Necropolis

by Michael Dempsey

  We were in the old rumrunning tunnel. Storage rooms had been carved into the rock. The Cadre had reinforced them with neocrete and metal doors. Now one of them was Crandall’s make-shift holding cell.

  “Doesn’t matter, I guess,” he said. “Interrogation techniques have come a long way since your day.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “No more waterboarding?”

  Armitage held up a pneumatic syringe. “Veracity virus.”

  I shook my head. More bugs.

  Maggie came around the curve of the tunnel. “Crandall’s got countermeasures.”

  “Shit.”

  “You mean biodefenses?” I said

  An appreciative smile from Maggie. “You’ve been studying.”

  “I was getting tired of being a mark.”

  “His system’s swarming with defense nanites. Probably a standard employee injection.”

  I rolled up my sleeves. “Guess we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Maggie.

  “We may have to do things in there, Mag. I need to know you’re not going to get in the way.”

  “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t.”

  ***

  Crandall had the complexion of a slug, a creature of filthy folds in the earth. The gauntness of his face made his eyes look sunken; he stared into space, slack-jawed and unfocused. His hair was brittle and receding, a crop far past season, ready to blow away at the first strong wind. The long black toenails were better suited to a lizard than a man. Sitting in this dim room of rust and concrete, he seemed totally alien.

  Jesus. Armitage and I looked at each other. Maybe this guy was toast.

  Then Crandall picked up a cup from the tray beside him and sipped delicately at some tea. The demure act instantly destroyed the frankenimage.

  “Mmm. Earl Gray.”

  He focused his watery eyes on me, amusement on his face. He’d been playacting the shock treatment routine to unnerve us.

  I fished a cigarette from my shirt and set fire to it. He was into games? Good. It would spell out my approach.

  He glanced at me over his Earl Grey. “Ah. My assassin.”

  I shrugged. “Want some slippers?”

  “No thank you.” He blotted his worm lips with a napkin.

  Armitage looked him up and down. “Jesus, talk about the cosmetic underclass.” He straddled one of the wooden chairs and crammed a piece of gum into his face. He flicked his hips, scraping the chair closer across the cement. Crandall’s face screwed up.

  “Senses are raw the first couple of days,” I said. “Is the light okay? We could dial it down a couple degrees.”

  I got an iguana stare. “Such concern for my comfort, when I’m about to be interrogated.”

  “We won’t insult your intelligence with clumsy tactics.”

  “Flattery is a tactic, is it not?”

  I looked at Armitage, smiling: “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Armitage blew a bubble. I didn’t know how he was doing it, but there was this masterful vibe of working class resentment simmering below his surface. He’d picked up on Crandall’s “my IQ is bigger than your IQ” thing and adopted the heavy-limbed roll of a lowbrow.

  “So he’s brainy,” he said. “Big deal.”

  “Hardly helpful at the moment. I am in the dark here, quite literally, am I not?”

  Armitage snapped his gum.

  “Oh, the doctor’s figured out plenty already, haven’t you?” I said.

  I hid from his gingivitis smile in a lungful of tobacco smoke. “I am reborn,” he said. “You used the Retrozine. That much is obvious. Now, as to the meeting I glimpsed when I awoke craving sustenance—”

  “‘Craving sustenance’?” Armitage snorted.

  “You can’t expect the doctor to talk like street trash,” I said.

  “I expect him to make himself understood.”

  “Forgive my erudition.” A smile. Taunting.

  Armitage snarled, his neck reddening. Crandall looked as if he’d just won a round. Good. Let him build his high tower.

  “I suppose he figured out we’re Cadre, too,” Armitage said.

  Crandall’s eyes lit up. I bit off an expletive like Armitage had just sold the farm.

  “I wasn’t sure,” Crandall said. “What with that gaggle of misfits up there you could have been anyone. Thank you for clearing that up.”

  Armitage left his chair murderously. I pushed the wall away and laid a hand on his shoulder. Armitage deflated, glowering, and reinstalled himself in his chair. I continued to the ashtray and ground out my filter. Crandall didn’t try to hide his delight. Stupid. We let the silence condense a bit while I lit a fresh one.

  “You don’t have to be the enemy, Morris,” I said.

  “Save the bonding routine. And the good-cop-bad cop. It was ancient when you were alive.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s what I really think: I think you should join us.”

  Armitage exploded, “What??”

  Crandall’s newest smile masked puzzlement. “Why would I do that?”

  “Surazal’s got the completed formulas now. What do they need you for?”

  That got a rise out of him. “Retrozine A and B are only the beginning.”

  “Not any more. They’ve announced your death in the media. Called you a traitor. Said you stole secrets.”

  He paled. “You’re lying!”

  “C’mon, you know how Nicole works. Once you got dead, you became the perfect scapegoat. Your death covers everything. A deranged, missing scientist. Now believed to have killed his own team members. Turns up hiding in the wall like a rat. Stealing vital Shift research. He gets violent when security confronts him, and voila.”

  I watched it make sense in his eyes. Watched the “after all I’ve done for them” program run in his head.

  Armitage grinned. “You’re a fugitive, same as us, pal.”

  The man twitched at the word. “I only have your word—”

  I put a smartscreen in front of him and ran the press highlights. He watched in growing fury as he was portrayed as a greedy, murderous turncoat, trying to sell vital secrets to the highest bidder.

  “You’ll have to go underground,” I said.

  “I have friends—”

  “Not anymore. Your funds have been frozen. Your body’s missing. Nicole’s not stupid, Morris. She knows you’ve revived.”

  He whitened a little more.

  “Oh yeah,” said Armitage, his jaw savoring the gum and Crandall’s shock in equal measure. “You haven’t seen the recent changes in our lovely city. Checkpoints, searches. You’re all over the Conch. Enemy of the state.”

  Crandall’s poise had gone the way of the dinosaurs.

  “Then there’s the wasps,” I added. “Thousands of these little walnut-sized things, buzzing the streets doing resonance biometrics of everybody. And they’re armed. Three Cadre members were vaporized right on 6th Avenue yesterday.”

  “In front of their families,” spat Armitage.

  “Even in this city of a million back rooms and alleys, it’s getting damned hard to hide. And let’s face it, doc. On the street, the smarts you got? They ain’t the kinda smarts you need.”

  I could almost hear Crandall’s processors spinning into overdrive.

  “We’ll put you in one of our safe houses,” I continued. “A basement somewhere, with blacked-out casement windows. Someone will bring you food, clothes, the necessities. It won’t be fun, but you’ll survive.”

  “And in exchange for this assistance?”

  “Everything you know. Starting with Struldbrug.”

  “Which Struldbrug, Mr. Donner?”

  “The brother and sister are working together, aren’t they?”

  The smirk was back. “My information is more valuable than you suspect.”

  Armitage and I traded eyebrows.

  Crandall’s eyes clouded in longing for a van
ished life. “My work is everything. Can you find me another lab, funding for my experiments? If what you’ve shown me is true, nothing can bring that back.” He raked skeletal fingers across his face. “I do not desire some mole-like existence in this nightmare city. Therefore, I want to leave Necropolis.”

  Armitage laughed. “Are you fucking nuts?”

  Crandall folded his hands. “There is someone beyond this place who may shelter me.”

  “You’d infect the outside world.”

  He didn’t say anything. But his eyes flicked sideways.

  There it was. Fresh information. Information that I knew couldn’t be finessed out of him.

  Good. I was going to enjoy this.

  I let my brow go smooth suddenly. “Fuck.” I stood and rolled down my sleeves.

  Armitage said, “What?”

  “We wasted our time.”

  Crandall’s arrogance faltered. “What? You don’t—”

  “He’s playing us. He’s got nothing we need. It’s all bullshit.”

  “I’m—now wait a minute—”

  I went into the hall and then returned with a two-meter polyethylene bag stamped “City Morgue.” I dropped the pouch at the man’s feet.

  “Use his body bag,” I said to Armitage.

  Armitage rose, sneering. I tossed him a roll of duct tape. He caught it and tore a strip free, nice and slow. The rending sound was awful in the room.

  “Tape the feet, hands and face,” I said. “Put him in the bag, take him to the swamp around LaGuardia. Cut notches in his belly so he doesn’t rise when he bloats.”

  Crandall’s composure exploded like the face of Bart’s building.

  “I do—I have information—”

  I stared my contempt at him. What he was worth to me. Armitage stepped forward with the tape. Crandall’s stink filled the room. He rattled in his wheelchair. Racking gasps hitched from his chest, staccato bursts of terror. “No, no! Anything! Anything!”

  Easier than I’d thought. “We’ll give you a minute to compose yourself.”

  ***

  In the hall, Maggie stared at me, her eyes a little too wide.

  “He’s ready,” I said.

  “You cracked him open like a piñata,” said Armitage.

  I looked at Jonathan. “Have a novice clean him up.”

  He nodded. “Terrence. He needs to work on his humility.”

  ***

  Jonathan and Maggie came back in with us. Crandall looked tiny and pathetic in his fresh jammies. Good. I didn’t want to lose momentum.

  “Alright, Doctor. How did Surazal cause the Shift?”

  Everyone in the room gave a little noise of astonishment.

  I ticked the points off. Index finger. “Forty years ago, Surazal conducts illegal genetic experiments on humans.” Second finger. “My wife, a federal regulator, is killed to prevent an investigation.” Third finger. “The Shift occurs. Supposedly an act of bio-terrorism, but no culprit ever identified. The Shift works by modifying and reviving dead human DNA.” Fourth finger. “Surazal just happens to be the company that identifies the retroviral carrier of the mutated DNA.” Fifth finger, contracting into a fist. “Surazal exploits this to become the power in Necropolis.”

  “You think the Shift was caused by some accident of ours? That I’m part of some elaborate, forty-year cover up?”

  “Surazal was conducting genetic experiments.”

  Crandall looked skyward, asking the heavens for patience. “As were hundreds of New York companies in the early 21st century. Any one of them could have been responsible. Genetics was the next trillion-dollar medical frontier. By the 1980s, we’d already sequenced and cloned human genes. Once viruses had been trained to—”

  “Trained viruses?” I sighed and turned to Maggie for help. “Okay. Talk to me like a child.”

  “Retroviruses are the perfect vehicles for genetic modification,” she said, “because when they attack the host cell, they introduce their own genetic material into not only the cell but its genome—its DNA. When the cell replicates, it continues making the new DNA. So the desired effect—the manufacture of a necessary protein, for instance—continues for life. The technique originally treated diseases caused by single-gene defects, like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia. Retroviruses could replace the defective gene with a functional one and cure the patient.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” replied Maggie. “As long as geneticists followed established protocols.”

  “So what was Surazal doing that was illegal?” I asked Crandall.

  He examined his fingers. “Germline therapy.”

  “Which means what?” asked Armitage, exasperated.

  “Human germline therapy is banned,” said Maggie. “Unlike the somatic cells of the body, when you modify germline cells—sperm cells, ova, or their stem cell precursors—the genetic changes not only become permanent, they become inheritable.”

  “Isn’t that good?” Armitage asked. “A hemophiliac knowing that his son won’t have the disease?”

  “Creating an inheritable change is genetic engineering, not gene therapy,” said Maggie. “It opens a huge ethical can of worms. Forget the debate about whether we should tamper with God’s blueprint. What if we accidentally created some mutation that could wipe out humanity?”

  Crandall laughed derisively. “That old saw?”

  “Genetic manipulation is difficult and risky,” Maggie retorted. “It’s hard to prevent undesirable effects. You have to get the virus to infect the correct target cells and ensure the newly inserted gene doesn’t disrupt any vital ones already in the genome.”

  “Sounds like Russian Roulette,” I said.

  “More like cooking when you don’t know how ingredients will interact,” said Maggie. “You could produce the tastiest chili in existence or poison sludge.”

  “Is that what the Shift is?” Armitage said.

  “No!” barked Crandall. “Look, the Shift is carried by a retrovirus, I won’t deny that. But it’s a mutation of a bioweapon, not some experiment that got loose from our lab.”

  “So you say.”

  “I don’t deny we’ve capitalized on the event, but Surazal did not cause the Shift!”

  I looked at Maggie. At her polygraph eyes. “He’s telling the truth,” she said. “As he knows it.”

  “Nicole could’ve kept him in the dark,” said Armitage.

  “Okay,” I said, “Go back to Surazal in my time. Why would they risk running illegal experiments in the first place?”

  “Sheer competitive impatience, probably. Marketable products were at least a decade away. That’s ten to fifteen years of very expensive R&D before the first big product comes to market. And faster is not only cheaper: whoever gets there first, well… We’re talking about products as world-transforming as the telephone, the light bulb, the personal computer. Remember how long Microsoft had the market cornered?”

  “What kind of ‘world-transforming’ products are we talking about?”

  “A gene-therapy drug that produces more intelligent children? More attractive children? Disease-resistant children?”

  I’d forgotten Jonathan was here until he spoke. “A world where ignorance, disease and disparity are banished. Where every child is a genius and an athlete. Think of how much we could accomplish.”

  I shook my head. How could anyone retain that kind of optimism? Was it faith or denial? From wherever it sprang, I’d never feel it. I was built different—I’d come out of my mother wanting to slap the doctor back.

  “Drug companies don’t just give away billion dollar treatments, Jonathan,” said Armitage.

  “Neither do insurance companies,” said Maggie. “Only the rich would be able to afford them.”

  “The beginning of a true genetic underclass,” I breathed. “The rich could actually become physically and mentally superior to the poor.”

  “What about longer-lived?” asked Jonathan, getting us back on
point.

  “Surazal could have been exploring anti-aging,” said Crandall. “A bit early for significant research, but… perhaps.”

  “Logical. Except for the fact that Nicole Struldbrug hasn’t aged a day in forty years.”

  Crandall reeled like I’d struck him. “What are you talking about?”

  Could he really not know? I thought back to that cement room. Nicole had sent him away before admitting it to me in the cement room. “How long have you known Nicole, doctor?”

  “Sixteen years.”

  “Who ran the company before her brother, Adam?”

  “Isodor, their father. It’s been family-held since the 1800s.”

  “Then how did you know I’d been killed?”

  “Nicole told me.”

  “She told you she killed someone?”

  “I balked at first when I learned that our team was to use human test subjects. So, as incentive, she told me a story about encountering a resistant investigator and what happened to the woman and her husband. She didn’t tell me it had happened forty years ago. Then, to make sure I really understood, she brought in McDermott. I took one look at his scarred face and realized I didn’t have a choice anymore.”

  A glacier crept over the surface of my thoughts. “McDermott’s dead.”

  “No, he revived during the Dark Eighteen down in Ecuador or somewhere.”

  “Bolivia,” I hissed.

  “When he was shipped to Necropolis, she made him Director of Security.”

  Yet another lie from Lady Nicole. Alvarez’s tattered newspaper clipping rushed back at me. The close-cropped platinum blonde hair, the dead blue eyes… The man who’d blackmailed Hector Alvarez into killing two people…

  When I came back a minute later, everyone was looking at me in alarm. Maggie placed her hand on my arm.

  “Donner,” she said.

  My mouth was bone-dry. “I’m okay.” I swallowed. “When did Adam become CEO?”

  “About fifteen years ago, after Izzy retired.” Crandall clicked his tongue. “Tell me why you think Nicole hasn’t aged in forty years.”

  So I gave it to him, the whole thing. Nicole in that hallway forty years ago. The murders. What she said in the cement room. Instead of looking shocked, Crandall quietly nodded to himself. “You don’t seem surprised.”