Deucalion

by Caswell, Brian

  Now Kennedy was on more secure ground. ‘It’s designed to check an individual’s identity. One known individual. If we suspect a forged ID we can take a drop of blood or a hair, and run a DNA-match to double-check. But in that case, it’s only a one-to-one comparison. It takes just about no time. What you are asking for is a complete data-match of every personnel record on the mainframe. Thirteen million individuals, each with hundreds of thousands of DNA variables. Do you know how long that will take?’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  Kennedy picked a number out of the air. ‘Five or six days, at least.’

  ‘What about if we limited the match? Only females between, say, fifteen and thirty? That’s how we limited the search last time.’

  Kennedy shook his head. ‘At least twelve hours,’ he said. ‘And it’ll mean tying up the Security mainframe. You’d better hope there’s no emergency while we’re at it.’

  Gaston stood up and stared into his Security chief’s eyes. ‘Kennedy, this is an emergency. We don’t know how much the bitch knows. About Icarus, or about us. And we don’t know how much she’ll be able to work out. She was one of the brightest Researchers at the Osaka Facility when she was there, which makes her at least a hundred IQ points too smart to mess around with. Besides, I have a feeling that if we find her, it might get us a lot closer to working out where the others disappeared to. Now get on with it. I have to get back to New G in a couple of days, and I’d like something concrete by then.’

  Gaston stared at the door for a long time after his Security chief had left, seeing nothing. His thoughts were turned inwards, and backwards in time.

  Back to where it began . . .

  Genetic Research Facility

  Seoul, Asia/Southeast Sector

  July 6, 2199ad

  The technician was shredding the last of the hard-files when they burst in. Gaston cursed silently to himself. That meant that the computer records would already be history.

  A single shot disabled the machine, and the technician was led away. She said nothing. There was no point. She knew why they had come, and they knew what it was she was shredding. He stepped forward and drew the half-shredded sheet from the hopper of the machine.

  PROJECT:ICARUS

  STATUS:CODE ALPHA (LEVEL FIVE CLEARANCE)

  SITE OF DATA-SOURCE:GENETIC RESEARCH FACILITY, SEOUL, ASIA/SOUTHEAST SECTOR

  FILE ORIGINATION DATE:16/6/2199.

  TOPIC:TERMINATION PROCEDURES (CONTINGENCY PLANS)

  The rest of the page was just so much confetti among the remains of all the others in the recycler fourteen floors below.

  They were too late. Again.

  Gaston watched a tiny wisp of smoke curling its way upwards from the damaged machine, drawn by the duct of the air-conditioner overhead.

  Icarus. The boy who learned to fly on borrowed wings.

  It was a nice image. Whoever named the project had poetic tendencies. But perhaps they should have remembered the whole story. Sure, Icarus learned to fly – but maybe too well, because, in the end, the wings he borrowed failed him and he was killed. Maybe it would have been more realistic to call the project after another mythical character – Pandora.

  Whatever – He screwed up the small piece of hard-copy and tossed it onto the floor.

  The project was history, and the Researchers responsible would never work again in any Funded project. A disbarred Researcher was lucky to get a job as a lab-technician. It was the way of the world.

  Now all that remained was to find the brats they had created, and terminate them, before they grew into the problem the Council’s ‘worst-case scenario’ computer simulation had predicted.

  Fifty individuals, each carrying an unpredictable gene for telepathy. The little information they had been able to capture suggested the gene was not merely dominant, but . . . what was it the notes had said? Super-dominant?

  Gaston was not sure exactly what that meant, but the experts on the Council were concerned. Cantrell from bio-ethics had tried to explain it by saying that a super-dominant gene actually altered its matching recessive on the chromosome pair – or, if there was no recessive, it replicated itself, so that not only would any offspring of that individual carry the gene and show the ability, but so would any offspring of any following generations. No matter how far removed.

  In response to Gaston’s blank look, he had tried again. ‘Look at it this way, Dimitri. We have, as far as we can work out, about fifty of these . . . hybrids. Now, assuming we don’t find them, and even as few as seventy per cent of them grow up to adulthood, that’s thirty-five individuals. With me so far?’ Without waiting for his companion’s nod, he had continued. ‘Now, the effect of this gene’s ‘super-dominance’ is that every child produced by each one of those individuals, regardless of who the other parent is, will have the power of telepathy – with no recessive gene. And every grandchild, and every great-grandchild, and on and on, the numbers doubling every twenty years or so.’

  ‘That’s not so many.’ Gaston stated what he thought was the obvious. ‘Even in a hundred years’ time, that would produce somewhere between five hundred and a thousand individuals. Among a population of billions, it doesn’t seem such a great problem.’

  ‘Maybe not, Gaston, but the Council sees it differently. If it were a gene for, say, green hair, or something equally harmless or obvious, it wouldn’t be so bad – but telepathy? You can’t see it, you can’t tell who has it. And you don’t know if they can read your thoughts. You’ve got ambitions; what if I were to tell you that one of your opponents was a hybrid who could read every one of your thoughts and knew your every move in advance and all your guiltiest secrets? What if that opponent could know what every voter was thinking, and campaign accordingly?

  ‘And forget about politics. What about the Corporations? Competition’s cut-throat enough now. What business could survive if its opposition knew all its secrets?

  ‘Who do you think would end up running the Council? Or the Government? Or the economy? And what makes you think they’d limit themselves to actually having kids? With organisation, they could clone as many hybrids as they wanted, and stack the key positions in Research and all the other essential areas. In two or three generations, they’d be making all the decisions. Homo Superior. We’d be as obsolete as the dinosaurs – and we wouldn’t even know it.’

  Poor Cantrell. He was one of the scapegoats who took it in the neck when the remaining Icarus brats suddenly disappeared. He didn’t have the survival instincts – or the will – to get away with his skin intact. The storm was building, but he thought he could save his career if he just rode it out.

  Dumb jerk! He’d climbed the ladder. He knew the drill. One slip-up and you took the fall; there were too many young hopefuls following you up. A screw-up like the Icarus incident was bad enough – if you were in the position of being responsible for stopping things like that from happening. But to ‘lose’ the hybrids into the bargain . . . to let some faceless group of bleeding hearts save them from termination. That was career-suicide.

  Gaston had known it. Just before it all hit the fan, he had taken the smart option. Early retirement from Grants Council Security, and a passage on the next C-ship out. He had his severance pay, plus every cred he could lay hands on invested in low risk bonds, programmed to mature a year before the C-ship docked, giving him fifty years of interest: a fortune with which to begin his new life.

  No more following orders. With that kind of cash and his . . . experience, he would soon be making the rules. Politics, government; and a chance at the power that, realistically, would never have been within his reach on Earth.

  Maybe the whole Icarus affair was fate. Destiny. Maybe it was just that he was smart enough to turn adversity to his own advantage. Yes. He liked that one.

  President Dimitri Gaston. Step one of the plan was complete, and his backers were happy. St
ep two should be just a formality.

  And yet in the back of his mind, he recalled the words of his doomed friend. You’ve got ambitions; what if I were to tell you that one of your opponents was a hybrid who could read every one of your thoughts and knew your every move in advance and all your guiltiest secrets?

  Well, none of the brats was in any position to cause him trouble at the moment. Once he had realised where they might have disappeared to (right here on Deucalion) and once he had followed the hunch, run the DNA-match and discovered their new identities, he had set about carrying out the termination order. Not through any sense of loyalty to his old bosses, but through loyalty to the only person who really counted. Himself. And those he had missed were in hiding, so they were not likely to come nosing around, checking up.

  The votes were in. The computer had pronounced him President and his party the majority government. What he didn’t need now – especially not now – was some telepathic . . . freak reading his mind, and finding out how the whole thing had been rigged. From the outside, no one could penetrate the scam. How could they anticipate the scale of the deception? But if they knew exactly how it had been done . . . maybe they’d be able to prove what a lot of people already suspected, and then he’d be in real trouble.

  Exposure was something his backers would definitely not appreciate. And if you screwed up on those guys, you lost a lot more than just your job.

  21

  ONE OF THEM

  Carmody Island

  Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

  12/12/101 Standard

  DENNY

  The screens showed nothing. No sign of life, no activity. Nothing but the ancient trees and the rain. Seven hundred centimetres a year, the ROM-file had informed him. Even on Old Earth that was a lot of rain. On Deucalion, it was almost unheard of.

  He grabbed his backpack, slipped out through the trap, and slid it closed behind him. There was no point in locking the thing. If they found the flyer when he wasn’t there, it would make absolutely no difference whether or not it was locked.

  As he moved around behind the tail of the flyer, he looked up at the small black hemisphere bolted to the fuselage. The field generator for the motion-detection screen. It had been his most expensive purchase, but without it he would not have made it within a hundred clicks of the island without alerting someone. Any organisation as well equipped as this one obviously was would not be relying merely on sharp-eyed observers to keep them safe.

  He had landed on the side of the island as far from the position of the tagging device as he could manage. He would sneak up on them, using the forest for cover, and check out just what he was up against before planning his next move. There was plenty of time before first light, and with the aid of the infra-red night vision – courtesy of Security – he was confident of making good time.

  The vid-screen glowed gently with the location coordinates of the tag. He used it to keep his bearings among the trackless trees. Under the canopy of branches, the force of the rain was reduced to a pleasant, drifting mist, and he walked without discomfort. If the situation had been different, he told himself, he might be singing as he walked. As it was, he hummed a tune under his breath, and kept a lookout for any evidence of human activity.

  Which is why it came as such a surprise when they surrounded him. He never even suspected they were there.

  About halfway to his destination, he stepped around a large tree and into a circle of young people, who seemed to be there for the express purpose of meeting him.

  The girl who faced him looked familiar, but it was a moment before he realised why. ‘Hello again,’ she said, and reached out a hand.

  Denny raised his own out of habit, before he remembered that shaking hands with her was not such a good idea. He tried to draw his hand away but it was too late. He saw the blue flash about a millisecond before the darkness crashed into him with the force of a medium-sized avalanche.

  ‘Well, Mr Woods.’ Gwen looked down, and smiled ironically. ‘At least this saves us another trip to the mainland.’ Then she turned to one of her companions. ‘Julie, you and Aidan go and pick up his flyer. Take it back to the settlement and park it. Our visitor will be staying for a while.’

  12/12/101

  JANE

  They carried Denny in on a stretcher, and for a moment I thought he was hurt. But then Gwen looked up at me and smiled. She raised her hand and revealed the tiny black box, and I knew what had happened.

  Poor Denny. He’d gone to all the trouble of screening his flyer and sneaking in in the middle of the night, when he might as well have roared up at midday, and knocked as loudly as he could on the front door. No one on the island was at all surprised by his arrival. They picked him up as soon as he crossed the coast. But not by tracking his flyer; his screen was top-quality. They simply picked up on his thoughts.

  I was a bit mad about the taser. I knew what it felt like to be zapped. I figured they should have listened to what I’d been telling them and trusted Denny. After all, they trusted me, didn’t they? After almost a month on the island, they knew as much about me as I did. Which to be fair wasn’t all that much. In spite of all that had happened to me since I woke up without a past.

  But to them, Denny was a threat. He wasn’t one of them, and he was a member of the Security Corps, not their favourite organisation. It didn’t matter how much I told them about how he’d helped me; about his relationship with Rael and Leani and the Wieta Clan; even about his dreams of being a seismologist – they weren’t impressed. He would have to prove himself, just as I had.

  And I couldn’t really blame them. Living your whole life under an undeclared sentence of death made you careful. They stripped Denny and checked for tracking devices. He didn’t know it, of course; he was still out. But I’m not sure he would have really objected. After all, he knew the value of security. It was his job.

  I was supposed to be helping Hendriks in the lab, but I couldn’t leave Denny. He looked so helpless lying there, and I realised just how much I’d missed him in the past weeks. They hadn’t let me contact him, of course. The whole place was under a strict communications blackout – except for the ether-link, which they used only when they had to. And even if it hadn’t been, Denny was about the last person they would have trusted with their secrets.

  Finally he came around, and after the usual period of semi-paralysis, followed by cramping pains as the nerves came back to life, he was ready for something approaching normal conversation. To tell the truth, there wasn’t too much conversation for the first few minutes. We had been separated for just under a month, and given how much of my life I could actually remember, that was a pretty sizeable chunk. Denny had a perfectly normal memory, but his reaction to the reunion was the same as mine.

  Eventually, we came around to discussing the situation on the island. I filled him in on most of the basics, in shorthand. I figured in the next couple of days he’d be seeing it all for himself, anyway. But there was one thing I wanted to get clear straightaway.

  ‘You don’t have to worry. They’re the good guys. They didn’t have anything to do with the sabotage of Johannsen’s flyer. In fact, they lost a couple of people when it went down. And they only just managed to get the two survivors out of the hospital before the assassin tried again.’

  ‘You mean Johannsen wasn’t the target?’ The Security operative was never too far beneath the surface, in spite of what he said.

  ‘That’s a bit hard to say. From what I can gather, the people who did it were probably pretty happy he was out of the picture – a sort of ‘two birds with one stone’ situation – but they could have hit him anywhere, at just about any time. The primary target was Elena – and her mother.’

  ‘Elena?’ Poor Denny. It was all a bit much for him to cope with. There was so much information to impart, I didn’t know where to begin.

  ‘The girl from the hospit
al. They managed to kill her mother, but Elena escaped. That was why they tried again at the hospital.’

  ‘But why would they want to kill a little girl?’ The big question.

  ‘Because she’s a threat to them. They all are; everyone on the island. Even me, believe it or not.’

  ‘You? Why, because you found out about Icarus?’ Suddenly it dawned on him. I could see the glow of realisation in his eyes. ‘Don’t tell me these are . . . them.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. Just about all the Icarus kids – and a few of their kids. But there’s more.’ I paused, and he waited for me to go on. I just wasn’t sure how to say it. ‘It’s not just them. It’s me. We finished the tests a couple of days ago. Denny, I’m one of them. I’m a product of the Icarus Project myself.’

  We were standing together beside the window, and I watched him as he took one step backwards and sat down on the bed. ‘You mean you can . . .’ He touched his head with his finger, and stared at me.

  ‘Not very well. Something’s stopping me. Probably something to do with the Nixon’s, but I should be able to. We ran the DNA screening test. There’s no doubt about it.’ I stopped again. There was a question I had to ask, but there were no words with which to ask it. In the end, I managed to stammer, ‘Denny? It won’t make any difference, will it? I mean, I—’

  The words ran out as he suddenly started to laugh. A shaft of fear stabbed through me. ‘Denny?’ I began, but he stood up, reached out and put his arms around me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, though he didn’t really sound it. ‘Of course it won’t make any difference. But I was just thinking – it’s no wonder you got on so well. With Leani’s family, I mean. After all, part of you was right at home.’

  I wanted to kiss him and kill him at the same time, but he kissed me first, and the other urge suddenly disappeared.

  When he finally came up for air, he had stopped laughing. He stepped backwards and held my gaze. ‘Jane,’ he began, then paused. I could swear he looked embarrassed. ‘I love you. And if some part of you is related to the Elokoi, then that just makes it all the better, because they are about the only real friends I have in the whole world. Now, do they have any food around here, or is there something else about these people you haven’t told me?’