by Joshua Guess
Mason let out an exasperated breath. “Who’d be stupid enough to do that in the middle of a place as security conscious as New America? I saw enough on my tour to know you guys don’t fuck around.”
Al shrugged. “Survivors out in the world are independent. Good thing, too, or many of them would have died long before we could have brought them here. Some people don’t accept the bargain here. They don’t like living under someone else’s rules.”
Mason grunted. “Seems to me when you agree to live by the rules, you’re agreeing to live with the consequences.”
“Or die by them, as the case may be,” Al said. “Those men killed two guards. I don’t think it will end well for them.”
Mason frowned. “Will they at least get a trial?”
“Of course,” Al said, seeming honestly shocked. “We don’t kill out of hand. Self-defense, certainly, but there are no summary executions here. We don’t have many laws, but the bedrock idea of a justice system is one of them.”
Mason scratched at his chin. He’d pushed the subject as far as casual interest would allow. Any more and it would start to look suspicious. “How’d you guys spring me, anyway? Figured I was going to be their leverage for a while.”
Al huffed at this, but Emily spoke before he could build up a head of steam. “Since we’re trapped in their base, they figure we’re not much of a threat. They can get to us any time.”
“Makes sense,” Mason said absently, thinking of the ways he might be able to fight his way back down here and free his men if the opportunity came up.
“That’s simply not true,” Al began.
“As for the actual how of it,” Emily said, speaking over him, “we made it clear we’d force a conflict if they kept trying to pressure us that way. It’s starting to sink in that we’re not fucking around here. We’re willing to work with them, but not under duress.”
Mason smirked. “Well, not under that much duress, at any rate.”
Emily shrugged. “Nothing’s perfect.”
They walked along in silence for a little while, guard escorts leading them toward whatever space had been set aside for the three of them. Eventually Al cleared his throat.
“I had another reason for coming to see you, Mason,” he said.
“Can it wait until we get to where we’re going? Is this something we can talk about while I’m eating, because I think there’s a small animal trying to chew its way out of my stomach.”
“Of course,” Al said. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me in your quarters.”
Mason chuckled. “Want? That’s a strong word. Tolerate you being there, sure. If you’ll promise to do me a favor.”
“I can promise to try,” Al said carefully. “I won’t break any rules for you.”
“No kidding,” Mason said. “This place doesn’t seem restrained with its punishments.”
Emily, walking ahead of them, snorted. “You have no idea.”
To his great relief, there was food waiting in the small suite. Somewhat more concerning was why the food was available; it had been delivered for Kell and was ignored.
He gave Mason a perfunctory greeting, and then turned back to the folder full of paper he was reading. Mason didn’t take it personally. He was years past that kind of petty shit. It did concern him that Kell was so wrapped up that nothing around him seemed of any interest. Far be it from him to judge, though. If it was that important, Mason would just watch and make sure the guy didn’t walk into any doors while he was reading.
“What was the favor?” Al asked as Mason sat on one of the folding chairs. For a bunker, the space was virtually palatial. It was about the size of a shipping container. Might have even been one. It contained three fold-out cots, a small bathroom, and a common area with a rudimentary kitchen that doubled as a living room.
“See if Bobby can get clearance to come visit us,” Mason said.
Al blinked. “That’s all?”
“That’s all,” Mason said. The food was some kind of pasta, and the fact that it was indistinct enough that he couldn’t identify it disturbed him. He piled his fork full of the stuff in its weird orange sauce and glanced up at Al. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
The older man grew noticeably uncomfortable. “The doctors have finished looking at your tissue samples. They wanted me to ask you whether you’d consent to more testing.”
Mason ate the bite of food. He chewed slowly, deliberately. His eyes met Al’s, and didn’t move away the entire time. Slightly hypnotized, Al didn’t look away either. Maybe he thought it was like breaking eye contact with a dog or something. Mason did it mostly just to make the guy sweat.
“What kind of tests?”
Another bite, slowly and methodically chewed. It really seemed to be bothering Al.
Good.
“They want to do two,” Al said. “One controlled, in the lab. The other outside. Apparently your test results were unique in some way, and they want to load you with sensors to measure a variety of factors while you’re engaged in combat.”
Mason’s eyebrows rose. Emily, who leaned against the wall next to him, shook her head. “He’s not their dancing monkey.”
Mason leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. “Do I really have a choice?”
Al’s gaze flicked between the two of them, even taking a moment to land on Kell. “Of course you have a choice. But I did have to sit and listen to them explain to me in horrifyingly boring detail why this was so important. Your biology is unique, or so they tell me.”
“It’s not,” Kell said, looking up from his reading. “They just haven’t seen a Reset who has been exposed to the cure. That’s the difference.”
“Think I should do it?” Mason asked.
Kell frowned. “It’s your call, man.”
Mason shook his head. “Not asking as your friend. Scientifically, do you think I should do it? Will it yield results that might help?”
Kell waved the pages he was holding in front of him. “I’m not even sure what they’re doing. But...well, they have access to much better equipment than I ever have at Haven. It probably couldn’t hurt.”
Al raised a finger. “That reminds me: they wanted to be sure you knew before making a decision that one of the monitors will have a subcutaneous sensor. That is, it will be—”
“Under my skin,” Mason said irritably. “I’m a killer, not an idiot. I know what the word means.”
Al nodded. “Of course. So, will you do it?”
Mason thought about it. Really thought about it, not just a show. He wasn’t concerned with any pain that might come with more testing. He liked to play it off as part of the small legend that had grown up around him, but the truth was that pain was less intense these days. Probably an adaptation of the Chimera stratified through every layer of his body. It was the difference between burning your hand on a hot stove, leaving a blister, and yanking your fingers away just in time to just leave a tender spot for a day or two. Even if the volume knob on his ability to hurt wasn’t turned down a notch, he still would have considered it.
Mason wasn’t afraid of being hurt. After all, he’d died already. Living through the sorts of wounds he had gave a man perspective on injury.
It would be good to show these people what he could do, let them see it with their own eyes.
“Yeah, okay,” Mason said, digging back into his meal. “As long as I can see Bobby. That’s the deal breaker.”
Al smiled. “I’ll pass that along. If you need anything, just ask one of the guards in the hallway. I believe they’ve assigned you a runner of your own as long as you’re here.”
Emily closed the door behind him, locking it tightly. “Well, that was fun times. Good to see you, man.” She raised a questioning eyebrow. Mason gave a barely visible shake of the head in return. Kell, adorably oblivious, was already back to reading.
Emily was asking him if it was safe to talk, and Mason suspected it wasn’t. Nothing he’d seen so far had convinced him these
people would let their group have even the slightest privacy. He’d have to search the space for listening devices after he was done eating. There might even be cameras, though those would be easier to spot.
Instead he let himself catch up with her. In the conversation, they shared quite a few details using coded language and particular gestures. Mostly this consisted of status updates, prearranged signals between the two of them to act as shorthand. Mason developed a good understanding of what their situation was.
Nothing terribly surprising other than eight of their spies being in custody. Mason had prepared himself from day one to be ready for the whole enterprise to fail. While it would have bothered him on a deeper level, he would have been able to partition that off and keep on functioning as normal.
Things weren’t great, but they were all alive. And being alive meant having hope.
If only he could understand why Kell was reading and rereading so obsessively, and why it unnerved Mason as nothing had done for years.
Kell
In the first forty-eight hours inside the bunker, Kell read or skimmed nearly a thousand pages of data. The collective of scientists were happy to send copies of the work up to him, encouraged by his interest. Tom, the kid working as the personal assistant to Kell’s group, was less enthused about making all the trips.
“Any idea what you’re looking at yet?” Emily asked while reminding him to eat.
Kell frowned that the page in front of him, then put it down. “No. It’s definitely Chimera, but I have no clue what the purpose is. They’re being deliberately silent on that front. I think they want my unbiased opinion, which means figuring out what they’re working toward on my own.”
Mason, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, sighed. “At least they’re not tossing any of us in jail. For the moment.”
“They wanted me here,” Kell said. “Considering how complicated this little genetic mystery of theirs is, my guess is they’ve been butting their heads against a wall for a while now. That can make people a little desperate.”
It was an understatement, of course. Kell wasn’t so divorced from things like politics that he didn’t understand the damage done because of that desperation. His guess was that the doctors put themselves in power by promising something and whatever that something was rested within the countless printouts he scoured every waking moment.
It would be instinctive for most people to assume that the promise was a way of getting power, but Kell didn’t buy it. These were clearly people who hung on to control by bare threads. No, his guess was that whatever this project was, they had been afraid—as every academic before them was—that having to wade through a bureaucracy bent on limiting their resources would choke or kill the work.
For them, the best solution wasn’t just to take control, but the bend the entire effort of their fledgling nation toward this project. It was pure conjecture, of course, but bolstered by ironclad evidence. How else to explain the vast resources put into capturing Resets and converting buildings to serve as remote labs and prisons? Mason relayed his tour of the surrounding communities, and pointed out the lack of anything like recreation. This place put the necessary work into keeping the people safe and fed and watered, but the bulk of its effort went toward manufacturing and industry.
The things you’d need if you wanted the infrastructure to make and distribute a new strain of Chimera, or possibly its cure, on a large scale.
Emily and Mason thought he was breathlessly obsessed with the material in front of him like he was some new grad student, but that was not the case. The thought reminded Kell of an old saying from his college days, which was the best way to kill a doctoral candidate, was to give him a puzzle and watch him starve.
No, Kell had left that sort of exclusive thinking behind with the world that had fallen to Chimera. He was trying to figure out what the Rebound doctors were doing, sure, but his prodigious mind was also analyzing every other piece of context he could find. Knowing there were pharmaceutical production facilities here was important, as was the focus on industry. He just didn’t know how. No matter how many times he turned it over in his head; there wasn’t enough information at hand to create that moment of perfect alchemy when the pieces and parts come together.
Clearly, they saw something in Mason that might help—and just like that, Kell sat up straight. It wasn’t a magic bullet, but it was something. “I’m an idiot.”
“Sometimes,” Emily agreed, “but I still believe I’ll be able to train it out of you one day.”
Kell yelled for Tom, who came through the door with the look of a young man well and truly sick of his elder’s shit. “How can I help you, sir?” Tom’s voice was tired and flat.
“Last trip today, I promise,” Kell said. “I need everything they have on Mason. I want to do some comparative analysis.”
Tom left with a sigh, not bothering with pretense.
“What was that all about?” Mason asked.
Kell tossed the paper he was reading aside. “I need a frame of reference. I didn’t even think of looking at your test results because I’ve studied you so much, but it might give me a place to start. There’s also a good chance they’ve got more data on you than I ever have, because that lab is top of the line.”
Mason grunted before grabbing Emily’s pack and pulling out a book. His ability to pull himself out of a conversation before Kell could bore him to tears with science was finely honed by the last few years. Kell knew that was what he was doing; Mason had proudly explained as much more than once.
Knowing that Emily would sit and listen while he blathered no matter how boring she found the subject, Kell decided to repay that kindness with silence.
Tom returned twenty minutes later with an armload of printouts and a folder stuffed with handwritten notes. Kell fell into them like an Olympic diver while Mason and Emily sat across from each other to play cards.
When he came up for air, Kell was disturbed.
“I know what they’re doing,” he said, his voice uneven and with notes of real fear. Emily and Mason stopped what they were doing—the fourth game of heads-up Texas Hold ’Em in a row—and looked over at him in alarm. Emily’s hand flicked up to cover her mouth, and she gave him a little nod.
Be careful what you say in here. Message received.
Fortunately, this part wasn’t dangerous to them. Not in the sense that talking about it would invite a reaction.
Mason, not missing a beat, spoke into the silence to prevent it from seeming too long to anyone listening in. “Don’t keep us in suspense, man. Spit it out.”
Kell picked up the folder and some of the printouts and motioned for the others to clear the tiny table of cards. “Unless I’m completely off base, and I hope I am, they’re trying to improve on my original work.”
Emily frowned. “Gonna need you to unpack that for me.”
Kell nodded. “Okay. So, Chimera is a symbiotic organism, right? When we discovered it, the possibilities seemed endless. I was way ahead of anyone else, and so I ran the original project. When the university got the offer to buy it out, I stayed on as head of the project.”
“We know all this,” Emily said.
Kell waved her off. “I know, but there’s context here. See, I was supposed to be mapping out all the ways Chimera could improve human health. I was supposed to be figuring out a way to alter the base organism using CRISPR/Cas9 so it could be adapted to do a bunch of different stuff. One injection, and your bones start getting stronger, the walls of your blood vessels get reinforced and cleaned, nerve damage is repaired, tons of stuff.
“But that didn’t work out. You guys already know that, too. My experiments showed that the more we snipped and replaced, the less predictable the result. Once that became clear, my primary focus was on creating a variety of Chimera that could repair nerve damage. I had to narrow down what I wanted to do to have any chance of making it work.”
Mason absently popped a few knuckles. “You’re saying
the doctors here are, what, trying to do the whole enchilada?”
“Yes,” Kell said, pointing to the pages. “They’re using people like you and me, Resets, as a baseline to work from. They want to understand how Chimera works in our bodies since it clearly improves almost every organ and system. They want to engineer it and spread it around.”
Emily put up a hand in a stopping gesture. “And that’s bad?”
“Of course it’s bad,” Kell said, exasperated. “This thing has a huge genome. Complicated, too. Trying this is like...” he trailed off, looking for the right metaphor. “Think of it like building a frame out of toothpicks that can only be connected at the points, and making it strong enough to hold a bowling ball at the top. The number of things that can go wrong are almost incalculable. This is exactly how the plague started in the first place.”
“Why, though?” Mason asked. “We already have it in our system. What’s the point?”
Kell looked down at the pages and ran a hand over the stubble on his head. “I don’t know. Maybe they think replacing the Chimera inside people with a better design will help us survive better. I can’t really make any sense of the reasoning. To me it’s just crazy. I don’t know a good reason why anyone would do this.”
He picked up one of the handwritten pages and gave it a glance, mostly just needing to do something with his hands. A nagging sense of familiarity had bugged him all through the reading he’d done over the last few hours, but Kell chalked it up to the subject matter. He had lived and breathed this stuff for ages, after all. Deja vu was bound to happen.
Rather than let himself get worked up again by talking more, he grabbed the next page. He pulled that mental thread, trying to figure out what part of the work seemed so familiar to him. There were certainly large chunks of the edited genes that had his own fingerprints on them. Maybe that was it.