The Methuselarity Transformation (23 page)

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. The 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.

Just as the pungent scent of Asian food wafted its way to her nostrils, a hand pushed her head down from behind and shoved her into a vehicle. Her step count was no longer relevant as the vehicle sped away from the scene. Now she attended to the motion of the vehicle, which descended
steeply before leveling out for most of its course. By the time it came to a stop and she was roughly pulled to her feet, she could smell salt air.

She was led a short way on pavement and then onto softer ground. A creaking sound erupted a few dozen feet ahead of her, reaching a crescendo as she approached. As she moved forward, the air around her began to feel damp and the ground under her feet became slippery and boggy. The creaking sound was now behind her, ending with a clank.

She sniffed the air. The muddy organicity had the kind of familiarity that resonates with long forgotten feelings and sharpens faded memories from long ago. Lena felt herself smile, ever so briefly, despite her peril. She knew this place and perhaps could use her knowledge in some way to her advantage.

Lena was born in the fall of 2008, the day after the investment company Bear Stearns suddenly went broke, which became part of the folklore of her family. Her father was an investment broker with another firm, but failed to escape the ripples that went through the financial world and left her parents destitute just as they were building their family. While many Wall Street executives continued to make high salaries and collect bonuses, her father had been too low in the hierarchy to merit such protected status. When he was unemployed, her mother went to work as an office manager for a medical practice while he stayed home and tried to care for their infant daughter.

When her mother came home unexpectedly early one afternoon, she’d found her father in the bedroom with a gun to his head. There was a note by the bedside telling her that Lena was at a neighbor’s house and that he was sorry he couldn’t handle things better. She convinced him to put the gun away and he was admitted to a hospital for treatment.
Over the next year, he was in and out of the hospital until he finally renounced the possibility of killing himself and committed to rebuilding his life.

With the hospital bills on top of their other debts, her mother was unable to keep up with the financial demands from her modest salary. They wound up homeless until Lena was four. It took another five years for them to work their way out of poverty on the combination of her mother’s salary and her father’s modest income teaching economics at a community college.

For most of the first decade of her life, Lena had either lived on the streets or spent her time scrounging on the streets along with a gang of similarly impoverished kids. They entertained themselves by exploring the nooks and crannies of the city, from the basements of the neighborhood businesses to the buildings and wharves along the waterfront. One day, they stumbled upon a pair of massive and mysterious iron doors. At the top of the doors was a space large enough to crawl through, but too high for them to reach.

The children returned a few days later with hooks and rope. Using the door hinges as braces, they scaled the doors and descended into the darkness armed with flashlights. Once they became accustomed to the company of the rodents and raccoons that inhabited the space, it became their secret hideout where they spent hours playing and carving their names into the rock. With time they became nimble at scaling the barriers to enter the tunnel in just a few minutes. The dank atmosphere of the tunnel grew familiar and welcoming. Now Lena imagined herself surrounded again by her childhood gang.

“If we finish her here, we could just leave her body for the rats.” The voice of one of her captors shocked her back to the reality of her present danger. The image of the dead guard in the corridor reminded her that the people who held her didn’t
hesitate to kill. She felt something hard thrust against her left temple. She drew a short breath and held it, as if not breathing might somehow make her invisible.

“First we need confirmation that Mettler’s dead,” came another voice. “Otherwise we’ll still need a hostage.” The pressure against Lena’s head subsided.

“Can’t imagine him surviving the cyanide. We already got word that he was in the apartment. Our sentry locked him in tight. She should be here any minute.”

Now Lena’s breath came in short gasps and her chest felt like it was going to burst. Following their brief rapprochement, Ray’s behavior had become even more bizarre and cryptic than before, driving them apart again. Her feelings for him had submerged, but now sobs bubbled to the surface and threatened to strangle her within the hood.

“If you’re going to kill me, anyway, could you at least take this off?” Lena pleaded, her words coming in choking fragments.

“Guess there’s no harm in that,” said another one of her captors. “The tunnel walls are thick enough to keep her off the grid.” She felt the ties around her neck loosen and the hood came off. Her eyes were already used to the dark, so things around her came quickly into focus.

Her assessment of her location was immediately confirmed. Light filtered through high arched spaces from both ends of the quarter mile long tunnel. She could see familiar niches in the contours of the walls where she and her friends had hidden various mementoes and toys. She now counted three human figures, corresponding to the three distinct voices that she’d heard through the shroud. Her sobs subsided as her attention turned to integrating the new information she now had about her surroundings.

One of her captors took pity and freed her hands so she could wipe away her tears with her sleeve. They had nothing to lose. The tunnel was secure and she was defenseless.

Lena tried to connect her MELD chip to the UDB, but the kidnappers had been right. There was no access to the cloud from the tunnel. Which meant that her captors were also cut off. That explained why they weren’t still in communication with their accomplice on the outside.

The creaking sound suddenly rose behind her. She turned to see one of the huge iron doors slowly moving outward as the aging hinges squealed and groaned. A female figure appeared silhouetted against the sky and pulled the door shut again with apparent ease.

“He got away.” she shouted from the entrance once the door was closed. Lena’s heart skipped with the hope conveyed by those words. Ray was alive, after all, and she’d likely at least bought some time.

“How in the world did that happen?”

“They blew up the window with a drone and extracted him,” replied the woman, now standing directly before Lena, who recoiled in shock at her appearance. There before her was the face of the woman on the floor with the steel blue eyes, identical in all respects absent the hole in the middle of her forehead.

Once the shock had worn off, it all began to come together. This was not the guard that had been posted outside her door. She was an identical replacement. The wound had been bloodless because no blood had ever flowed in either woman’s body. They were SPUDs and had been manufactured at the same time in the same version. Somehow, whoever had abducted Lena had been able to replace the one who had been posted to guard her with this one. Lena wondered whether this SPUD
had been the one that destroyed her double and what, if anything, she might have felt when she did it.