Evolution Expects

by Jonathan Green

  He felt his body tensing involuntarily, his breathing quickening, becoming shallow, as visions of scalpel blades, red with droplets of his own blood, and blinding arc-lights sprang uninvited into his mind. For a moment he even thought about getting up and walking out, forgetting about his appointment altogether.

  “Doctor Doppelganger will be with you shortly,” the receptionist suddenly piped up, as if reading his mind and wanting to put him at his ease again.

  Ulysses smiled again, sinking back into the chair. “Don’t worry,” he said, with forced bravado. “There’s no hurry.”

  Ulysses took a deep breath to calm himself, inhaling the heady aroma of the jasmine, letting the memory of the scent of it take him back over two years to one particular valley, hidden deep within the Himalayas and the monastery of Shangri-la.

  I’m just being ridiculous, he thought. He had braved much worse than this in his life – a fully-grown stampeding Megasaur, the Megalodons of the Marianas depths and the Barghest of Ghestdale – it was just that the short time he had spent under Doktor Seziermesser had left scars that ran much deeper than those that had formed where his severed left arm had been replaced with... well, whatever had come to hand, as if happened.

  Not doing a very good job of distracting yourself are you, old boy? He thought and turned his attention to the low table covered with carefully arrayed periodicals, from the London Illustrated News to the most recent instalment of the latest penny dreadful by Stefan Konig.

  Amongst them was a neatly folded copy of the day’s Times. Ulysses eagerly picked it up and read the front page banner headline in full.

  JUPITER STATION LAUNCH ON SCHEDULE, SAYS PM

  The papers were full of it at the moment; Prime Minister Devlin Valentine’s golden goose, or so the new PM no doubt hoped. It was claimed that with the Jupiter Station in place in the skies over London, the Weather Machine could set to work dealing with Londinium Maximum’s worsening air pollution, improving the quality of life for the many millions living under the ever-present shadow of the Smog, the legacy of a century and a half of relentless industrialization. There had to be a price to pay for being the original Workshop of the World and then the Gateway to the Stars.

  But the Wormwood Affair, and the terror attacks perpetrated under the name of the Darwinian Dawn, had proved that there was another price to pay for being the foremost polluter in the world; the planet’s environment was changing beyond all recognition. Greater extremes of weather were being experienced all over the planet, from longer and colder winters in the heart of Europe and Russia to the increased desertification in Africa.

  But Devlin Valentine was a man with an eye to the future, although whether it was with an eye to his own future or genuinely that of the planet’s, Ulysses wouldn’t yet like to say. He was certainly keen to improve the image of Magna Britannia across the globe, from its put-upon colonies in Africa and Asia to how it was perceived by emerging nations such as the United Soviet States of America to Britain’s long-held rivalry with China. And having been given a brutal wake-up call in the aftermath of Queen Victoria’s 160th jubilee celebrations, Valentine was keen that Magna Britannia was seen to be doing something about the problems that it had been mindfully ignoring for so many decades.

  Valentine was a much younger man than his predecessor, ready to lead the greatest Empire on Earth, and indeed the Solar System, into the twenty-first century, or so his campaign slogan had declared. But whatever else he might be, there was no doubt that Devlin Valentine was a man with a plan.

  The Jupiter Station was simply the first stage in a much larger plan. But for the time being, that plan seemed to involve distancing himself as much as possible from Valentine’s predecessor, making sure that he was seen to be as completely different from Uriah Wormwood as possible.

  His first months in office had seen the collapse of the Carcharadon Shipping Line, in the wake of the Neptune Disaster, and the death of renowned industrialist Josiah Umbridge. Companies now fought like animals to fill the economic void as others circled the dying corpse of Umbridge Industries, waiting for it to breathe its last so that they might garner rich pickings from the crumbling business empire.

  “Mr Quicksilver?”

  The receptionist’s voice roused Ulysses from his perusal of the paper and his considerations on what to make of the new PM – he had as healthy a disregard for politicians, particularly Prime Ministers, as he did a newly-developed distrust of doctors.

  “Sorry,” he said, recovering himself. “I was miles away.”

  “Doctor Doppelganger will see you now.”

  The white-painted door opened and two nurses emerged. Ulysses was momentarily taken aback. They were identical in every way, from their starched white uniforms – the hems of their belted dresses ending daringly above the knee – to their long black hair, and the way they wore it, to their high-sculpted cheekbones, eerily piercing green eyes and rouged rosebud lips.

  It was one of those rare occasions when Ulysses didn’t know what to say as he looked the pair up and down. Images of the ‘perfect’ secretary were sent away to do the filing while fantasies of an altogether different nature filled his head.

  “This way please, Mr Quicksilver,” the pair said in unison.

  Ulysses went to reply when he realised that his mouth was already agape and so shut it instead. Tossing the newspaper back onto the table, he got to his feet – rather too eagerly, considering how he had been feeling about his appointment with Doctor Doppelganger up to that point.

  The carbon copy nurses stepped aside and ushered Ulysses into the doctor’s consulting room, the same smiling expression on their identically alluring faces and he felt a shiver of unease pass through his body.

  “Good morning, Mr Quicksilver,” an older woman’s voice came from within and Ulysses immediately turned his attention to Doctor Doppelganger, feeling himself physically recoil on hearing her German accent. The last time he had encountered a doctor with a German accent the madman had proceeded to remove his left arm below the shoulder so that he might stitch it onto the nightmarish vivisect body he had prepared for his insane employer.

  “Doctor,” he replied curtly.

  “Please, Mr Quicksilver, take a seat.”

  One of the pair who had welcomed him pulled out an upholstered chair that he might sit down. He did so, never once taking his eyes from the woman behind the large mahogany desk in front of him. She was as striking as her assistants, although a generation older, at least. Her hair was streaked with grey highlights and where other women her age might have tried to hide such an obvious sign of aging, she wore hers proudly, like a badge of her experience and expertise. She sat stiffly upright in her padded leather chair, her hair in a tight bun on the back of her head, a pair of pince nez glasses perched on the end of her nose. She looked over them now as she regarded Ulysses as she might a naughty schoolboy and he realised she had the same striking green eyes and high cheekbones as her assistants. He glanced back to the two now standing either side of him, just to be sure.

  “Ah, yes, you are most observant, Mr Quicksilver,” Doctor Doppelganger said at his so-obvious reaction, “these are indeed my daughters, Mercy and Clemency. They are assisting me today. Now, what can I do for you?”

  There were a few things the twins could help him with, Ulysses thought, but that would have to wait for another time.

  “Well, it’s rather...” Ulysses began, struggling to find the words suddenly, now that he was in the presence of the formidable Doctor Doppelganger. “It’s like this,” he tried again and then faltered once more. “Well. It’s rather embarrassing, to be honest.”

  “Mr Quicksilver,” Doppelganger said in a tone that was half sympathetic and half impatiently chiding. “I am a doctor. There is nothing that I haven’t seen before.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Ulysses muttered under his breath.

  “We of the medical profession deal with what you might consider embarrassing conditions all the tim
e. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps it would be easier if you just showed me. Would that be easier for you?”

  “Yes,” said Ulysses, releasing the pent-up tension in his body with his exhalation of the word. “Perhaps it would.”

  He stood again and, having taken off his jacket, unbuttoned his waistcoat and then set about undoing the buttons of his Egyptian cotton shirt. Dr Doppelganger and her disconcertingly identical daughters watched him with measured interest. As he pulled off the shirt he became painfully aware of the scars of old wounds that criss-crossed his body and, now that his injuries were brought under such close scrutiny, making him feel self-conscious all over again, he exposed his left shoulder and left arm last of all.

  To her credit she barely even raised an eyebrow in surprise. “I see,” was all she said as she got up from behind the desk, moving over to where Ulysses stood, to examine the arm more closely.

  Adjusting her glasses she peered at the marks left by Seziermesser’s sloppy needlecraft and, taking a fountain pen from the desk, began poking at the leathery grey flesh of what was now Ulysses’ left arm.

  “Does this hurt?” she asked as she continued to prod at the limb where the ape’s arm had been attached to his shoulder.

  “No.”

  “And can you feel this?”

  Ulysses nodded. “As if the arm were my own.”

  “So, no noticeable nerve damage then?”

  “Not so far as I can tell.”

  “And this happened to you when?”

  “November.”

  “Last year?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Incredible.” It was the most emotion Doppelganger had shown since the consultation had begun.

  She began squeezing the long grey chimpanzee’s fingers, moving the arm into various different positions, flexing the simian musculature, as her daughters looked on, intense hawk-like fascination on the faces of both of them.

  “Aren’t you at all curious?” Ulysses asked at last, feeling that someone had to acknowledge the strangeness of the situation they all now found themselves in.

  “As to why you appear to have a chimpanzee’s arm attached to your body in place of your own, you mean?” Doppelganger peered down her nose at Ulysses, looking like a disappointed headmistress about to admonish an errant schoolchild. “I believe in client confidentiality. Total confidentiality. You will be paying me enough so that I do not feel the need to ask. You can put your shirt back on now.”

  She returned to her seat behind the desk. Taking out a fresh patient report form she took the lid off the fountain pen and began to write. Ulysses craned his neck forward, as he began to get dressed again, trying to read what she was writing. It was a typical doctor’s scrawl; the only words he could make out with any certainty was his name at the top of the page, in the box labelled ‘Patient’.

  After the break in conversation passed the point of comfort, and Ulysses had started drumming his fingers on his knees again, Doctor Doppelganger finally spoke.

  “Doctor Gallowglass recommended me to you, did he not?”

  “That’s right. Victor’s an old school friend, from my Eton days.”

  “Quite so. Well, Mr Quicksilver, you will be pleased to hear that I can help you.”

  Ulysses relaxed a little, feeling a portion of the weight, that felt like it had been laid across his shoulders, lift from him. “That’s good to hear. But I’m intrigued, doctor. How precisely can you help me?”

  “Doctor Gallowglass did not tell you what it is we do here?”

  “No. Only that you could help me.”

  “Well, to put it quite simply, we will help you by growing you a new arm.”

  Ulysses stared at her in disbelief. He had tried to visualise all sorts of solutions to the problem of his inhuman arm but had failed to come up with that one. He had got to the point where he would have been happy to settle for Doctor Doppelganger shaving the coarse black hair from the arm and applying some kind of bleaching treatment to the leathery grey skin. He had certainly not expected this.

  “You’ll grow me a new arm?”

  “Quite so. I have perfected a procedure that will allow me to replicate a new arm for you, a thing of flesh and blood and bone, grown from a sample of your own flesh, which I can take from what is left of your upper arm.”

  “Will it... hurt?”

  “A little,” Doppelganger admitted, “but judging by the scars on your body, it won’t be anything you won’t be able to handle.”

  Ulysses had to agree with that assessment. “And will it take long? Can you do it now?”

  “It will take some time to grow you an entirely new arm,” the doctor said in that condescending tone of hers. Did people expect superior smugness when they visited a private Harley Street clinic, Ulysses wondered. “Several weeks, in fact. But we can take the tissue sample now; it will only take a few minutes. We can begin right away, if you are happy to proceed.”

  “Well,” Ulysses sighed with relief, the stress lifting from him almost entirely now. The thought that all he needed to endure was something akin to a blood test was much more appealing than the thought of having the offending limb removed again. “As they say, there’s no time like the present.”

  “There is the small matter of my fee.” Doctor Doppelganger raised the issue as if that was a greater source of awkwardness than any embarrassing condition of the flesh.

  Now it was Ulysses’ turn to adopt a condescending tone. “Doctor, if I had any doubts as to whether I would be able to afford you services, I wouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

  “Then let us begin,” Doctor Pandora Doppelganger announced with a smile. “Mercy? Clemency? If you would show Mr Quicksilver through to the other room I will be with you shortly.”

  As the twin nurses stepped forward to flank Ulysses and follow their mother’s instructions, in the lull that followed, he felt a faint, yet familiar sensation at the base of his skull.

  The scream cut through the walls to the ears of all inside Doctor Doppelganger’s consulting room. In Ulysses’ experience, a sound like that could only be described as a death-scream.

  ULYSSES BURST FROM the consulting room, Mercy and Clemency trotting anxiously after him. He passed straight through the waiting room, ignoring the appalled look on the receptionist’s face, and raced on up the corridor in the direction of the other consulting rooms of the practice, following the blood-curdling scream to its source.

  Moments later, he was throwing open a door, eyes locking onto the body lying on the floor, half hidden behind a desk. Only the corpse – with its smart Savile Row suit and a stethoscope still around the dead doctor’s neck – wasn’t of as much interest to Ulysses as what appeared to be a giant cockroach crouched on top of it.

  The undoubtedly dead doctor’s clothes were saturated with blood, his torso a ruddy ruin where the cockroach had cut open his ribcage to get at the juicy organs within. As Ulysses entered the room, the vile insect raised its malformed head, its gore-stained mandibles clacking spasmodically. His legs almost gave way as he confronted the horrendous truth with which he was now faced.

  A face that had once, unmistakeably, been human, but which was now hideously malformed – jaws distended by the mandibles that they had been forced to accommodate – stared back at him. Tears ran freely from eyes that were becoming compound orbs even as he watched, and the lips moved, attempting to form words despite the encumbrance of the raw-fleshed mandibles – that Ulysses could now see had been created when the wretch’s lower jaw split down the middle, the two halves stretching out to the sides – and in a voice thick with blood and saliva pleaded: “Help me!”

  As Ulysses stared in frozen horror at the creature – its insectoid limbs still forming from what had been the victim’s own arms and legs, now reshaped into new bone-twisting alignments, the middle pair of its three leg-sets forming from the wretch’s ribs – it scuttled away from the partially devoured doctor and up the wall, never once taking its swelling and
darkening eyes from Ulysses.

  “Help me!” the wretch managed again before his words became incomprehensible insect noise.

  The scratching at the back of Ulysses’ skull intensified suddenly and then, a split second later, the giant cockroach leapt for the doorway and freedom. Forewarned, the dandy was ready for it. As 180 pounds of mutating cockroach flew through the air towards him, Ulysses lashed out with his simian arm.

  The punch connected with what Ulysses supposed had once been the man’s solar plexus – which was now hardening chitin – with a sharp crack, as Ulysses put all his weight behind it.

  The cockroach tumbled back into the room, landing on its back, legs clawing the air helplessly, and Ulysses did not hesitate in pulling the door shut again.

  “What’s going on?” came the clipped Teutonic consonants of the startled Doctor Doppelganger.

  “Well, Doctor,” Ulysses said, turning to face her, but keeping a firm grip on the handle of the consulting room door, “it would appear that the Daedalus Clinic has a something of a pest problem.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Test Flight

  THOMAS SANCTUARY STOOD on the parapet, at the very edge of the ostentatious crenellations of Sanctuary House, and gazed towards the teeming metropolis, feeling like a man reborn.

  His heart was pounding in excited anticipation. He flexed his shoulders, adjusting the weight of the jetpack on his back, pulling on the straps of its harness to ensure that it was securly attached. Four weeks ago, when he had first set eyes on the suit and tried it on, he had barely been able to stand; ten years’ enforced lassitude and a prison diet having taken its toll on what had once been the half-decent physique of an ex-University rower. And there has been little point in making an effort to improve his physique when there had been nothing to look forward to when he eventually got out again either.

  But now that his life had purpose – a burning need to put right the injustices of the past – he had started upon a gruelling physical regimen, making himself take time out each day from working on his father’s final and greatest creation, and had begun to repair the damage that ten years’ incarceration had done to his body. The suit, particularly the jetpack, weighed more than his withered frame had at first been able to support; with it on he had hardly been able to move.