Deadly Design (9780698173613) (15 page)

D
r. Sharp's condo is in the center of the city. The five-story building, made of sandstone, used to be a high school back in the early 1900s. I remember watching the news with Dad and hearing an architect talking about how the place was being renovated into upscale condos. I remember because I thought, what rich person would want to live in an old high school? But they've done a great job. The large windows of sectioned squares have been replaced with large plates of glass. The cement stairs students used to climb are gone, having been replaced by a smooth sidewalk lined with snapdragons and marigolds. At the end of it is a tinted glass door that only slides open for those who know the code to the keypad beside it.

I have the code. I look back at Cami, sitting in her truck. I want her to come with me. I need her to, but I'm to go alone. That's the deal. Dr. Richard Sharp will talk only to me.

Inside the door, I expect to see a lobby, but there isn't one. There's no desk, no sofa or chairs. On one wall is a row of mail compartments. Each is the size of a large shoe box. On the other side is an elevator. I'm about to press the Up button when it makes that chiming sound and a woman walks out. She looks like the kind of woman who would live in a high-dollar condo. She's thin with pale yellow hair cut stylishly around her slightly wrinkled face. She looks at me, gives me an awkward smile, and then hurries toward the front door.

I step into the elevator, glance down at the torn sheet of notebook paper, and press the button for the fifth floor.

The elevator opens into a wide corridor with cream-colored carpet that sinks with every step. The walls and the ceiling are the same color as the carpet, giving the feeling of walking through a squared tunnel. There is only one door at the end of the corridor, and beside it is a security pad. I punch in another number. A light flashes from red to green. I turn the doorknob.

The thick carpet ends in the hallway. The floor of the apartment is dark wood, the walls painted a deep brown. There is a portrait hanging in the entry of a young woman wearing a gold gown that matches the color of her hair. She's holding a red rose, and her skin is white. She looks like a corpse, like someone's beloved bride died, and he propped her up and quickly painted her before decay marred her beauty.

In the living room is an antique sofa, framed in ornate, gold-painted wood. Thick burgundy curtains block out the morning sun. A floor lamp in the shape of a half-naked woman leans over the sofa. The light is turned on but barely gives off more than a whisper of a glow. The coffee table is marble, and there are no magazines or television remotes on it. On the other side are two chairs with straight oval backs upholstered in tightly pulled fabrics that look like medieval tapestries.

A woman, probably my mom's age, comes out of the kitchen. She's wearing beige scrubs.

“He's very tired, so I don't want you staying long.” Her full face is a mixture of concern and annoyance.

“Is something wrong with him?” I ask. My heart literally skips a beat like it's practicing for when it will stop and never start again.

She scoffs at my ignorance, but then her eyes soften behind the thick blue frames of her glasses. “Pancreatic cancer. It's spread to his liver and his lungs.”

“How long?” I ask.

“One month, maybe two.”

“His mind?”

“Dr. Sharp's mind is as brilliant as ever. But he tires easily, and he's always in a great deal of pain. He wouldn't take his pain medication this morning because of your meeting. He said he wants his mind to be clear. So, please, don't keep him any longer than you need to.” She points toward the hallway leading away from the kitchen. “It's the last door.”

I feel totally unprepared. I should have a notebook and a pen to jot down any tips he's going to give me: tips on how to save my life. I press against the door. At first it feels heavy, like it's made of solid stone. But then I feel as though I'm not alone, like Connor and James and the rest of them are here with me—all of us anxious to see this man, this demigod who created us. The door gives easily under my touch and glides in across a thick rug.

Dr. Mueller, I mean Dr. Sharp, looks small standing in the middle of the spacious bedroom. He is thin, a frail specimen of a human being. He's wearing pants that pucker beneath the belt that holds them in place. The dress shirt is tucked in, but hangs from his bony shoulders. He's standing with the help of a gold-knobbed cane, and I can see a bandage on the back of his hand, where fresh blood seeps from the site of a recently removed IV.

“You didn't have to get dressed up for me,” I say, startled and grateful for the strength in my voice.

“Of course I did,” he says. His face is smooth and hollow, and while his eyes should seem large in the recesses of his skull, they look like black pebbles laid in the places where eyes should be. “I've wanted to meet you for some time. I'd planned on it, actually, though I wasn't sure at what point would be best. Then the gentleman who works for me, the one who helps me access certain bits of information that I need, detected a . . . presence. In short, my hacker discovered that he was being hacked. I contacted the young man you were using to find me.” His thin, cracked lips curve into a smile. “I believe he thought finding me would be much easier, but I employ only the best. I guess I'm trying to say that this meeting would not be occurring if I didn't want it to.”

“But why now? Why wait until after James is dead?”

“It seemed best. The pacemaker was a variable thrown into my experiment. While I knew the chances of it working were . . . well . . . minuscule at best, one has to let these things play out. Find out for certain what the outcome will be before proceeding further. But there was little doubt in my mind that it wouldn't work. When DNA tells the heart to stop, a burst of electricity is not going to start it again.”

“You knew it wouldn't work. You didn't want it to, did you? You wanted James to die.”

“Of course. No scientist wants his experiments to fail.”

His experiments. Is that all any of us are to him? An experiment?

He shakes his head a bit sadly. “What did they tell you? That it was a mistake? That you have some strange genetic sequence they've never seen before, and they don't know how it got there?”

“A mutation,” I say. “The genetics specialist said it's a mutation because of all of the DNA you manipulated in us.”

His thin, white face hardens. “You know that when Einstein first presented his theory on black holes, the scientific community thought he was crazy. Still did long after his death. You place genius right in front of someone, and they can't see it. In front of educated people, no less—it's infuriating. Cancer is a mutation—a mistake. I don't make mistakes.”

“What are you saying?”

His black eyes meet mine. “I genetically modified you—yes. That's what my financial investors were interested in. They wanted to know if it was possible to make someone tall or smart or talented or good-looking. And yes, as a researcher, the possibilities fascinated me as well. I won't lie. And that part of my experiment went quite brilliantly. My investors are very pleased. The world should expect to see several world records in sports being shattered in the coming decades and IQ scores soaring. Of course, only the richest will be able to create luxury children to ride around in the luxury cars, but that's no concern to me. My legacy is the other part of my research, the part that has nothing to do with my investors.”

“What part is that?”

“I wanted to know if I could control a person's aptitude for intelligence, beauty, and athleticism. Why not see if I could control mortality as well?”

“You killed us just to see if you could?”

His smile is wide this time, pushing the little flesh over his cheekbones into the hollows of his skull. “A scientist's calling is to push the boundaries—to see what is and isn't possible. The genetic sequence inside you isn't a
mutation.
It's an expiration date, a date of execution, an end to your existence.”

“You programmed us to die,” I say. “How many of us? How many exceptional beings did you create just so you could watch them die?”

“Do you really want to know? I normally don't ascribe to the notion that ignorance is bliss, but in this case, you might want to stay ignorant.”

“How many?”

“Twenty-five. You are my last living creation.”

The cemetery in my brain grows exponentially, and it hurts, like pieces of my soul are being torn out to make room for the bodies of people I don't know, but care about just the same.

“Why?”

He looks at me like I'm five and I've just asked
why
balloons sail into the sky when you let go of their strings or
why
camels have big humps.

“Because we're human,” he says. “As the most intelligent species on the planet, it's our duty to
try
everything. It's why we climb mountains, why we had to master flight and go to the moon and split the atom, and why in several countries, including our own, I'll wager, humans are being cloned. We do it because . . . we ate the apple.”

“The apple?”

“In the garden of Eden. The devil told them they could be like God. All they had to do was eat the apple. And they did, because it is in our nature to
be
God. To create life and to decide when it should end.”

I look at him, at the man who made Connor so that he could fly over the bar when he pole-vaulted, at the man who made Connor a whiz at math and debate. But he didn't make Connor a good person, a kind, caring person. Our parents did that. And this man, this brilliant scientist, is nothing but a frail, cancer-riddled body in baggy clothes.

“You're not God,” I say. “You can't save yourself, can you?”

He struggles to draw a large breath into his sickened lungs. “I want to. You don't know how much I want to. Mostly because of you.”

“Me? You're sad because you won't be around to see me die, to read my autopsy report.”

“Sad, yes, but my interest in you is purely scientific. You have the same sequence as the others, but yours is just a little different. He couldn't tell, could he, your genetics specialist?”

I shake my head, and his face illuminates like a Halloween skull with a flickering candle inside.

“I knew he wouldn't. The difference is so small, so minute. And they didn't find the other difference, did they?”

“What difference?”

His bony hands knead at the golden knob on the top of his cane. “The most inconsequential change is in your expiration date. I hate loose ends, and your parents wanting to freeze you for two years extended my experiment past a deadline that I was comfortable with, so I programmed you to die at seventeen, instead of eighteen. I could have programmed you to die sooner, keeping more within the parameters of my study's time line, but then you'd have been the first to die, and somehow I didn't want that for you. You're special.”

“Special? I'm going to die in four months because of you, but I'm special?”

He takes a step toward me, and I recoil.

“Your parents' decision to freeze you offered me more time to manipulate your cells. I added another sequence, one hidden away in what's come to be known as junk DNA. I knew it wouldn't be detected there. I would very much like to see if it works. If I were healthy, if my brain were functioning normally, I might be able to come up with a way to save you, and thus see if my other experiment worked. But I'm not healthy, and as you so eloquently point out, I can't save myself. Thus, I cannot save you. You and I are both going to die very soon, and I'll never get to find out if the sequence for immortality I placed inside of you will work. Such a shame.”

“Sequence for what?”

“Immortality, virtual immortality. A life span of anywhere from two to three hundred years, I suspect. I could try to explain it to you, but even though I made you intelligent, I didn't make you a genius. Let's just say that this sequence works on the brain, regulating the growth of new neurons and the release of neurotransmitters—chemicals. The fountain of youth isn't hidden away on some island somewhere. It's in the brain's ability for neural plasticity—its ability to grow new brain cells.

“If the brain constantly generates new cells, replacing itself, so to speak, then it won't become old. Dementia, Parkinson's all happen because the brain starts to deteriorate with age. As cells break down, they don't create the same amounts of neurotransmitters, of hormones as they did in youth. But keep the brain replacing its own cells, keep it young, and it keeps the rest of the body young. That's what the sequence will do. That's the simplified version, anyway.” He makes a gesture of modesty with his hand, like mastering mortality is simple for someone like him. “The genetic sequence that will kill you simply tells your heart to stop beating. This sequence, the more complex one, is programmed to begin once the body reaches full maturity—around the age of twenty-one or twenty-two. But you'll be dead by then. Neither of us will ever get to know if my immortality sequence works.”

I'm in shock. That's it. I can't be hearing this right.

“How does it feel?” he asks, looking around for a moment like he might want to grab a pen and paper and write this down. “It must be quite perplexing to hold both imminent death and immortality in the same body. To know that if you could just live past the age of seventeen, you could live indefinitely.”

“Fix me. I don't want to die. Please.”

He smiles, almost nostalgically. “I cannot.” He shrugs.

“Please,” I say, moving toward him and fighting the urge to grab hold of him. “You have to help me!”

“Or what?” He grins.

I smell the bitterness of medicine on his breath; I smell it seeping through the pores of his skin.