by Shanon Hunt
21
October 2022, Mexico
Layla spun around to see Dr. De Luca and a younger assistant marching toward them.
She was caught.
Dr. De Luca’s eyes burned into hers before he shifted his attention to Caitlyn. “Ladies, can I help you with something?”
Caitlyn fumbled for an apology. “Oh, goodness, I’m sorry, I know the testing center is closed, but Sister Layla just wanted to see it, and—”
“Is that so? Layla, cucciola, you should have called me. I would’ve been happy to show you our facilities.”
Layla’s thoughts raced for an excuse, but none came.
The doctor tilted his head, waiting for a reply, his forced smile not masking his scowl.
Screw him. She glared right back. “Well, that’s kind of you to offer, but I didn’t want to trouble you. You’re obviously quite busy with such an expansive program. And Caitlyn’s been a terrific tour guide.” She put an arm around Caitlyn’s shoulder. “Who knew so much work had gone into the carrier program?”
They locked eyes. Layla could feel Caitlyn looking back and forth between them, breathlessly anticipating who would break first.
“Indeed. Now, you’re supposed to be on bed rest, yes?” His eyes never wavered as he addressed Caitlyn. “Cucciola, please escort Layla back to the infirmary. Get a driver to take her home.”
“Of course,” Caitlyn murmured.
Layla broke the deadlock and marched out of the testing center. This would certainly get back to James, but she didn’t care. It was time for a confrontation. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure Dr. De Luca wasn’t watching before heading back up the path away from the infirmary. She had no intention of leaving until she learned everything there was to learn.
“Uh, Sister Layla?” Caitlyn was scurrying behind her. “The infirmary is this way.”
“No, the nursery.”
“Sorry?” Caitlyn skipped to catch up.
“The nursery. Where do the babies go after they’re born?”
“Oh. We don’t see them when they’re born. The doctors take them straight away.”
Layla halted. “What?”
“They go to their forever homes.”
Forever homes. They were taken out of the Colony? Hers, too? They would whisk her baby away to some stranger in the poisoned world? No, this wasn’t what she’d expected, at all. Would she not get some time with him? To hold him and count all his tiny fingers and toes?
“Sister Layla? Are you okay?”
Oh god. Had they lied about her first delivery? Perhaps the baby had been born alive. Healthy. And just … swept away…
Well, where is he? Can I hold him yet?
I’m sorry, Lay, James had replied, his eyes downcast.
She’d known something was wrong because James never dropped his gaze. He believed in direct eye contact in all communications, good or bad.
Why not? What are they doing to him? Is something wrong?
He didn’t make it. I’m sorry.
In the moment before grief overwhelmed her, she’d gaped at him, trying to read the emotion on his face. It hadn’t been anguish or loss; she’d known that even then. Only now did she realize what that look was: guilt. Guilt for lying to her face, for knowing she’d feel like a failure for months. He’d always known she wouldn’t get the see the baby. He’d just been too gutless to tell her. And he would no doubt pull the same move this time, allowing her to wallow in sorrow for months, knowing it had been her last chance.
She had to get back. She would march straight into James’s office and confront him. How could he do this to her? How could he lie to her about something as important as the death of her baby?
Caitlyn’s face materialized in front of Layla’s, steeped in concern. “Do you need me to get medical? I can run over—”
“No!”
Caitlyn flinched as if she’d slapped her.
“I mean no, I’m fine. I’m sorry. I just realized how late it is. I promised Brother James I’d have this council presentation ready tonight.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry for keeping you. Let me walk to the infirmary, as Dr. De Luca—”
“No need. I have a driver. But thank you, uh, Caitlyn. Really, so generous of you to take the time to show me around.”
Layla hustled back toward the cafeteria. As hard as she tried to hold in her feelings, her face twisted, and angry tears welled in her eyes. She palmed them away and dialed Michael.
In a voice much too cheerful, she said, “Hey! I’m done. Any chance I can get a lift back home?”
As she waited for him, she tried to clear her head. Her brain felt stuck, like a vinyl record on an old-time record player, repeating the same lyric over and over with a sickening screech in between. Everything she believed was a great big lie. All this time, she’d stupidly thought she was the only carrier. Why would a Colony as big and powerful as this implant a single carrier? How could she have been so naive?
But somehow everything she saw and learned today paled in comparison to what James had done. The man she loved, the one person she trusted implicitly had lied to her about their very own baby.
The van pulled up and she climbed into the passenger seat, turning toward the window so Michael couldn’t see her red blotchy face.
“I heard you needed a ride.” It wasn’t Michael’s laid-back California voice.
She whipped around. The narrow face and eyebrow bar were unmistakable.
Eric Ortiz, EGNX Security.
22
March 2024, California
“When that top-secret government official handed me that vial of whole blood, it was like Christmas morning,” Jordan said over his shoulder as he led Nick down the hall. He held the door open for Nick, Jenna, and Abder.
Nick whistled. He counted eight computers, each with three raised monitors.
“We crunch a lot of data.” Jenna crossed the room and parked in front of a computer beneath a poster that read Save the Rainforest above a picture of a monkey swinging from a tree. Ironic.
“So back to the sample.” Jordan pulled a chair from one of the nearby computers and gestured for Nick to sit. “We ran a whole blood sequencing panel to find genetic mutations without naturally occurring polymorphs.”
“Meaning we were looking for anything that didn’t seem human.” Abder perched on the edge of a desk.
“Jesus. That’s possible? Humans with nonhuman genes?”
“You wouldn’t believe what’s possible nowadays with genetic engineering,” Abder said.
“Wordski.” Jordan’s dreads bounced as he swung around and opened an Excel file. A long list of gene names filled the screen, and he slid the cursor to one section. “These here in orange, these are the target genes, the genetic mutations we had to rebuild. They’re all related to neural activity.”
There must have been fifteen or so genes, all with names Nick had never heard of. “So did it work? Were you able to fix the mutations?”
“Technically, yeah, but that was only in the lab. In vitro. Our next step was to create an injectable to test in animal models.” Jordan sucked in the remaining Coke from his cup. “We started with mice, but the uptake was poor. Even though we share ninety percent of our DNA with mice, brain cells are a bit different, so we moved into primates.”
A screech from across the room made Nick swerve around. Jenna’s monitor showed a cage filled with monkeys.
“Over here,” she called.
Nick crossed the room to look over her shoulder.
“This is the cynomolgus monkey model,” Jenna said. “We were lucky enough to get them cheap from a pharmaceutical company that used them for drug testing.”
On the monitor, ten or twelve monkeys were swinging across a caged jungle so elaborate it could’ve been the movie set for Tarzan.
“First, we transfused them with the mutated viral DNA and isolated them for a week. Then we gave them IV infusions of our cocktail of prime-edited genes. Sure enough, the viral gen
es were repaired, and the cynos’ behavior normalized.”
“But here’s where it gets weird,” Jordan said.
She nodded. “Watch this.” She clicked to video playback of a smaller cage. “These are our three subjects. At this point, they’d been together in this cage for a week. Pretty boring. No interaction. No grooming, no gesturing. They hardly even exercised.”
She fast-forwarded the recording and stopped. All three monkeys lay on the floor of the cage. They looked dead.
“Sleeping?” Nick asked hopefully.
“That’s not how primates sleep,” Jenna said.
The video continued with no movement from the animals. A minute later, he saw Jenna arriving in front of the cage door, carrying a bucket. She dropped it to the floor with a crash. The monkeys didn’t move.
“Fuck!” Her voice echoed in the large room. “Jordan! Hurry!”
She fumbled with a key, swung the cage door open, and hurried inside. As soon as she dropped to her knees to examine the bodies, all three monkeys sprang to their feet. There was a flurry of activity as she sat back on her heels, obviously stunned.
In less than fifteen seconds, the monkeys were outside the cage, after slamming the door and locking her inside.
Jenna paused the video and pointed to two of the monkeys. “You probably missed it, but while these two were distracting me, Zen—over here—unclipped my tranquilizer gun and pulled it from the holster. I didn’t even notice, not until…”
She started the video again. Jenna got up and moved toward the door. The big monkey she called Zen held up the gun and pointed it at her. The other two monkeys took up places on either side of him.
“Jesus Christ!” It was just like an episode of Planet of the Apes.
A door slammed off camera, and all three monkeys turned toward the sound. Jordan’s mop of hair flashed past the camera and out of sight again.
“Don’t scare them! Don’t scare them!” Jenna shouted. “They might charge if—”
Zen gently laid the tranquilizer gun on the floor, and all three monkeys sat down in unison.
A ball of uneasiness and confusion settled like a kettlebell in Nick’s gut.
Jenna looked back at him. “You can’t see it in the video, but when Jordan came into the hallway, they all gave a play face, which looks like a human smile. It’s a show of submission.”
On the video, Jordan slowly opened the cage door. They didn’t need luring or coaxing. They knuckled their way back inside and swung up to the highest plank.
Jordan spoke up. “No one knows primate behavior like Jenna. She’s been working with them for fifteen years. We’ve analyzed all the tapes up until this incident, and we’re dumbfounded. Somehow, these cynos managed to plan and coordinate a—a prank, and as far as we can tell, they never overtly communicated with each other. No gestures, no facial expressions, no sounds.”
Nick wondered if he was being set up. “Are you suggesting they used some sort of telepathy?”
He expected an emphatic no, but not one of them answered. He found that unsettling for a group of scientists.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “If they wanted to escape, why didn’t they go? Why didn’t they try?”
“I don’t believe they wanted to escape,” Jenna said.
“Then what?”
“I believe they were giving us a message.”
“Like ‘We’re smarter than you think’?”
She shook her head impatiently. “It’s not the trick I keep thinking about. It’s the dart gun. Zen knew it was a weapon, and he could’ve shot me, but he didn’t. He was showing me that he had the upper hand.”
“Over you?” It really was Planet of the Apes.
“Maybe I’m crazy, but I think it was an expression of dominance,” she said. “Superiority.”
“But not using primate symbolism,” Jordan added. “Using human symbolism.”
While Nick’s mind was racing to figure out how this could possibly fit with a cure for the virus, Jenna was clicking out of the video and standing up.
“Some time has passed since that incident,” she said. “I go inside the cage to feed them and clean up. I talk to them, like usual. They watch me carefully, but there haven’t been any other tricks. No threats or aggression. But a week ago, we made a new observation. Come on.”
They left the computer lab and walked down a hallway that brought them to a long observation window. Inside, two monkeys sat along the back wall, their heads down and eyes closed, apparently napping. A third monkey on a raised platform swung down to the floor as soon as the humans arrived. The others climbed to their feet and looked up.
“Give them a wave,” Jenna said.
Nick did as he was told. All three of them waved back. God, it was strange.
“Do something else.”
Nick did the first thing that came to his mind, the famous arm gestures of the Village People’s “YMCA.”
All three monkeys mimicked him.
“Holy Houdini, Batman.” He couldn’t help smiling. It was remarkable.
“In college, I worked with chimps using sign language,” Jenna said. “It took months to teach them a simple gesture. But watch this.”
She held up one hand, her fingers moving quickly through the American Sign Language alphabet. As soon as she stopped, the monkeys imitated her—all twenty-six letters.
“So what are you concluding?” Nick asked in a hushed voice. Maybe the monkeys could hear him. Maybe they could read his mind. “That they’re more intelligent than humans?”
“I wish that were all.” Jenna’s voice lowered. “The thing is, this is a one-way polycarbonate observational window. The other side is mirrored.”
23
October 2022, Mexico
Layla gaped at Eric Ortiz, unable to speak.
He turned back and appraised her. “Glad I could be of service. You shouldn’t be walking quite so much.”
He pulled out of the driveway and toward the long desert road.
She clutched her bag tightly on her lap and stared at the dashboard. Where was Michael? Why was this man answering Michael’s phone? She was too afraid to ask.
“You know, I’ll bet you’re feeling tired and heavy, so far along in your pregnancy.” His voice was low. Dreamy. “But I for one think a woman is never sexier than when she’s pregnant. You have that glow. Everything about you is full of life.”
The hair on the nape of her neck bristled.
“Are you planning to breastfeed?”
She could feel him staring at her chest.
He chuckled softly. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s probably none of my business.”
Another minute passed.
“I just have to ask. I can’t help it. Can I put my hand on your belly? Feel the baby?”
“No!” She finally snapped out of her terrified silence. She grabbed her bag tighter and faced him.
Michael startled. “Why are you yelling?”
Pain stabbed her in the middle of the forehead. Confused, she groped for the door handle.
“Stop!” Michael swung the car to the side of the road and hit the brakes, just as she flung the door open and stumbled out of the van. “Layla!”
He hopped out from behind the wheel and ran around the car.
“Stay away!” She scooped up a rock.
He put his hands up and stopped a safe distance away.
The thundering ache between her eyes made her drop the rock and press her palms to her eyes. She bent over, worried she might vomit.
It’s Michael. It’s not the guard. It’s just Michael.
A minute later, she felt his arm around her. “Hey, what’s up with you? Do you want me to take you to the infirmary?”
“N-no. I’m okay. It’s … I have these migraines lately. I just … I’m so sorry.”
He helped her back into the van and jogged around to the driver’s side. “Are you sure you don’t want to see the doctor? I’m worried about you.”
She was still
trembling, but she managed to steady her voice. “No, no. She knows about the headaches. It’s just pregnancy business as usual. Her recommendation is to sleep it off. I’ll go straight to bed.”
They drove in silence. Layla’s head still throbbed, and she considered trying some meditative chanting, but the thought—no, the feeling, the physical sensation—of Eric Ortiz sitting right next to her, driving the van, was too vivid. She could still smell him.
What was it about that guy that upset her so much?
Thankfully, Harmony was gone by the time she arrived home. Layla crawled under the blanket, raised the back of the bed, and opened her laptop. She clicked on the bookmark she saved: Eric Ortiz, EGNX Security.
She’d stared at his image so many times and for so long that it was burned into her brain. The tiny scar on his long forehead, just over his furry eye bar. The lump on the bridge of his nose, a little left of center. He’d probably broken it at some point. His mouth was pressed in a hard line, as the Colony required ID pictures without a smile, but she could still remember his teeth. Long front teeth that matched his long face, yellower than the mouthful of squirming white maggots crawling over his lips.
Can I feel the baby?
Sure. In a minute.
And the stench. The rot that came from his insides when he leaned in to speak to her.
You’re barefoot. I should walk you back and help you clean up.
His voice whipped through her head like a sandstorm, clear as day, then wiped away in a haze of dust.
She stared at the face on the screen another minute, willing it to mutate into the dead, decaying face she could still so clearly envision. She needed to see it. To make it real. But he remained maggot free, his skin still attached to his face. His wide-eyed surprised look was nothing more than the expression of someone not used to being photographed.
The pounding between her ears had softened to a pulse. She closed her laptop. This was all illogical. She was behaving like a mental patient.