Just before the blast, Corinne and Marcus had been walking toward the kitchen. Now Marcus lay by her feet and two life forms just beyond him were moving toward the house’s rear entrance. The standing figure was unknown to her. She identified the limp life form in his arms as Corinne and determined that she was alive.
Photina bent over Marcus’s inert form and hesitated a moment. He’d been good to her and she was almost certain Corinne would want her to save him. Corinne and Marcus usually seemed happy to see one another, greeting each other with friendly looking gestures, including a form of embrace they called “hugs.” Sometimes they would touch their mouths together and commingle their microbes.
But there had been one time very early in her education when she’d returned late to the house with a question for Corinne about the day’s lessons. The front door was unlocked. She’d let herself in and wandered through the house until she heard voices coming from the bedroom. Corinne’s voice came at first in almost a whisper, but soon became louder and higher pitched, similar to the distressful utterances that she’d tutored her about days before. She peeked into the room. Corinne was lying on the bed and Marcus appeared to be holding her down and hurting her. The utterances increased in tempo and pitch while they moved rhythmically together in an apparent struggle. She didn’t know what to do and was about to rush into the room to save Corinne when it all suddenly stopped and they became quiet. Corinne had her arms around Marcus with her left hand cradling the back of his head and was whispering again. Photina had backed away from the door as softly as she could, walked to the front door and run all the way home.
The heat at her back intensified. When the second fireball swept through the corridor, Photina threw herself upon Marcus, absorbing the brunt of the heat. Once the explosion was over, she threw him over her shoulder and ran to the front of the house where the fire was already starving for fuel. He was no longer breathing by the time they got outside, but the rescue team arrived in time to resuscitate him. Photina sat a few feet away and watched as he began to come around.
“That’s good,” she thought, while dimly aware that an alternate scenario in which she would have had Corinne all to herself might have been even better for her.
Ray dove for the embankment beyond the car’s path and heard the dull thump of the impact behind him as he landed and rolled. He watched the body land behind the now stationary car and bounce once before coming to rest on the pavement.
“Get in,” came the command from the two-seater that had pulled up beside him with the passenger door flung open. Without a moment’s thought he propelled himself through the opening and pulled the door shut as the car sped away.
The first thing Ray noticed once inside the hovercar was the driver’s flowing red hair. He exhaled slowly and let his body settle into the seat, which conformed instantly to the shape of his body. In the rearview mirror he saw the blond man on his feet in pursuit of the car, but the figure soon faded into the distance.
“For a brilliant scientist, you’re pretty brainless,” chastised Terra. “What could you possibly have been thinking by coming here?”
“Good thing I did,” replied Ray, “or Corinne wouldn’t have had a prayer.”
“Perhaps, but that was serendipity. You put yourself, your contract, and our project all in jeopardy. And now look what a mess you’re in.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter anymore now that Marcus is dead.”
“You’re an amazingly lucky man, Ray,” said Terra. “Marcus is alive. He was rescued by a SPUD who stays with them. She shielded him from the fire and pulled him out.”
“Photina,” Ray thought, remembering their brief encounter during his earlier visit to the house in Marcus’s body. He drew a deep, luxurious breath that cleared the last of the smoke from his lungs. He was getting a second chance, another shot at immortality. But even once the contract was completed, he now realized, he would still be vulnerable to accidental death...or murder.
“Corinne’s alive, too,” Terra added, anticipating his next question.
“What are you doing here, Terra? How did you find me?”
“Don’t think I came here just to rescue you, Ray. I came to stop you once we’d tracked you to the capital.” Terra’s voice was quiet, but her disapproving tone came through loud and clear. “You were breaking all our rules. We wanted to keep you from doing something that you were sure to regret.”
“All I wanted to do was to see them,” Ray said, “to prove to myself that what I’d gone through was real.”
“You mean ‘to see her’,” Terra corrected him. “You’ve become much too emotionally involved to act rationally. Any further contact with Marcus or his family will have grave implications for the project...and for you.”
“I’m not sorry,” Ray said, “considering how it turned out.”
“That may be, but you’ve done plenty of damage.”
The car veered sharply from the road and within minutes was in a long tunnel that descended at a steep angle into the earth. When it finally leveled out, the car slid into a brightly lit underground chamber and abruptly stopped. Terra switched off the power and the vehicle settled softly to the ground.
“You can get out now,” she said.
“Where the hell are we?”
“We’re in a project safe haven. We have a number of them throughout the world. This chamber is completely shielded from airborne communication signals. Here we’re completely off the grid.”
“So the authorities can’t track me?”
“The authorities are the least of your problems. Your impulsive actions have placed you right in the crosshairs of The Tribe of 23.”
“You mean the hate group?” Ray had long since pegged them for what they were and had stopped supporting them.
“The same. They were behind the firebomb. And the man that was just chasing you is Samson.”
“Fast as hell,” said Ray, “and the collision barely slowed him down.”
“He’s a SPUD, of course,” said Terra. “He’s their poster boy for the threat of SPUDs against humanity. They also use him to do their dirty work.”
“So what happens now?”
“We lay low while our collaborators cover your tracks. By now they’ve removed the car from the scene. They’re preparing an upload to your MELD chip that will place you back home at the time of the fire. It will load as soon as we’re back outside.”
“So my MELD chip won’t function here?”
“No, nor, for that matter, mine,” answered Terra. “If we want to find out anything, we’ll have to do it the old fashioned way.” She pointed to a laptop computer sitting on a marble platform. It bore a logo in the shape of an apple.
Ray’s face lit up. “Like the old days.”
He recalled his early years as an environmental scientist before the days of MELD chips at a time when the survival of the world had been a greater priority for him than his personal longevity. Water had grown increasingly scarce and had quickly become the top priority of conservationists. Drought tolerant vegetation was targeted as a primary goal that would drastically reduce irrigation needs and conserve huge amounts of water in densely populated urban areas while still maintaining green space.
HibernaTurf had come to him in a memorable flash of inspiration early one morning while watching a groundskeeper on a golf course mowing the putting greens. Keeping the greens tight and smooth was a labor intensive task.
“What if the grass grew so slowly that it would only need occasional mowing,” Ray wondered, “or better yet, none at all?” The secret would be a glacial pace of growth that required minimal nutrients, grass that would hibernate. Without even stopping for breakfast, he returned to the lab and searched the database for the slowest growing plants on the planet. The saguaro cactus was the most indolent plant to which he had ready access. By the end of the month, he had a roomful of them and within several months had sequenced their genome.
The next steps unfolded at a slower pace than he
would have liked. The genetic sequences responsible for the saguaro’s growth rate proved elusive. No single gene was responsible, but rather a complex network of genes that regulated everything from nutrient utilization to the structure of the channels that moved water from the ground throughout its system. Only by comparing the saguaro with other slow growing species and with more rapidly growing plants like bamboos was Ray able to isolate the critical factors he was seeking. By the time he’d solved the riddle, he’d devoted four years to his research.
In the spring of 2025, Ray Mettler first spliced the slow growth sequences of the saguaro into the genome of a centipede grass variety and HibernaTurf was born. By the following spring, he was producing it commercially. By this time, the water shortage had become so critical that it was an instant hit. Homeowners and golf courses were the earliest adopters. Irrigation systems were turned off all across the continent. A bonus feature of the product was that it was naturally resistant to pests. Pesticide use rapidly dwindled, another apparent victory for conservationists.
In fact, HibernaTurf wasn’t just resistant to insects, it was completely inhospitable to them. Nothing lived in its soil, which became entirely sterile. For Ray, the idea of being able to lie on a bed of grass that was inherently antiseptic was a dream come true. But he should have guessed that the dream would become a nightmare. Looking back through the lens of knowledge later provided by his MELD chip, Ray wondered how he ever could have missed that vast swaths of land incapable of sustaining life would inevitably create a disaster of epic proportions.
“We fortunately have powerful friends,” Terra continued. “As far as the authorities are concerned, you were never here. The Tribe of 23 is another story altogether. Samson got close enough to analyze your DNA. They know who you are.”
“Lena!” exclaimed Ray. Terra saw him flinch, his eyes darting around like a rabbit exposed to the hunt. The intensity of his alarm took him by surprise. They’d grown so distant during much of their marriage and had just begun to repair their frayed relationship when Corinne came into his life. Lena’s encounter with Katrina and her budding suspicions had driven a new wedge between them, further complicating his feelings for her.
“Operatives have been dispatched to protect her,” Terra assured him. “They should already have her under surveillance.”
“Who the hell are you?” Ray asked with simultaneous relief and indignation. He hadn’t given a lot of thought to the nature of his benefactors when Terra had first approached him with her proposition. Now it was becoming apparent that there was more to her organization than the service they provided. They seemed to have the kind of power that was usually available only to the stealthy arms of governments.
“You don’t need to know,” Terra replied. “Just be glad we’re on your side.”
Marcus and Corinne arrived in separate ambulances at the hospital, where they were both swarmed by security personnel. Corinne was still unconscious, but her vital signs were strong and she was breathing on her own. Marcus had begun to regain consciousness at the site of the fire. His extreme fitness had served him well. Within an hour, he was awake and alert. His last conscious images had been of the blast and the fire.
“Corinne! Where is she?” were his first words.
“She’s here in the Emergency Pod,” said the nurse. “She hasn’t woken up yet, but they expect her to recover.”
Photina was at Corinne’s side, holding her hand, when Marcus arrived at her cubicle. He smiled at the gesture of concern and affection that was becoming commonplace for Photina and many others like her. How could anyone regard her as anything but a fully sentient, feeling being? She looked up and smiled when she saw him.
“They tell me you saved my life,” he said extending his hand to her. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And Corinne? You got her out, too?”
“No. There was a stranger...a man. I don’t know where he came from. He pulled her out before I could get to either of you.” She hesitated a moment. “If he hadn’t been there, I would have rescued her instead of you.”
“And that’s exactly what I would have wanted you to do.” Marcus smiled and squeezed her hand. “Now...tell me about this stranger.”
27
RAY CLIMBED INTO the front pod of the six pod cylinder and took a last look at Terra standing on the loading dock before the hatch was shut. She’d tried to convince him not to go home just yet. It would be dangerous now that The Tribe of 23 knew where he lived. But he’d insisted on returning to Lena’s side now that she was also in danger.
As the cylinder entered the vacuum tube and accelerated on its frictionless path to thousands of miles per hour, Ray remembered when he’d first envisioned what land travel was to become. He was a teenager, living in a time when money and other physical tokens of exchange were used to purchase goods and services. It was still necessary to visit banks from time to time in order to obtain money from an account or to deposit money into one.
Ray recalled the many hours wasted waiting in lines of cars driving through service lanes outside banks. He never ceased, though, to be fascinated by the way the money traveled between him and the teller inside the bank. He would place his identification inside a glass cylinder, put it into a vertical compartment, and it would whoosh through a transparent tube at lightning speed to the waiting teller. His money would return to him the same way.
“Why can’t everything travel like that?” he thought one day, “even people.” Even as a teenager, Ray was already imagining things that had not yet come to be. Having withdrawn largely from the physical world, he lived inside his head, where there existed a futuristic world with boundless possibilities.
Ray never followed through with the invention of vacuum tube travel, but the technology gradually appeared on the horizon, first with pricey elevators catering to a niche market of wealthy individuals and luxury hotels, then with land based transit that soon became the dominant form of mass travel, replacing conventional trains and most air travel. Networks grew like giant spider webs crisscrossing the continents.
Once vacuum tube transport caught on, it turned into the most cost-effective way to travel long distances, with less expensive infrastructure than rail, and incredible energy efficiency. Because it was nearly frictionless, the capsules could travel long distances with minimal energy once they’d accelerated up to speed. Even the power needed to achieve cruising speeds was minuscule compared with the energy required to accelerate more primitive vehicles.
Ray smiled as the transparent capsule glided soundlessly past the landscape at nearly four thousand miles per hour. This was exactly what he’d imagined decades before. It had taken him a while to become accustomed to the landscape passing across his field of vision so quickly and so close at hand. The perception of speed with air travel was blunted considerably by the distance between the aircraft and the ground. Ray found tube transport, in contrast, dizzying until his body accommodated to the sense of speed. What he found most remarkable was that the feeling of being in a speeding vehicle came almost entirely from the visual realm. After he closed his eyes for a few seconds, it felt as if he were motionless, so smooth was the course of the capsule and so constant the speed.
With a whoosh, the cylinder came to a stop without even a quiver. The hatch opened automatically and Ray stepped onto the underground platform. The whole trip had taken less than an hour, a fraction of the time it took to fly cross country in his youth. He navigated the underground walkways until he reached a pod that said “Powell” and got in. The pod whisked him silently to the station.
When he emerged onto the street, he headed for the corner of Powell and Sacramento and the building where he and Lena had lived for more than a decade. Once inside, he stepped within the force field of the unwalled elevator and was on the twentieth floor within seconds.
In front of the entrance to his condo stood a black clad woman with dark glasses, armed with an ultrasonic sidearm. She performed a ret
inal screen as he approached and stood aside to let him pass. Ray stood in front of the body scanner and the door slid open. He stepped inside and heard it latch behind him.
“Lena,” Ray called as he moved through the front hall to the great room in the center of the unit. There was no response. He entered the huge central room with the twin support pillars. Still no Lena. He went next to the bedroom, but there was no sign of her. He began running from room to room. She was nowhere to be found. He ran back to the front door to find the guard, but the door was locked from the outside. He beat on it with his fists to get the guard’s attention and tried over and over to open it, but it was sealed shut. He moved back to the great room and, standing in the middle, tried to think.
Then he heard a faint hiss, turned and spotted the end of the canister peeking from behind the sofa just beyond its edge. His heart pumped double time and sweat poured down his forehead, clouding his vision. His thoughts became too scrambled to find an escape, even with all the knowledge available to him through his MELD chip.
He ran to the periphery of the building as far from the canister as he could get. The outer walls were floor to ceiling glass, but there were no windows that opened and the glass was designed to withstand earthquakes and high winds. It was virtually unbreakable. He grabbed a marble sculpture and flung it against a window with all his strength. It just bounced off.
He lay on the floor, pressing up against the glass, and pulled his shirt up over his face, breathing as shallowly as possible. The dizziness swept over him all at once. His vision dimmed like a shade coming down over his eyes. A faint scent of almonds wafted past his nose at the same time he heard a high pitched whine. Calm set in just before the last lights went out.
28
“THERE WAS SO much smoke,” began Photina, “I could barely see the man who saved Corinne.”
“Think hard, Photina. What did you notice?”
The Methuselarity Transformation Page 16
