The Legend of Things Past (Beyond Pluto SciFi Futuristic Aventures Book 1) (12 page)

“Cloning will enable mankind to reach eternal life.”

–Claude Vorilhon

May 15, 2176

Fort Belvoir, VA

Donovan Knight

They connected the device to the satellites on top of the
building. It would give the device an infinitely wider range. They set it up to
track any brain waves within a 2% similarity to Tobias’s. After another couple of
days, it found what it was looking for.

“It was a previously unknown planet,” Colonel McGregor was
saying to General Umar. “We don’t know when Tobias discovered it, but the clone
is definitely there. I have no doubt.”

“Upon further investigation,” Captain Umar said, “we found
that the planet is habitable. It’s nowhere near as flourishing with life as
Earth, but it has water and breathable air.

“In addition, when we looked through the pictures of Tobias’s
lab we found one of this very planet with its coordinates. The location had
been hiding under our noses the whole time. Tobias had placed a label on it. It
said ‘Planet Lohiri.’ He’s named it. We have yet to find anything else.”

“This is fabulous news,” General Umar said. “You guys did
great work. Now it’s time to get a good night’s rest. Tomorrow, you’ll travel
to this new planet to see if you can uncover more clues.”

“Yes, sir.” They were dismissed.

Donovan lay in bed that night wide awake, his mind still
buzzing from all that had happened that day. It was late before his mind
finally calmed down and allowed him to rest.

The next day they set out for Lohiri. They suited up in
space force uniforms. Even though tests had shown that the air was breathable,
they wore oxygenated helmets just in case.

They arrived on the quiet rocky planet but didn’t disembark.
They stayed on the ship and observed the land from above, looking for anything
interesting.

They used the brain wave tracker to lead them to Tobias’s clone.
Tracee flew the vessel in the direction indicated by the device. Eventually,
they spotted a building. It was odd, being on an alien planet and seeing a structure
that could have been built on earth. The landed nearby.

They were surprised when nothing happened. There were no
attackers—no Tobias there to confront them.

It was pretty anticlimactic.

“Well, let’s get moving. Can’t sit here all day,” Donovan
said.

“But what if it’s a trap?” Captain Umar asked.

“Then if we fall into it, we’ll run for it. But we have to
try and explore at least a little.”

Reluctantly, they all left the ship. The weight of the guns
and e-guns in their holsters was of some comfort. If Tobias did show up, at
least they all had two types of weapons—one of them had to work.

The building was a lot bigger up close. It reached into the
purple sky, towering above their heads. There were a set of glass double doors
under a three-story archway.

Donovan felt like an ant.

The doors opened when they approached.

Donovan was suspicious. It was just too easy, too inviting. They
walked inside. Donovan became even more alert to his surroundings. He heard the
footfall of every comrade behind him.

They crept further and further into the lion’s den, finding
nothing but large, white echoing rooms and chambers, all of them empty.

“This can’t be it,” Colonel McGregor said. “We can’t have come
here for an empty building.”

They delved deeper and finally came upon metal science
equipment stored in the rooms. None of it was in use, but at least it was something
other than empty air.

Donovan led them into the largest room yet. It was filled to
the brim with stainless steel. There were hundreds of devices, all of them
exactly the same, lined up in perfectly neat rows.

They each resembled a dentist’s chair. There were large
tables and contraptions that hung over them sporting hundreds of tools, most of
which had sharp points. Underneath each chair was a storage cabinet.

“What the hell is all this stuff?” Captain Umar asked.

Donovan realized that he recognized the devices. He hadn’t
really been paying attention at the time, but there was one of these things in
the secret room in Tobias’s lab back on Earth.

These machines were used for cloning.

With these machines, Tobias could make hundreds of clones at
once. Based on his last encounter with a clone, Donovan thought that one was
enough. The sight of the lab—designed for the mass production of human clones—chilled
Donovan to the bone. It was extremely eerie. The emptiness made it even more
so.

They crept around the place, finding nothing but sterile
equipment.

Then, from seemingly nowhere, a figure appeared. It was a
hologram.

Tracee whipped out her gun in less than a second and fired.
The bullet only disrupted the surface of the image, sending pixels scattering
for a moment then landing in the far wall.

The hologram smiled.

Donovan looked at it in the eyes. “What is it that you find
so amusing, grandfather?”

Tobias raised his eyebrows. “Grandfather? I have no
grandchildren that I know of.” He chuckled then. “Well, of course. They found
the virus then. And of course they would use
my
invention and send my
own descendants against me. Fools. Tell me boy, what time are you from?”

“2258.” Donovan didn’t know what else to do but answer him.
Maybe he was just in shock.

“So it took them that long, did it?” Tobias chuckled again.
“What do you all want from me?”

“The cure to this crazy virus.” Tracee said.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?” Donovan asked.

The hologram sighed. “None of you would understand. You
haven’t done the things that I’ve done. Seen the things that I’ve seen. It
would be difficult to explain.” Here Tobias took on a mournful look.

“Well, try anyway,” Donovan said. He was suddenly very
angry. This man wasn’t his grandfather. This man who spoke in such a cloying
tone. This man didn’t even know Donovan. And apparently the future version of
Tobias didn’t care if Donovan lived or died, either.

Tobias looked at Donovan for a moment as if searching for
something in his eyes. Finally, he nodded. “Very well.”

He paused, collecting his thoughts. “I grew up learning
about the marvels and miracles of science in the slums of West Haven. The human
race had saved the planet from destruction by ending global warming, they had
brought back extinct species and rebuilt natural habitats, and they cleaned up
and eliminated all of the world’s trash. It would seem that humans should be
living in a utopia. But that was not that case.

“Humans still hoarded resources. Greed, murder, theft—all
were rampant, not only in the slums but in the rich cities. In fact, it was the
rich who had access to unlimited resources who withheld life-giving materials
from the poor. They charged us double for water and food. Living in the slums
was a day-to-day fight for survival.

“I’ve seen men murdered over a loaf of bread. Children
beaten and robbed for a single bottle of water. They pitted us against one another,
waiting for us to kill each other off. Police were no help. They were all
corrupt. They would only help if you had enough money to pay them, and no one
did except for drug lords and food smugglers.

“Yes, I’ve seen awful, terrible things. Things that should
never have happened when there was unlimited clean water, power, and food just
ten miles away in the next city. I went to school religiously, studied every
day so that one day I could escape from that evil place. I learned the sciences
and created new things—things that I’d hoped to use to help people in the
slums.

“However, whenever I tried to use my inventions to aid the
poor, the government stopped me at every turn. There was always some law, some
reason why my plans wouldn’t work. To think, mere words on paper holed up in
some congressional library stopped me from saving real human lives with my
advanced technology!

“That’s when I began to defy the government. I work with
them now, yes, but I have long since stopped working
for
them, like some
blind dog sent to its master’s bidding. I wouldn’t be their slave anymore. I
would create justice, whether they liked it or not.

“For a while, that’s exactly what I did—I created justice. I
fed people. I clothed them. All anonymously, of course. But then a day came
where I lost hope in even the victimized people of the slums.”

Tobias paused for a moment.

“I was married once, you know.” The hologram toyed with a
golden band on its finger. A look of longing came across Tobias’s face. Then
the look turned to anger and disgust.

“My wife, Deidra. Your grandmother, if you’re really my
grandson. And you must be—you look so like me, so like your father, too. Your
grandmother knew about everything I was doing. I had met her in school. She was
a biology major. Smart, beautiful, funny. She was a remarkable woman. She was
born and raised in a wealthy city, but she visited the slums quite often,
giving out food and water to those who needed it. She believed in my cause and
she helped me.

“One day, we were touring the slums at night with food. The
meals were free and we came to this particular area frequently. There was a
boy. About seventeen. We saw him every time we went. He was always very polite,
always giving, sharing with his two younger siblings. That day, his little
brother and sister weren’t with him. When I asked where they were he looked
nervous.

“We were beginning to serve the food when he pulled out an
e-gun. He aimed it at Deidra. Three other boys, all of them a few years older,
came over and pulled out guns too. The young boy commanded us to give him all
of the food. I tried to talk him down, to awaken his empathy—there was a line
of people, many of them children and elderly. But he wouldn’t listen.

“He grew impatient with what he called my ‘rambling.’ He
said he didn’t care about everyone else—so long as he survived and found a way
to make money, he was happy. The food smugglers had made him a deal. They’d
wanted to teach Deidra and me a lesson—we’d been stealing their business by
giving away food. So they bribed the boy to rob us.

“For good measure, he shot my wife in the heart. She died
instantly, but I had to watch her body writhe on the ground from the electric
shocks.”

Tobias was caught up in the memory. The hologram was so
clear that Donovan could see the tears well up in Tobias’s eyes. Donovan almost
began to feel sorry for him. Tobias collected himself and continued.

“I never returned to the slums again. Deidra was everything
to me. The boy whom we had fed for months, showing him nothing but caring and
kindness, killed my wife for a couple thousand dollars.

“When I looked at the world around me, all I could find was
corruption. Visits outside the U.S. did nothing to dispel those findings.
Genuine kindness was a rarity. Everyone pursued their own ends blindly, never
giving thought to anyone else.

“That’s when I made my decision.”

“What decision?” Donovan asked.

He’d been listening to the story in half amazement, half
horror. He knew the things that went on in slums—both Tobias and Nona had grown
up in them—but he’d never heard of starvation and murder in the streets. Nona
had never mentioned it. Perhaps Tobias’s slum had been worse than any of the
others. Or perhaps Nona decided to keep that darkness to herself.

“Why did you never tell me about my grandmother? You told me
she died in a skycar accident.”

“I don’t know, dear boy. I haven’t withheld that information
from you yet, have I?” Tobias suddenly lost the gloomy air with which he’d told
his story and chuckled at Donovan’s momentary lack of common sense. “But I
imagine I will keep all this from you in the hopes of keeping you pure. I’ve
never told any of this to your father, either. I’m hoping that he will be the
just and loving ruler over one of my new countries on earth. Maybe the future
me saw the same potential in you. It’s perfect, really, my own blood taking up
the major leadership positions.”

They all stared at Tobias in angry shock.

Tracee was the first to react. “
What?
What do you
mean,
ruler
of new countries?”

Donovan was about to ask the same thing despite the fact
that he had a good idea of what his grandfather would say.

“Oh, hadn’t I gotten to that part yet?” Tobias waited
dramatically. “The virus is designed to destroy the human race from the inside
out. I’m going to kill you all and start over with a new human race—all of whom
will be descended from me.”

“You’re insane.” Colonel McGregor spoke for the first time.

Tobias laughed—Colonel McGregor seemed to particularly amuse
him. “I thought the same thing once. I said to myself—why Tobias, how can you
create a whole human race from your own genes? It would never last—not enough
diversity.

“But then I came up with a brilliant idea. Surely, out of
all the billions of people on earth, there had to be at least, say, a couple
thousand worth saving. I began to look for people. I found a few here and
there—people doing kind deeds, not for gain but out of the goodness of their
hearts. Those were the people that I would save. Those were the people worthy
of breeding with my master race.”

This time Jonathan was the first to recover. “This guy must
be shitfaced. He can’t be serious.” He shook his head, looking back and forth between
Donovan and the hologram. “He isn’t
really
serious right now, is he?”

“I think he is,” Tracee said.

Donovan stood, frozen. His mind couldn’t fathom it. Flashes
of heat ran up and down his body. This man wasn’t his grandfather. He couldn’t
be.

“How could I have not seen this?” Donovan said. “I knew you.
You raised me. How could I have not seen this—this madness?”