“Hey, Jimmy,” Phillip said. “When you gonna come see me about opening an account?”
This was a routine that they went through every morning. Something to fill the void while Phillip waited for the elevator. The Maglev train whirred by overhead as it cut through the Genico lobby, the light green of the algae fin visible as it sped into the distance.
“I don’t know, Mr. Saxton.”
“You forget? Is that Alzheimer’s kicking in already, or did you take some Amnease?”
“No, no,” Jimmy said quickly. “I’ll see you sometime soon.”
“Jimmy, you’re killing me. You’ve been saying that for three years now. You still have my card? Your kid didn’t miss out on The Sound of Music so his old man could wear burgundy suits and flag down cabs. You look like a blackjack dealer at Mohegan Sun.”
“I still have it.”
The doors pinged and Phillip stepped inside.
“Call me,” he said through the space between the closing doors. And then Jimmy was gone, but not before Phillip caught the doorman shake his head and mutter “asshole.” Phillip was an asshole. And he was fine with that.
The elevator ascended rapidly. Inside Phillip was barraged with news. A volumetric display of CNN filled the elevator’s space. Another Synthate terror attack in San Francisco. The heat wave continued in Alaska. More violence in the African nation of Ituri. Phillip sipped his meltwater as an Ituri village burned. Horrible. Really, horrible. He checked his watch. Running late.
As the doors opened onto the chaotic swell of the brokerage floor, the congregation was in an uproar. The ring of syncs, the shouting, the swearing, the sweating of the eighty-ninth floor all bled together into one beautiful mess. Phillip stepped out of the elevator and took it all in, like the pope at St. Peter’s Square, arriving to meet the faithful.
Size mattered, and Genico was the biggest swinger in the industry. The floor stretched out before him, a massive space surrounded on all sides by giant windows. Rows of cubes divided the floor, pockets of honeycomb filled with industrious bees. The walls were barely waist high. Each cube had a sync and an eyeScreen.
The bees themselves, who shouted and cursed into their syncs, were the chosen few. They had been harvested by the biggest trading firm in the world and sown into neat little rows. The old-boy warriors of the eighty-ninth floor went for what they wanted: the mao, the women, the drugs, the cars . . . God, the cars alone. The parking lot reserved for the eighty-ninth brokers could have been a showroom straight from Automotive Digest.
Phillip let the amazing hum of the room flow over him.
A Bentley Continental was standing up, squeezing an exercise handgrip. “I’m telling you, people are fucking dropping like flies from this. It’s big mao for us . . .”
Across from him, a Jaguar S-Type was pacing back and forth, frantically swinging a golf putter while he yelled, “Bone cancer? I don’t know, is that even fatal? What the hell is the survival rate on that? If it’s over fifty percent, I don’t want to go near it! Get me some fucking research on this. Jesus!”
“Ulcerative colitis? I don’t deal with digestive disorders!” cried an Aston Martin Volante, loosening his necktie and staring hard at a 3Dee Synthate in a bikini dancing on his eyeScreen.
They were all bachelor cars. Meant for you and whoever your strong buy party girl Italian model friend for the evening was. There were no hatchbacks, no minivans . . . if you wanted a family car, you wouldn’t be wanted at Genico.
And everyone here wanted the same thing.
Like Scarface said, “The world, chico, and everything in it.”
Phillip breathed it all in and he loved it.
He was one of them, these financial warriors. Each morning they woke, the scent of battle in their noses, like the smell of gunpowder at the Games. This was pure. No bullshit and only one rule: You’re making mao or you’re wasting time.
“Phillip!” Amy waved to him. She was one of the last natural secretaries. Her dating profile: With the body of a Social Class Synthate, she cardio kickboxed five nights a week, or whenever she wasn’t pulling all-nighters in the office. She had just bought a top-floor condo; Tribeca, pretty hot :) She loved fast cars, and a man who gave it to her real.
She lowered her voice as he approached her desk. “Pancrease took a drop today.”
Pancrease had been last week’s IPO of Nucleotech Pharmaceutical and Development, a genetic treatment designed to limit and prevent pancreatic cancer in men. The ticker symbol, PCR, had gone through the roof on its release, going from an IPO mark of 19 all the way up to 97 1/3 on the first day of trading. Last Phillip had heard, it was trading just above 130. Without treatment, pancreatic cancer had a survival rate of less than ten percent, bad news for people diagnosed with the disease, but great for the business of making profit.
Phillip had made sure to invest for his clients as heavily as possible.
“What?” He frowned. “How much?”
“Six mao a share.”
Phillip’s heart skipped. “Six mao? Jesus. How the fuck did that happen?”
“What do you want me to tell you?” Amy shrugged and inspected the tips of her nails. Phillip turned to look back across the floor. The clamor had taken on a distinctly ominous tone now. He thought of the packet of Mama Blanca in his desk just waiting for his attention. At least that would sustain him through the morning.
“Where’s the old man?” Phillip asked.
“He’s doing an interview on SampWatch until nine thirty, but he’ll be around after that.”
Phillip checked his watch. A little over an hour to set this right. The Hallucion that Phillip took on the ride to work had kicked in and made his mind very foggy. Nothing made sense.
“Did you hear about the new Starbucks promo for Mommy Mocha? You get a free prenatal genetic screening with five cups,” Amy asked, mumbled something else, and then said, “Or was it a free gift card?”
Phillip was suddenly filled with anxiety. He opened his mouth to speak. “No . . .” Then he slowly backed away from Amy’s desk, like a cartoon character tiptoeing away from a ticking bomb.
“Hold my calls,” he said. He turned away, stepping up his pace until he was almost running down the line of desks toward his own office. He could fix this. He just needed some Mama Blanca to set his mind right first. Mama would tell him what to do.
His office, at the far corner of the floor, had a view over the Hudson and into New Jersey. 2Dees hung from the wall: Phillip in the Hamptons, Phillip in Paris, at a polo match, in Turks and Caicos. He collapsed into a chair, checked his Rolex again, then slid open the desk drawer. Inside, next to a roll of Certs, a few paper clips, and a bottle of Hallucion, was a small, clear, glassine envelope. He opened it, dumped the contents onto his desk, then with his trash bucks card he carved up little white lines.
Last year it was all about the synthesized drug Paradise. Everywhere Phillip went, people were popping those little blue pills. Chelsea gallery openings. Blue pills. Upper West Side bar mitzvahs. Blue pills. Tribeca model shoots. Blue pills. But Paradise was definitely over, or at least done only by the bridge-and-tunnel set.
Euphoria, a nice little red pill, wasn’t so bad. Nice mellow high. Long lasting. Engineered in Russia. Good for corporate attorneys. The occasional actor. But Wall Street guys had to kick it old school. Strictly cocaine. The same drug that fueled the 1980s was the only real choice for today’s power broker.
A shrill ring interrupted his focus and an image of Charles Mazomba appeared on the sync. Phillip checked his watch. Almost one p.m. in Ituri. Lunch time in much of Africa. He was familiar with Mazomba’s schedule. Morning was for raping and burning. Next, hacking children to death with machetes. Then lunch. And the afternoon was usually reserved for machine-gunning women. After which came a nap. The civil war there was completely out of control, but fortunately the chaos allowed for a lax level of human rights restrictions that benefited Phillip’s plans. He sighed, took a yearning look at the little lines,
and answered the call.
Immediately, General Charles Mazomba appeared in a small window just below the Bloomberg Stock Ticker on his monitor projection. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and was dressed in a military green shirt, bands of decoration hung like party streamers over his left chest. Behind the general was a bookshelf, the green-and-blue flag of Ituri, and a white marble bust of Mazomba himself.
“How do, general?” Phillip asked.
Mazomba looked annoyed and tapped his fingertips on the surface of the polished oak desk in front of him. “I seem to remember a conversation we had when I was promised an amount of a certain one of your products.”
“I remember that conversation, and I will, in fact, be delivering said product.”
“Yes?”
“Indeed, and in payment, all I am requesting is—”
The general held up his hand. “I know what you are requesting. And it is easily accomplished. We have many Butu refugees who will suit your purposes. This is not the problem.”
“Then we have no problems.”
Mazomba leaned back and flashed Phillip his famous smile. As an indication of thought, the general’s smile was somewhat ambiguous, seeming to roughly translate that he liked you, but perhaps also indicating that he was about to behead you gleefully. Both were scary propositions.
“Do not fail me on this. I am a happy man now, but if I find you are lying, well, you will not find me cheerful.” The general took up a pen and paper and placed them on the table. “I would like to send you an official invitation to my country. Where is it that you live?”
Phillip felt the sudden urge for a strong sell. Not a chance he wanted the African warlord knowing where he lived. The butcher didn’t show the local pit bull how to get into the meat truck. “Send it to the office,” Phillip said. “I’m here most of the time, anyway.”
The African leader shook his head in displeasure but wrote down the address Phillip gave. Then the man’s image flashed away. Phillip exhaled, reminding himself to upgrade the alarm system. The general was a means to an end, but his constant demands became tiresome. He acted like a Roman emperor, not the self-appointed military despot of a country that hadn’t existed a year ago and would probably cease to exist a year from now. The only things the general had that were of interest to Phillip were a large number of diamonds, a fierce civil war, and an almost inexhaustible supply of naturals.
He pondered Africa, until thinking became too much work and he bent down for a spirit boost from Mama.
The sync interrupted him again with the name George Saxton hovering on the monitor, more menacing even than a General Mazomba smile. He debated ignoring the call, but his father would only keep trying again and again. The old man was a genetic disorder with no Samp. A second later, Pop’s image appeared on screen. He was calling from his own green room up on the penthouse floor as he was being prepped for an interview with CNN’s genetic news studio. A makeup girl bent over him to put on a finishing tan, then quickly whisked away the tissue-paper neck bib tucked around his collar.
His father turned toward the camera lens. “What’s the story, Phil?”
“Nice to see you, too, Dad. How are you?”
“This isn’t Sunday dinner, it’s business. It doesn’t matter how I am.”
Phillip knew exactly why his father was calling. Better bite the bullet. “Pancrease?”
“What’s going on with the drop?”
“Jitters, nothing important, just a market correction,” Phillip said as he called up the Samp’s numbers onscreen. Share price had fallen another fifty cents, half a mao. Mama Blanca whispered to him from the desk. His throat was dry and he looked toward the minifridge next to the scale model of Alinghi, last year’s America’s Cup winning yacht.
His father sighed, then looked at himself in the makeup mirror. “What’s our holding on this?”
Phillip paused, stalling. “Uhh . . . I’m checking.”
Phillip didn’t have to check. He knew exactly how much was at stake. Alarm bells clanged inside his head.
“Solution?”
“I’m working on something.”
“Something? That’s rather vague. When will I see this something?”
“Within the week,” Phillip said vaguely. “Or two.”
“I’ve got CNN in five minutes. How’s this make my credibility look?”
“I know.” Phillip eyed the cocaine again.
“I look like an amateur.” George shook his head, looked off camera, then spoke loudly to someone else in the room. He looked back at his son. “All right, I’m up.”
“Okay,” Phillip said. “Wait, Dad.”
“What is it?”
“Martin Reynolds was murdered last night.”
George Saxton look annoyed. “It’s taken care of. Lay off the drugs. I’m running a brokerage company, not a nightclub.”
George’s image flashed off and the AT&T logo appeared in its place, 3Deeing over his desk. Phillip stared thoughtfully at the insignia, then bent down and pulled two lines of white powder into his nose.
He crumpled up the empty envelope, then touched his trash bucks card to the garbage can beneath his desk. The can blinked green, opened, and deducted two credits as Phillip tossed the envelope inside.
Unbidden, the eyeScreen glass on the windows flashed to CNN’s SampWatch, where George Saxton appeared behind a panel desk, the panoramic view of the Hudson River behind him. A balding man in an arrow-collared shirt and suspenders was interviewing him. Phillip flicked off the sound of his father’s voice. He leaned back and regarded the city thoughtfully. So many lives below him, so much sickness, so much pain and suffering. And so much mao to be had.
The old man had created Genico, but Phillip wanted more. He deserved more. And why shouldn’t he? He had the greatest motivator ever invented working for him. Fear. People feared what gave them pain. They’d pay anything, any amount of mao to stop that fear. And those that couldn’t pay? Well, Phillip thought, their deaths would only motivate the rest of the pack.
The income potential was limitless.
Genico was the largest and most powerful genetic firm in the world. Genico Investments pioneered OTC trading of Samps and was the first to capitalize fully on the most important aspect of the scientific breakthrough of DNA research.
Making mao.
The markets were waiting. They just needed Genico to provide them with cures. The revenue market for asthma was six to seven billion. For HIV/AIDS, four billion. Diabetes, seven billion. And the champion of them all, cancer, an astounding twenty-seven billion and climbing. If the old Deep South had cotton, Genico traders had cancer. And from now on, Cancer Was King!
The Genetic Samp Exchange traded cures like the NYSE traded stock equities, genetic trading being the buying and selling of gene therapy samples, or Samps. Each Samp was the equivalent of a share of stock, with a fluctuating price that rose and fell according to market conditions. The difference was, instead of representing a piece of a particular company, a Samp represented a discrete amount of therapeutic DNA. Each Samp could be redeemed for a single sample of a therapeutic gene that could be delivered into a patient’s cells.
Dying of lung cancer? Buy a portfolio of a hundred Samps to receive the cure. Born a hemophiliac? Seventy-five Samps would eliminate symptoms.
That these diseases could actually be cured was an astonishing revelation. No more would the goal be remission or the diminishment of pain to the point of livability. Now chronic and sudden illnesses could be wiped out. What would people pay for that?
In the 1980s, an enterprising trader named Lewis Ranieri working for Salomon Brothers had created the mortgage bond market. Some years after the decoding of the human genome, and following the model Ranieri had set up, Genico created another sort of market. The first international exchange for cures: the Genetic Samp Exchange.
Greed was back.
This was the world Phillip Saxton had inherited. He swiveled his chair to look out across the city. A
solar island floated just over the Hudson. Further to the north, the Central Park dome glittered in the light, but his eyes fixed on a video billboard, a smiling blond woman holding an infant in her hands, a twirling strand of DNA rotating around them.
Genico. Your Baby. Only Better.
Phillip buzzed his secretary. “When my brother gets here, tell him I want to see him.”
CHAPTER 6
Breathe.
Jack Saxton slowly opened his eyes. He took in the feel of the room. By the bed, a glass of water stood on the nightstand next to an empty plastic skin spray bottle. A Van Gogh print 3Deed on the wall. Two windows looked out across the Brooklyn conurb, the clack of a trash grinder audible from the street below. A plant died slowly on a bureau. A terrible wave of dizziness overtook him. The same dizzy sensation he’d experienced when he was younger.
A woman lay in bed next to him. Her eyes were open. A door closed somewhere.
“Hi,” she said. “Remember me?”
“Of course. You’re my wife.”
Dolce smiled, looking relieved. “I thought you might have forgotten.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been around much. Work.”
Dolce wore jeans and a T-shirt. She reached out and touched his face. “Please, stay with me.”
“Why are you wearing clothes?”
An hour later, Jack Saxton navigated his mountain bike down Broadway through the constantly shifting phalanx of cabs and solars. He slowed at a red light and watched the mass of crowds pass by on the crosswalk. Early ’90s grunge rock played to his left, and he turned toward a woman in an open jeep solar. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore shorts and a small tank top. She was drinking coffee, and she lowered the mug, smiled at Jack, and turned down the radio. “Number thirty-four,” she said. “Miami.”
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