by Sims (lit)
“Mercer approached the Pentagon with a plan to co-develop an aggressive warrior-type simian-human hybrid along with the more docile strain we wanted to market for commercial use. The World Trade Towers were still standing then, but everyone in the military accepted that sooner or later we’d be at war again in the Middle East. So the generals jumped at the plan. But they realized the outrage that would arise when the public learned that the army was creating gonzo animal warriors and training them to kill humans—what if they got loose?—so they cloaked their involvement under layers of security and bureaucracy.
“A wing of Army Intelligence was created to develop and train these hybrids as warriors; it was given the innocuous name of Social Impact Studies Group. SIRG in turn created Manassas Ventures as a conduit for the funds funneled to our new company, SimGen. To make this look like a real venture capital deal, the head of SIRG, a colonel named Conrad Landon, demanded that Manassas get a piece of SimGen in return for the investment. We agreed, not knowing at the time that we’d be mortgaging our souls.
“But even with all these millions in funding, the transgenic road to a sim-human hybrid was fraught with obstacles, and at times seemed impassable. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, embryo splitting, and germline modifications are routine procedures now, but not then. We found we were able to increase the intelligence of apes, mandrills, and baboons by only small degrees, which did not make the Pentagon happy. And we were also running into walls trying to ‘upgrade’ the chimp genome closer to human. We were swapping genes from our own cells into chimp germlines and making a hideous mess of it. With a string of failures and the Pentagon breathing down our necks, I was cracking under the pressure.”
Ellis sighed, remembering and regretting his decision to take a sabbatical at that time. Merce had been enraged, screaming that he was jeopardizing both their futures, but Ellis had made up his mind. He’d recently wed Judy and already their marriage was in trouble because he was never home. So for his own sanity and the sake of his marriage, he’d left his brother to work alone while they flew to France and rented a little house in Provence. It had temporarily saved his marriage, but it ruined the rest of his life.
“So I took a breather to rest and recoup. I intended to stay a month but that stretched into two, then three, then longer. I shouldn’t have gone at all. I’ve done many foolish things in my life, but the most foolish was trusting my brother to work alone.”
32
SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ
Darryl Lister had been waiting twenty minutes in Portero’s undersized backwoods shack. How did he stand this crummy, uncomfortable furniture? The guy lived like a refugee.
But not for too much longer.
He heard a car pull up outside and gestured to Venisi, one of the two men he’d brought with him, to check the window. He looked out and nodded.
Okay. Portero was here. Darryl took a deep breath. He’d been steeling himself for this moment since the word had come down a few hours ago. Now that it was here he wanted to get it over with. They’d been through a lot, Portero and he, but the time had come to put the past aside and deal with the present.
Darryl pointed to either side of the front door; Venisi and Markham nodded, drew their pistols, and moved into position.
He’s seen my car, he thought. He’ll be expecting me, but not them.
A few seconds later Portero stepped through, dressed in black BDU shirt and pants, his face tight, obviously ready for a confrontation. He immediately spotted his two extra guests and his hand darted toward his sidearm, but stopped halfway.
“Let’s not do anything precipitous, Portero,” Darryl said.
Portero glanced around the room. “Maria?”
“She’s in the bedroom. She didn’t feel a thing.”
Portero squeezed his eyes shut. “You didn’t have to—”
“Yes, I did.” Markham had held her down while Venisi put a bullet through her brain. She’d looked very peaceful when Darryl had looked in on her. “And it’s your fault. If you’d dumped her when I told you, she’d still be alive now, but you’re bigger than the rules, aren’t you, Portero. Now hold still while these two gentlemen search you.”
Darryl had warned his two men about Portero. He’d seen the guy in action—tough, fast, vicious—and didn’t want any slipups. Venisi covered him while Markham removed Portero’s pistol from his holster and did the pat down.
“What’s this all about?”
“Clean-up time. The time when you tie up the loose ends, mop up the floor, close the door, and walk away.”
When Markham was done, he nodded.
“You’re telling me I’m a loose end?”
“Eminently so.”
Portero looked at the ceiling. “I see.”
Darryl had to admire his composure. No breakdown, no begging. But he’d expected no less. If he kept this up, the next five minutes would be bearable.
“The Old Man found out about Snyder and Grimes,” Darryl told him. “I had to say you hid their deaths from me as well.”
That had been one hairy meeting. The Old Man had just received word that the DoD had reversed its approval for Operation Guillotine—soon as the Pentagon heard about the sim’s baby, it decided it wanted nothing to do with monkey commandos—and he was in a frothing rage. For a few bladder-clenching moments there Darryl had thought he might be scheduled for a one-way ride into the woods, but he’d managed to shift all the blame to Portero.
“Snyder and Grimes brought your loss total to six men—five KIA and one Section Eight. But that’s only part of the reason I’m here.” He gestured toward the door. “Let’s step outside.”
Portero led the way, followed by Venisi and Markham. Darryl brought up the rear.
“It’s all falling apart,” he said as he ejected the clip from the pistol that had been used on Maria. “The sweetest arrangement ever—ever—is tumbling down around us. All because you didn’t do your job. So now we have to fall back. Covering our tracks isn’t going to be enough. We have to erase them.”
One by one he began removing the .45 caliber rounds from the clip.
“For instance, as we speak, there’s an inferno raging in the middle of an Idaho nowhere, roasting a lot of monkey meat. When the arson squad, or whoever eventually gets the job, starts to sift through the ashes, they’re going to have a lot of questions, but no answers.”
When he got down to the last round, he left it in the clip and pocketed the others.
“Since no clean-up can be guaranteed perfect, another aspect of the process is to provide plausible deniability for the high-ups should the dogs come sniffing their way. That means removing the weak or the too-visible links in the chain. You, unfortunately, fall into both those categories.”
“I thought we were friends.”
“We were. But this goes beyond friendship. It’s not like I have a choice, so don’t make this harder than it already is. You botched a number of crucial ops and, worse, made a spectacle of yourself at that hospital this morning.”
Darryl watched him bristle at this, but Portero said nothing. Couldn’t blame him. Why talk? Nothing he said would change anything.
“And because I brought you in, it falls to me to usher you out.”
Darryl checked the pistol to make sure the chamber was empty, then wiped it and the clip clean with a handkerchief. He handed both to Portero.
“So…it’s time. After all we’ve been through, I feel it’s only fair to offer you a chance to do the right thing.”
Portero took a deep breath, then nodded and accepted the weapon.
“I’d like to do it alone.”
“I think we’d all prefer that.” Darryl gestured to the trees. “Do it in the woods.” That was where Darryl had planned to leave the body anyway. It might be months before anyone found it, if ever. “But don’t try anything cute, Portero. Stay in sight. I’m giving you the option to go out like a man. Try to run and we’ll hunt you down like a dog.”
Another nod from Porter
o as he stared at the pistol and the clip in his hands, then he turned and walked into the trees.
“Spread out,” Darryl told Venisi and Markham in a low voice. “Triangulate on him. Keep him in sight. He starts to run, take him down.”
But Portero acted the good soldier. He walked about a hundred feet along a path into the trees, stopped beside a big oak. He faced them and raised the pistol to the side of his head.
Jesus, he’s looking right at us.
Darryl’s instinct was to turn away, but he forced himself to watch.
The shotcracked through the chill air, Portero’s head jerked to the left, and his body collapsed into the brush.
Darryl let out a breath. Done. Clean and neat.
He gestured to Venisi and Markham. “Check him out. If he’s still breathing, finish him.”
He’d heard of people surviving some outrageous head wounds. And with the way things had been going for Portero lately, who knew? He might have botched this too.
33
FAR HILLS, NJ
“When I returned after six months away in France,” Ellis told his audience of three, “refreshed, renewed, ready to work, I discovered that Mercer had made a staggering leap in our research. He presented me with six surrogate mothers, all recently implanted with human-chimp hybrid embryos. We hired obstetricians to watch them carefully through their pregnancies, but to our dismay, one after another miscarried until only one was left. But her fetus was a tough cookie. It held on, and in her thirty-eighth week she delivered a living hybrid infant: Sim Zero.”
Patrick said, “By any chance was her name Alice Fredericks?”
“Why, yes,” Ellis said, startled to hear that name after so many years. “I believe it was. How on earth—?”
“We’ve met.” He turned to Zero. “We’ve spoken to your mother, Zero.”
“She’s not my mother,” he snapped without looking up. “I don’thave a mother.”
“He’s right, Patrick,” Ellis said. “Zero was grown by cloning techniques from a recombinantly hybridized nucleus. But when Mercer saw Zero he said that he’d overdone it: He’d swapped in too much human genetic material.
“He explained to me how, among many other changes, he’d deleted the two chimp chromosomes that millions of years ago fused to form human chromosome 2, and replaced them with a human chromosome 2. He’d also ‘cleaned up’ the hybrid genome by removing loads of junk DNA—deleting AT-rich regions, shortening CpG islands—along with codons and minisatellites; he even managed to remove an entire chromosome that may have performed some useful function in the past but was now just taking up space.
“So Zero wound up with a largely junk-free twenty-two-pair genome—one shorter than human, two shorter than the chimp’s. Mercer told me he did it to make the splicing easier, but I later learned he had a more sinister reason.
“However we both agreed that Zero was too human. The public would never accept the merchandising of something that looked so much like themselves. To make a commercially viable laborer, we’d have to swap back some of the chimp genes he’d removed.”
He noticed Romy’s hate-filled look. “I fully deserve your opprobrium, Ms. Cadman. But please understand, I was a different person then: young, drunk with the egomaniacal power to shape and create, never looking beyond the next splice. That was why I went blindly along with Mercer’s solution to work backward from Zero: Use his cells as a starting point and swap back some of the chimp genes he’d removed. I was ablaze with excitement at the possibilities opening before me. And because I trusted my younger brother, I didn’t ask the questions I should have.
“So we worked back from Zero with great success. Seeing that success, and realizing that its own future was tied to SimGen’s, SIRG started gathering information on any public official who might have a say in the legalization of sims. When we introduced the species, SIRG contacted those who voiced opposition. When blackmail wasn’t an option, SIRG’s field operatives went to work using intimidation and violence. It was SIRG’s behind-the-scenes manipulations that resulted in the classification of sims as neither humans nor animals but property—SimGen’s property.
“And I confess that I knew all this—not all the details, but the general plan—and I approved, thinking, Why should we allow these small minds to block the road to the future? Mercer and I were like gods, leading the way to a new world. To hell with anyone who dared stand in our way.”
Ellis stopped, took a breath. “I believe I was crazy then, suffering from some sort of monomaniacal mental derangement. But eventually I sobered. When all the legal hurdles had been cleared and the labor markets across the globe were clamoring for sims, sims, and more sims, when my personal net worth exceeded that of some small nations, when I finally had time to look back and reflect on how I arrived at my position, I became suspicious.
“Something was gnawing at my subconscious and wouldn’t let up. So I went back to the source, to Zero, who was still alive; the basic research center’s only permanent resident. I took an oral scraping of his cells and started checking his DNA. Mercer’s ‘cleaning up’ of Zero’s genome may have made the splicing easier, but I realized then that it also removed links back to the source DNA. After exhaustive efforts, working in secret, I eventually traced Zero’s DNA back to its origin.”
Ellis looked around at the three faces fixed on his. Yes, even Zero had lifted his head for this.
Could he say it? Could he push these words past his lips? He had to. He’d come too far to turn back.
“That source DNA didn’t belong to a chimpanzee. It belonged to me.”
Romy’s voice was barely audible. “Oh…dear…God!”
Patrick was speechless, staring in slack-jawed shock.
And Zero had closed his eyes.
Ellis spoke past the lump in his throat. “I confronted Mercer and, after strident initial denials, he reluctantly confirmed it: Zero had been fashioned from one of my cells. My brother had lied to me about adding too many human genes to a chimp genome to make Zero; the truth was he’d swapped chimp genes intomy genome. And from there I unwittingly helped him in further devolving Zero’s genome to create the sims.”
“You’re telling me,” Patrick said, sputtering, “tellingus …that…that a sim is not a recombinantly evolved chimp…it’s a recombinantlyde volved human being? Tome is a human being who’s been genetically adulterated and then farmed out as a slave? I…I…” He raised his hands, then let them drop.
Ellis understood. There were no words for what he and Mercer had done.
Romy was silent, tears streaming down her cheeks as she stared at Zero.
“Then I am—or was—a man?” Zero said, eyes open now, his too human features tortured. “But I’m reallynot a man, am I. I’m a thing. A freak!”
“Zero, don’t!” Romy sobbed.
But Zero went on, glaring at Ellis. “What have youdone to me?”
Ellis could barely hear his own voice. “The unforgivable. The unconscionable. The unspeakable. But I didn’t know, Zero.”
“That’s a little convenient, don’t you think?” Romy said, the edge on her voice slashing at him. “’Fess up: You didn’twant to know.”
“Maybe you’re right. But I do know I’ve been trying to undo this ever since I found out. Until this moment, Mercer and I have been the only two who’ve known the truth. Not even Colonel Landon of SIRG knows. What astonished me then, and what I still find incomprehensible, is how Mercer could know all along that the sims he was leasing to the world as slaves were his cloned half brothers, and not be bothered a bit.”
“But you didn’t go public,” Patrick said. “You didn’t even quit the company.”
“I wanted todissolve the company, but Mercer and SIRG controlled too much stock. I couldn’t go public with what I knew because I had children by then and I’d been instrumental in creating the sims. If the truth got out I’d be seen as a monster on a par with Mengele, and my children would be seen as offspring of a monster.
“I was trapped, and SIRG knew it, but just in case I had second thoughts, my daughter Julie disappeared for half a day. She wasn’t harmed, in fact she had a nice time with the lady who took her to an amusement park, but the message was too clear. To protect myself I hid a number of computer disks revealing everything; they’ll be released to all the media in the event of my death. SIRG and I entered a cold-war state of mutually assured destruction, but it was too much for me. Knowing I’d been instrumental in a monumental atrocity made me unfit for human companionship. And since I couldn’t tell anyone, not even my wife, my marriage fell apart.
“So I dedicated myself to the only solution I could think of: a Quixotic quest to develop a true chimp-origin sim to replace the human-origin sims in circulation. But I’ve found it impossible. I don’t think it can be done.
“But all the while, Zero had been growing up in the sealed-off section of basic research. Mercer had forgotten about him until Harry Carstairs casually mentioned him. Mercer decided he was a liability, the Missing Link between sims and humans. He ordered Zero destroyed—sacrificed, put down, like any other lab specimen that had outlived its usefulness.
“When I heard I told Mercer I’d take care of it. But I had no intention of allowing Zero to be killed. I was suddenly energized. In Zero I saw a chance to bring SimGen down. Instead of administering a lethal injection, I spirited him off. I financed him, setting him up as the nemesis of SimGen, a fifth column to turn people against the use of sims. I saw him as a way to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. And Zero was more than willing to help liberate his brother sims.
“Now Meerm’s baby will accomplish that. What I’d hoped for was to put SimGen out of business with all of its secrets intact. That might not be possible now, seeing as the baby is a girl.”
“Why is that so important?” Patrick said. “I saw Dr. Cannon react when I told her it was a beautiful girl.”