The Games

by Ted Kosmatka

  If you have the money or connections, Silas noted to himself. He poured his beer into a glass.

  “But these great leaps forward are not limited only to helping those of us suffering from disability or disease. Telomere research holds great promise in the area of longevity. We may see life spans double, perhaps treble. Gene-therapy research is now under way that will one day soon eliminate obesity, baldness, and nearsightedness.” He paused for effect. “These are all conditions that will come to an end in our lifetimes. Daily progress is being made. We are standing at the door of a golden age, and that door is swinging open because of the advancements being made by talented people like the scientists at Helix. I believe God is on our side in this struggle. I believe He gave us our uniquely powerful minds in order that we may unlock our own destinies. Yes, we live in interesting times, my friends.” He smiled and leaned in to the lectern with his elbows. “And I don’t have to tell you who’s leading the way, do I?”

  The crowd applauded wildly. They knew, all right.

  Baskov grinned into the wash of approval, letting it linger. Finally, he continued, speaking in slightly lower tones. “Before the end of next year, our gladiator will compete right here in the U.S., in the city of Phoenix. The human portion of the Games will take place in Monterrey shortly thereafter.

  “Rightly or wrongly, the gladiator competition has come to represent much more than just a simple Olympic event. More than just our opening event. When the rest of the Games commence a month later in Monterrey, the events of Phoenix will still be ringing in the hearts and minds of people around the world. What happens in that arena has come to stand for each nation’s bioengineering capabilities. The results are a badge each nation wears. But I think it is much more than that, even. I think it is what biologists call true signaling—a single trait that stands for a whole suite of characteristics related to strength and vitality. It is the peacock’s feathers. It is the lion’s mane. It is the sheer raging bulk of a charging bull elephant. And these things are not meaningless.” Baskov slapped his hand on the lectern. “They stand for something.” Then softly, “Just as this United States team has stood for something for the last twelve years. Our Olympic Development team has yet to lose in the steel arena.”

  As Silas watched Baskov spool out his practiced monologue, he had to admit the man was very fucking good. The bait was in the fish’s mouth, and all he had to do now was set the hook.

  “Most significant to you, our precious sponsors, is this: last year more people watched the Olympic Games worldwide than any other single event in the history of the world.” Baskov rested for a moment to let it sink in.

  “The Chinese don’t watch the Super Bowl. Americans don’t watch the World Cup. Last year, the only ones interested enough to watch the inauguration of Indian Prime Minister Saanjh Patil were the Indians. And understandably so. Each nation has its own concerns. But everywhere around the planet, people watched the gladiator event. Billions of people.”

  Baskov paused for effect.

  “I don’t have to tell you how important product placement is to the dynamic of the global marketplace; you already know that. But you should also know that by helping us, you are also helping yourselves. And I’m not talking about your bottom line. Or not just your bottom line, anyway. The scientific advancements that are made while striving toward Olympic gold can be used to benefit everyone. What we learn can be applied against disease. It can be applied toward getting a larger yield from an acre of crop. It can be used to prevent birth defects. By helping us, you are helping yourselves. You are helping mankind.”

  Wham! Baskov jerks hard on his finely tuned fishing pole. Silas smiled, but it was less a grin of pleasure than one of simple embarrassment. Poor fish never saw it coming.

  The applause swelled again. Baskov smiled indulgently, holding up his hands in a show of modesty after all that bluster.

  But the crowd wouldn’t be quieted. Eventually, he gave up and let it roll over him, unimpeded, a wave of applause. The crowd rose to its collective feet, first in the front, then all around the room. The faces were smiling, eyes alight.

  Silas took a sip of his beer to assuage the sour that had crept into his stomach. The man should run for president, Silas thought, as the applause went on and on. But no, then he’d lose too much power.

  BENJAMIN SAT on a stool in the near darkness of the gene-mapping lab, slowly rubbing his sore eyes. He placed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose and concentrated, but the information contained on the glowing surface of the electrophoretic gel still made no sense. Something had to be wrong. He resigned himself to starting the entire process over again. Either way, Silas would want confirmation.

  He pipetted a new sample out of the plastic cap labeled F helix DNA. Earlier they had used a centrifuge to isolate the plasma from a sample of whole blood serum drawn from the newborn’s arm. Affinity chromatography provided the necessary quantity of purified DNA, which had then been cleaved through several steps by restriction enzymes for the analysis he was about to conduct.

  He slid the tip of the standardized pipette cautiously into the agarose gel and pushed the dispense button. The solution gathered in a tiny pool beneath the bulging surface tension of the gelatinous matrix. He hit the toggle at the side of the apparatus and electrified the field. DNA molecules possess a negative charge due to their phosphates, so the various segments always tended to migrate toward the positively charged side of the unit. The differential action of friction on the relative sequence lengths determined how fast and how far they moved. The smaller the segment, the better it traversed the micropores in the gel, and the farther it migrated in the two-minute time period. Benjamin toggled the electricity off.

  He stained the newly attenuated DNA with an ethidium bromide standard and bathed the set in ultraviolet light for a full six minutes. As expected, the result was an unbroken fluorescence down the entire column of gel lane. Benjamin then used the Southern blot technique to develop the reference standard he’d need later. He applied a final critical restriction enzyme to the sample set and then transferred the entire assemblage of DNA fragments to a metered nitrocellulose filter, being particularly careful that the sequences on the filter were oriented in the same way as when they were in the gel. If human error was a factor the first time around, this is where it had most likely been introduced.

  He looked down at his watch and grimaced. Half past two in the A.M. He wondered vaguely if Silas had gone home yet. His hand lingered on the videophone at the side of his lab bench. Better to wait until he had firm results, he decided. He didn’t want to embarrass himself if the bizarre results from his first analysis had simply been the artifact of some careless mistake on his part. He glanced at the electrophoretic gel drying on the counter. Yes, it had to be a mistake.

  When the gel solidified enough to maintain its internal structure, Benjamin slid the new set in the vacuum oven, where the DNA fragments would fix to the metered filter. He punched two hours into the digital timer and hit the start switch. His feet seemed to weigh sixty pounds apiece as he dragged himself to the other side of the lab and collapsed into the swivel chair. He kicked his shoes off and propped his feet up as far as they would go onto the desk. His eyes closed.

  There was no dream, just the total nothingness of exhaustion, less like sleep than a subtraction of consciousness. When the buzzer went off two hours later, he managed to hoist himself to the upright position. A sharp pain lanced at his neck when he straightened his head. His left leg was completely numb from the hip down, and he had to rub it vigorously to bring it back to life.

  Benjamin pressurized the vacuum chamber and used a pair of tongs to remove the fixed set from the oven. He lowered the nitrocellulose filter into a hybridization buffer and prepared an autoradiograph to visualize the relative positions of the complementary DNA sequences.

  Nearly an hour later, just as the first glow of morning was beginning to light the world outside the window, Benjamin finished the restriction
map. It was done.

  He held the gossamer plastic sheet up to the light.

  The polymorphisms were unmistakable.

  The genetic diversity contained within the newborn’s genome was like nothing he’d ever heard of. Very few bands lined up together on the sheet. It was heterozygous across most tested loci. Half of the young gladiator’s genes were apparently either co-dominant or unexpressed recessives.

  Why engineer unexpressed genes into an organism? What were those recessives hiding?

  Ben rubbed his eyes. Perhaps the more important question was Why had the world’s most powerful supercomputer put them there in the first place?

  He looked at his watch: 5:47. Picking up the receiver, he hit the call button on the vid-phone. He’d try Silas’s office first.

  SILAS WAS washing his face in his office’s bathroom sink when the phone rang. It had been a long night. He pulled a towel down from a ring and patted his face dry. This early in the morning, he knew exactly who was at the other end of the line.

  “Hello, Benjamin.”

  “Silas, I’m glad I caught you. Are you early to work, or late getting home?”

  “Home? Haven’t been there in a while.”

  “I know what you mean. Listen, I just got the results of the restriction map. I double-checked it. You might want to come down and take a look.”

  “Yeah, but give me a minute. I’m just trying to wake myself up. Wait, better yet, why don’t you meet me in the cafeteria for some coffee? I want to show you the karyotype I just finished.”

  “Is the cafeteria open this early?”

  “It is if you have a key.”

  “Must be good to be boss.”

  “Now I know you’re sleep-deprived. I’ll trade you anytime you want.”

  “No, thanks, but I’ll see you in five.”

  SILAS RAISED the coffee cup to his lips with one hand and held the restriction map with the other. He willed his sleep-fuzzied eyes to focus. At forty-three, he was doing a good job staving off the optometrist, but his eyes did take a little longer to wake up than the rest of him. “You double-checked this?”

  “Yeah,” Benjamin said. “I knew you’d ask.”

  They sat in the empty cafeteria—a huge, open expanse of white tile divided by endless rows of glossy plastic tables. Against one wall was the kitchen and the glass refrigeration units. Every kind of snack or food or drink you could ask for. Enough to feed a small army of hungry, caffeine-addicted techs. Three hundred people might eat here for lunch. Right now, it belonged to just the two of them.

  They sipped their coffees.

  Silas put the plastic sheet down on the table and handed Benjamin a white page he’d pulled from the briefcase sitting on the floor. “This is what I was working on,” he said. “Don’t bother counting, there are one hundred and four.”

  Benjamin whistled softly as he looked over the sheet. “A hundred and four chromosomes?”

  “Certainly puts our paltry twenty-three in perspective.”

  Ben shook his head as he studied the sheet. He’d never seen a karyotype like this before. The chromosomes were laid out in neat pairs from largest to smallest, across and down the page. They took up the whole sheet. Benjamin adjusted his small wire-rimmed glasses. “This is some dense reading.”

  “Yeah, I get the feeling that might be the whole point. With this bulk of material involved, back-engineering wouldn’t be time-effective. There’s just too much to dig through.”

  “With a large enough team, we could probably make sense of at least part of this before the competition.”

  Silas shook his head. “With five years instead of thirteen months, we still wouldn’t unravel this, particularly with the diversity in the restriction map you just handed me. It almost seems as if this thing was designed to throw up roadblocks to any sort of investigation. It doesn’t want to be understood.”

  “You mean Chandler didn’t want it understood?”

  “I’m not sure what I mean.”

  Benjamin laid his forehead down on the table. “So what next?”

  Silas looked at the stack of papers that Benjamin had handed him when he first walked into the cafeteria. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said. “You got any ideas?”

  “Yeah, but most of them would make me look like a crackpot.” Benjamin stretched in his chair. “Oh, hell, you’re the … What was it the magazines were calling you last time? The genetic pioneer? What do you think?”

  “I think my pioneering days are over. But I’ve got one more idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How about we get some doughnuts to go with this coffee?”

  “That’s your idea?”

  “Only one I can come up with right now.”

  “Well, it’s the best idea I’ve heard today.” He sipped his coffee. “Though my standards are low this early in the morning.”

  STEPHEN BASKOV flipped through the report on his desk. He tried to force back the growing sense of apprehension that threatened to muddle his thinking. His mind needed to be sharp to face the decisions ahead.

  He eased his chair back and ran a hand through his white hair. It had taken two frustrating weeks to track down the directives used by the Brannin computer. There had been no record of it at the Five Rings complex. The scientists at Helix were able to produce literally thousands of bytes of data on biology, physiology, and genetics, which they had given to Chandler’s team for upload. But there were no directives, nothing to guide the design parameters. Earlier today, when he’d finally discovered where the directives originated, he’d come very close to a total meltdown.

  His own commission had developed them.

  Several people nearly lost their jobs before lunch, but eventually, he’d decided it wouldn’t be in his best interest to have disgruntled ex-assistants floating around at this most inopportune of times.

  He glanced at the papers on his desk. Stupid. Stupid. He couldn’t think of a more fitting descriptor. The report on his desk summarized the raw data that the Brannin was given before the design stage of the program. The vast majority of the text was comprised of information on the gladiator contest itself—the arena dimensions, the contest rules, as well as the specs of all past contestants. Winners and losers. There was also, thank Christ, a list of qualifications.

  Baskov adjusted his glasses. He was relieved, at least, that the computer had been given information about the ban on the use of human DNA in all gladiators. The contestant wasn’t likely to be disqualified on those grounds. But it was the last page of the report that interested him the most. He studied the sheet in his hand, reading and rereading the short passages it contained.

  That last page contained the sum total of all the directives given to Chandler’s computer for the design of the gladiator.

  The extent to which the Brannin computer could have misinterpreted Helix’s intentions was terrifying.

  He wondered how it could have happened. Who had overlooked it? When exactly had things begun to spin out of control?

  There was only one directive typed on the page. Just a lone, solitary instruction that had been used to guide the design.

  The gladiator was created to do only one thing.

  That one directive was this: survive the competition.

  He read the sentence over and over.

  Survive the competition.

  What in the hell type of directive was that? There was an awful lot of room for interpretation in that strategy.

  Survive the competition.

  He laid the report back down on the smooth surface of his desk. IQ test results to the contrary, he knew Evan Chandler to be a fool. But Chandler was a crazy fool, and if history had taught him anything, it was that the world was often changed through the works of crazy fools.

  Stephen Baskov liked the world just the way it was. He pushed the call button on the vid-phone, then punched fourteen digits.

  After a few moments, a man appeared on the screen. “Yes.”

  “
I want the Brannin up and running again.”

  There was a pause. “And the cost?”

  “I don’t care. Find room in the budget somewhere.”

  “How long do you need?”

  “Give us a full five minutes.”

  The man stared through the screen. “The budget isn’t that flexible. Even for you,” he said.

  “Okay, three minutes.”

  “When?”

  “Inside of two weeks,” Baskov said.

  “That’s short notice.”

  “Can you do it or not?”

  “I’ll see what can be done.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Silas’s breath hung in a smoky pall on the thin mountain air. He rubbed his hands together as he gazed out over the precipice at the sun boiling up between two jags in the distant range to the east. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” his nephew answered. His voice still came raw from the thousand-meter climb over rock and scrub.

  The terrain was steep, and Silas had pushed hard to beat the sunrise to the top of the ridge. He had almost decided not to bring Eric today, but the boy had size beyond his years and a serious, thoughtful demeanor. For a boy Eric’s age, something like this could leave a mark.

  When Eric’s breathing slowed, Silas had him stand and then tightened the straps on his pack with two firm tugs. He pulled the small curved bow from the carry strap and held it out for the boy. “Keep it in your hand now.”

  Silas played his fingers along the slow arc of his own bow, feeling for splits in the raw-hewn wood. There were none. His finger hooked the sinewy string and pulled back just an inch. The deep thwump of the release was hardly melodic, but it was music to his ears nonetheless. He’d been too long away from places like this, where there were no roads or concrete, and nature didn’t have to ask permission.