The Other Side of Life (Book #1, Cyberpunk Elven Trilogy) (23 page)

Anya rolled her eyes slightly, at Julius’s
ignorance of her presence, and lack of acknowledgement of her
handiwork at the institute.

“
I had help,” Nin replied,
assuredly. “What does he know about elves?”

Anya looked down at her collarbone just
then, and then at the elves. She had just realized their pendants
were missing.

“
The iron particles in the
sensor,” Nin said, when Julius didn’t respond. “That was…your
invention?”

Julius smiled, showing a straight set of
white teeth, that belied the lack of genuine warmth in him. He was
like a cat, playing with its prey. “I thought it might help
me…capture an elf.”

“
So it’s you that knows
about elves…not Gilbreth.”

Julius stayed quiet. Nin picked up on his
game quickly. Julius would answer, but only if the other person
deserved to be given the information. In Nin’s case, he had to
prove it by showcasing his mental acumen, to be an “equal” in
Julius’s eyes.

Nin remembered Anya’s mention about Samuel
Lycata. “Unless it’s Gilbreth’s parchment, that you stole.”

Julius gave a half-smile. “He claimed his
ancestor was a medieval scribe. He talks gibberish sometimes. The
man has Alzheimer’s, along with paranoid schizophrenia…and thus is
a little, senile.”

Nin thought about it. “That’s how you know
Gilbreth? You’re his private drug-dispenser.”

“
You’ve read Xenith’s
catalog, I see,” Julius said, with the same smile as before.
“Nearly correct. He goes to my dad for new drugs not on the market
yet.”

“
The man in the photo at
the vault.”

Julius nodded. “I’ve been to Gilbreth’s home
a few times. He’s very scholarly…he has a library full of medieval
history, and the like. But he doesn’t always remember what he’s
studying. One day, I did see a parchment. He had taken it out, and
left it out in the open on the table in his study.”

“
You could read the Latin
words,” Nin pointed out. “I saw the dictionary on your bookcase.”
If there had been an English-Latin dictionary on the bookcase in
Julius’s office, Anya had missed it.

Julius raised an eyebrow.
“Earlier that day, Gilbreth had given us a tour of his private
collection in the vault. I noticed the parchment in Gilbreth’s home
matched one of the pieces in the glass cabinet, in the vault. This
part”—he pointed to the middle portion of Gilbreth’s
parchment—“looked identical.
Arbor
was the first word that caught my eye.”

“
The Latin word for tree,”
Nin said. Anya wondered how many more things that were obvious to
Nin continued to remain non-obvious to her. She thought she’d need
more than ten fingers to keep count.

“
Funny how things seem to
all fall into place at once, hmm?”

Nin nodded. “So you didn’t need to hear the
poem from me,” he said with a sort of grave courtesy. “You actually
had the human version. We had to look for a missing piece.”

“
I just wanted to make
sure.” Julius took a step forward, as his jaw twitched slightly.
“That’s something I wanted to know. Why are there two
copies?”

“
Elves and humans got along
better, in the past. They actually mingled, and socialized,” Nin
told him. “My guess is that Gilbreth’s ancestor had an Elven friend
or two.”

“
The part about the tree is
what I figured out first,” Julius said. “It happened by chance. I
knew then that the other two sections of the poem had to be
true.”

“
Leticia told you, while
you had her under hypnosis,” Anya said.

Leticia continued to alternate between
staring blankly into space, and adoringly at Julius. “He had to
test the drug out on someone,” Leticia said.

“
She told me what she knew
about the poem, her ‘Elven friends’, and about the break-in,”
Julius shared the specifics. “All I had to do was appear on the
scene, and return, with a real, live elf. And your friend,
Tavia,”—Julius waved a hand towards her—“she happened to set off
something on my GVMT.”

Nin held Julius’s gaze, wondering what he
meant with the insidious phones the elves had long known about.

Julius brought out his GVMT cell phone
model, fiddling around with some of the consoles. “My model detects
nanoparticles in the air—they show up as red and orange little
cells on my screen.” He held the phone up, to show Nin and Anya an
example. “I was at the stairs, in the GI…”

Anya remembered lying in wait, with the
beefy guard skulking around in front.

“…
when my phone started to
vibrate. I checked the screen—and there were nanoparticles, but
they were of a different color.”

Julius located another image, and showed
them the screen. This time, the little cells were light blue and
purple, the color of the swirls in the elves’ plasma guns, which
Tavia had carried along with her into the GI.

“
What is that? I know
they’re nanoparticles, because that app on my phone doesn’t pick up
on any other substance—but why are they this color?”

“
They’re a safer, more
sophisticated blend,” Nin answered. “The human version of
nanotechnology creates particles that settle in the brain and
lungs. Prolonged exposure induces skin aging through oxidative
stress. The chromosome damage is linked to all the big killers of
man—cancer, heart disease, neurological disease, and
aging.”

Julius simply nodded, a reflective
expression on his face, as he took in everything Nin had just said.
“Yes, we use nanotech to create untraceable weapons of mass
destruction…networked cameras for use by the government…and
weapons-development, fast enough to destabilize arms races.” He
paused for a moment. “And what do you call your Elven version
of…nanotech?”

“
Titanium-nano.”

Anya thought Julius might be interested in
the safer form Nin spoke of. Maybe they could work together, on
something?

Nin was still piecing things together,
thinking of the photo he’d seen of Julius and Samuel. “You knew
about the tree, before you saw Gilbreth’s parchment, didn’t
you?”

Julius relaxed his shoulder muscles. He
seemed to accept Nin as being intellectually on par. “My dad and I
found that tree. We had our scientists transport some of the roots
to our ‘playground lab’.”

At the GI,
Nin thought, remembering the scientists they’d
seen.

“
I thought diamond dust was
saints’ bones—Gilbreth has some of those in his underground
vaults.”

Vaults—so there’s more
than one vault,
Anya thought with a
shudder.

“
But along the way, we
discovered the roots had…anti-aging properties.” Julius turned, and
held a white jar in front of Nin.
timeless,
read the all-lowercase
label, a popular peppermint-scented anti-aging skincare product
marketed by
Klum Laboratories.

“
Aging is the worst
disease,” Julius began, talking like he had a mouth full of poison.
“To watch the human body waste away…wouldn’t it be nice if the
human body just expired? No illnesses, no pain…immortality, if some
people wanted it—those who could afford it…”

Nin hid a smirk at Julius’s obviously shrewd
business sense.

“
timeless
hides some of the signs of aging, to some extent,”
Julius continued. “But look at your skin.”

He went up close to Nin’s face, eyeing his
flawless, blemish-free complexion. “Your blood is the secret to
promoting skin renewal for a smoother, firmer and ever-refined
appearance.” Julius was already considering the possibility of
breeding elf babies for their blood.

“
Looks are not everything,”
Nin answered, eye to eye with Julius.

Julius gave a hearty, unrestrained, slightly
maniacal laugh.

“
You could take our Elven
insight,” Nin continued, on a topic Julius spent his life and work
obsessing over, “or our Elven wisdom…but you want our longevity,
and regenerative properties.”

Julius threw his hands up
in exasperation. “People don’t want to be smart—it’s not
what
you
think is
best…it’s what people want and are willing to pay for.” He leaned
back against the table, a slightly faraway look in his eyes.
“People don’t want to be smart,” he repeated. “They are
pleasure-seeking animals. That is the basis of why drugs
sell—people
want
their drugs. That is the need. And Xenith supplies the
demand.”

Before Nin could reply,
Julius brought out his GVMT again. “Xenith will have the world at
its feet with GVMT and the upgraded version of
timeless—
what shall I call
it…
timeless no. 217?
”

“
Xenith owns GVMT?” Nin cut
in, keeping up with the lightning speed of Julius’s
thoughts.

Julius gave a nod, looking like he was
enjoying a light conversation over dinner. “GVMT is…my dad’s pet
project. He’s passing Xenith on to me—we’re having a friendly
competition…to see who can bring in more profits.”

“
Entertainment and
technology, versus…drugs, health, and beauty?” Nin had summed up
the billion-dollar industries that made the world go
round.

Julius grinned. “Xenith is one of the four
pharmaceutical megacorporations left. Only three left to destroy.
With GVMT, and a network line, we’d be able to get governments at
our feet too. We’d be able to plant subliminal…”

“
Political messages…” Nin
added.

“
And sponsored corporate
messages…plus advertisements to brainwash people into buying things
they might not really need, but that they
want
, at all costs…using our new
infra-red nanotechnology—people wouldn’t even know it. It’s in the
beta stages right now.”

Nin kept himself still, wondering about the
implications, even though the elves had already been on to it.

“
I’d have all this…and
Leticia, my first lady, beside me.”

Nin looked up at Leticia, who smiled back
sweetly.

Anya squirmed as discreetly as she could in
her seat, trying to wriggle her way out of the tight ropes around
her wrists and ankles.

“
timeless
isn’t the only product with traces of the tree
root, am I right?” Nin said grimly.

Julius nodded. “Basically the same chemicals
and products: just repackaged. The root is a versatile ingredient.
It makes perfect sense though…that a tree which renews the earth,
would work just as well for humankind.”

He turned, reaching for a stapled set of
spreadsheets with colored horizontal bars. “The root’s used in all
of these.” He ran a thumb down the first couple of pages, reading
out some of the product names as he went along. He set the pages
down, then lifted one of the vials that held Elven blood, licking
his upper lip as he did so. “Who knows what else this could be used
for?”

You’re sick,
Anya viciously thought. She was disgusted to the
point of speechlessness.

“
And what does that go in?”
Nin said to Julius, in a neutral tone. Aside from the elixir, Nin
couldn’t fathom what else Julius had in mind.

Julius shrugged. “Nothing that a little
testing won’t find out.” He liked experiments of any kind,
particularly when they involved substances that were new and
unknown.

“
What do you list the tree
root as,” Anya asked, unconcerned if Julius chose to pay no
attention to her, “on the product label?”

“
Hypoallergenic, no animal
testing, paraben free, non-comedogenic,” Julius rattled off.
“Xenith looks good in the eyes of the public. Our products are
proven to work, and customers trust us.”

“
All that charity stuff
online…” Anya began, her voice dripping with irony. “So, did
Leticia help you, with the Spanish website?”

“
You just reminded me,”
Julius replied, making a note on a piece of paper on the table.
“I’ll have to see to that, another day…”

“
You mean, the charity
stuff, is real,” Anya said flatly.

“
Everything is very well
balanced,” Julius explained lyrically. “We can afford to be
generous because profits are a sure thing.”

“
You make sure of that,”
Nin said, with a subtle touch of what could be called
praise.

“
People love their drugs,”
Julius continued, unraveling some of the details that constituted
the core of the company’s operations. “And we keep them satisfied.
It’s already been calculated, so that there’ll always be a certain
number of people kept ‘sick’ and ‘dependant’ on the drugs…then you
have a market base that never depletes. You never run out of
customers.”

“
And this is your next
step.” Nin gestured with his head, to the vials behind Julius,
containing Dresan and Tavia’s blood.

Julius had a gleam in his
eyes. “By selling samples of a rejuvenating elixir…along with a
breakthrough ‘forever young’ drug…we’d corner the market. And
be
the
company, at
the top…Xenith would crush the other three pharmaceutical
corporations. It’s survival of the fittest. Kill or be
killed.”

Julius went over to the
bottle of
timeless
, picking it up. “The Best Age-Defying Product in the
Universe, by Xenith.” He held his other hand out, with an exuberant
enthusiasm. He could have been holding the world in the palm of his
hand. “Youth is yours, forever. Never see a wrinkle. Skin pure as a
newborn baby’s. No more endless botox trips!” He rested an elbow on
the tabletop, placing the bottle down again. “Think about
it.”