by Sean Platt
“That’s because I—”
“I said a moment ago that I neither believe nor disbelieve your story.”
Ephraim said nothing.
“That's not actually true. On a factual level, there’s no proof either way. But in my gut, I feel that you’re telling the truth. It isn’t much. But it’s something.”
Ephraim opened his mouth to speak, but Wood kept going.
“I’ve checked you out. From what I hear, Ephraim Todd hates to lie. You’re terrible at it, too. But I’ve seen the recording of your last deposition, where you mention the MyLife you claim should have been submitted as evidence, and your reaction struck me as genuinely surprised. Meaning that maybe there was a MyLife. And that it got lost somehow.”
Wood’s sharp eyebrows raised.
“What do you think, Ephraim. Should you and I go off the record? Talk honestly for a change, without fear of reprisals?”
“Okay.” But Ephraim wasn’t going to volunteer more rope for Wood to hang him. Not until the other man laid at least some of his cards on the table.
“I think you did bring something back,” Wood said. “And if that’s true, it suggests the way you got that thing to bring back is true as well. It takes one seriously stone-cold son of a bitch to cut out a man’s implant. You wouldn’t have done it without a damn good reason, and handing evidence to GEM so we can punish the people who wronged your brother — your real brother — is just about the only reason I’d buy. That makes me believe the ‘loss’ wasn’t your doing or your fault. And that makes me wonder, between your hands and our files, where could a device like that have gotten lost?” He tipped his head and gestured with his drink. “Or intercepted?”
Ephraim kept his mouth shut. He knew exactly where the MyLife had gone, but connecting the dots for a man like Hershel Wood wasn’t a good idea. It implicated Fiona, sure, but it couldn’t help but implicate him, too.
“It’s a puzzle,” Wood said, with an I surrender shrug. “And who knows if we’ll ever solve it. But there is something else. Because as I was saying before you corrected my tense, Fiona and Connolly were in the same line of work. That makes me think that if you know Fiona, and if you brought back a bunch of Evermore trade secrets that have vanished …” Hershel shrugged again.
“What about it?”
“Nothing. It’s just that this missing MyLife, if it exists, wouldn’t just help to clear you. It would make my job easier, too. Having a reason to believe there were actual clones on Eden would justify GEM’s involvement in all of this, and I’m whore enough to love a new feather in my cap.”
“Wait. Does that mean you believe me about the clones?”
“I believe Fiona believes you about the clones. And that if she could do the same thing using Connolly’s secrets? Well. That would be very profitable for Riverbed.”
Wood set his drink on the shelf beside the orchids, then clapped Ephraim on the arm and gave him a pressed-lip smile. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Todd. We’ll talk soon.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I’m going for a walk. Away from the lights and the noise. Away from busybodies who butt into things that are none of their business, so I can be alone where nobody is watching or listening.”
He pointed toward a door that led onto Fiona’s mansion’s patio — then down a dark path that edged the forest.
“That’s where I’ll be if anyone asks.” Hershel looked at his watch, then at Ephraim. “Two minutes from now.”
He left, and Ephraim waited by the orchids, alone, for another thirty seconds.
Then he went after GEM’s director, out into the cool night.
CHAPTER 8
THE SAME MISTAKES
“Wallace Connolly had arthritis,” Hershel said with no preamble after Ephraim found him sitting under a dim and decorative lamp past Fiona’s landscaped garden. “Did you know that?”
“No, but I’m not surprised,” Ephraim said. “He was an old man.”
“He had it since he was young. He started developing it in his twenties. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think. It came and went, but the flares were excruciating. He couldn’t hold a pen when it was bad. He could barely type. He hated dictation — said it used the wrong part of his brain, and that his thoughts should leave without making noise — but it was the only way to get his work done.”
“His work?”
“His schoolwork. In college.”
Ephraim looked at Wood, then away. This was a strange discussion with a man who was supposed to grill him, then maybe arrest him. “So?”
“Wallace was my advisor in college,” Wood said. “I have an advanced genetics degree, same as him and Fiona. Had to have it, to land this job. I went to the same school as Wallace. Same program, years after he’d gone through it. I liked him a lot. He told me the stories. He told me about his debilitating, gnarled hands whenever I’d bitch about the difficulty of my course load, which I did plenty. He became a friend, as much as Wallace Connolly ever had friends, anyway, which wasn’t much. In all the time I knew him, he only ever talked about one other person with any affection. Someone I very much wanted to meet, because the two nearly went into business together.”
“Fiona,” Ephraim said.
Wood smirked. Apparently, he hadn’t known that Ephraim knew about Fiona’s relationship with Wallace.
“No, this was someone else. Someone he grew up with. His name was Timothy. Maybe there was a professional love triangle with Fiona; I don’t know. All I know was that by the time I met Wallace, Timothy was mostly out of the picture, at least in terms of a partnership. They talked regularly, though; Wallace told me that much. ‘Tim this’ and ‘Tim that’ — half of Wallace’s advice was flavored by Timothy’s insights. I never got to meet him, though I asked enough times. I guess he chose a different way to change the world — something as big as Eden, judging by the way Wallace talked.”
Ephraim regarded Wood as he sat beneath the lamp. The story was curious. When Ephraim had spoken to Fiona about her old partnership with Wallace, she’d painted the man as a bitter rival who’d gone too far, pushing limits that ought not to be pushed. Wood spoke about Connolly, by contrast, in an almost reverent manner. And it sure didn’t sound like he’d parted ways with this Timothy in the same irreparable way he’d parted with Fiona.
Wood looked up at Ephraim. His stone eyes had become human. His expression bore a permanent semi-squint.
“Back then, we were in a renaissance for genetics. You may be too young to remember. Precipitous Rise hadn’t appeared yet, but it was all beginning; the first true exponential leap since Watson and Crick. It was an amazing time for science. Wallace and I would have these long conversations, and I kept asking him why he didn’t go into arthritis research. Gene therapies were being tossed about and sent through trials, for everything from Alzheimer's disease to autism to diabetes. Including arthritis. While the therapies were being developed, scientists worked to identify an increasing number of genes and indicators, with the goal being to eradicate diseases before they began — when babies were still in the womb. That’s when the ‘eugenics’ cries were loudest. Do you know eugenics, Ephraim?”
Ephraim nodded. The whole world knew the “better genes” buzzword. Should science rewrite what God hath written, preferring some traits over others? Voices screamed, both pro and con.
“Even early on, there were treatments that could have reversed most of Wallace’s arthritis. But he wouldn’t take them, same as he had no interest in pursuing the research. He was stubborn about it. His obstinance became increasingly strange as time passed and the available treatments became simpler. Wallace was my advisor for five years, and by the end of that time, I was practically screaming at him about it. He’d be crippled by pain, and I’d tell him he could end it in a blink. It would have taken a single outpatient visit to a gene center to eliminate that pain forever. But Wallace wouldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“His argument was that nature is
imperfect, and that to be natural was to be imperfect. He never said as much, but I think Wallace believed his arthritis was a curse, and that he was required to bear it like a punishment. Like he was one of those wackos on the religious game shows, whipping himself in penance.”
Wood met Ephraim’s eyes. “You know Eden’s history. Haven’t you ever wondered why Eden never offered gene treatments to cure diseases? Their offerings have always been purely aesthetic. Just spa packages. They’ll manually scrub you of dead cells, inject fresh ones engineered with the insertions and deletions all proofread and fixed. They’ll wrap new ends around the fraying telomeres on your chromosomes. But if you go in with dementia, you leave with dementia. If you go in with diabetes, you leave with that, too. It would be easy for Eden to fix those things — hell, any underground clinic in Switzerland can do it, for a price — but they don’t, and now thanks to your visit they never will. Why?”
“Maybe there’s no profit in it. People just want to look younger.”
“More than they want to be cured? Eden is in international waters. They could have done anything. Turned brown eyes blue. Taken sperm from a father and an egg from a mother, then sent the woman home with the tall, broad, beautiful, athletic, destined-to-be-a-quarterback baby that her husband always wanted.”
“They have the Tomorrow Gene.” Ephraim wondered which position he was arguing, seeing as he more than anyone knew the Gene wasn’t what it seemed to be.
“They do, don’t they?” Wood said, clearly anticipating the correction. “But that always bugged me. Eden doesn’t discuss the Tomorrow Gene beyond repeating the words and its tagline, ‘The one thing that changes everything.’ But the folks who come home after having the Tomorrow Gene don’t even have pimples. NDA or no NDA, the secret is out. If you believe the rumors, Eden’s miracle treatment rewinds the clock — not just to an earlier you, but to an idealized earlier you. And that’s what’s always bothered me. I knew Wallace Connolly, and that man never believed in repairing what nature saw fit to break.”
Wood continued after a moment of silence. “No. Wallace believed in starting from scratch to create something better.”
“So, you do believe me. That Eden is making human clones, not just ‘fixing’ the people who come in for treatment.”
“Yes and no. Cloning itself isn’t a difficult process. But you didn’t describe simple clones.” Wood sighed and scratched his ear. “I’m torn. On the one hand, it’s hard for me, knowing Wallace, to believe that he finally created a treatment that would cure people of their illnesses at the same time as it makes them young. But on the other hand, it seems true. Look at the celebrities and athletes who are suddenly refreshed. Look at how, as Eden’s rumored destroyer, you’ve become one of the world’s most hated people — for taking away what it wanted most.”
“I don’t think the Tomorrow Gene makes people young. I think it makes clones, and then Eden keeps or kills off the originals. They don't send people home with their clocks turned back. They send home duplicates instead.”
“Duplicates who think, act, and feel exactly like their donors? Clones who can move into the lives left behind by their older twins? It doesn’t make sense.”
Ephraim was thinking of Quarry, which he’d left at home in its matte metal box. If it did what Fiona promised — mapped a subject’s brain and stored it to a drive — then the gulf between faith and distrust wasn’t as large as Wood seemed to believe. He wanted to mention it, but kept thinking of what Fiona had implied: Wood can't be trusted. He was the kind of man they’d need leverage on if they wanted to avoid a double-cross.
But then again, hadn’t Fiona double-crossed Ephraim already?
“I can only tell you what I saw on Eden,” Ephraim said.
Wood regarded him. Then he said, “I’m on your side, Ephraim, whether you believe it or not.”
“I believe you.” But he didn’t. Not exactly.
Wood stood and looked across the dark valley. “Wallace and I were friends once. I kept in touch with him even after college — after he launched his first seastead lab to use Precipitous Rise in international waters. For a while, we kept up fine. Then Wallace stopped wanting to video-chat. Eventually, he didn’t care to talk at all. He blamed bandwidth when I asked, saying his signals from ocean platforms were too weak for video or calls. After that we moved to text only, communicating less and less frequently. It wasn’t too long before our communications became strange.” He glanced back at Ephraim. “Around the time you claim that Eden says he died.”
“You think it wasn’t Wallace you were talking to? That it was Neven?”
Wood took a long time to answer. When he did, he answered a different question — one Ephraim hadn’t asked.
“I never met Neven. He’s a surprise. I believed Wallace when he told me that he couldn’t have children.”
Wood shrugged and went on.
“My later chats with ‘Wallace,’” he said, emphasizing just enough for Ephraim to hear verbal quotation marks around the man’s name, “slowly became different from what they’d been before. I remember thinking how subtly his old views had sharpened, growing more polarized over time. He’d always been pro-cloning, but in time he launched into it, giving it his full attention. He’d always thumbed his nose at government interference, but after a few years at sea he was furious about any and all restrictions on his work. There used to be an open line of visibility for the world to peek in on Eden, a showcase like Disney’s first visions of Tomorrowland. But that line closed, and Eden became the mystery it is today. I watched it all grow darker and darker, wondering what out there in the deep sea had twisted Wallace into something new.”
“New how?”
“The controversial stances he’d always held became … magnified, is the only word for it. Darker, too. In his emails, he told me matter-of-factly that nature was fundamentally flawed, evidenced by his arthritis and all the other diseases afflicting humanity. When I suggested his work could fix those flaws, he said people were beyond fixing — maybe that they didn’t deserve to be fixed. Cloning was his answer because clones could be made perfect from the start. What God did wrong, science could do right. His vehemence scared me. I was a twenty-something kid back then, but I could see the writing on the wall. It made my skin crawl. He sounded insane. He talked like reproduction was obsolete. I remember deciding that if he had his way, humans would be made in a lab, perfect every time.”
“And there’s a chance you don’t believe me, even after all of this?”
“As I said, cloning is easy. Same for eugenics. Using Precipitous Rise to mature clones quickly even sounds easy at this point. But you’re not talking about clones as ‘engineered, accelerated people.’ You’re talking about copies, right down to personality.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because for a long time now, I’ve been bothered by what my old friend seemed to be up to. I could see his trajectory and what you’ve described, though hard to believe, wouldn’t surprise me at all. And if it’s true?” Wood turned to Ephraim. There were shadows in his eyes. “Then Eden needs to be stopped.”
“It is stopped. It burned to nothing.”
“But not by you. That’s your claim.”
“No. I think Neven started the fire.”
Wood nodded slowly. He said nothing, but Ephraim could read the silent words on his face. Then maybe it’s not over after all. Maybe it’s only beginning.
“Fiona has the MyLife,” Ephraim blurted in the sinister night air, abruptly deciding that Fiona’s betrayal had earned a double-cross in return. “When she’s finished pulling data from it, I think I can get her to—”
“I need it now. I need to know what’s on the MyLife immediately. If Eden set the fire, it’s probably part of a plan. Wallace was never an idiot, and this Neven doesn’t strike me as one either. There might be no time to waste.”
Ephraim had been so sure before; but now, hearing Wood’s stories, even he was having a hard time b
elieving his old theory — and he wondered if he’d been fooled again. “It shouldn’t take much longer,” he said. “After she’s done with it, I can get her to give it to me. It’ll be simple then. Impossible now.”
“What makes you think she’ll give it to you at all, finished or not finished?”
“Because she’s on my side,” Ephraim said, feeling how lame the words tasted in his mouth, how unthinkably naïve.
At first, Ephraim thought Wood might laugh at him, but he said something else instead.
“Let’s take a walk, Ephraim. I have something to tell you about Fiona Roberson … and your brother.”
CHAPTER 9
PLAYING MURDER
Ephraim sat on the subway, trying to focus on the swaying car. Lights outside came on and off, echoed by the car’s interior illumination. When the lights flickered and the car plunged into second-long bursts of darkness, it felt to Ephraim like going blind.
Only sound and sensation remained. He tried to capture every nuance. Because the alternative, if Ephraim didn’t distract his mind with nothingness, was to replay his last discussion with Hershel Wood on his MyLife — a recording he’d already verified had been captured accurately, in high resolution, with perfect fidelity.
He’d already re-watched that particular memory twice. Doing so hadn’t improved his mood, nor helped his paranoia.
Focus on the subway. Focus on the mundane world, if just to stay grounded.
The subway car smelled stale, its odor neither good nor bad. There were a dozen people in it with him (Ephraim had counted them twice — another way to focus on the mundane) and for some reason, it felt like at least four of his fellow riders were unduly interested in everything Ephraim was doing.
There was a woman in a man’s suit, wearing a man’s hat. There were two children, twin girls of maybe eleven years old, in matching blue dresses far too dressy for the subway, seemingly traveling alone. A man further up the car was playing Murder on his Doodad to pass the time. Ephraim could see his screen when the man was facing forward, the way the man’s hand, reproduced as a graphic on the Doodad’s screen, appeared to hold a virtual machete. He watched the man slash his empty hand in the seat, then saw the machete onscreen cleave the woman sitting in front of him.