Extreme Makeover

by Dan Wells

  Lyle froze for half a second. “He used other doses of ReBirth before the bad one?”

  “I was an actor,” said the man.

  The woman nodded. “He kept changing for different roles. The fourth dose turned out to be Lyle Fontanelle, so we tried a fifth, hoping it could reverse it, but this time it was a Lyle with Down syndrome. I didn’t think that was possible.” Her eyes were wide and pleading. “Please say you can help him.”

  Lyle’s mind reeled: five doses of ReBirth in three months, and who knows how many since then. There wouldn’t even be time for one to finish before the next started in. Kerry had done something similar, but …

  “Do you think it’s because we stacked Lyle on Lyle?” she asked.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” said Lyle. He’d been overwritten with his own DNA at least once, and it hadn’t done anything. The wheels were turning, though, and he had his own theory about what had happened. It wasn’t going to make her feel any better. “I don’t think it was a bad dose, either.”

  The woman grew tenser, her mouth pinched in worry. “What happened?”

  Down syndrome is a chromosomal disorder, he thought. A human being is supposed to have forty-six chromosomes in twenty-three pairs, but a person with Down syndrome has an extra in pair twenty-one. Three chromosomes instead of two. If this man had six different genomes all warring for control of his body, sooner or later something was bound to go wrong. The signals got crossed, or confused; maybe the lotions even attacked each other. The plasmids in the lotion were designed to unroll and mimic DNA long enough to write portions of themselves onto the host DNA—if one bit of ReBirth got to another bit of ReBirth halfway through this process, rewriting not just the host’s genetic code but the competing rewriter itself.… He swallowed. There’s no telling what could happen if they started doing that.

  “What happened?” she asked again.

  Lyle looked at her, speechless. There were dozens of chromosomal disorders, and so many ways for the chromosomes to become disordered: inversions, insertions, translocations. The list went on and on. If ReBirth can do this, and if ReBirth is even half as aggressive as it seems to be, this could mean the end of …

  … of human genetics.

  “Please, sir,” the woman sobbed, “tell me what I can do for him!”

  Lyle looked up sharply, shocked back into the real world. “Don’t take him to the Amnesty Center.”

  “But they can help him—”

  “They can’t help anyone,” said Lyle. “It’s a scam.” He pulled on his fake mustache, tearing it off in one long, painful tug. “I’m just like you, okay? And I’m trying to help you. Take your husband to the Amnesty Center and he will spend months or years in what is essentially an underfunded prison camp; in his condition he’ll probably die in there.” Lyle dug in his pocket for cash, some of the hundred thousand he’d stolen from Kerry, and handed her a wad of thousands. “You want my advice, go to the other side of this platform, take the first outbound train that comes along, and get as far away from civilization as you can. Rent a room on a fishing island or something; get away, stay hidden, and wait it out.”

  The woman stared at the money.

  “Wait what out?”

  If this means what I think it means … Lyle shook his head. “The end of the world.”

  47

  Sunday, October 14

  8:03 P.M.

  Flushing, Queens

  61 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD

  Lyle returned to his grandmother’s place only to find himself already there, dressed in a pink floral nightgown and dead in his grandmother’s bed.

  “Grandma?”

  The dead Lyle’s hair still held the chemicals from the old woman’s last perm—faint wisps of curly, snow-white hair with over nearly half a centimeter of strong brown growth at the scalp. The room smelled of death and excrement. The intense nutrient needs of the transformation had apparently been too much for her ancient body to handle.

  Lyle covered her with another sheet from the closet, and retreated to the living room to try to figure out his next move. He could place an anonymous call, but to who? The country’s infrastructure was falling apart; electricity was still turned on, and water and gas were still flowing through the pipes, but the society that used those staples was crumbling. There were millions of ReBirth cases in the country; a massive percentage of them, especially in New York, were Lyles, and the military was scouring the streets for every Lyle they could find. More Down syndrome cases had cropped up, and leukemia and other cancers, all generated spontaneously by the lotion. Almost no one dared to use the lotion, and yet more clones—almost all of them Lyles—were surfacing every day. Nobody knew where they were coming from.

  The political situation was no better. Half the world’s nations had closed themselves off, terrified that another nation would try to replace their leaders, or threaten their religion, or make a desperate, São Tomé–style attack in a mad grab for resources. Private citizens were doing the same thing on a small scale, encasing themselves in hazmat suits or a homemade equivalent, buying up piles of food storage and guns. Lyle could call a mortuary about his grandmother, but who would answer the phone? Who would care? It was the end of days.

  Lyle searched the house for food, but there was little to be had. His dying grandmother had eaten almost everything she owned during the transformation, up to and including a can of water chestnuts he knew for a fact that she hated. Lyle took a long drink from the sink, washing the dishes carefully when he was done—because his grandma would want them that way—and then scrounged through the shed for a shovel. Even if there was no one else around to bury her, the least he could do was bury her himself.

  It took him an hour to make a hole big enough, and two more hours after that to make it deep. It was almost midnight when he carried her body—his own body, filthy and brittle and hollow as old bones—to the small backyard of the home she had lived in all her life. He laid her gently in the dirt, said a silent prayer, and covered her with moist shovelfuls of earth. He’d never buried anyone before, let alone himself, and he felt a morbid shiver race through him as he covered her legs, her chest, and finally her face. His face, gaunt and skeletal at the bottom of a grave. He filled the hole and patted it down, ringing it with rocks from the garden. He had no headstone, but found a picture of her and his grandpa on the mantelpiece, and placed that on the mound instead.

  Lyle showered and changed his clothes. It was one in the morning. He’d realized weeks ago that if the government was determined to imprison all Lyles, then the simplest answer was to not be a Lyle. Even knowing that, though, he’d hung on doggedly, refusing to give up the last remnants of his identity. It wasn’t sentimental reasons—it wasn’t that he loved being himself, because over the last few months he’d grown to hate being himself. Over the last few years, maybe, if he was being honest. It was more than the ubiquity—the news stories, the wanted posters, the people on the street. It was the knowledge that he, somehow, was the cause of it all. He’d thought at the time that he was trying to stop it, but looking back he realized that all he’d really done was whine and pity himself. And that’s all he’d been doing for years. So no, he wasn’t maintaining his DNA because he liked being himself.

  In some ways, he realized, he’d clung to his identity because it was the only thing he had left. He had thrown out his driver’s license and other ID cards to protect himself from the law, destroying every evidence that he was the “real” Lyle Fontanelle, and all he had left was a face shared by a hundred thousand others. It wasn’t much of an identity, but it was his. In a world where so many people had lost themselves, he’d kept himself—as damaged and criminalized as he was—and he’d drawn some kind of strength from that.

  But it was a meaningless gesture, and an increasingly dangerous one. Millions of people around the world had taken the plunge and changed themselves, so why not him? His resolve had weakened, and tonight, burying his own body in a shallow grave, his reso
lve had snapped in half. It was time to start a new life.

  He hadn’t been following the black market for weeks, but he knew where the old dealers had hung out, the old hot spots where a paying customer could score some ReBirth. Lyle counted his money—still most of Kerry’s hundred thousand—and hid the majority of it in an ankle brace he’d started using for just this purpose. With his pants worn long, no one could even tell it was there. He hid the rest of it in various pockets and waistbands and shoes, separated so that a single mugger wouldn’t take a dangerous amount, and then raided his grandma’s dressers and nightstands for jewelry. If he was going to get some ReBirth, he needed to be ready to pay for it.

  He walked through the dark streets, keeping his ears open for cars—especially the army’s Lyle wagons—and his eyes always scanning for dealers. He approached one likely dealer and recognized the same seven-foot giant he’d met before, though of course he had no way of knowing if it was the same man. He approached the man casually—noting, with practiced eyes, the three thugs waiting in the background.

  “You’re out late,” said the man. His voice was deep and sonorous.

  “I’m looking for something,” said Lyle, beginning the verbal dance of codes and implications that passed for a drug negotiation. “I was wondering if you might give me directions.”

  “I know where a lot of things are,” said the man. “And I’m not doing anything else, so why not?”

  “A friend of mine’s an athlete,” said Lyle. “Nice guy, good bone structure. Maybe you know where he lives?”

  “Maybe,” said the man. “Maybe the guy I know isn’t the guy you know. How much does he earn in a year?”

  Lyle did his best to stay calm and professional. “A hundred thousand.”

  The man smiled. “I’m pretty sure I know that guy. It’s dangerous on the streets this time of night, though—you want a ride?”

  Lyle nodded. He’d seen this before. Once the dealer knew you were serious, they moved the deal to a car; it kept the negotiations private and, if things went bad, mobile. “Sure.”

  The man stood up, and a moment later a black car with dark, tinted windows slid up to the curb, beams from the streetlights rippling across it like water. The tall man got in, and Lyle helped himself in to the other side. When the doors were closed the car began driving slowly through the neighborhood, and the tall man spoke to him directly.

  “You have a specific model in mind, or just whatever I got in stock?”

  “Anything that’s not Lyle,” said Lyle.

  “If all you want is non-Lyle, I’ve got plenty of celebrities—”

  “No celebrities,” Lyle said quickly. “Nothing identifiable. I just want to be … different. I want to be background noise.”

  “You and every other Lyle in America,” said the dealer. “Celebrities used to be the expensive stuff, now it’s cheap.”

  “Then what can I get for a hundred thousand?”

  “The cheap stuff.”

  Lyle’s jaw dropped. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “How desperate are you to not be Lyle anymore?” While Lyle struggled to find an answer that didn’t destroy his negotiating power, the dealer pointed at him with a long, slim finger. “Exactly. Now consider that there’s more than a hundred thousand of you, and they’re all just as desperate. I can name my price for what I have left, and I can turn you away and still find another buyer before morning.”

  Lyle grimaced. “What celebrities do you have?”

  “Does gender matter?”

  That stopped Lyle short, staring at the man as he searched himself for the answer. After a moment he nodded. “Yes.”

  “Not so desperate after all, then. The price list is upside down, now that anonymity’s such a priority. I could put you in a Tom Cruise for fifty, but for the full hundred thousand we could go all the way up to C-List: daytime soaps, and a couple of people from Dancing with the Stars.”

  Lyle nodded. “How much for a guy that did, I don’t know, a few pilots? Maybe died on CSI?”

  The dealer snorted. “You don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Make a recommendation, then,” said Lyle. “You know your stock better than I do.”

  The dealer pulled a small notebook from the seat-back pocket, and consulted it quickly in the dim light from a passing streetlamp. “How about a former model, couple of series, and a stunning performance as ‘Security Guard’ in an episode of 90210.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Dan Wells.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Most people haven’t.”

  Lyle frowned. “He did a few series, though? I mean, he’s famous?”

  “Famous enough, but the average American isn’t going to know him in a crowd. Especially if you put on some weight and get a different haircut.” The dealer leaned forward. “Look, man, I can’t offer you a complete unknown. That’s not what the lotion was designed for—if he wasn’t famous enough for people to want to be him, I wouldn’t have his DNA in the first place. Now, if you have twice the money you claim to have, and you’re just holding out on me for some reason, then we can talk about ‘Cheering Man Number Three’ in a crowd scene from a Lifetime movie. Otherwise, Dan Wells is the best I can do.”

  Lyle pondered the question. A former model would be in better shape, probably more tan, certainly better groomed—if Lyle took his DNA and then completely let himself go, he’d be almost unrecognizable. He hoped. But there were more concerns than just the fame. “How do I know it’s not Lyle?”

  The dealer’s eyes widened, as if Lyle had just offended him. “I couldn’t stay in business if I sold Lyle.”

  “Everyone sells Lyle,” said Lyle. “Even people who think they don’t usually have some in their stock. Do you test for it? Do you have any kind of quality assurance system?”

  “My word as a businessman.”

  “We couldn’t even discuss this sale on an empty street,” said Lyle. “You’ll forgive me for not taking a drug dealer at his word.”

  “Then let’s be honest,” said the dealer. “I’m a criminal, selling a biological weapon to other criminals. If you’re not satisfied with your product, be a man and just shoot me.”

  Lyle stared at him. “I have to admit that’s a compelling argument.”

  “Then do we have a deal?”

  Lyle hesitated only a moment. “We do.”

  The car rolled to an elegant stop at the next dark corner, and the dealer pulled a briefcase from under the seat in front of him. “You have the hundred?”

  Lyle reached into his ankle brace and pulled it out, a thick stack of sweaty bills. “Sorry about the … dampness.”

  “Money is money,” said the dealer. He opened the briefcase and pulled out a plastic baggie with a single gelcap pill inside, the pill containing a single drop of white lotion. The baggie was labeled with a sticker that read DAN WELLS. Lyle handed him the money, the dealer handed Lyle the baggie, and a moment later he was standing alone on the street corner, staring at his prize. His money drove away and turned at the light, disappearing forever. Lyle looked back at the baggie.

  “It’s now or never.”

  He opened the baggie and took out the pill, discarding the empty plastic bag in the gutter. The gelcap was warm in his hand, and slightly tacky as the moisture from his hands slowly started breaking down the gel. All he had to do was crush the pill, or squeeze it, or even swallow it, and he’d never be Lyle again. That tiny drop was all it took.

  He’d never used ReBirth on purpose—he’d sent it out into the world, and he’d used it on Susan, but never on himself. Was he really ready for this? He thought again about the Lyle with Down syndrome, his chromosomes destroyed by competing ReBirth samples. Would the same thing happen to him? Something worse? Surely public execution would be better than congenital cancer.

  He wanted it all to be over. To stop running, to stop being afraid. To stop being Lyle Fontanelle. He crushed the capsule in his fingers, and smea
red the lotion between his forefinger and thumb.

  48

  Wednesday, October 31

  11:39 P.M.

  Brooklyn

  44 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD

  Three weeks later, Lyle was still himself; the lotion had either been Lyle DNA or plain old lotion. He couldn’t escape himself, it seemed, plus now he was broke.

  The Lyle Camps were becoming infamous: the squalid conditions, the humiliations, the hunger and thirst. The secondary camps had it the worst—after they figured out who you were they shipped you off into hard labor and the brink of starvation. The former was intended to solve the latter, but they couldn’t feed them fast enough. There were too few resources left in the country these days, and too many Lyles.

  Lyle had heard the latest numbers on TV earlier in the evening, catching the tail end of a news story as he waited for night to fall so he could try to find some food. “Nine hundred thousand Lyles in the U.S. alone,” it said. “There are now more Lyles in America than Pacific Islanders, including persons of partial Hawaiian descent. There are more Lyles than Navajo, and experts predict that if the number of Lyles continues to rise at the current rate it will reach one million by late next week, two million the week after, and three million by Thanksgiving. That will be more than all Native Americans combined.”

  Lyle heard a lull in traffic and peeked out. He had a few seconds to dart across the street, and he jumped up to take it. Flatbed “Lyle wagons” cruised the streets in this area, rounding up Lyles and hauling them off to the camps, and it was all but impossible to keep clear of them. He’d stretched his meager food out as long as he could, laying low in an old drug den—now more of a flophouse for refugee Lyles—and ventured out tonight under cover of Halloween. He had a small rubber mask, an old Ronald Reagan costume, and hoped that he could at least make it to the store and back without getting caught. The mask was good cover, but it narrowed his vision and made it hard to run. He scanned the street up and down before dashing across to the other side. There was a cigarette shop there run by an old Ethiopian man who didn’t ask questions, and Lyle figured he could spend the last of his money and stock up on whatever the old man had—you could never tell from one day to the next what any store would manage to find and sell. Lyle could make it a few more days, at least, and then … He didn’t know.