Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “I’m Mizter Dekkle,” the man told them, when they’d come a little closer.

  He sat before a round table that gave the impression of having grown right out of the floor. This table was topped with glowing glass, beneath which were any number of minute pieces of equipment.

  “I’m Luck,” Luck said. “And this is Starlock. We came—”

  “—from the Cathedral Proto reservation, I would guess,” the man said, interrupting her with an unexpected eagerness.

  “Yes,” Luck agreed. She’d heard the Rez called “Cathedral” before by Mizter Caldwell. It was the Rez’s name among humans, even if no Protos ever used it.

  The man pulled an oxygen mask up to his mouth and inhaled from it for a time, holding up a finger politely to ask them to give him a moment. After several slow breaths, he removed the mask.

  “How can I help you?” he asked kindly.

  “We…,” Luck began, then she fell silent. She was hesitant to tell him that they’d come only to find out if the Proto Authority was still operational—and that they had dearly hoped it was not.

  “Humans stopped coming to the Rez,” Starlock said. “And so we…” He too trailed off.

  “You wanted to know if we were ever coming back at all,” Mizter Dekkle suggested.

  “Yes,” they both said.

  “So. The short answer is no.”

  The man put the oxygen mask over his face again. His eyes inspected them as he breathed. Luck became aware of how shabby they both looked in the old camouflage uniforms, their hair full of dust, their hands and faces as dirty as the Naturalists’. Mizter Dekkle was surely taking in all of those details, but she sensed that he could see much more. This man designed people, and Luck had the peculiar sensation that he might be peering into their minds.

  At length, he removed the mask again. “I will explain more, but are you hungry?” he asked.

  They had gotten no food from the Naturalists and so were ravenous. Mizter Dekkle pointed them to the far end of the room, where a refrigerator sat beneath a counter. On the way, Luck peered into a tank full of iridescent beetles and another that held tiny starfish.

  “You see here some of the things we steal,” Mizter Dekkle said, noticing her interest. “The traits we take from you Protos—hair color, eye color, skin color, height, and so on—are added in the womb. Other traits come later, and we borrow those from every creature in nature.”

  Another piece of the human puzzle fell into place. Of course the humans had not been merely studying and cataloging Proto DNA. They had been using it.

  The refrigerator was full of some sort of food that came in bars wrapped in plastic. They returned to Mizter Dekkle and ate while sitting on the floor in front of him, surrounded by tubs of grain.

  “Please, can you tell me who that human is?” Luck asked, pointing to a large portrait standing on the floor, where it was leaning against the glass of the lab windows.

  It was an image, she was sure, of the same man she’d seen on the necklace belonging to the pilot of the crashed transpo they’d found on their way to the city. In this portrait, however, the man had made more changes to his body. The wavy black hair on one side, the curly brown hair on the other, the black eye, the green eye—these were the same, but he had, additionally, a yellow eye like the eye of a bird of prey on each of his temples and two extra arms. Each of his four arms exhibited a different skin color.

  Mizter Dekkle removed his mask and said, thoughtfully, “That, Luck, is the Reverend Mizter Tad Tadd. Once a rabble-rousing preacher, later the man singularly responsible for uniting the modern world. He…well, he spent his life influencing the masses—the masses you have undoubtedly seen as you walked through the city.”

  “Is it a religious painting?” Luck asked.

  Most references to religion had been excised from the Proto library and school curriculum, of course, but there were still hints here and there, in books on art and music. The Reverend Mizter Tadd, in this image, reminded Luck of the poses she had seen in some centuries-old paintings.

  “Some would say yes, it is a religious painting, though most would claim it is exactly the opposite—that it pays tribute to a man who set science free from religion.”

  “And the darts?” Starlock asked, for the portrait had been used as a dart board and was speckled with holes from this abuse. A tight knot of darts had been left in place, piercing the man’s chest just where a glowing, enormous heart had been painted.

  “I have become somewhat less enamored with the great Reverend Tadd,” the man answered, “in light of recent events.” He disappeared into his oxygen mask for a time. When he removed it again, he said, “You wish to know what’s happened to the humans? The best answer I have is this: we are all dying or dead.”

  “Everywhere?” Starlock asked.

  “That brings up an interesting question. When you say everywhere, what do you mean by that word?”

  “We mean the whole Earth,” Luck answered. “Are humans all over the whole world dying?”

  “And by humans you mean modified humans?”

  They both nodded. “We thought you were a different species,” Luck said.

  “That was by design,” Mizter Dekkle admitted. “But you’ve figured out the truth?”

  “That you just like to make changes?” Starlock suggested.

  “Yes,” Mizter Dekkle agreed. He continued, “I know you’ve been given no books on recent history, so you won’t know that the rest of the world, apart from the North American Voluntary Federation, has shut themselves off from this country for decades. Their idea of what humans should be and our idea were not…compatible.” He spoke rather slowly, to conserve his breath, and here he paused to take more oxygen. “Russia and many others didn’t like the variety we’ve given ourselves. To them, manipulating our own genome was unethical, a kind of profanity. And we in the West didn’t like the half-mechanical slave laborers they were creating to make their own lives easier. Both sides arguing for human rights from opposite directions.”

  “So…there is no ‘rest of the world’?” Starlock asked.

  “Oh, it’s there all right,” the man answered, “though I know very little of it. Occasionally a scientist might break the communications ban to speak illegally to a fellow scientist on the other side of the Genetic Curtain, but this doesn’t happen often enough to get a sense of their world.”

  After a stint in the oxygen mask, Mizter Dekkle continued, “But let’s set aside the rest of the world, which may be healthy, for all I know. Everywhere in our country and in the North American Federation, humans are dead or dying. Like the poor souls you have seen on your way here. Indeed, like me.”

  “You’re dying, then?” Luck asked, sorry to hear it. “I thought maybe you just had damaged lungs from the fumes, like the Naturalists—”

  “Have you been with that crazy lot?” he asked, a little sharply. This brought on a fit of coughing, which necessitated more time in the mask.

  She and Starlock explained their encounter with the Naturalists and the attack by another group, also calling themselves Naturalists. When their story was finished, Mizter Dekkle removed his mask and said, “Naturalists come in different factions, representing varying degrees of craziness.” Their host shook his head. “So…they control the city? Hmm. But it’s not a lung condition, Luck,” he explained. “I may look unmodified, and I am largely unmodded. But I was given extra-efficient lungs when I was a child, to extract more oxygen from the air. This gave me increased brain function and a lower sleep requirement. It’s a standard mod for a family who wish their child to go into science. My lungs haven’t entirely succumbed yet, but they will in time.” He paused for a few breaths in the mask, and then continued, “We humans all got modified hearts and lungs of one sort or another in early childhood, but doctors do most basic o
rgan mods automatically and aren’t required to tell the parents. Most Naturalists may not even know that parts of their bodies aren’t original. They may not understand why they are being affected by this illness. But they will die nonetheless, just as I will. No one modded will be immune.”

  “They wanted to put us in their lab and take our cells,” Starlock said, “to teach their own cells how to grow properly again.”

  Thoughtfully Mizter Dekkle said, “If they took enough of your healthy cells, often enough, and injected them in the right places in their own bodies…it’s possible they could put off death for a time. An interesting thought. But it would not be pretty for you.

  “What did they tell you about this sickness? That we created it right here in the Bureau of Modifications?”

  Luck answered, “Miz Babbidge said this building was the source of it.”

  Their host looked amused. “That’s an easier story than the real one. But the truth is that we’ve all been killed by crop blight.”

  “Crop blight?” asked Luck, trying to understand the connection. The Protos were familiar with blight, of course—they were farmers, after all.

  “Do you mean that your food supplies failed?” asked Starlock.

  Mizter Dekkle shook his head and gestured to the tubs of grain all along the floor. “No, I mean that we’ve been building ourselves out of food supplies.” He pulled up a stalk of grain from one of the tubs. Luck thought it resembled millet, but it was brown and dead-looking, and the head, where all the seeds were, was too large, each seed more like a small fruit than a kernel of grain. Mizter Dekkle split one of the seeds, revealing something that was not millet at all inside. A gray-brown goo leaked from the pod onto his hand.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s millet—and humans,” he told them. “It’s both. A hybrid of human and plant cells and the building block of mods. Some are programmed in at conception—hair, eye, skin color, height, gender. But for bigger mods—wings or extra limbs or special lungs—we guide the DNA, often copying other creatures from nature. And these cells”—he was rubbing the goo between his fingers—“are very easy to program. They’re the scaffolding for all modification. Do you understand that word, scaffolding?”

  “Yes,” Starlock said.

  “Starlock’s an engineer and I…I read,” Luck told him.

  “Ah, scholars. That is fortunate for me. But then again, I am one of the few who campaigned to keep enough science in the Proto curriculum to give you some control over your world, even if it was only the world of the Rez.” He pointed out to them several tubs of millet, all of which were dry and brown. “The Naturalists attacked the modified millet crops—to stop people from creating mods. They did it publicly. Do you see all the withered stalks? Those plants died a few weeks ago. But the virus does more than attack the human crops. It goes after any cells derived from these plants—which means all of our added mods, all of us. And it spreads faster than anything I’ve seen.”

  “We saw one Rez sentry catch it from another in a few seconds,” Luck told him.

  “Yes,” said Mizter Dekkle, “I was here in the lab early on the day it crossed from plants to humans. I watched people in neighboring buildings catching it from each other almost instantly. Our population lives entirely within city borders, so the spread was…cataclysmic. I will give the Naturalists the benefit of the doubt and assume that they achieved more than they intended. But they will succumb too. And soon.”

  They were all silent for a while, until Luck whispered, “Who will take care of those children when the Naturalists die? And will they try to take the children’s cells?”

  They explained the long trucks gathering up infants from all over the city. Mizter Dekkle grew increasingly upset as he heard this. He spent a long time in the mask, staring at the floor. Eventually, he said, “I am too slow. You see that some of the plants are still green. I’ve gathered varieties from the greenhouses downstairs that are not as susceptible to the blight.” The tubs behind his desk were full of healthier plants. “And see…”

  They rose to look at the table in front of him. Beneath the lighted surface were several round glass dishes, each with a slimy and spongy sheet of something vibrantly pink alive inside it.

  “Healthy tissue from the healthy plants,” Mizter Dekkle said. “If I could culture them more rapidly…” He gestured helplessly at his failing body.

  “Could we help?” Starlock asked.

  He regarded the two of them as he breathed through his mask. After several breaths, he said, “We kept you on a reservation for our own convenience, taught you that you were inferior. Did you really come here to help us?”

  “No,” Starlock admitted. “We came to see if you were still watching us. But now…”

  “…we’ve seen the city,” Luck finished for him, “and all of those children.”

  Mizter Dekkle nodded, visibly moved. “How many other Proto reservations have gotten free?” he asked them. “If I had all of you to help—”

  “Are there other reservations?” asked Luck.

  “Are there more of us?” asked Starlock at the same time.

  After a moment’s confusion, the man understood. “Of course,” he said. “You haven’t found each other yet. It’s only been a few days.” Seeing how startled the Protos were, he explained in a gentle voice, “There are reservations dotted all over Colorado. Most are exactly like yours. A few are where we keep the Protos who get kicked off their original reservations or who managed to sneak past their border fences. But even those are much like your reservation.”

  Starlock swallowed, and with a painfully hopeful look he asked, “Do you mean that…that all…?” but he wasn’t able to put his question into words.

  Luck asked it for him. “When Protos are taken away for breaking the rules, they’re not killed?” she said. “Or thrown in prison or something? They’re just moved to another reservation?”

  “Yes,” Mizter Dekkle agreed, looking contrite. “I’m sorry that we led you to believe the worst. You can understand that there had to be consequences for breaking our Covenants? We wanted to keep you diverse.”

  Tears had sprung to Starlock’s eyes. “My sister and her boyfriend were taken. So…?”

  “She is very likely safe, within a few hundred miles of where you’re standing now.”

  Starlock stood there quietly, overwhelmed.

  “How—how many other Protos are there?” Luck asked.

  “Several thousand,” their host told her. “If I can slow our deaths enough to help all of you…”

  He studied the two of them again as he brought the mask to his face. Luck’s right hand hung by Starlock’s left, and he appeared to be appraising those two hands, so different in color, but so much the same in every other way.

  When the mask came off, Mizter Dekkle was looking past them, toward some vision only he could see. “We took all inherited disease out of the human genome. At least we did that for you,” he reflected. “Then we took your strawberry-blond hair, Luck, and your brown skin, Starlock, for nothing more than vanity. But for someone like me, who is supposed to take the long view of our race, you Protos were always a backup plan, our safe-deposit box, our genetic repository.”

  His eyes came back and he gestured for them to move closer to him. When they did, Mizter Dekkle took one of their hands in each of his. Then he put their hands together.

  He looked from Luck to Starlock and said, “You came here to see if you were still our pets. You’re not. You are free.”

  11. THEY SHARED A DREAM

  Mizter Dekkle asked them to bring him into a back room for the night. They pushed him there in his rolling chair, down a long hallway. Their destination was a space that had been a break room, with tables and chairs, and one long couch. Rumpled blankets on the couch showed them
where he’d been making his bed each night.

  “No, it’s all right,” he said, waving away their help as he transferred himself onto the couch and arranged his oxygen tank so it was in easy reach. He allowed Luck to straighten out his blankets and pull them up over his chest, though. “The fifty-seventh floor is nearly self-contained,” he told them, pulling the mask aside. “You’ll find showers down that hall to the right. And a bedroom beyond that.”

  Luck was mortified that this man was concerning himself with their sleeping arrangements. Her cheeks burned hotly, but Mizter Dekkle only smiled at her as he closed his eyes.

  “It’s for you now,” he told them.

  “What is?” Starlock asked.

  “All of it,” he murmured.

  Mizter Dekkle fell into a fitful sleep only moments later. And Luck, watching him, fell into a kind of reverie. What was it like, she wondered, to be the last of everyone you knew?

  She was roused by Starlock’s warm hand taking hers. He led her down the hall, toward the lighted room at the very end.

  “My sister,” he said, in a voice that told her he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying, and yet his dark eyes looked more awake somehow. “And maybe everyone who was ever taken.” Luck squeezed his hand.

  They found the showers and also a small adjacent laundry, where they slowly undressed. Since that day long ago in the woods, Luck had imagined undressing in front of Starlock again so many times, and she’d always pictured the moment as wildly romantic, a chapter in a novel that she would savor because she’d waited so long to read it. This was something else.

  “I don’t feel…,” she began as she stripped off her shirt. They were both filthy, and she was aware of all the death just beyond the walls.

  “It’s all right,” Starlock murmured. “I keep thinking about those children in the truck.”