“There was a war in 2196. It was fought between the United Nations and the rogue colonies of the United States and China which had found residence on the moon. Over years of heavy taxation and exploitation, the colonists had enough of the rule of Emperors and Kings and Presidents. They declared themselves independent and took up terrorist activities on Earth. The United Nations responded with heavy bombardment of the colonies.
“When someone is willing to die for their cause, subduing them is no simple matter. Bombs and bullets, and something you haven’t experienced yet, plasma blasts, were ineffective. The war dragged on for so long, weapons of that sort couldn’t be produced fast enough to meet demand. An old fashioned war with swords and spears began.”
Jessica shifted uncomfortably in her seat. It never ceased to amaze her how passionately some patients believed in their delusions. “Who won?” she asked.
“The United Nations overwhelmed the colonists with sheer numbers, though I must admit, they fought valiantly. Anyway, enslavement resulted. But what’s of interest to you, Doctor, is that a mutation began appearing.”
“What kind of mutation?”
“What you see before you. A person that could survive on the moon’s surface without oxygen tanks or atmosphere suits. You’ve tested my blood, you’ve seen that my enlarged blood cells require little oxygen. To be accurate, they require no oxygen. When I’m in an oxygen rich atmosphere, like Earth, it allows my circulatory system to simply add oxygen, and hence, extra energy to my movements. My muscles can contract with much greater force. That’s the increased speed and strength you’ve seen.”
“How many of you were there?”
“Very few at first, but because of our added strength and stamina, the mutation was selected for in the breeding of slaves. We soon became our own race.”
“Why blood?”
“Blood is rich in nutrients. For a slave, the blood and flesh of others is sometimes all he has to survive on. We eventually began to prefer it to what you’d call normal food.”
“So, I assume you found a way to travel back in time?”
“Oh yes. It was a heavily regulated industry you understand. Only the mega-corporations, of which I believe there were only four, were allowed its use.”
“So how’d you manage it?”
“Revolution my good doctor. On Earth, we were the equivalent of thirty men in terms of strength and speed. Wiping out the United Nations military forces was much easier than anyone had expected.
“When we became absolute rulers, we began the slow genocide of the human species. Without war, we were able to focus ourselves on the mysteries that plague us. Most notably, time travel.”
“Won’t that disrupt your time? Maybe you never come into being?”
“The grandfather paradox? It’s a sham. Time is more complex than anyone could have imagined. It’s almost…alive. It strives, as life strives, to always maintain itself. Quite simply, someone traveling through time can always go back to the same place he remembers. By changing something in the past, you create a new dimension. One identical to yours except for the changes. Any illogicalities cease to be an issue because different people’s dimensions can overlap. No, time is far more subtle than we could have imagined.”
“It doesn’t make sense, what about your future selves?”
“Human beings, and your evolutionary superiors, are not as unique as you think. When we travel through time, our cells become affected in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise. They are destroyed in one time and recreated in another. We, from a physical point of view, become someone else. Ergo, we can exist in the same time and place as our future or past selves.”
Jessica took off her glasses and cleaned the lenses with a cloth she pulled out of her pocket. “That’s quite a story, Dr. Zaman.” She stood up. “You’re more insane or more creative than I thought. Perhaps both.”
The doctor smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “Tell you what, watch the news tonight. It would seem that elder’s recourse won’t be revisited.”
Jessica grimaced. He’d made plenty of incoherent statements before and she was too tired to ask about this one.
She stood and walked out of the room. Taking the glass elevators to the fifth floor, she rubbed her temples trying to alleviate the headache she’d had since late last night.
She walked into her spacious office and sat in a large black chair behind her desk. The wall behind her was made entirely of glass and it looked down on the Los Angeles streets below. She turned toward it now and stared at the pavement. Heat waves distorted the images of a few transients begging on a street corner. The sun gleamed brightly off the buildings around her and she took off her shoes to enjoy its warmth on her bare feet.
She thought about Dr. Zaman. She remembered the day when her section chief had told her that they would be attempting human cloning again after multiple failures and her shock when she found out the test subject was Dr. Cornelius Zaman.
The military pays a lot. What else can I say?
That was the only explanation she received as to why one of the worst criminals in American history was chosen as the subject for human cloning.
She accepted the task of leading the team that was attempting the actual somatic cell nuclear transfer of his genetic material to the host egg. Once fertilization occurred, they could experiment and attempt to select out his worst traits. Essentially, his clones would just be mindless automatons with superhuman physical prowess. Far better than average soldiers with families and jobs and hopes and dreams.
Her job was to ask how the doctor existed, not why. But to her the why was increasingly becoming more important. She had informed anyone that would ask that he was a mutation. A one in a billion fluke that is bound to occur every thousand years or so. That explained his strength and speed, but why the insanity? As best she could explain it, it seemed that power just has a tendency to corrupt. Most men with incredible power eventually became sadists and she thought Zaman was no different.
She stood up and removed her keys from a drawer in her desk. She was too tired for a full day of work.
As she left the building, she waved good-bye to the security guards at the front desk and put on a dark pair of sunglasses.
The drive home was miserable. Her CD player wasn’t working and her car still had a rotten egg smell from the milk she’d spilled a few days ago. She spent two hours on the freeway and nearly rear-ended a BMW.
She walked into her twentieth floor apartment and just stood at the entryway leading into the living room. She felt the cool breeze of the air conditioner hit her face and the smell of dead roses filled the air. The roses had been a gift from her husband. She wished she’d thrown them out as soon as she got them instead of throwing them in her trash.
Her husband had called her last night and wanted to reconcile before the divorce was finalized. But she couldn’t. She didn’t even want to anymore. She had swore to herself that she would never be one of those women. Her mother had been one of those women.
Jessica remembered the days when she would come home early from science club or soccer practice and find her mother sprawled on the kitchen floor; dried blood gluing her hair to her face.
As the years wore on, Jessica felt less rage toward her father and more and more anger and frustration toward her mother. Her mother was the one that stayed around.
As much as Jessica loved her, she wanted her mother gone. Her hope had been that she would come home one day and her mother would’ve just left. No note. No good-byes. At least that way Jessica could always have had the thought that her mother wasn’t the type of woman to stay with an unemployed alcoholic that beat her. But every day she would come home and every day her mother would be there to hug her and tell her she loved her. The hugs eventually made Jessica’s spine tingle from anger and the I love you’s turned meaningless.
Her mother pushed her to receive the highest grades she could and told her that she wanted her to go into research science. She said that her
dream was to have her baby girl discover the cure for cancer. Jessica didn’t understand why at the time.
It wasn’t until she was a teenager that Jessica realized her mother had stayed, not because she was weak, but because as long as her father was beating her, he wasn’t beating Jessica. She had stayed to protect her daughter. And after the breast cancer reached stage four, Jessica understood why her mother had pushed her into research science. Jessica had a newfound respect for her mother.
But, as it often does, fate intervened. Before Jessica could tell her mother that she understood and that she loved her, her mother died of breast cancer. She never got to say good-bye. The thing that bothered her most was that she didn’t get a chance to thank her mother for staying.
When she moved out of her father’s house at sixteen, she swore that she wouldn’t become like her mother. No man could ever lay a finger on her. As Jessica put her keys on the coffee table and lay back on her white couch, she remembered the day one had.
She’d come home from work later than expected and Richard was drunk as usual. The entire house reeked of whiskey and vomit. He wandered out of the kitchen to greet her. He put his hand to her face and gently stroked her cheek. Then, he grabbed her by her hair and hit her across the face with his other hand so hard that she flew against a wall and cut her head open on a glass photo behind her.
“Where have you been bitch!” he screamed as she lay crying on the floor. He reached down and punched her in the cheek with as much force as he could muster. “Don’t you cry! Stop crying right now you bitch! Is it Martin, huh? Answer me! You think you can go around embarrassing me in front of my friends for Martin? Huh?” He kicked her in the stomach. She hunched over and as he bent down and grabbed her hair, she thrusted a shard of the broken glass into his eye.
Richard fell over and howled in pain. Jessica ran to the door, and then to the police.
It had lasted less than a minute, but it had cost them a marriage. She had to have facial reconstructive surgery to repair her shattered cheek and he had lost sight in one of his eyes. Jessica used to think that life-changing moments happened gradually, over time. She understood now that the most important moments in life were just that; moments. Moments full of emotions that affected everything else.
She had decided to go into science because of its logical orderliness. There were no emotions involved; only detached logic.
She exhaled deeply and leaned her head against the back of the couch and closed her eyes.
*****
Jessica suddenly woke up with a start, an image of Dr. Zaman in her mind’s eye. She had to reorient herself with her apartment a moment before looking at her watch. She went to the bathroom to straighten her hair and wash her face. She had a date tonight.
The restaurant was tightly packed and Jessica was nervous that a careless waiter could drop food on her evening gown: one she had rented and couldn’t have afforded to buy. The man standing next her was Jacob Philips from the mechanical engineering division at the Clinton Research Center. He was tall and had a puff of shaggy black hair. He was average looking but had a sense of humor that could make her laugh in even the worst of moods. She liked him more for that than anything else.
They were sat at a booth near the front and ordered oysters with lemon juice as an appetizer. Jacob picked lint off his suit before speaking to her.
“So what’s the plan for tonight?”
“I thought we were going to the symphony?”
“We are, I meant after.”
“Whatever you want. We could stop by Serena’s. She’s having a little get-together to celebrate her divorce.”
“Divorce? She was married like a year ago.”
“Ten months.”
Jacob shook his head as he looked up at her. “What is it with scientists and divorces?”
“Don’t know. Maybe they’re logical people and love’s just illogical.”
The waiter came to the table and Jacob got into a discussion about the freshness of the lobster. Jessica glanced around the dimly lit room and saw people in gleaming dresses and Armani and Polo suits with gold watches. Outside the darkly tinted windows, a homeless man with a worn face and ragged clothes begged on the corner. It was one of the men she had seen earlier in the day in front of her building.
A particularly annoying woman with a high voice in the booth behind her kept talking about the repercussions that would have occurred if the U.S. hadn’t invaded Iraq thirty years ago. As if she could possibly even guess based on her daily experiences of daytime soaps and shopping at Barney’s.
“The war had to happen,” she said, “who the hell knows where we’d be if it hadn’t? We might not be sitting here.”
The woman sitting across from her just mimicked her thoughts. “Oh you’re absolutely right. Fran told me that her husband said that terrorists would have destroyed Beverly Hills by now. We were next on their list!”
“I totally agree.”
Jessica heard a large gulp of what she assumed was liquor before the woman started speaking again.
“Did you hear about Gabriel Samos?”
“No, what about him?”
“I just read on the news that he died.”
“No.”
“Yes. Of a drug overdose.”
“Oh my. He was so young.”
“Only thirty-six. He’d only gotten to write three books.”
“Well I didn’t like his books much anyway.”
“Two of them were terrible. But there was one that I read recently; oh what was it…Elder’s Recourse. It was based on the life of-”
“What did you say?” Jessica said as she turned out of her booth.
The woman hesitated and gave Jessica a disdainful look. “This is a private conversation.”
“What was the name of the book you just said?”
“Elder’s Recourse.”
“When did he die?”
“Just today. It was on the news before I came here.”
Jessica turned back to Jacob who was joking with the waiter, who, it turns out, was a biology major. “I have to go Jacob.”
He turned and looked at her. His smile started disappearing. “What? We just got here.”
“I have to go. I’ll take a rain check,” she said as she grabbed her purse and stood up.
She ran out of the restaurant and heard Jacob yell something about not being able to get the money back for the tickets. She asked the valets for a cab and got one in less than a few minutes.
The cab ride to the Clinton Center was emotionally draining. She couldn’t seem to sit still.
There had to be logical explanation. He must have heard about it somehow. He could have guessed, maybe the author was ill? They didn’t allow him any news, perhaps a security guard was talking about it? No, that wouldn’t be it either. Only one guard was permitted in there at a time and they weren’t allowed to speak with him.
She scurried through security as quickly as possible and grabbed a cup of coffee from a vending machine. She checked the news online to make sure the story was true. Halfway through the article, she came to a sentence that made her heart jump:
His latest work, Elder’s Recourse Revisited, was found among his items in the hotel room and was not completed at the time of his death.
Jessica ran through the hallways until she reached Dr. Zaman’s containment cell. “Leave us for a moment please,” she said to the guard who was half asleep.
When the guard had left, she approached the cell as Dr. Zaman was reading a book on the history of chemistry.
“How’d you know?” she demanded.
“Know what dear?”
“Don’t play games with me, how?”
“I already told you.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible, Jessica. Quantum mechanics says that there’s a chance I may fall through this chair and the floor and straight down into the center of the Earth right now. The probability of it happening approaches infin
ity, but it still exists.”
“You must know someone at the newspapers, or the guard heard about it and told you—”
“The police searched for acquaintances of mine and found none. I doubt the guard’s viewing schedule included the daily news. Besides, if memory serves, he died in the afternoon. I told you about it in the morning. He’s quite the author you know. As popular in two centuries as Hemingway or Faulkner is now.”
“You’re lying. It can’t be true.”
“Why can’t it? Because it’s too hard to grasp mentally? Jessica my dear, the universe is not only complex, some aspects are simply incomprehensible to the human mind. Perhaps, with time, we will evolve to be able to grasp its higher mysteries. This particular concept, however, is graspable: I am from the future.”
Jessica shook her head and looked away. “Tell me something else then.”
“Do you want to know the date of your death? I looked it up before I jumped to this time.”
Jessica’s breathing became erratic. As if she would forget to breath and then suddenly remember. “Why would you look it up?”
“Because you’re the key figure, my dear. You create the first real replicant; the first clone. You lead humanity and the new species of clones on a course you couldn’t possibly imagine. We will be enslaved because of you, our women raped, our men slaughtered. But one clone will stand up to your species. And…she will be you, Jessica. She will be your clone. Now, would you like to know the date of your death?”
“No. I don’t want to know.”
“Suit yourself.” The doctor stood up and stretched. “It’s been a fun game. But I believe I’ve learned all I needed about you. It’s time for us to leave.”
“You’re not going anywhere. They’re going to put you in prison and then execute you after we’re done with you.”
“Are they?” the doctor said with a smile. He leaned forward and then crouched down, exhaling loudly. In a flash Jessica barely saw, the doctor sprinted toward his cage. Jessica closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands as shards of broken reinforced plastic flew at her and a thunderous crash echoed in her ears.
Star Dreamer: The Early Short Stories of Victor Methos Page 2
