Wine of the Gods 1: Outcasts and Gods

by Pam Uphoff

  Mercy looked around for her main ally. "Pax! Come talk some sense into Wolfgang."

  "Can't be done." The blond looked barely eighteen, but from passing remarks Wolf thought he must be several years older.

  "He wants to escape."

  "Whatever for? Miss your mall hangout? Or does Baby need his Mommy?"

  "Baby wants to be a human being, not a lab animal." Wolfgang said. "Guess I'd better plan on doing it alone, people around here like being slaves."

  Annakarina snorted. "We're not slaves."

  "Oh? Don't you wonder what happened the night you had dinner with the Director? Those date rape drugs ate your whole memory. Not that I expect your deflowering was any fun. Nor whatever the guards did when they took twenty minutes to walk you two to the dorms."

  Mercy leapt to her feet, fists clenched. "How dare you imply something like that! You filthy little animal!" She stalked off.

  Annakarina backed away wide-eyed. "I wondered if they gave us something. What happened? What do you know?"

  "You know what they are saying. Dr. Forstein had a bad heart and all the excitement set off a heart attack. In all the rushing around, Dr. Winston overstrained his, and it was ambulances for two, but too late. But Rebeccah and I have windows on that side of the buildings, and we could see the guards haul you two out of there, and then twenty minutes later lead you up to the dorm."

  "That, that doesn't mean anything. They, they . . . " AK stared into space for a long minute. "I hope I killed Winston. Son of a bitch sterilizing me when I was only five." She turned and stomped away.

  Pax snorted. "No wonder you're so popular, karate kid. Tact like that is hard to find."

  "Listen Gamma, I know you don't have a family, like the Yellows, but there are people out there willing to help."

  Pax curled a lip and strolled away. Charlie Alpha and Michael Omega stayed, along with a couple of the Orange team, Ashley and Emre.

  Michael Omega hunched his shoulders. "That's a very odd coincidence, two rapists, two fatal . . . heart attacks. Do you suppose they used the ESP thing?"

  Emre One cocked his head. "And the Bosses wiped their memories? Those guards were either lucky, stupid or both."

  Ashley One shivered. "And that was very cruel of you, Wolfgang."

  Wolfgang sighed. "Yes. I suppose I shouldn't have told them—but damn it, every time you can't remember, you have to wonder what happened."

  Rebeccah nodded. "I have nightmares. All about waking up and not remembering how I got to bed, and wondering what happened. I want out of here, now."

  "You two I was sure about. Friday night. Jason, don't close your room door or you'll be locked in. Come to my room."

  Eventually eight others joined them.

  Whining all the way as Wolfgang snipped the fence open and led them southwest through mostly pasture land. A miscellany of cars were parked along the road. More cars than escapees. More than a few sobs over the small number of escapees.

  All of Dad's army buddies were there. Jack drove off with Jason, saying he'd have him back in Texas in no time. The others took the NewGene and Oner kids, saying they had places for them. Rebeccah's parents mobbed her and hauled her away, and the rest went too.

  Wolfgang looked over the disappointed parents. "I'm sorry. They are all just too nice. Too afraid to break the rules."

  His mother pulled him into their car, and they drove away.

  "How much trouble is this going to get you into?" Wolfgang tightened his arm around his mother.

  "I don't know. It's too large of a conspiracy to not be blown." His father kept his eyes on the road, but Wolfgang could see his worried frown reflected faintly on the windshield.

  "I think, perhaps the best thing to do would for you to hide me very briefly, then get home and look innocent." Wolfgang looked worriedly down at his mother. He was so much taller than her, now!

  "I've got the fake ID. If I enlisted, went off to boot camp . . . You know I was always planning on an Army career."

  His dad sighed. "West Point accepted you."

  "I think I'd best do my four years and then apply to OCS, instead. A couple more election cycles and everything will change, and then I can see you again."

  "Oh." His mother blinked away tears. "I know you're right, but, but . . ."

  "But you wouldn't see much of me if I was at West Point, either. I'll send cards with silly names, okay? So you’ll know I'm all right, and where I've been."

  "You're right, son. But we're going to treat you like the prodigal son for, oh, six weeks I suppose, until they haul you off to boot camp."

  "Tilda and Markly are waiting for us in Sioux Falls, and we've rented a house in Denver." His mother blinked back tears.

  "Good. I've missed them horribly. It'll be like a last, great vacation, Mother."

  ***

  "Fifteen of them! I can't believe you let fifteen valuable experiments escape!"

  Harry shook his head. "They're children. They'll have gone home to their parents. I think you need to allow them to call and write their families . . . "

  "They do not have families. We are the legal owners of these laboratory created hybrid animals. We own them. We created them and we will keep them and use them." The Chairman of the company had flown in to oversee what he considered a disaster himself. Chou was a large man, more muscle than fat, but plenty of each on a large frame. Eurasian, perhaps? A mixed phenotype from California. A dozen family members constituted the largest voting block among the stockholders. Harry wouldn't be surprised to learn that all the stock led back to Chou clan hands. His young assistant certainly had a strong family resemblance. The assistant was being quiet, just occasionally tapping a note into a tiny computer. His eyes roved, but he was checking out the techs and equipment, not the staff. A more distant halo of body guards were eyeing all the staff that came near.

  "That is a legal nicety, with no foundation in reality." Harry frowned. "If their skills are valuable, offer them a salary to match."

  Chou looked at him in disbelief. "They are not people, they are property. They are inventions. My grandfather is the man who identified the genes that enable people to gain energy through listening to music in company, from the combined electrical energy of a crowd. He modified those genes, and made them capable of what they are doing. He owns anyone with those artificial genes. There is no need to pay them, and there will never be another opportunity for them to escape and contaminate the gene pool. Or work for some other company. Never. Do you understand me?"

  "Oh yes. But may I point out that yelling at me does no good. I am not in charge of security." Harry's guts felt cold, frozen solid. His back brain was screaming at him to run from the madman, but somehow he managed a reasoned, logical tone. The young assistant was looking amused. And superior.

  "But you are in charge of training them, and you have failed to raise obedient children."

  "They were all teenagers before I started working with them. Intelligent, imaginative, educated. Of course they are independent, resentful of a remote parent-company who will not acknowledge their adulthood and release them."

  Chou snorted in contempt. "In any case, we have located three of them and I have sent people to collect them. We will have them all back within a few weeks. And this will not happen again. The ringleader was this 'Wolfgang' creature. When we get him back, perhaps an example should be made of him."

  "A better way to give a court a reason to rescind our custodial status is hard to imagine. They look much to human for your arguments that they are animals to stand. We need to treat the telies like beloved children, well cared for, kept safe in an environment that understands the horrible genetic handicaps they struggle under. An environment that will both keep them safe, and keep normal people safe from them."

  The assistant raised his eyebrows. Hadn't he ever heard someone talk back to his boss?

  Chou narrowed his eyes.

  Harry hoped he was thinking logically, not emotionally. The situation was sufficiently dire a
lready.

  The assistant spoke for the first time. "Perhaps we should see what our 'beloved child's' attitude is, when we have him back here."

  The Chairman nodded slowly.

  ***

  Two and a half weeks into boot camp. "John Dewulf" was so tired and so hungry he was hallucinating. He could see big soap bubbles, floating along on an unfelt air currents. He reached out and grabbed one. Funny, it almost felt real. He poked it, and it popped. He caught another, and tried to gently open a hole in it. Looked inside. Tilted it to get some light on a bronzy sort of hollow ball about the sized of his backpack. Stuck a careful fingertip into it. Examined his finger. No damage. He stuck his backpack in. His hole closed and it disappeared from sight. He kept his grip on the bubble and carefully opened a new hole and reached in. His backpack was right there. He heaved a sigh of relief, and started to pull it out. Stopped. Hefted the bubble. Moved it, and checked for the pack. Climbed to his feet and started walking again. The bubble was light as a bubble. He didn't fish the pack out until he thought he might be coming back into the sight of the drill instructors. He hated to release something so potentially useful . . . he smushed it against the outside of the pack and it stuck. Excellent. He staggered to the top of the hill, got his bearings and started down. Fifty miles would be a lot easier if it was flat . . .

  He dropped so much weight he got extra rations, and his performance rebounded. So much so that he found himself facing ranger school. Dad and all his Army buddies had done this. So, he should be able to as well. If he didn't starve to death first.

  Chapter Six

  NewGene Experimental Facilities

  Wisconsin, North American Union

  12 May 2112

  Harry Murchison listened in dismay to the bruised child.

  "They hit my father." Rebeccah sobbed. "I was afraid they'd kill him."

  "Whatever made them think they could simply take you home?" Gisele was sounding less than sympathetic after the week they'd had.

  "He had an injunction. We had a court date. You're going to hear from the judge about this."

  Gisele sighed. "No, the Federal government has already stepped in. I'd doubt you'll find the court you wind up in at all sympathetic."

  "Well, anything is better than sitting around here, waiting to be the next one to be hauled off and raped." Rebeccah swiped her hand across her face, switching back to rage, she glared at Gisele. "Are you the one that gave Mercy and AK the date rape drugs? So they didn't remember? I am so glad those horrible men are dead and those rapist guards ought to be!"

  "Dear, no one gave them . . . "

  "Liar! Why do you think they can't remember? I could see from my window the guards leading them off. It was twenty minutes until they got back to their rooms. How are you going to explain that?" The child actually spit at Gisele.

  Gisele was white as a sheet. She turned and walked out.

  Harry sighed. "That's enough of that, young woman."

  "Slave. Nigger. Better make sure your Masters will supply the right drugs before you try anything. Or did they geld you instead of just sterilizing you? Yeah, I'll bet you don't have any balls."

  He had to step outside.

  "It shows!" she screamed as the door closed.

  He leaned back against it, his hands trembling. Something hit the door. Then something else. He practiced deep breathing and relaxation exercises. They didn't seem to be helping much.

  After a long time Gisele walked back down the hall. She was pale and shivering. "Verity admitted that Forstein and Winston both died while raping the girls. It was cute, he said, watching amateurs flirt. Until the girls decided it had gone far enough and the men didn't accept that. He thinks they killed them telepathically. He says he drugged them so they didn't remember how to do it. And then sent them off with two guards."

  "How did we end up on the wrong side of this?" Harry looked at his hands, they were almost steady. He jumped at a clang on the other side of the door.

  "I don't know. I wonder what would have happened if we didn't take these jobs? Kelly died in a car accident about then. Gabriel fell while mountain climbing."

  "And everyone else is here. Except Jason and Wolfgang."

  "They've caught Jason. They'll ship him back as soon as he's out of the hospital."

  "What did they do, shoot him?"

  "Just his horse. His collar bone and wrist are broken, concussion. He's got a lawyer, and is claiming emancipation due to age. And suing the bounty hunters, and the local sheriff for not arresting the bounty hunters, for attempted murder, destruction of property and cruelty to animals."

  Harry closed his eyes and tried to remember a prayer. Came up empty. "And if it works, what would you bet there will be an unfortunate accident?"

  "Nothing. I'm all out of optimism."

  They took Rebeccah back to her room themselves, with a guard following.

  Two weeks later, Jason was back. Officially and legally a non-person. The look in his eyes was dangerous.

  There was no sign of Wolfgang, and the peeved board of directors kept harping on it.

  Harry buried himself in the training, and grew inured to the whispered insults. The hatred. Being addressed as Massa Harry.

  "It's like a cross between air hockey and bumper cars. You see, through the VR hood, what the vid cam on your floater sees. The controls are going to be a bit trial and error, as each individual works out how they interact with the computer controls. We thought your kids might like to do the alpha testing, bit of a reward, you know? By next year this will be the hottest game on the market." Chairman Chou sat back and smiled.

  Harry eyed him skeptically. There's more to this than he's saying. Is the interface dangerous? "Is the interface dangerous?"

  Chou looked surprised. "No. But it is very difficult. We need some indication of whether the experience is worth the effort to master the controls. This is just the first game. Other, much better VR will branch out from this, but it is a step by step training experience. This is the first step, we need to find out if we should cut it in half."

  "Well. I'm sure the kids will give it a good test run, sir." Richard Newland glanced at his agenda. "Now, about the new animal testing facilities . . . "

  Chou nodded. "Yes, we need to keep up a slow and steady improvement to our genetic engineering abilities, as inevitably the political winds will shift. Just, no primates or dolphins, people are not rational about them, act as if they are as intelligent as humans, at the same time they insist that the genetically engineered could not possibly be real people with souls. It makes one wonder if they could pass their own standards of intelligence, doesn't it?"

  "Yes, sir. We'll stick to the lower animals. Dogs are especially useful for intelligence tests, and one of the researchers said something about horses having long series of genes in the same order as humans, which makes in vivo testing especially useful."

  Chou looked a bit dubious.

  Harry put in. "We can answer honestly that we are looking for a cure for canine and equine diseases, and that we can judge our success through biopsies and whole body scans, not euthanizing the test animals, but rather keeping them so that we can judge the success of our efforts to alleviate the diseases old dogs are prone to. Same with horses."

  Chou nodded slowly. "And they aren't food animals, so if there are any further escapes of our test subjects, it won't leave a trail of tainted offspring to poison the food chain. Very well." It was his turn to glance at the agenda. "At least you are down to a single escapee. That one, and the one just recover were both sterilized, so there won't have been any unauthorized spread of our patented genetics. I expect the other will show up eventually. Now, the engineered yeast trials . . . "

  Harry tuned out most of the details. Vat grown "meat" wasn't something he thought had any future, for all he'd been tasked with selling it to the public.

  The kids were getting good with the computers. With the control hoods they gave the impression of being one with the machine. But it w
as all subconscious. They just 'guessed' answers and made assumptions. Three fourths of the time they were right. Not because they could tell what the computer was going to do. What the computers did was significantly off random, in the direction the kids guessed. And it was getting more obvious.

  He was keeping records.

  And wishing that it had occurred to him earlier to conceal the results. This new "game" system seemed designed to take advantage of their special abilities, which made Chou's explanation spurious.

  What did Chou really want the kids to learn to control?

  The new game was a hit. Within a month the controlling computers were doing everything the kids wanted them to do. Ground breaking for the new installation came as soon as the ground warmed. Whatever they were building would have a prototype ready within the year, and the full scale version was planned to be operational in two years.

  On the political front, primary season peaked and another ultra conservative was nominated by the Republicans and an anti-genengineering fanatic by the Greens. Even the small parties couldn't seem to find a common sense candidate. The Democrats chose a communist, the Social Liberals an idiot, and the Constitutionalists a bigot.

  Harry mentally pushed his agenda to emancipate the telies back another four years. And his apprehension grew. This cannot end well. I have to find some way to avoid an out-and-out slaughter. The slaves must be valuable enough to keep them alive and well, until . . . A sea change in government. Enlightenment. A miracle.

  Chapter Seven

  Central America

  12 January 2113

  The Good Thing about a magical shield is that the Bad Guys can't shoot you through it. The Bad Thing about a magical shield is that the Good Guy, presumably oneself, can't shoot back through it.

  "Not that there is anything magical about it of course." Private John Dewulf elbow crawled a few more feet, trying to keep the area of the sheet telekinetic effect as small as possible. His first experience with friendly fire ricochets had been sufficient, thankyouverymuch. With a bit more of an excuse for cover, Wolfgang got his feet under him and sprinted for the next house, released the shield to dive through the window, and dodged through ransacked rooms of the mostly intact house to a window on the far side. Shield up again, forward and very close to his face so he could peek around . . .the impact of the bullet spun him and he tripped and went down. "Oh yeah," he muttered. "And then there's the kinetic energy of anything hitting the shield. Did someone forget to tell me what to do about the kinetic energy? Nope. And why, you ask is that? It's because you aren't suppose to be here, you farkin' idiot."