RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy))

by Utley, Todd

  There were some incidents before where one of the women accused two men of raping her; Cyrus had killed the accused with no investigation. As sick as he was he still would not tolerate anyone abusing another person in his organization. It was more of a sick jealousy really, if any abuse was going to take place it would be at his hands and none other. Just after the incident he called everyone down to the old foundry floor. The accused were brought before him.

  “This is what happens to you when you harm one of your fellow soldiers,” said Slade. He grabbed them both by their necks. One in each hand lifting them completely off of their feet, tightening his grip until their faces turned blue and everyone could hear their necks snapping.

  He was a freak of nature for sure, incredibly strong and seemingly incapable of feeling pain or fear or any emotion for that matter. Since that incident she slept much better, but never as good as when she was with Toby. Having him there made her feel safe. After she woke, she went in to wake Toby, but he was sleeping so soundly that she decided not to. She just slipped out and went back to her own room. She had to get ready for work and grab some breakfast. She was instructed to report to the lab today but didn’t know why.

  When she got to the lab there was a work order on a clip board lying on the bench. She picked it up, and saw that it was assigned to her. It was a detailed work order to begin monitoring Dodge Kerrington’s new clones. They were already growing rapidly and the order included instructions for even faster acceleration to facilitate reaching the age of four, mature enough to speak clearly and basically experience full pain recognition.

  She was horrified. At that moment she realized she would soon be forced to participate in the torture of a four-year-old boy with a middle-aged man’s lifefile loaded into him. She went back and viewed the clones. There were five started and much to her dismay they all survived. They were now in suspension and were at about the two-year-old stage. It would be only a matter of days until they would be brought out of suspension, hyper nourished for twenty-four hours and then loaded one at a time.

  One by one Cyrus would torture them to get as much information as he possibly could. He would torture them to death and then move onto the next one. In one case he had done this and succeeded by making the next clone in line witness the torture of the previous one, promising each one that they would get to live and be set free if they only cooperated.

  Even when they did, he still killed them anyway. His promises were nothing but bold faced lies. She started feeling sick to her stomach and had to run for the restroom in the back of the lab. When she emerged from the restroom she sat and stared at the precious toddlers suspended in the liquid. They were all so perfect, so beautiful, how could anyone have such total disregard for human life?

  Some greater power out there, maybe God, maybe some superior race had given us this life, and even gave us the gift of intelligence to discover these great ways to preserve life and create immortality. Yet that same power allowed people or things like Cyrus Slade to exist without intervention, it didn’t make sense to her at all that a creator that made such wonderful and beautiful things also allowed such ugliness to coexist with them. Then she thought, that’s why we have to fight back against evil on our own, apparently that’s why we’re here. I have GOT to do SOMETHING!

  She racked her brain, how could she spare these children the pain of torture. Yes! She had it, she would simply ruin the process, she would keep it from working so that Cyrus had nothing to torture. But if she killed the clones she would feel like she had murdered them and wouldn’t be any better than Cyrus.

  Then she remembered something, the first time Cyrus tried this he had used the wrong file to load them up and then tortured them to death before he realized what had gone wrong. That error bought Dodge and John and their families some valuable time. It was not likely he would make that mistake again. What if Slade did have the right file this time and what if he tortured Dodge to the point where he cracked and told everything about the take down of the compound? If that happened, they would all be doomed. She had to sabotage this effort but how?

  She did her work as ordered until lunch time, she wanted to talk to Toby, he was a really smart guy, maybe he would have an idea. When she went for lunch, he was waiting for her at the far corner table. He was already eating something so she made herself a sandwich and got a bowl of chili that someone had made a big pot of. It was a late lunch so most of the early crowd was gone and they nearly had the room to themselves. The remaining group was on the other side of the large room and they were very engrossed in their own conversation.

  Alice kept her voice low and told Toby what was going on in the lab and how she needed to figure a way to scuttle the whole thing to buy Dodge and John and all of them more time.

  Toby said “Why don’t you finish that chili and take that sandwich to go.” They left the kitchen and went down to the oven.

  Toby checked the area as they went along to make sure there was no one around. When they got to the oven, they thought they could have some privacy, but when they went in, there was a couple inside kissing.

  “Whoops, sorry!” Toby said, as he backed out of the oven and closed the door.

  “Well, I guess we’re not the only ones around here with those ideas, huh?”

  “I guess not” Alice said.

  They went to a much smaller oven and slowly opened the door while looking in, it was vacant so they went on in and sat down on a bench made of a plank and two five-gallon buckets.

  “Well it’s not the Hilton, but it’ll do.”

  “Okay, so they have these five clones and they’re planning to load them up and get information out of them. Let’s see, well, you could poison them.”

  “No, no, Cyrus would suspect foul play and run tests. I would be blamed and you heard about what a speedy trial those accused rapists got.”

  “Oh yeah,” Toby said, “That wouldn’t be good, it has to be absolutely untraceable back to you. Toby thought.

  “Hey, I’ve heard that the LifeTech chip must be planted into the clone’s brain within the first month of life, if that’s true and you were to insert chips that are faulty it would be months before you would discover that those chips were no good, right?

  “Well, yes, you’re right, but they would still say it was my fault. Cyrus would still blame me for it whether it was obvious sabotage or an apparent accident.”

  “Who oversees the storage and handling of the chips?

  “Glitch keeps them in a locked cabinet in the lab. He gets them out and tests them before each clone is started. I do the chip placements in the embryos when they are developed enough for good placement.”

  “Well it’s simple then, all you have to do is figure out a way to ruin the chips that you’ve already implanted in the five clones and you’ll have to also ruin the chips in the locked cabinet. See that way it looks like it was Glitch’s fault and maybe, just maybe, Cyrus will kill him.”

  “Okay, but how can I do it? I mean, ruin chips that are already implanted and ruin the chips in the locked cabinet? It’s a very secure storage cooler with a good fingerprint lock.”

  “Maybe you don’t need to get them out, if it’s like most lab coolers I’ve seen, there is a hole on the side or top to put tubes and wires through for when you’re conducting experiments that require measurements to be taken with outside equipment. If that hole is large enough you could just insert a probe into the cooler and turn on an attached Tesla Coil and watch it arc all over the interior of that cooler for about a minute. No precision electronic chip without serious static protection on it is going to survive that kind of an assault from high voltage static electricity.”

  “That’s a fairly good idea but what about the one’s already in the clones?

  “I’m pretty good with mechanical things and even electricity but I’m no biologist and certainly not a doctor. I have no idea what shocking those clones might do to the chips already in their brains.”

  “You know I cou
ld probably inject enough current into the brain to toast the chip. But even if the chip didn’t toast the brain would sustain some damage and either way they would never think to test for that after the fact. I think Glitch would suspect the chips. Then he would go back and check the rest of the batch in the cooler. If even some of them were bad, he would blame it on the manufacturer or bad handling practices. The good news is, I have never touched those chips in the cooler, Glitch is the only one with access.”

  “Well then, it sounds like a plan” Toby said.

  “What about the security cams, there is one that covers the lab cooler.”

  “Well come on, we’ve all seen those spy movies, there are really only two choices; you either take a still shot of the room from the same camera angle and slip it in front of the cam or steal some video from that same cam and create a video loop of the empty room, either one will work just fine.”

  “Well, I think the high tech route would be better because the cams are high resolution, I just don’t think a cheesy photo dangling in front of it is going to fool anyone.”

  “All right then Doc Alice, we can do it tonight if you have the moxie.”

  “Yes young man, I do, we’re on for tonight! After all Dodge is out there risking his life every day along with John and a whole crew of people that are trying to save us from Cyrus, it’s the least we can do to contribute.”

  Toby was confident they could pull it off, and besides, they had to, he was scheduled to go back to the house with Todd and Cheyenne the day after tomorrow, Cheyenne needed his help to be a lookout. If they waited until he returned again it would be too late, Cyrus was planning to load up the clones and began interrogating them within the next week or so. They had only a small window of opportunity to get it done. They began laying out the finer points of how they would pull off their plan and cause Cyrus another unexpected set back.

  Chapter 23 At ESS Dodge was working hard, he was focused on getting Ross Middleton completely invested in everything the team was doing. He needed his substitute to be sharp and ready to lead in his absence. He had not received the approval for his leave yet but by the way Tim talked it was all but guaranteed to go through. He had no idea of what was going on at the compound. As much as he wanted to, they just hadn’t been able to get eyes and ears on the inside with an open com channel. They knew Toby was in there off and on but so far they had no way of securely communicating with him.

  Traditional means were just too risky and would likely be detected resulting in Toby being terminated in the worst possible way. He thought about Toby often and hoped that he was all right. Bobby had tried calling him twice but only got his voice mail, his phone was secure, but obviously he didn’t have a good signal or he couldn’t answer it for some reason.

  Dodge was excited about what was going on at the farm. He knew from his clone’s memory that two of the Black Ops team members were already deployed to the farm and they would be working with JC and DC today on hand to hand combat skills in the morning and advanced weapons training in the afternoon. They had decided to call Dodge’s clone DC to eliminate confusion.

  It would be twelve hour training days for the next several weeks to get them as prepared as possible for anything they might need to know on the big day. There was not a planned day of attack on the compound yet, they were waiting for just the right moment and they had to be ready for it when it arrived.

  Alan also wanted to be involved in the operation, in fact he wanted it so bad that he approached John about creating an alibi for him. They concocted a phony vacation for Alan to the Bahamas complete with a cruise and several Island stops. At his first Island stop they replaced him with a man that looked a lot like him and flew Alan back on a small private plane to the Anderson Indiana airport.

  They got him out to the farm where he would spend his days assisting there in any way that he could. He had a great deal of combat experience and was a decorated war hero so he had plenty to contribute in the weapons and combat training area but he was willing to do pretty much anything, even cooking or mopping the floor. He didn’t care how he contributed, and he just wanted to help.

  Meanwhile they both had plenty of work to do during the day and they too would be contributing to their clone’s knowledge every night. It was a two-way street, every night their minds became one, it was the most amazing thing they had ever experienced. Not only were they breaking new scientific ground with this but they were also building their own secret weapon to unleash against Cyrus and if all went well, he would never see it coming, it would be the take down of the decade.

  Dodge was finishing up his day with several brief meetings at work with Tim and several of the department heads. They were discussing the launch of their next major product line. It would be a comprehensive approach to providing the most economical and reliable lifefile backup service ever offered. The two services currently available were clunky and riddled with vulnerabilities to hacker attacks not to mention generally poor customer service and not so user friendly web interfaces.

  Their new plan would offer the absolute latest security measures and the most affordable rates thus far in the industry. The two existing companies were price gouging because they knew they had the corner on the market and people had no choice but to pay their overpriced fees. Now ESS would offer an alternative that would be better in every way and very affordable plus the web interface prototype was already much better than anything out there.

  Across town John Calhoun was in his man cave working on his PC. He was diligently searching for files and building a database of everything he could find related to the individuals that Cyrus had captive. Toby had managed to slip a list to Bobby the last time he was at the house. It was not a complete list of everyone at the compound but it was over half of the people there.

  Each one of these individuals had their lives stolen and taken over by Cyrus. Just like Alice, most of them had been murdered in such a way that their loved ones truly believed they were gone forever and they would never see them again, while others were simply missing persons, some presumed dead.

  Meanwhile they were all still alive, stuck working for Cyrus in his make shift compound. It was dirty, dark, and dank. The only upgrades made to the facility were those required to prevent escape and utilitarian upgrades necessary to get the job done. Each of them had an explosive brain implant that meant certain death if they disobeyed or escaped from the compound. These people had very little contact with the outside world so they had little chance of contacting their families. If they did attempt it and were caught they would be killed for it.

  As John went through each of their files, he felt emotional pain for their families. In many cases wives had buried their husbands and mourned for them, moving on they had remarried and had children with new mates. This was true for several men as well that believed their wives dead at the hands of some crazed murderers. How horrible it must have been for these prisoners of Cyrus’s. They must have known their families had moved on and turned the pages in their lives without them. Even when they were liberated by Dodge and John and their Black Ops team, they would soon learn that the lives they once knew had been so derailed that they would never be able to get back what they had.

  He noticed one man in particular that lost his wife to Cyrus’s evil plot. His name was Vince Lombardi, same name as the famous football coach from nearly a century earlier. Vince’s wife Cheyenne had been murdered outside a department store where she worked. She was leaving late that night after she and the assistant manager had locked up for the night. When she got to her car in the parking garage a man was waiting and he murdered her by strangling her. There were no witnesses and the only evidence at all to the crime was a security camera with a bad angle and a dirty lens.

  One of Cyrus’s men had carried out the crime and another had switched out her Lifecorder back at home while both she and her husband were at work. She was lying there dead for almost an hour before she was discovered, making it impossible for medics t
o get her to the hospital in time to be restored. Her husband even went on several talk shows after her death because he made statements to the media that he didn’t believe that she was really dead. He insisted that there must be a government conspiracy to kill certain people faking their deaths and that his wife was still alive somewhere. He said he could “feel it” he knew she was still alive.

  John studied Vince’s web search history after Cheyenne’s death. He had spent months conducting research in an effort to develop a conspiracy theory. Lately though Vince was researching it a lot less, as if he was beginning to give up on ever proving anything. It made John a little sad, he only hoped that they could free his wife from Cyrus in time to be reunited with Vince, before he gave up and moved on.

  As it turned out Vince’s wife Cheyenne was the very same Cheyenne that was posing as Toby’s mother. She had gained enough trust from Cyrus that he was letting her out on assignments such as this one where she was posing as Todd’s wife and Toby’s Mother. No doubt she had a glimmer of hope that she might earn her freedom, but John knew from researching Slade’s psychological profile that this would simply never be allowed to happen so long as Cyrus had control.

  John felt his hatred begin to boil hotter for Cyrus. He imagined killing him with a big gun, blasting him through a large glass window in a tall office building, then watching him go on a very long fall to his ultimate messy death on the street below.

  He leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen, folding his hands behind his head and looking at the frozen image of Cyrus. He was not an attractive man, he was dirty, disgusting and covered in blemishes and scars as if he had been through a war and somehow survived when he shouldn’t have. His countenance gave off a disturbing vibe even in a still photo, he could only imagine how threatening he must seem in person. He sat there and stared at the image for a little while longer, and then said, Slade, my man, at some point it’s just going to be you and me, and you’re goin down you sack of shit!