "This is how nature stores information. This is how DNA molecules with only four basic nucleotides-adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine-can contain all the incredible diversity of life. Not just human life, but all life. Miska realized that if we could harness this information-carrying capacity, we could revolutionize… well, you name it. An infinitely small computer with infinitely large storage capacity? Can you imagine? So we started creating our own Mandelbrot Set, our own self-perpetuating equation, not with figures but with organic molecules. In effect, blank DNA. Writable DNA."

  We were approaching an archway in the dome wall. It funneled down to an air-lock door like the one we had encountered outside. Dr. Langhorne rolled me in, and as the pressure equalized very slightly, I asked, "Are you telling me that was Agent X?"

  "Not quite. But we used it to create a very interesting thing: a rudimentary organism with some of the desirable properties of a stem cell, only far more robust, like a prion. We called it our 'Magic Bean.' It could replicate itself and incorporate its genetic matrix into other cells."

  "A virus, you mean."

  "Kind of, except that instead of killing the cells, it streamlined them, radically simplifying the metabolic processes and turning each cell into an independent unit within the whole. The body as colony organism, analogous, I suppose, to a jellyfish. Strictly speaking, the host was no longer human, or even alive as we know it, but it was far more efficient and resilient. The organic structure remained, but it was arbitrary-a bag of obsolete parts governed by a solid-state master. Think analog to digital."

  Listening to her talk, I wondered if this woman had ever seen a Xombie. Had she ever run for dear life, with blue hands clawing at her back? Had she ever seen a loved one transformed into a demonic predator? "You make it sound like an upgrade," I said.

  "It was supposed to be. You have to look objectively at what we accomplished-don't think of the hosts as monsters, but as an interim stage of our evolution. Because that's what it is: an evolutionary leap, a transformation to another state of being, just as when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons shared the Earth. Change is always scary, but our fear comes from ignorance. We can outgrow it and learn to understand."

  Understand what? I thought. "Didn't Neanderthals go extinct?"

  We passed through the air lock, and she wheeled me into a separate dome, one that was smaller, emptier, and far less colorful than the first, but just as impressive in its own right, being all unobstructed open space. They could have held a monster truck rally in there. It looked like it was still under construction, with aluminum catwalks crisscrossing a tread-marked field of gray mud, and prefabricated sheds clustered among boulders in a fenced compound in the center. All around the periphery a deep trench had been excavated to drain the thawing permafrost, and we paused at the edge of the moat.

  "Why are you telling me all this?" I asked.

  "Because you're going to be challenged to overcome your prejudice and see this for what it is."

  "I've seen it. I've been out there. Have you?"

  "What you've seen is only half the picture. It's more complex than that."

  "Oh, well, I'm glad there's more to it than just the human race being wiped out. What the hell happened?"

  "There were fail-safes to prevent the lab strains from being infectious, even if they got loose. We had configured them to form a chemical bond with anoxic hemoglobin, but it was much, much weaker than the normal oxygen bond, so the effects would be neutralized in the presence of air. Pure oxygen swept it away like a magic wand. What we failed to anticipate was how long the inert organism could remain infectious, its longer-term mutagenic properties, and that it could colonize iron, forming a fast-spreading blue anaerobic rust. These X factors allowed our 'Magic Bean' to take root and multiply in all kinds of hard-to-reach places, away from the air-inside vacuum-sealed containers and liquid-filled tanks, in plumbing and wiring and soil-eventually saturating the environment. It went worldwide before anyone even noticed."

  "Hard-to-reach places. Oh my God." I winced as a million-watt lightbulb exploded in my brain. "You mean like the uterus. That's how it got into women-through the uterus. During their cycles."

  "Yes," she said, studying me. "Boy, they weren't lying about you. The uterus was an ideal incubator, I'm sorry to say."

  Across the trench an Erector-Set drawbridge jerked to life, spanning the mucky green water.

  I watched it move, suddenly conscious of how real it was. The grinding motor, the stadium lights, the mud. This was all real. But it couldn't be, it couldn't be! Light-headed, I tried to ground myself by asking, "What caused all the women to change at once?"

  "The organism reached the end of its shelf life. That was another safeguard: a biological timer that expired on midnight of the new year. After that, its governing proteins were expected to become unstable and break down. Instead it… did something else. And the rest," she said, "is history. Okay, go on across-they'll meet you on the other side." She ripped the Velcro bands off my wrists.

  It took me a second to grasp that she was telling me to get up. "Oh. By myself?"

  "Yup. This is where we part company, kiddo. I have a house call to make."

  I hesitantly stood up out of the wheelchair. She must have given me a shot of something to bring me around: My legs were steady, my head clearer by the second. But I still felt vulnerable emotionally. Much as I resented what they had done to me, I dreaded being left alone. I called back, "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Just try to keep an open mind," she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I crossed t
he bridge and made my way down a metal pier. It ended short of the fence, so that I had to walk in freezing-cold mud with only thin booties on. A door opened somewhere in the complex, and I could hear the hyperventilating approach of a dog… or what I thought was a dog. It came charging around a corner and leaped high up the fence, its great frizzy mane bouncing like an oversized afro. At first I took it for a hideous giant poodle, and even when I realized what it was, I couldn't believe it.

  It was a baboon, the gorgeously colored type known as a mandrill, with curved fangs as long as my pinkie and malevolent golden eyes that peered at me out of a face like a witch doctor's mask. I couldn't recall ever having seen one this big on TV or at the zoo. Also, it was berserk with bloodlust-my blood. I froze well back from the gate, hoping that whoever had released the animal would gain control before it realized it could easily scale the fence.

  With a buzz, the gate rolled open.

  I backpedaled frantically, searching for anything to climb or hide behind, but my only prayer of shelter on that bulldozed wasteland was the deep watery drainage ditch, and there was no chance of reaching that. Still, I ran for it.

  "Yo!" a man's voice shouted. "Little girl! Stop!"

  Sensing the baboon at my heels, I dove to earth and shielded my head with my arms-the classic "duck and cover" position. The mandrill trampled up and leapfrogged over me, my back muscles jerking involuntarily at the touch of its hard hands.