“He wasn’t as tall as you. Heavier around the middle, and a good bit older.”
“What else?”
“I couldn’t see his face, but there was something very familiar about him.” She closed her eyes to visualize the data streams.
“Familiar? How? You mean you’ve seen him before?”
“Yes...and no,” she replied. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen his body. But the way he moved. That was what was familiar. I know I’ve seen someone move the same way.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. My memory traces are contaminated. There was an anomaly as a result of the explosion.”
“Anything else?” asked Marcus.
“Yes. One other thing. The way he moved through the house. It was like he’d been here before. He knew the house. That’s how he was able to get to Corinne so quickly.”
Marcus considered the implications of what she’d told him. A stranger had rescued Corinne from the fire, someone who’d been in the house before, but whom no one had seen there. Photina had somehow encountered someone with a matching kinetic pattern, but it wasn’t the same man. Why would he have been there in the first place? And why would he risk his life to save Corinne’s?
“Where did they put Corinne’s clothes?” he asked next.
“I don’t know. They were pretty badly burned. They might have disposed of them.”
“Let’s find out. If we can recover the clothes, there would be DNA traces on them from the stranger. You’d be able to analyze them. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. That is among the capabilities in my programming. I’ll ask about the clothes.” She left the room.
One possible solution to the mystery crossed Marcus’s mind, but it seemed too outlandish to be true. He shook his head. Corinne was beginning to stir. He turned his attention to her, touching her cheek with his hand. She moaned. Her eyes opened. Her lips parted as if to speak, but no words came out. Instead, she began coughing and choking.
“Shh,” he said, raising a straw with some water to her lips. “Take a few breaths. Then have a sip.” The coughing stopped. She breathed deeply, then sipped on the straw.
“Thank God you’re OK,” he said, reaching down to kiss her forehead. For the first time, he noticed the signs of aging that had gradually crept over her face, the deepening folds around her mouth and the tiny lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes. She’d also recently begun wearing reading glasses to enjoy her books. They’d been hard to come by since the digital media most people used automatically corrected for vision. He liked seeing her in them, peering at him from above the half lenses. He wondered if she’d noticed, too, and if she’d noticed she was starting to leave him behind.
“Thank God you’re OK,” she mouthed silently and smiled. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes.
The doctor appeared in the doorway to the cubicle. “I see we’re awake,” he said cheerfully.
“She just woke up,” answered Marcus. “She still seems to be suffering the effects of the smoke.”
“That’s to be expected,” said the doctor, turning to Corinne. “It may be a while before you can speak. Just be patient. Don’t strain your vocal cords. You’ll be talking soon enough.”
Corinne moved her hand in the air as though she was writing on a tablet and looked at the doctor.
“Sure,” he said, understanding her gesture, “I can get you a pad and a pen. Better yet, how about a keyboard?”
She shook her head and repeated the writing gesture. Corinne liked things simple and leaned toward low tech whenever possible. A nurse arrived shortly with the requested implements.
“I love you,” was the first thing she wrote.
“I know,” Marcus replied. “I love you, too.”
“Natasha?” she wrote next.
“Safe where we left her.” Corinne smiled and paused a few moments before she wrote again.
“Our house?”
“Gone. Burned to the ground.” He shook his head.
“My books? Gone, too?” She already knew the answer. Tears filled her eyes, dripping onto the paper as she wrote, smearing the ink. She looked away for a moment to pull herself together.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she wrote next. “I saw the man who saved me before I passed out.”
“And...?”
“He was a stranger,” she wrote. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“So what’s the crazy part?”
“When he touched me, just before he picked me up, it was like I knew him. His touch felt so familiar.” Her mouth and eyes crinkled in a silent laugh. “I told you you’d think I was crazy.”
“Not at all,” Marcus said. He was looking straight at her, but his thoughts were now a million miles away. It was crazy, but the pieces were starting to fit together. And he had no idea how he felt about what they meant. Just months ago, a stranger was in his body, in his bed, making passionate love to his wife while he was fighting for his life. And as improbable as it seemed, he’d come back, this time in his own body, for who knows what reason. And he’d arrived just in time to pull Corinne from the fire. Marcus felt grateful to the man for saving the woman he loved, but at the same time was enraged at his intrusion into their lives and into their bed. And if he were there to see Corinne again...if he now loved her, too, then he’d crossed another line.
Photina was back. “They had the clothes in a plastic bag. They were about to incinerate them, but I got there just in time. There was DNA residue that wasn’t Corinne’s. I got a sample. I’ll have the genome read in an hour and compare it with the Universal Data Base.”
“Thanks, Photina. We owe you a lot for what you’ve done for us today.”
Photina looked into his eyes and looked as though she had something else to say. She held back.
“Photina,” Marcus coaxed, “Was there something else?”
“Mr. Marcus,” she said, looking flustered, “the man I saw who moved like the stranger. I think it was you.”
29
THE EXPLODING CHARGE of the drone as it struck the corner of the window shattered it into millions of beads that sprayed across Ray’s inert body. Fresh air rushed into the room and filled his lungs. On the other side of the condo, Terra’s confederates stormed the door and raced to his side. They zipped him into the hyperbaric suit and loaded him onto the copter that now hovered by the opening.
As the craft veered around and headed over the bay, Ray began to regain consciousness and wondered whose body he was in. As his mind cleared, he was able to identify the body as his own and felt grateful he’d survived. He was still struggling to breathe, though, and the anxiety was returning.
“Odd,” he thought, “how powerful the drive to survive is.” Even knowing his fail safe mode of escaping annihilation, he’d still panicked and had desperately wanted to continue living his own life a while longer. And he had unfinished business: to find Lena. He prayed that she was alive and that he’d have another chance to make up for lost time.
Within minutes, the aircraft was far out to sea with no land in sight. Then it stopped all forward motion and began to descend rapidly and apparently randomly toward the water. Just before impact, the water beneath it began to swirl, creating a void in the center that swallowed them up. They descended into the funnel as Ray watched the spot of light from the sky getting smaller and smaller, finally slowing to a soft landing on solid ground. With a whirring sound, something slid across the opening overhead and they were in total darkness. The copter’s motor silenced.
Suddenly the space around them was flooded with light. They were in an underwater chamber the size of an airplane hangar. He was quickly removed from the aircraft and placed inside a clear enclosure. Once the hatch of the container was sealed tight, it began filling with gas. Ray felt pressure surrounding his body. As the pressure increased it became easier and easier for him to breathe. The hyperbaric chamber was providing oxygen to flush the remaining poison from his system. The panic that had overtaken him as he
suffocated in his apartment and had returned as he regained consciousness now began to recede and was replaced by calm.
Through the canopy of the enclosure Ray saw a flash of fire red hair, then a familiar face peering down at him. A brief crackling sound and he could hear sound from around the enclosure coming through a speaker.
“Hello again, Ray.” Terra’s voice echoed in the space around him. “We’ve definitely got to stop meeting like this.” Her face was somber despite the humor in her words.
“Where the hell are we this time, Terra?”
“It doesn’t really matter, Ray. Your antics have created an enormous mess for us. You’re turning into quite a liability.”
“I’ve created a mess for you? What about me? I paid you a hell of a lot of money and look what I have to show for it. We had a deal.”
“Our deal didn’t include babysitting you for the rest of your life and rescuing you over and over from your impulsive blunders. Your violations of our contract are sufficient to void it. Make no mistake, Ray. You’re expendable. Don’t expect another rescue.” The distortion of Terra’s amplified voice within the hyperbaric chamber underscored her threat with an ominous tone.
“Lena!” Ray exclaimed. “What happened to Lena?”
“They took her. We don’t know where.” replied Terra. “She’s gone dark.”
“Who took her? Is she alive?”
“The Tribe of 23. I told you they’d come after you. We don’t know whether Lena’s alive, but I’d guess she is. They’re likely to use her to get to you.”
“What do they want?”
“They want you dead. And they still want Marcus and Corinne dead, too. So your insurance policy is also in jeopardy.”
“What happens now?”
“Now we wait,” said Terra. “Our people on the outside will watch for signs of Lena’s whereabouts and wait for any communication from The Tribe. I expect that we’ll hear from them soon.”
The canopy of the hyperbaric chamber began to open. His treatment was complete. Ray was surprised at how well he felt. He had more energy than usual. His blood was still supersaturated with oxygen and all the poison was gone. He stepped out of the chamber and looked around the space.
The helicopter took up half the room. The other half was buzzing with activity. There were around a dozen people beside him and Terra. Most were at workstations staring intently at the blank spaces in front of them. They were watching encrypted holographic images visible only to them.
“What are they monitoring?” asked Ray.
“You don’t need to know. This station wasn’t put here just for your convenience.”
One of the people who wasn’t watching a monitor approached him. She passed an instrument over his body from head to toe while looking at the space just above her eye level.
“He checks out,” she said. “The body scan is normal. He’s in pretty good shape for a man his age.”
One of the people at the workstations looked in their direction and waved Terra over. Ray watched their animated whispered conversation until Terra shook her head and headed back his way.
“As I expected,” she said, “The Tribe of 23 has Lena and they’ve made their demand.”
“What do they want? Ransom?”
“They couldn’t care less about money. They want you. They’re offering an exchange. And it’s no mystery what they’ll do with you when they get you. Either Lena dies or you’re a dead man. That’s what you’ve gotten yourself, and Lena, into.”
30
MARCUS COULDN’T WAIT to identify the man who’d bought his body and saved his wife’s life. He had no idea, though, at this point what he’d do with the information when he got it. He had a strong urge to seek him out and meet him face to face, but didn’t know whether he’d want to hug him or throttle him when he did. This unknown stranger had both given him a life and was prepared to take one. He’d made love to Corinne and had saved her life, restoring her to Marcus. And he’d someday be with her again.
Another more pressing mystery remained unsolved. From what Marcus now knew about the mysterious stranger, he was certainly not the one who’d firebombed his house and tried to kill him. Given their contract, that would have made no sense at all. For whatever reason he was at the house at the time, it had to have been serendipity. So the question remained: who tried to kill them?
While Marcus was a beloved public figure, he did have enemies. As minister of discovery, he’d been instrumental in initiating some controversial programs. And even as the creator of Takana Grass, he was despised by extremists who opposed some of the consequences of his discovery. The revival of farming animals for meat production brought animal rights groups out of the woodwork that opposed raising animals for food. He’d received threats from members of several of these groups. And despite the many benefits that Takana Grass bestowed on humanity, there were still those who opposed genetically engineering any living things.
HIs role as a vocal advocate of SPUD rights had probably earned him the most vicious enemies. The Tribe of 23 was the largest and most vocal anti-SPUD organization. Their rhetoric and tactics were reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan that terrorized African Americans in the last two centuries. One difference is that they didn’t wear hoods or otherwise hide their identities. They were sufficiently self-righteous that they felt no need to be secretive and skated very close to the edge of the law, sometimes sliding across it. There were stories of assassinations both of SPUDs and of some of the people who stood up for them. The firebombing had the earmarks of their style.
Photina was back in an hour as promised. She stood beside Marcus and projected a huge holographic image of a nest of twenty-three chromosome pairs in front of them. As often as Marcus had seen such images of the human genome, he retained his childish delight at its elegance and beauty. In front of him now was the blueprint of the man who’d already had an indelible effect upon his life and the lives of his family.
“So were you able to identify him?” Marcus asked.
“Yes, I was,” She replied. “His was a well-known genome, given his identity. His name is Raymond Mettler.”
Marcus felt as though he’d just plunged over the cliff again in Ray’s car. “That can’t be,” he exclaimed. “Are you sure you got it right.”
“Of course,” Photina said. “You know how accurate genomic identification is. There isn’t a chance in a trillion that I’m wrong.”
“The same Ray Mettler that created HibernaTurf?”
“The same. That’s why it was so easy to identify him. His genome is all over the UDB, just like yours.”
So HibernaTurf and its creator had made possible the life that enabled Marcus to undo its effects. The greater irony was that Ray Mettler would someday assume Marcus’s identity and take credit for undoing the havoc that he’d caused. Could the world really be that small? Or had Terra woven this intricate joke into the framework of her diabolical experiment for her own amusement? Marcus was never supposed to have learned Ray’s identity. And they certainly were never supposed to meet.
But meet they would if Marcus had anything to say about it, even if Terra tried to keep them apart. It didn’t take long to learn that Mettler lived in San Francisco, all the way on the other side of the continent. He had to have come there deliberately. His presence in Marcus’s home couldn’t possibly have been an accident.
As Corinne recovered, questions began to form that nagged at her attention. The memory of her rescuer’s touch remained vivid. When had she felt it before, and where? The answer was almost palpable like a word balancing just at the tip of the tongue, but not quite articulated. She tried discussing it with Photina, but on this subject Photina was uncharacteristically evasive and provided no clues.
Another recent surreal experience floated around the edges of Corinne’s awareness. She suspected that they were somehow connected, but had no idea how. Photina had also connected these two apparently disparate events and was struggling to fit the pieces together. Th
e stranger’s moves in Marcus’s body...the stranger’s touch familiar to Corinne. None of it seemed to make sense. And yet, there was a symmetry to it all that was compelling. Neither her logic nor the rudiments of her human intuition could figure it out.
Marcus knew that Corinne was getting dangerously close to discovering his secrets. The consequences of that discovery would be devastating. It could easily destroy their marriage. And who knew what retribution would come down on him and on Corinne from Terra and her cronies. For all Marcus knew, they would find a way to eliminate Corinne in order to protect the secrecy of their project. They might even kill him if the project were sufficiently compromised and start over with a new human guinea pig.
He weighed the risk of Corinne finding out on her own and considered briefly taking her into his confidence and telling her everything in order to control the damage and keep her safe, but her rage would be stunning, and she would likely do something impulsive that would compromise their secrecy before he could calm her enough to reason with her.
Now he’d have to come up with an excuse to travel to San Francisco in his quest to find Ray Mettler. And he’d make the trip knowing that whoever tried to kill him would be watching from the shadows for another opportunity to finish the job.
31
LENA COULDN’T BANISH the image of the guard in the hallway, lying face up with a hole in the middle of her forehead that went clear through the back of her head, a clean, bloodless, lethal wound. The wide open, steel blue eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling.
The hood had been placed over Lena’s head in the elevator. It not only rendered her blind, but also blocked her access to the Universal Data Base via her MELD chip. She had no means to navigate her position except by observing with her native senses. As a journalist, she’d developed keen observational skills that she brought to bear upon her current predicament. She counted steps and did her best to keep track of turns as they walked. She listened as best she could to the street sounds muffled by the hood. Her keenest sense was her ability to smell her surroundings through the holes left in the shroud for her to breathe.
The Methuselarity Transformation Page 17
