The rear door of the vehicle slid open. My companion pushed me inside and slid in after me. The door closed with a thunk. Inside it was black as a tomb.
“We’re going to cover your eyes,” my companion said. “It’s just a precaution.”
A black bag was pulled over my head. I struggled.
“Settle down,” my companion said. “It’s only until we get where we’re going.”
We were both hunkered down in the back seat. We drove, crawling forward, for almost an hour. Nobody said a word. The only sounds were my own laboured breath, the faint hum of the vehicle engine, and the crunch of the tires on road below.
From the twists and turns and the rough ride, I figured we ended up somewhere deep in the Dregs. We finally stopped. I heard a deep rumble ahead of us, and the vehicle drove ahead a few meters. The driver knocked twice on the dashboard.
My companion put his hand under my elbow, motioning for me to get up. I sat up, and the bag was removed from my head. I was finally able to get a good look at him. The light filtering back from the vehicle’s dash was dim, but I’d seen his picture enough to know.
It was my Uncle Zack.
CHAPTER 25
The Dead Shift
“This is it,” Uncle Zack said.
I could see his face in the dim light. From pictures I would have sworn he was my uncle, but he didn’t look over twenty-five. Was it possible that this was my dad’s older brother?
“Pretty fancy tech,” I said to him, nodding at the vehicle.
“Some of us have been around a long time,” he answered. “We’ve been able to accumulate some resources.”
The lights of the vehicle switched off and we were in total blackness. It wasn’t natural. It should be twilight, not night. I could barely make out the shadowy shape of the driver up in the front. We must be somewhere indoors.
The driver opened his door, got out, and opened mine.
“You can come out,” he said.
I climbed out, holding onto the door frame like a blind man, and stood by the car. Uncle Zack climbed out the other side, walked around the vehicle, and joined us. We felt our way to the right, using a wall to guide us. I was still almost blind. A door opened ahead and a dim light spilled out. I followed Uncle Zack and the driver inside.
There wasn’t much more light in the space we were in now, but as soon as the door closed somebody switched one on. It was so bright I had to cover my eyes until they’d adjusted. When I opened them, we were standing in some kind of storage room, with boxes and miscellaneous junk piled around the walls. But the place was clean; it looked like they’d been set up here for a while. A table, surrounded by four folding chairs, stood in the middle.
There were three of us: me, Uncle Zack (I guess — it was still hard to believe), and the driver, a guy who looked a little older than me, with blond hair and a thin mustache.
Uncle Zack turned to me.
“Welcome,” he smiled.
There he was: the curly dark hair, the penetrating black eyes under expressive brows. Somewhere in his expression I could see my dad — as he must have been… It was like traveling back in time, coming face-to-face with the grainy images from the family info card. Uncle Zack seemed to be enjoying my confusion.
“Have a seat,” he said. He motioned toward one of the chairs.
I put my hand on the chair back. Maybe this was just part of some kind of twisted SecureCorp scheme to recapture me. I kept my eyes on both of them as I sat down. The driver took a seat to my left, Uncle Zack sat across from me.
“Well, Alex,” Uncle Zack said. “It’s great to finally meet you. You’re the spitting image of your father. Do you recognize me?”
“I know who you look like,” I said, “but it’s impossible.”
“You of all people should know it’s not,” he said, with a patronizing smile.
“Me — of all people?” I said. So far Uncle Zack was a bit too cute for my taste.
“Well,” he said, leaning back, “if you’re referring to me being dead, you’ve probably heard that in the eyes of the world you’re dead too. If you’re referring to the fact that I don’t look much older than you… We’ll get to that.”
Uncle Zack nodded at the driver. “This is Connor,” he said. Connor smiled and held out his hand, which I reached over and shook, still suspicious.
“What were those SecureCorp guys doing in the warehouse,” I said. “It scared the shit out of me. I figured you’d screwed me over.”
“Just bad luck,” Uncle Zack said. “They periodically send teams through the old buildings, hunting for ‘enemies of the state’. They’ve stepped up the searches big time in the past few weeks.”
“How come?” I asked.
“Looking for you,” he smiled again.
He asked me about my father. I told him about my mother, what my father’s life had been like, and how he’d finally given it up for me.
Uncle Zack looked at the floor and shook his head. “We both got screwed, in our own way.”
Only he’s dead and you’re still a twenty-year old, I thought.
“How much do you know about what’s happening?” he asked.
I shrugged. “After my Appraisal they kidnapped me, kept me prisoner in some hospital, and did a bunch of tests. A guy died helping me escape. Now everybody in the world’s after me. My dad just said I should find you. He said something about some outfit called ‘Vita Aeterna’.”
Uncle Zack raised an eyebrow. He glanced over at Connor, like he was asking what he should do. Connor just shrugged. Uncle Zack described how he’d been held prisoner after his Appraisal and experimented on, like I was, for three months. When they drugged him for transport to a different facility, he’d woken up prematurely, in the back of a moving ambulance.
“I just opened the doors, jumped out, and took off,” he said. “I went on the run. I dropped by home first, just to say goodbye.” He smiled. “Your dad wanted to come with me, but of course I refused. He was just a little kid, anyway.
“But why?” I asked. “What are they after?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Uncle Zack said, “but we’ve got time.” He stood up and paced back and forth. “You gotta understand about these guys — the Elite. They’re used to getting everything they want. They want your house? They’ve got it. They want your wife, your girlfriend, your dog? Presto. They want you dead, you’re dead. They want your life ruined, it happens.”
He turned, and stared down at me. “There’s only one thing they can’t control: Appraisal. Nobody, not even them, can change how it alters someone’s lifespan. That drives them batty. They can’t stand the arbitrariness, the democracy, of it. It flies in the face of their belief in their own superiority — their divine right to lay ownership to anything they want by virtue of their power and wealth.
“They’re enraged that the treatment can double the lifespan of some pathetic street bum while shortening that of one of their number.” He started pacing again. “Over the years, armies of scientists, with a massive war-chest of funding, have toiled away in pursuit of one goal: controlling life extension.
“Their masters wanted Appraisal to be governed in the same way as everything else in the world: the more money you have, the longer you get to live. They wanted to be able to buy immortality the same way they buy everything else.
“But even with the trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours poured into the project, the scientists weren’t able to change the treatment one iota.
“The guys paying for it all started to think the scientists were deliberately stalling — that they wanted the process to fail because of some twisted resentment of their masters’ wealth, or some socialist vision of a world that didn’t play favourites.
“One of the problems was that a lot of the scientists, Corp workers, and even some of the Elite themselves, were burdened by the remnants of morality.”
I thought about Travis — and what Dr. Treadwell has said about him.
<
br /> “They refused to perform certain types of experiments,” Zack continued, “experiments that inflicted what amounted to torture on human test subjects to get the answers they wanted.”
Uncle Zack stopped again and turned to face me. “So a group of the richest and most powerful of the Elite took matters into their own hands.” He stuck out his chin and raised his fist. “This was the giving of life itself. Cheating death, or at least delaying it for a while, was the dream of the ages. If a few insignificant lives needed to be ruined, or even snuffed out, in pursuit of that goal, then so be it.”
He turned back to me. “The group formed a secret society called Vita Aeterna — Eternal Life. Its goal was to carry the research work a step further, unbridled by the sentimental morality of the ‘public’ work.
“Vita Aeterna aren’t constrained by any ethical considerations. Their only interest is to control the Appraisal process — at any cost. They recruited a cadre of scientists willing to do their bidding without question. Their work focuses on subjects with exceptionally high Appraisals. Such people don’t show up very often. When they do, the organization is informed. They kidnap the high scorers and conduct experiments on them. They believe they can discover the secret of long life by studying people who have it.
“Over the years, some of those test subjects managed to escape, like we all did.” He gestured with his head around the table. “We found each other and formed an underground resistance movement. We’re all supposed to be dead, so we call ourselves the Dead Shift.”
“So how do I fit in?” I asked, a feeling of dread creeping over me.
Uncle Zack sat back down and leaned toward me. “Do you know what your Appraisal is?”
I shook my head. “That’s how this all started. Nobody would tell me, and then they’re all after me.”
“I know what it is,” he said.
I tensed. The way everybody seemed to be acting about it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. He sat staring at me. His expression reminded me of the one I saw on Chuck and the first doctor.
“Well?” I said.
He snapped up his right hand, with all the fingers spread apart. Again I was confused.
“What?” I said. I stared at his hand. Finally it hit me. “Five?”
He nodded.
“Five?” I said. “Bullshit.”
He shook his head. “What it is, is the highest Appraisal anybody’s ever scored. And it’s yours.”
It hit me like a sledgehammer. I was too stunned to say anything.
“Do the math,” Uncle Zack said. “With an Appraisal of five, every fifty years you’ll have aged ten. Fifty years from now your effective age will be twenty-six. In a hundred, it’ll be thirty-six.”
I was in shock. I was hardly conscious of what he was saying.
“In fact,” he continued, “you put us all to shame. Connor, here,” he nodded at the driver, “has an Appraisal of two point three. Mine’s two point five. Still, if we ever have children, and those children have Appraisals as high as ours, they’ll grow up, live their lives, and die of old age, and you’ll still be going.”
A jolt went up my spine. Everybody — everybody I ever knew, everybody I met for the next hundred years, would be dead long before I’d even reached middle age…
“You’re messing with me,” I said. “It’s not funny.”
He shook his head. I looked over at Connor. He wasn’t laughing.
I felt like I was going to be sick. My eyes were wet with tears. Suddenly I was sobbing. What was I going to do? I put my hands in front of my face.
Uncle Zack put a hand on my shoulder.
“What kind of fucked-up lonely-ass existence am I in for?” I said through my tears.
For the first time since it all started I truly wished I’d never heard of Appraisal, and that had nothing to do with being imprisoned or experimented on, or having those bastards chasing me all over the city.
“Don’t worry, Alex,” he said. “We’ll look after you. We’ll make it right.”
“Nobody can make it right,” I sobbed. “I’m screwed, and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about it.”
Uncle Zack patted my shoulder.
“We’ll leave you alone for a while to think about it,” he said. He and Connor left the room, left me sitting there, staring into an empty future with nobody beside me. Appraisal had reprogrammed me to live for four hundred years, but right now all I wanted was to die.
CHAPTER 26
Uncle Zack
I lost track of the time, so I’m not sure how long they were gone. Finally, Uncle Zack came through the door alone and sat down again across from me. I didn’t really feel any better, but I’d come to a conclusion: this was the hand I’d been dealt. All I could do was accept it and go on. Anyway, I still had the immediate problem of a crack army of highly-trained soldiers trying to hunt me down. I’d have to think about the rest of my life later.
“By the way,” he said, smiling, “under the circumstances you can dispense with the ‘Uncle’ bit. Just call me Zack.” He leaned forward. “Now, let’s get down to business. Statistically speaking, you’re the holy grail. You could outlive everyone on the planet, even babies that won’t be born for generations. They want you bad.”
“So I’m screwed?” I asked. “I just keep on running until they catch up with me and rip me apart like a lab animal?”
“No,” Zack said. “We fight back. That’s the purpose of our little group here. The only chance we have of surviving and returning to society is to get rid of Vita Aeterna. As long as they’re around we’ll be living in fear and on the run. We want to destroy them, and make sure that they never come back.”
“But what hope have we got of doing that?” I asked. The whole thing sounded pretty hopeless.
“It’s a long shot,” Zack said. “Our best chance is to eliminate the guy who’s the big mover behind all this.
“And who’s that?”
He turned and stared at a poster on the wall, the same one Benny had stuck up as a shrine in his office, the one he’d kept so pristine and new.
It was like Zack had shot me with a poison dart. “Charles Wickham?” I said. “The head of the CCE?”
Zack nodded.
I swallowed, thinking back on what Travis had said about them. “Then we are screwed. Us against him, the CCE, and all of SecureCorp?”
Zack shook his head. “We know we can’t hope to win against SecureCorp. That’s the difference between us and that ridiculous Rebel group you were hanging out with.”
I looked up at him, shocked.
“Why so surprised?” he said. “We know all about what goes on around here. How do you think we knew about the phone?” He nodded at the bulge in my shirt.
“How did you know?”
“We ran into your friend Fatso.” He smiled.
My spine stiffened. “He’s no friend of mine.”
“Then you’ll be pleased to know that you won’t have to worry about him anymore,” Zack said without emotion. “We know where you’ve been. We don’t know exactly where the Rebels are at any given moment, but we’ve got a good idea what they’re doing. They’ve got this fantasy that they can wake the general public and engineer some kind of popular uprising. We know that’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
Zack sneered and shot me a look. He was my uncle, but I wasn’t so sure I really liked him.
“The public are sheep,” he said. “The thought has never even crossed their minds that anything can be changed, or even should be changed. They’ve bought into the idea that if they work like dogs and are willing to screw their neighbour, someday they’ll be up there with the Elite.”
He shook his head contemptuously.
I felt my cheeks flush. Up until a few days ago I’d been one of those people. I still wasn’t sure I believed him.
“But if they knew the truth…” I said.
Zack scowled at me. “And how’s that going to happen, nephew? Are
you going to tell them?”
I glanced at my hands, then looked back up at him. “Well, if you can’t change the public’s mind, what do you plan to do?”
He shrugged. “There’s only one option. It might not change anything, but at least it’s got some slim chance of succeeding.”
“What’s that?”
His eyes locked on mine, and a thin smile curled up on his lip. “We’re going to kill Charles Wickham.”
☼
We sat there staring at each other for almost a minute. I swallowed. If that was our best chance…
Zack finally spoke. “If we can get to Wickham, the organization will be crippled, maybe beyond repair. If we can couple that with getting out the word about them, in a way that they can’t discredit, we might have a chance. InfoCorp controls the media, so if they say we’re dead, there’s not much we can do about it. We have to find a way to change that.”
I still didn’t say anything. I felt like I was already dead — I just hadn’t fallen down yet.
“You could be a real asset,” Zack continued.
“Me?” I said, snapping out of it. “What have I got to do with it?”
“Vita Aeterna wouldn’t have a problem killing most of us — there’s more where we came from. We’re already on record as being dead, so if we make too much trouble for them, all they’ve got to do is get rid of us for real.
“You, on the other hand, are an anomaly — one of a kind. They’ll want you kept alive so they can study you. We might be able to use that to our advantage. While they’re tripping over themselves trying to get you, maybe they’ll make a mistake.”
I still wasn’t convinced. And something about my uncle didn’t seem right.
“You can bet your buddy Travis knows all about your Appraisal,” Zack said out of the blue.
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