by Sean Platt
CHAPTER 44
ACCEPTABLE RISK
“Don’t you think that was a little creepy?” Ephraim asked as Jonathan closed the door behind Elle and Doctor Dennison, giving them privacy. “Sitting back there in your chair, just watching it all? Were you twirling your mustache? Were you petting a cat in your lap?”
“Can you sit up?” Jonathan asked.
Ephraim shook his head, confused by the answer. “I think.”
“Then do it.”
Ephraim did. He felt unsteady, but soon the room stopped turning, and there he was in bed, upright in its center.
“All right. Now wh—?”
Jonathan came forward and wrapped his arms around Ephraim. The hug was bone-crushing. Ephraim felt himself come off the bed’s surface a bit before being set back down.
Jonathan stepped back, pulled his chair to the bedside, and sat.
“You can lay back now.”
“I thought you were dead.”
Jonathan nodded. “I figured you would.” A sigh. “I missed you, Ephraim.”
“You’ve been here the whole time? Just hanging out on the Denizen?”
Jonathan nodded. “There was work to be done.”
“You couldn’t get in touch? Just drop me a line?”
“It’s not that simple. What Wallace and I are working on? It’s big. So big it’s scary. And I’ll bet you’re thinking, ‘Wallace has him under a gag order.’ But that isn’t true. I’ve got myself under one.”
“Why?”
“Because I know you. You wouldn’t buy the bullshit I told the rest of the world, in the wake of the UCLA scandal, and you sure wouldn’t help me spread it. If I got in touch — if I kept any line of communication open between us whatsoever — you’d keep asking questions. I’d bluster and tell you whatever lies I thought might make you stop asking, but you’d put them all together and see how they didn’t fit. Unless I wanted you all the way in, you had to be all the way out. And that meant cutting all ties. Which meant this.”
“There was no official declaration. You’re just ‘missing.’”
“You’re wrong. There was an official declaration, legally speaking. But there was no body, so to speak. That was necessary as well. Because everyone is curious about Eden. Predators think we’re prey. Did you know this part of the world has pirates? Pirates, Ephraim! We had to buy them off. And we had to buy neighboring armies and guerrillas to protect us. Even within Eden, we have all sorts of rules. Guests are heavily screened, but even then, they can’t come to the Denizen or any of the other off-limits islands — unless they’re my brother. We’re always on guard. It’s only a matter of time before someone tries to sneak in and steal what Wallace has spent a lifetime building.”
Ephraim looked away. That’s exactly what he’d come to Eden to do. That and find his brother.
“We tried to spread some rumors away from Eden. But they didn’t work, did they? You knew I was here.”
“I figured.”
“So why did you come? If you thought I was dead.”
Ephraim’s mind felt sluggish and unreliable. He couldn’t tell Jonathan the truth — not until he had more information.
“I figured you died here, and I had to know why.”
“How did you get into Eden?”
Ephraim squinted, playing it up. “My head, Jonathan. It’s just hard to think.”
“It’s not important. It’s just important that you’re here.”
“How did you know?”
“You have a great set of genetic spoofs. And whoever did the work on your false identity? Fantastic job. But when you demanded a ‘before’ genetic snapshot, they sampled it. Your blood doesn’t lie.”
Ephraim’s eyes closed. How the hell hadn’t he thought of that?
Spend all this effort hiding, then wave a big old flag announcing your true genetic identity.
What an asshole.
“But the bigger question is why, Ephraim,” Jonathan said, suddenly serious. “Nothing’s changed, you know. I work with Wallace. Even today.”
“I never objected to you working with Connolly. It was the way you ended up with him that bothered me.”
“I confessed it. Publicly. I treated a group of volunteers as lab rats at UCLA, and that was unforgivable. But I said my piece. I told the world how sorry I was.”
“You should have been arrested, Jon. You got on a boat. You ran from your crime, and we both know damn well that you should have faced it. Confession isn’t penance. You told the world the truth on that forum, but then the families called for justice. I don’t know if you’re tuned into mainland news, but if you didn’t watch, then you have no idea how bad it got. They came after me, man. They came after Mom.”
“Fuck her.”
“We patched things up, you know. Mom and me. She got clean. Got herself a job.”
“Good for her.”
“You can’t stay angry at her and run away, Jonathan. That’s not fair.”
Jonathan stood, stalked to the window, and looked out across the ocean. Then he turned back and said, “Did you come here to start this up again? It’s been more than ten years. Are you still mad at me?”
Ephraim sighed, old anger beginning to percolate. “I don’t know. I’m glad to see you. I wouldn’t have come after you if I didn’t miss you and want my brother back. I wish we hadn’t fought. But dammit, Jon, the fight, before you vanished? That was your fault! We could’ve had it out when that shit with UCLA went down. You could have settled. Faced the families, including your own.
“But Connolly called, and you went like a dog. You know what people said? They said you went to Connolly because you were two of a kind. Neither of you had a moral compass. They kept waiting for you to come home. The US, as far as I understood it, had half the world’s countries ready to extradite your ass. By the time you got here, they were ready to pin you to the wall instead of letting you off with a slap and a fine like what would’ve happened if you’d just faced the music to begin with.”
“It was an opportunity,” Jonathan said, his voice suddenly too loud. “Not just for me; for everyone! I regret what I did, and I’m not proud that I ran. But what was I supposed to say when Wallace called and asked for my help?”
“You were supposed to say no. You were wanted, and Wallace’s work had been outlawed. Banned by every goddamn international agency!”
Jonathan began to pace, the old arguments afire. “Short sighted bullshit. It’s the same thinking that slapped labels on GMO produce, as if warning people against a superior product. Fucking people who can’t understand, making judgments that get in the way of people who can. It retards progress. Stops genius in its tracks.”
“So now you’re a genius?”
“I was always a genius!” Jonathan paused, held up a hand, and closed his eyes. Then more softly he said, “UCLA was terrible. A tragedy. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t regret those lost lives. But the failure of the administration to even consider my research was worse. I wouldn’t have needed to take that experiment into my own hands if they’d been willing to green-light my project. Through proper channels, we could have created a treatment that would have saved countless lives. Just think of what it would have affected if it had worked, Ephraim. Cancer, autism, even Alzheimer's disease!”
“Those people are dead.”
“Acceptable risk! I’ve had ten years to regret what happened, but given the same situation I’d take the risk again if it meant a chance at a breakthrough. The technology we were working with, explored in the open rather than in secret and with adequate funding, could have reversed all sorts of supposedly irreversible conditions. It might have been able, in time, to conduct chromosomal repair. An end to birth defects, corrected in vitro at the zygote stage.”
“Again with your hard-on for eugenics?” Ephraim said, pulling a buzzword from his brother’s vocabulary. “You want to ‘perfect’ the human race? Hell of a thing, coming from a black man.”
“Oh, fuck
you, Ephraim. Nothing has changed with you, has it? You think everything is so black and white. You see ‘eugenics’; I see potential. No, I don’t want to ‘purify’ the race. It’s insulting that you’d propose it, and I know you’re not stupid enough to believe that that’s what I mean. There’s always room for improvement. Room to make humanity, as a whole, better than we are without science’s assistance.”
“And that’s why, when you were facing arrest, you ran to the man who thought he knew better than the world’s governments? So you could play God?”
“This from a man who just got a treatment to turn back his own clock? Have you seen yourself in a mirror yet? You look ten years younger!”
“How nice of Eden to help me out with that,” Ephraim said, “for a price.”
Jonathan rolled his eyes. “I know you’re not that stupid. Capitalism is as valid an evolutionary force as any other. He who does the best work wins.”
“So those who make the most money are the most correct? And I’m stupid? I’m naive?”
“You believe Evermore hasn’t made leaps and bounds? Is that honestly what you’re saying?”
“I think that Precipitous Rise was banned,” Ephraim said. “And the world started to get scared when geneticists could suddenly grow full replacement organs to maturity within days.”
“Tell that to a liver recipient. Tell him that you apologize for making him a perfectly matched organ that his body will accept as its own, from his own raw material, within a week’s time.”
“Who decides what’s acceptable to make, Jonathan? Who polices it?”
“You’re not thinking. You’re parroting liberal propaganda. Nobody was talking about making an Aryan Race of Organs. This was progress, not purification.”
Ephraim turned his head toward the window — furious, fatigued, and knowing this was an argument he’d never win even with all his wits about him. They’d had this fight over and over before Jonathan vanished into Eden’s archives. For Jonathan, forward progress was always justified. But for Ephraim, the question of should we? was always as valid as can we?
Yes, Precipitous Rise could grow new life from cells to maturity in a blink. Humanity kept the hunger-alleviating applications and rejected the rest. That had happened, in Ephraim’s mind, because geneticists like his brother never knew when to stop.
Today they could make organs. Tomorrow, who knew?
He looked down at his hands. His body apparently restored to its younger version.
Tomorrow, the Tomorrow Gene. And now that he’d had the procedure, Ephraim was complicit.
“Look,” Jonathan said, turning with his anger carefully in check. “That was all a long time ago. You’re here now. You found me. And even though you’re not finished judging me and my life’s work, I’m happy to see you. I’ve spent a decade hating that we fought. Hating that things came to what they did. Regretting the distance between us and missing my little brother. But now it’s over, and we’re both in this room. We're brothers again if we want it. So what now?”
Ephraim said nothing.
“Ephraim?”
Ephraim held his gaze on the window, not looking at Jonathan. It was all he had. It was the only way to fight — the only way to hold what he suspected, all things considered, might now be a somewhat unreasonable grudge.
“Ephraim?”
Another ten seconds of silence.
And then Jonathan left Ephraim in the warm light of the sun.
CHAPTER 45
GREETING THE SUN ALONE
Ephraim felt better the following morning. Or maybe the morning after that.
He awoke in the same room, at about the same time of day judging by the light. His head felt clearer. He couldn’t remember any nightmares, and he hadn’t woken with Elle possibly having shared his bed.
He’d already decided he might have been mistaken about that. Elle had been around, maybe, but yesterday (or the day before?) he’d been fuzzy, and the notion that she’d slept with him already felt ridiculous, a flight of fancy, concocted by a confused mind.
The doctor had been right about his mind and its ability to focus. He was more exhausted, inside and out, than he’d believed. Jonathan’s visit, ironically, hadn’t helped.
Now he greeted the sun alone, stretching in this new bed, feeling more or less well. If he wasn't in a strange house, he’d have decided that this was a dream. Even so — even though he could verify from the view that he was on the Denizen, even though he felt sure that his talk with Jonathan had been real — it was all a haze.
He’d been searching for his brother for a decade. Suddenly, whiplash fast, he’d found him alive — then fought with him, alienated him, and lost him again.
No wonder he was fuzzy. No wonder he felt disoriented and confused.
With nothing else to do and no one to greet him, Ephraim pulled the covers away and sat up. He put his bare feet on the rug. He wore only boxers. When he turned, he saw the same three lines of dried blood on the sheets. Evidence, perhaps, that Elle had been more than his concierge — and a tad aggressive in her affections.
When he hobbled sleepily into the bathroom and craned around to look in the mirror, he verified that the blood had come from his back. He saw three scabbed-over scratches beside a fourth that hadn’t broken the skin. And to think, he didn’t even have a memory to accompany his wound.
What a gyp.
But it was too early, and he was too tired to think much about it, so he ignored the truth that he was a stranger in a strange land and focused on his simple routine.
Someone had laid out toothpaste and a brush, soap, and a washcloth. He drained his bladder and cleaned up.
Ephraim surveyed his body. His skin felt tighter all over. His love handles and slight paunch were smaller. The sun damage on his arms was gone. He felt lighter on his feet. His muscles didn’t ache, and his back didn’t hurt. Everything seemed easier.
His identity-obscuring contacts were gone, and the resin on his fingertips had worn away. Right now, he had nothing between his true genetic identity and the world — and as he realized that, Ephraim felt naked.
But it didn’t matter anymore, did it?
What had Jonathan said? Your blood doesn’t lie.
There was a short, self-important ring from the other room.
Ephraim walked back into the bedroom to find his pants neatly folded on a wooden chair, his Doodad in the pocket.
He looked at the device before activating the screen, confused by its presence. But why? He’d had his Doodad when he’d gone in for treatment. What had he thought — that someone would take it?
The phone dinged again. The lock screen activated, and Ephraim saw three unanswered texts from Fiona:
Are you okay?
Call when you can.
We need to talk.
Three separate messages. As if she’d wanted three chances, halfway across the world, to nab his attention. How long had it been since they’d talked? Ephraim had no idea. He didn’t even know how long it had been since she’d sent the last cryptic message he’d been unable to answer. That one that had warned Ephraim not to do what he’d had done, nor to discuss it with anyone.
Ephraim was about to pocket the Doodad when he noticed something curious. Bars. Data service, right here in this room. Permanent residents were apparently allowed to communicate whenever and wherever they wanted, without the need for dedicated zones.
He tapped the screen, then flicked through to Fiona’s contact entry. It didn’t say Fiona Roberson, and the number she’d given him to use forwarded to her primary rather than being the number itself. Supposedly, the destination wasn’t easily discoverable.
Unless he dialed and someone was listening.
He blacked out the screen and slipped the Doodad into his pocket. Doing so, he realized what he was telling the world — telling himself, really — through his actions. Ephraim didn’t trust his brother.
But that was crazy. Just because Jonathan had been here on Eden all along a
nd even now wasn’t apologetic about rushing to Connolly rather than facing the music didn’t make him suspect. Did it?
They were brothers, weren’t they?
Of course they were. Ephraim had come here on a hunch to find anything he could about Jonathan and had found his brother, safe and sound. That was a joyous success. He loved his brother. Always had, always would.
But that didn’t mean he needed to return Fiona’s call right now, from inside this room, where anyone might be listening.
He sniffed the air. Thought he smelled bacon.
Ephraim got dressed then left the bedroom, to see what awaited in the house beyond.
CHAPTER 46
IT'S NOT A PROBLEM
Jonathan stood in the kitchen alone, making breakfast.
“You’re up!” Jonathan smiled.
“How long did I sleep?”
“Too long. Have a seat. You still like your bacon medium?”
“You still like yours crisp?”
“Floppy bacon is disgusting.” Jonathan was smiling, offloading a few thick strips onto Ephraim’s plate. He cooked the remaining few for a while longer and placed them on a folded paper towel. He turned off the gas, blotted the bacon to remove the excess grease, then nudged the crisp strips onto his plate.
“You remove all the flavor when you do that,” said Ephraim, taking a bite of his first strip. There were scrambled eggs, too, but he neither cared enough to reach for them nor wanted to ask Jonathan for help. He could smell toast. Whether it had popped and was being kept or whether it was in the toaster, he hadn’t a clue.
“I’m removing fat, not flavor.”
“Where do you think the flavor lives?”
Jonathan laughed. “Remember how I used to try and sell Mom on the idea that she should cook the bacon longer and make it crisp because it was healthier? Because more fat cooked away?”
“Same basic argument you used to get her to buy Low Fat Pop Tarts. But come on. If you’re going to eat a Pop Tart, man up and eat a fucking Pop Tart.”