“That’s impossible,” I dismiss him, reaching for the door.
“Not anymore. I made it possible.” Crane taps his fingertips together in front of his chest. “A long time ago, I made it very possible.”
I drop my arm, the slightest bit intrigued. “What do you mean?”
Crane clears his throat. “A very long time ago I invested in a lot of research. Genetic research, robotics, you name it, we did it. And Nanobiotechnology was a major field. We created nanocytes, tiny little robots that can be injected into the human body and they repair all the damage associated with age, illness, and injury. The end result is that the biological specimen injected with the nanocytes gets to live forever.” Crane adjusts his tie as I digest this information.
“I don’t believe you,” I tell him.
“Hmm. You don’t?”
“No.”
“Ah yes, it must be the scientist in you. Would you like some proof? Some numbers and data to mull about in your brain. Here’s one: Did you ever wonder why the Guardians just keep multiplying? After all these years living outdoors, many of them should have died. I know how you work, Andromeda. You count things and I know you’ve counted them. I know you’ve noticed there are more. That is because they don’t die.”
“I still don’t believe you.”
“Well, we have time for you to see that I’m telling the truth.”
“No,” I take a step closer towards the door. “I’m not listening to this garbage.”
“Agree.” His voice gets louder, almost a warning. “This new world needs you, forever. There is no one else who can do what you do. No one else has the attachment to the Residents that you do. And the Residents trust you, the Sovereign trust you.”
“No,” I tell him again. I look at Adam. His face is placid as he stares at me. He believes this propaganda that Crane is spewing.
“You want your children freed? You want to go back to the serenity of the Pasture? Agree.”
For a moment I think if I agree it might just get us out of here. If I just agree to his lies, no matter how incomprehensible they seem. If I say yes, he’ll just let us go. “And my family?” I ask him.
“I am only offering this to you.” Crane stands from his seat.
“Definitely no,” I tell him, taking another step towards the door.
“You don’t worry about your fragility, Andromeda? Why Baillie almost crushed you a few years ago. I’m sure you recognized it then.”
“I don’t care, Crane. I’m not afraid to die. I realized that a long time ago. I thought I needed to be alive to protect my children from you, but now I have a lot more people on my side. People who will take care of them. I am not afraid to die trying to get them out of here. But I’m definitely not going to live forever without my family at my side.”
“It’s your decision. Immortality, everlasting life, or your family. They’ll move on without you. And you will get over their deaths when the time comes.”
“And if I kill you now? Then it won’t matter, then I can do whatever I want.”
“Sure, that would be one scenario. But the nanocytes are already waiting within your body. All I have to do is press a button to release them. You kill me, you get blessed with an immortal life.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Try me. They’ve been there since you returned from Crystal River and Morris died.”
Pushing up my sleeve, I rub my fingers over the small scar where Crane injected the tracking device in my forearm. “You’re not even giving me a choice.” I look to Adam, who remains standing still on the other side of the room. “I don’t want this,” I whisper. “I don’t want this,” I repeat louder looking at Crane and Adam to make sure they heard me.
“I know,” Crane replies. “But many others do. It’s a gift. One that I’ve only offered to a few. Those with strong principles, those who no longer fear their own death.”
“You don’t fit that description,” I tell him.
He laughs. “I did once. A long time ago. But that’s what watching the same cycle of contamination and corruption repeat itself over and over again will do to a person.”
“Then why are you doing this?” I ask.
“Because we are creating a new world. Instilling old morals that most have forgotten, and now this new world needs deities to guide them, deities to fear.”
I step closer towards the door. From the first Committee meeting I speculated that he was playing God, but this, to actually hear it from his mouth, floors me.
Crane continues his speech, “For hundreds of years humans speculated in a divinity, each arguing that their idea of God was correct. They prayed and worshipped and sacrificed, and guess what? Nothing happened. Because there were no gods, just stories. Humanity continued in their downward spiral of wickedness and corruption. We can give them what they’ve always prayed for. Real gods, real responses to their prayers.”
“So this is why everyone appeases you? This is why they all fear you and do what you say?”
He nods. “They just want a piece of the pie. They want this gift that I have offered you.”
“This is why Dr. Drake wanted to be on my team, because he knew, didn’t he?”
He nods, smiling.
“I can’t live without them,” I tell him.
“Imagine it. A life forever. You could have a thousand new families.”
I close my eyes, envisioning Lina and Raven growing into adulthood, finding their own pairs and having their own families. Standing beside them, I see Ian, his hair graying, his skin wrinkling, while I stay the same. I can see their children. My grandchildren. Ian’s grave. Lina’s grave. Raven’s grave. But there will never be a grave for me, not with this future. My static existence next to them seems so wrong. A heavy, hot tear slides down my cheek. I don’t wipe it away. I let them see it. I let them see what this will make me become. This will ruin me.
I open my eyes, pulling myself back from this heartbreaking future and ask, “Who else?”
“What do you mean?” Crane asks sweetly.
“Who else are you offering this option to?”
“Well, there’s you. Me, of course. I tested the nanocytes on myself and here I am, the epitome of health.”
“When?”
He smiles a sly smile. “When did I test them on myself? A long time ago. Long before you were born.”
“Who else then?” I demand.
“Sakima, George Crossbender, and a few other of the original Funding Entities are on my list if they fulfill my wishes, if they pass the right tests.” He stands and begins walking towards me.
“This is so wrong, Crane. You chose the most extreme members of the group. The absolute worst and best.”
“No.” he reaches forwards, grasping my hands, squeezing them. “It is so right. The earth will be forever taken care of. There will be no shifting of power, no alteration of laws, just the same few to watch over and keep everything right. They will keep a balance, a yin and a yang, opposites; they will balance it and keep it right.”
I try to pull my hands out of his grasp. “I don’t want this.”
“You made those people, Andromeda.” He lets go of my hands. “You made those Residents, you altered them genetically and now you need to watch over them. Nobody will watch over them better than you will.”
“Find someone else, Crane. There are plenty of brains in Hanford. You don’t need me for this.”
“Ah, but we do.”
I hear the loud laughter of the children down the hall as they play in the gymnasium.
“Why are we doing this here?” I ask Crane. “In the middle of nowhere West Virginia?”
“There are ears everywhere in the Districts. And if the other Entities knew that you have been given this gift, they would be very jealous of you. And now that this little Resistance has formed against me, you’ll see. You’ll see what those Entities will do for a chance to live forever. But they don’t know what I’ve just told you. They still fear their
death. It is obvious that you do not.”
“You don’t think they’ll find out? With each year they’ll notice I’m not aging.”
“Don’t fret, Andromeda. I will ensure your safety.”
“What happens after?” I ask. “After you’ve done this to me, then what?”
“You go home. You live your long life and resume your duties. You watch over generations of Residents. You decide with the other Entities on changes.”
“I don’t want you in Phoenix.” I tell him.
“That’s fine. There are other places I can go. Although, Phoenix is my home town, the place where I grew up a long time ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m sure when you last visited the family grave you didn’t pay attention to the old, crumbled gravestone near the tree line?”
I think back to the day I was there with Raven, telling him stories about the relatives he will never know. He did, at one point, place his hand on an old gravestone outside of our family plot. That one strange stone with the name B. C. Bertrand.
“A grave would mean that someone is dead.”
“Or presumed dead,” he offers.
“That’s impossible, we are not related,” I tell him with disgust. “I would have seen it. I would have seen it in our data!”
“It’s not a blood relation.”
“Then what is it?”
I look at Adam, who shrugs and rubs the stubble on his chin.
“Let me tell you a story,” Crane smiles. “Once upon a time there was a young man, a very intelligent young man-”
“I don’t want to hear your life story,” I interrupt him.
“This is not a story of my life. So this young man was very intelligent, his name was Arthur. He graduated at the top of his class, attended Stanford University on a full scholarship and then moved on to Johns Hopkins University to pursue his post-doctoral work. This young man had a very promising future, working on the cutting edge of cancer research and all. You see, cancer research was a major topic in those days. The chance of a cancer diagnosis among the general population was astronomical and everyone wanted a cure. The race to find a cure was a competition. Scientists were often pitted against each other, always in pairs, working on the same type of cancer research. We had the same cells, the same samples, the same equipment.”
“Now that you’re saying we, I’m guessing you’ve come into the picture?” I ask.
“Yes. So Arthur and I were paired together, both of us working ourselves to death trying to find a cure for a specific form of bone cancer. Now the rules were you were not to speak or collaborate with the team you were working against. The Cancer Institute founders didn’t want a contamination of theories. One team worked during the day, the other at night. We were not to cross paths. But one day, we did. Both of us sitting in the park outside of our government funded housing development. We were walking our dogs and realizing that we had the same breed, we stopped to talk. When it came to the topic of work… we realized we were on opposing teams. Arthur and I were really working against each other.
“Arthur and I knew that we had a better chance of finding a cure if we worked together. So we did. Meeting secretly, collaborating. We spent all of this time cutting out tumors, irradiating body parts, injecting dangerous medications into the bodies of these sick people only to have another cancer spring up, a secondary diagnosis. For years we did this, until one day we came to a conclusion. This was an unwinnable fight, this race for a cure, these cancers that were consuming humans. So we looked elsewhere. We looked at the food we ate, the chemicals we were exposed to, the toxic wastes leaching into our systems from years of abusing the earth. All the while the population was exploding, the ozone depleted, and soon the skies over the busiest cities were thick with smog. Arthur and I knew we had determined the cause, the whole time the real cancer was the human race.
“So as the government was shifting monies from research and development to better the human race, to food and housing to care for the population, it wasn’t long before our funding was cut. Both of us were without a job. But I had a secret. One that not many knew. I had a wealthy family trust and being the only inheritor I was able to better our lives. I bought a little island, built a little lab, hired a few scientists and crew. Having no means to support himself, Arthur joined me immediately. And instead of searching for a cure for cancer, we searched for a way to cure the human race from its cancerous ways.
“The money didn’t last for long. So we had to outsource ourselves. This was a time when people wanted to choose the gender of their children, their eye color, their hair color, and we could do that. We were solicited by the richest members of society; celebrities, kings, queens, rulers of the free world, you name it, they came to us. And so we made money, and contacts. Are you listening, Andromeda?” he asks in the middle of his story.
I’m listening. I’ve been listening, so intently that I find my mouth hanging open. I close it slowly and swallow hard. What an information dump.
“Because this is where it gets good. This is the important part. One week Arthur was attending a genomics conference. While I had instructed him to only bring back a few of the brightest minds to help us, he brought back one person: a biomedical engineer. She was a very beautiful woman with blonde curly hair and green eyes, much like our Catalina. At first I was very wary of his selection, not only because of her beauty, but she was so quiet and I was sure Arthur was not thinking with his head when he brought her back. But I was wrong. Andrea turned out to be one of our best scientists. She was the one to suggest we branch off into the field of Nanobiotechnology. We had come to the conclusion that there needed to be a larger change to society and we all feared that finding others to continue on with this plan would be hard. So we were searching for a way to continue on ourselves.”
“And you made the nanocytes so you three could live forever and do this. This Reformation was your plan, wasn’t it?” I ask.
“Yes, it was. It didn’t take long for us to figure it out.”
Crane smoothes his hand over his tie. “Soon, something began to change in Arthur. It seems he fell in love with our biomedical engineer. But then, living on a tropical island surrounded by the beauty of nature can do that to a person.”
“Let me guess,” I interrupt him again. “You loved her too.”
“No,” he says with a small smile. “I was too intent on this plan we were creating. I had no time for love, or marriage, or children, as Arthur did. It wasn’t long before Andrea became pregnant. They did it the natural way, you see, there was no playing with the genome of Andrea and Arthur. I worried for them, but I was wrong. Andrea delivered a beautiful baby girl and they named her Selene.” He stops for a moment to clear his throat. “While I never wanted children I found myself very fond of Selene. Especially when she called me Uncle Burton. It was… very sweet.” He looks away from me for the first time since he started this story.
“So back to the adults. Being involved with the leaders of the world, tweaking their genetic data, meant that we were also involved with the high criminals of the world. And this made our job very dangerous. We created our own security detail, the Volker. And furthered that security detail to include the Guardians. But we also had to travel a lot, which made that danger uncomfortably close at times. This became apparent as Arthur and Andrea traveled back to the states to solicit a very prominent scientist and bring him back. It seems there was a drug lord in Rio de Janero who was rather unhappy with the intellect of his son whom we genetically altered for him. This drug lord wanted a smart son, someone to take over the family business, but what we gave him was a genius brain and drug lords have no time for a child with book smarts, they want the street smarts kind. If only we had realized this before. Sadly enough Arthur and Andrea never made it back from their last trip. They were murdered in their hotel room as they packed to leave.”
“What about their child?” I ask.
“Ah, Andromeda.” He smile
s. “That is a very good question, indeed. They must have had some intuition about their mortality, or maybe there was some warning. Either way, after their bodies were discovered so was a child, hiding in the back of the hotel closet. Selene was alive and well, albeit she had just witnessed the murder of her parents, my greatest friends and collaborators.”
“Let me guess, you raised her as your own and everything was unicorns and rainbows?”
“No. I was-I am,” he corrects himself, “a very selfish person. And Arthur and Andrea and I had a plan. We promised each other that we would continue to carry it out even if something happened to one of us. So because of my selfishness, I allowed Selene to go to a foster family. Being an orphan myself, despite having been placed in a poorer example of a family when my parents died, I hand-picked a couple whom I thought embodied the ideas and beliefs of her parents. I have missed them terribly, but I know that I have been able to keep my promise to them.”
He stops, looking at me expectantly. Perhaps he does have a heart.
“I don’t understand, how does this relate to me?”
“You haven’t figured it out yet?” he asks.
I stare at him, my brain spinning, trying to make some connection here. But the sound of the children laughing down the hall is distracting and so are the eyes of Crane and Adam on me.
“Your grandmother was an orphan. Did your mother never tell you?”
“Yes, she did, but my grandmother’s name was-”
“Constance Selene Salk,” Crane says. “The women on your mother’s side of the family have a habit of not changing their last names once they are married. I’m guessing it has something to do with not wanting to forget the past. Not wanting to forget that loving family that adopted Selene. Except for you, you’re the first to take on your husband’s surname.”
“So you are my great-grandfather’s best friend?”
“Yes,” he smiles proudly.
“That means you should be dead.”
“And here I am. Another example for you that the nanocytes work.”
“And you’ve been keeping an eye on me this entire time? My whole life you’ve been keeping tabs on me.”
The Phoenix Project Series: Books 1-3: The Phoenix Project, The Reformation, and Revelation Page 82