Generation A (29 page)

“It’s a neurofarm.”

“Huh? Where?”

“That one?” I focused on the screen. “Nebraska, I think, far away from any protestors. And it’s manned by unemployed corn workers eager to accept Bangladeshi-calibre hourly wages. It’s massively cloning neural tissue.”

Zack asked, “What
is
that stuff they’re making?”

I looked more closely. “That batch is green. That means the gel-like substance is, well,
you
, Zack.”

“What?”

“Just what I said. Specifically, it is two-point-three acres, eight inches deep, of cells from your central nervous system, all of them cranking out Solon starter. It takes three days per batch, 33,000 cubic feet grown atop a sterile culture of agar. Congratulations, Zack—you’re the biggest person who ever lived.”

Onscreen, a worker pushing a small dolly bumped into the edge of the jellied mass; it jiggled. Young Zack barfed inside his mouth.

Diana said, “You mean
all
of us have been farmed like this?”

“That is correct. The Solon starter cells from the five of you clone easily. And each of you is colour-coded.”

“And all that jelly food we ate in the underground rooms—that was . . .
us?
”

“Yes, it was.”

“Wait,” said Zack. “I was eating this jelly shit even before the others got stung.”

“At first you were eating a synthetic version.”

“At
first?
”

“Yes, at first.”

Diana left the room to vomit in the bathroom. The others sat frozen. I put the farming into perspective for them. “Remember, those cells are unconnected to a brain and experience no pain.”

Zack asked, “Okay, then, Serge, what do you do with this stuff once you’ve grown it?”

“We cut it into slabs that are then dried into sheets. The sheets are then taken to a nearby facility.”

Diana re-entered the room.

“The material is powdered and mixed with toluene. We run this slurry through a centrifuge and extract your eons. These eons are quickly modified by replacing a few sulphur atoms with phosphorous atoms, and—
voilà!
—we have Solon.”

“What? We’re made of
Solon
?”

“No, you’re made of DNA, and it’s your DNA that helps make Solon. And farming your brains is much cheaper and easier than building Solon molecules from scratch.”

Sam said, “This is like one of our stories. No, this is weirder than any of our stories.”

I replied, “Haven’t all of you noticed that your personalities and your ideas have begun to morph into each other’s? It’s a terrible pun, but the five of you are turning into a hive mind. I think it would have happened to you anyway—your minds are somehow rigged to melt together; it’s the storytelling chemical you make—but eating each other’s brain material only sped up the process. You heard each other’s stories. The five of you almost arrived at the truth on your own. Your bodies know the truth.” I looked at Harj. “You guessed it, Apu.”

Diana said, “You know this is all being taped and webcast, right?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“So you realize this is an end to your evil plans.”

“You make me sound like the Riddler, the Penguin or Solomon Grundy. And I wouldn’t say Solon is finished. People like Solon. Even if they know there’s an antidote, they won’t take it. People like the freedom of being alone. Once you go Solon, there’s no going back. Once you start using it, our perpetual revenue stream begins. So there you have it. Does the truth make you happy? Does the truth set you free?
Ha!
”

Zack said, “Serge, tell us, then, why are you fucking with the Haida?”

“Why?
Why?
Oh, grow up, young man. You know nothing about power. Why do I do it? Why do I do it? I do it because I
can
.”

ZACK

We stored Serge in a downstairs room with only a mattress and a unicorn poster abandoned by a long-gone former tenant. We buttressed the door and the windows with plywood and long screws, and by the time we finished, it was almost sunrise—but no sleep for us.

Sam said, “Right. I, for one, prefer not to wake up and find myself hanging by a bike chain from the Esso station sign.”

Diana said, “Serge stores uppers in his travelling case. They’ll keep us charged.”

We went into his room—anally organized, as one might expect. Beside Serge’s small medical bag sat a large trunk case.

I asked, “What’s in there?”

We pried it open with the bowie knife, and . . .
holy shit!
It was a love child born of Louis Vuitton and the Texas Medical Center’s main operating room. Hundreds of gleaming surgical instruments: retractors, saws, rasps, forceps, specula and blades—just amazing. Diana wolf-whistled at the shiny steel cornucopia and apologized for using a rudimentary knife to remove our chips earlier. “I wish I’d known about this thing a few hours ago. Jesus, you could separate Siamese twins and put them back together with this much gear.”

We then quickly got ourselves hopped up on primo amphetamines—far smoother than my father’s home-cooked meth. I felt clear and radiant, and my body was already tingling and saying,
Zack, you know, you really might enjoy being addicted to this stuff
.

Serge was yelling from within his own little neutrality chamber: “You people are being stupid! Listen to me. All I wanted to do here was find a way to come up with a cheap, easy antidote to Solon. It’s inside you—you know it is. Just keep on making up stories, we’ll do some blood tests. Do it for the betterment of our goddam
species
.”

Our thinking was,
Well, okay, Serge, you make a good point, but we can’t get past the idea that you could destroy a tribe—a society—as if it were so many sea monkeys in a fishbowl.
So we ignored him, and as he began to withdraw from Solon, his personality grew nasty and our trust level for him, already low, sank further. “Do we have last night backed up?”

“We do.” We’d made multiple copies of the evening’s webcast stories, culminating with the unfinished story of Trevor that was still playing itself out, there on the island. And so, come dawn, the five of us walked into town with half a white bedsheet taped onto an ancient aluminum rod from a children’s playground. It rippled in the wind. If bullets had entered our bodies or if a noose had circled my neck from nowhere, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Our worries were quickly validated as we came up to the Esso station: two more dangling bodies—those of the two men from the jet crash, the Solon burners. This came as a surprise; we’d thought
they’d
be the ones orchestrating the hangings. We pantshittingly walked farther into town, but we didn’t see any people. There was nobody there to surrender to. Everybody was gone.

“What the . . . ?”

Julien said, “Maybe they’re in the old village.” Masset has two locations: the new Masset, in which we lived, and old Masset, an Indian reserve two miles up the road. We went home to fetch the pickup. Diana drove while Harj and I stood in the bed, holding up the white flag.

As we approached old Masset, we slowed to a crawl; we didn’t want to surprise anybody. But once there, all we found were a few barking dogs.
No Haida
.

We stopped in front of a burnt-down house with a knee-high necklace of sun-bleached grey whale vertebrae in its front yard. Diana said, “They’ve obviously all gone somewhere together, but where?”

We cursed.

“So where should
we
go now?” I asked. “Special forces are probably going to be here to wipe us out any moment.”

“Nobody’s going to take us out,” said Diana. “Everyone knows everything now. So they can’t kill us. We’re safe that way.”

“If you need to believe that, believe it. But I think we’re fucked.”

“Let’s go to the airstrip,” suggested Harj. “We can see the crash remains in full daylight.”

In the absence of a better idea, we drove to the airstrip. Again, no people; only the chilled remains of the previous evening’s crash, easier to see now, as all of the dead grass and brush surrounding it had burnt to stubble. Harj wandered over to the patch of debris holding the bodies and began to pray.

“Why?” I asked him. “I thought you didn’t believe in anything much.”

“I am not praying for the dead. I’m praying for myself, that I can make some sort of sense of what’s happening to us.”

Diana said, “I can agree with that.” She called to Julien and Sam. “Come here. We’re going to say a prayer for the Channel Three News team. Are you in?”

“Sure.”

And that’s how the five of us ended up having a two-minute silent prayer for the Channel Three News team.

Praying is funny. When you pray, you leave the day-to-day time stream and enter a quieter place that uses different clocks and values things that can’t be seen.

At the two-minute mark, we heard choppers arriving from the east. “Shit.
Scram!
” Diana yelled.

We could hear three or four choppers arriving at the airstrip and then hovering before they landed. We charged into the adjoining forest. Sounds from the outer world instantly muffled as plant life soaked up noises. We didn’t think we’d been spotted, but this didn’t stop us from charging farther into the maw, wading through moss up to our hips, climbing rotten hemlocks the size of freight containers, which crumbled like cookie dough under us. After maybe fifteen minutes we stopped and collected our breath and our wits. I asked if anybody knew where we were, and Julien, king of satellite map skills, knew exactly. “We’re close to the Sangan River. If it’s low tide, we can walk up it and into the Naikoon forest—we’re actually only fifteen minutes from the
UNESCO
bee’s nest.” So off we went to the nest. Why not? As with the airstrip, it was a destination in the absence of any other.

A lot of spooky shit was going through my head—mostly the thought of Solon’s makers lobotomizing me and hooking my body up to a respirator and feeding tube for the next five decades. This thought fuelled me onward.
Fucking Solon. Fucking bees. Fucking century.

The tide was low but rising, and the river was the colour of bad Mexican whiskey. A school of oolichan darted within its flow, and birds in the trees made their noises. Diana became a self-appointed Little Bo Peep, in charge of herding us to the nest site, and she and I began having a stupid argument over what to do once we got there. Three, maybe four more choppers flew overhead. They could have been the government, come to inspect the crash site. They could have been Solon’s goons. They could have been . . . well, that’s what we were arguing over as we arrived at the nest to find several hundred Haida of all ages sitting wordlessly around the site of the vanished hive. To the side were dozens of open boxes of Solon. A ceremonial wooden bowl was being passed slowly around among them, each Haida taking a sip.

“They’re drinking the fucking Kool-Aid!”

Several of the Haida turned and shushed us.

Sam said, “We can’t let them take that shit. It’ll destroy them.”

Diana said, “It’s not our business.”

“But it . . .”

But it
wasn’t
our business. It was the Haida’s business, and we sat and watched them partake, the bowl and packages of Solon moving silently, first across the elders in the front row, then going backwards, one by one. By the time the third row was taking their pills, the people up front were standing up and walking away. They walked past the five of us, and their bland facial expressions were like those of people who are headed home, wondering how many emails they have in their inbox.

Within ten minutes all the Haida had drunk the Kool-Aid, and within twenty minutes they were all gone.

We walked to the circle of dirt and sat down. A helicopter flew directly overhead and then returned. It hovered over us, then landed in a bog beside the circle, but after what we’d just seen, we no longer cared. It felt as if something far larger than us had played itself out.

The blades came to a stop, and we wondered what might emerge—Navy SEALs brandishing AK-47s? A Channel
Four
News team? But instead it was an older woman. Sam said, “Louise?”

Louise looked at her and smiled. “Sam—you’re alright. Good.”

“Louise, what are you doing here?”

“Making sure you’re okay.”

We’d all stood up and come forward by then, but our body language told Louise we weren’t comfy in her presence. She said, “No, I’m
not
connected to Solon, and no, I’m
not
here to kill you or sedate you or capture you or anything else.”

Sam introduced her to each of us. We could see a few figures inside the helicopter, but they didn’t emerge.

Louise asked, “Where’s Serge?”

“Back at the house. We’ve made a prison cell for him.”

She looked quite shocked by this, but not in a bad way.

“Frontier justice,” I said. “That bastard fuelled the entire Indian tribe here with fucking Solon. They’re going to be toast now.”

“Wait—that’s
all
he did?”

“Huh? We thought that was more than enough to merit imprisonment. And you should
know
all of this. We’ve vlogged and blogged everything here since we arrived.”

“Actually, no, you haven’t. Serge had a scrambler set up. The outer world has no idea what’s been happening here.”

Motherfucker!

Louise continued, “Can I ask what it was he was doing with you people here?”

“Some kind of experiment—making us invent campfire stories with the goal of generating an antidote to Solon. And he was always going on about
Finnegans Wake
.”

“I see.”

“What—you mean there’s some kind of truth to that?”

“Well, possibly. Actually, yes.”

I said, “Louise, I think we’re missing something here.”

“I think you’re right.” Louise sucked in some breath and looked into the forest.

Sam said, “Please tell us, then. We’re in the dark.”

“You see, Sam, Serge didn’t want to invent a cure for Solon any more than he wanted to fly to the moon,” Louise said.

“So, then, what was he doing with us?”

“My dear, you haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”

“Figured what out, Louise?”

“Samantha, I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but Serge wanted the ultimate Solon hit. He wanted to eat your
brains
.”