“You have children, Philip?”
“Not anymore. Like I said, your kids become your life, when they die, you feel as if you’ve died too.” He gave a small smile and turned towards the car. “I’m going to try to get a few hours’ sleep. You should do too.”
Rei watched him walk slowly to the car. There seemed much more to Philip than she had ever imagined when she’d first met him back at the clinic. Now their lives had become inextricably linked, and every day she found out something more about him, and each time a piece of the façade that he used to cope with the world fell away.
48
I have a visitor. Someone has come to the apartment.
Mathew felt puzzled by the entry on the parent c-pac’s memory. It had evidently been broadcast two days ago, not long after they’d left Deon and journeyed out to the Roamers’ camp. The wind had picked up very early in the morning and they had all felt the cold, causing all three of them another night of little sleep.
Stiff, hungry and still tired all three had awoken early and decided to leave as early as possible. While Rei had been checking Philip’s hand once more Mathew had been fiddling with the c-pac and had found the new message. He hadn’t even been looking for entries from Deon, not really expecting anything until the route across the Channel had been fully arranged, but this memo, evidently left by Deon for himself, had come through, and somehow Mathew had played it. He listened again, and tried to work out if there was some more information on the memory as to whether this was likely to be a problem.
“What’s happening?” Mathew looked up as Philip walked across to join him.
“Not sure,” Mathew answered. “I seem to have a partial message from Deon. He’s left a note to himself about having a visitor, and then there’s a load of muffled voices and talking, but I can’t really understand any of it. It seems to go on for ages. Do you know anyone called Michael?”
“Not that I can recall? Not unless he’s been visited again!”
Mathew shrugged.
Philip mimed a prayer, and an exaggerated cross. “His angel friend?!”
“Could be. I can’t work most of it out.”
“Anything about the boat across to France?”
“Not that I can hear.”
“Fuck it. He’s screwed it up and done something weird hasn’t he?”
“Well, it’s certainly not the message that I was expecting. But the bit after saying someone’s gone to the flat doesn’t sound like he’s up to anything odd. From the bits that I can understand he just sounds like he’s talking to some friends.”
“More than one?”
“Yeah, there’s a male and a female voice, but I can’t really understand them.
“Is it Nasreen?”
“No, although I caught the woman’s name, she’s called Caroline.” Mathew noticed a feint flick of recognition in Philip’s face. “Do you know her?”
“To my knowledge I don’t know anyone that Deon does,” replied Philip evasively. “What do they talk about?”
“I think she might be another God-junkie, because I can make out something about divine missions and stuff like that, but mostly I can’t hear what they say. It could be something private, so I’m a little wary of listening. It’s a bit like eavesdropping.”
“Can you share that?”
“I’m not sure how,” replied Mathew, taking the device off his thumb and passing it over.
Philip reached across for the c-pac with his good hand. “Give us it here and I’ll try and enhance it. It may be important, we have to know what he’s up to, especially if he’s been in contact with other people but not with us. If what’s being said was private he wouldn’t record it onto a broadcasting c-pac, would he? It doesn’t sound like the police or anyone from the Walden, no?”
“Don’t think so,” said Mathew watching as Philip went through a list of programmes to boost the vocals. He heard Deon’s voice over the speaker, far clearer than he had it set, and waited for the conversation to start making sense, but as usual much of the start of the recording seemed to be Deon talking to himself.
“There’s about 2 hours’ worth on this by the look of it,” explained Philip as he made a note into his own c-pac, while listening to the one from Mathew. Why don’t you see if you can find out what Rei’s up to, then hopefully I’ll have something off this before we move out today.”
Mathew left Philip to the disembodied voices and wondered off from where the car was parked towards the diminutive figure walking toward him. Something made him smile to himself slightly seeing Rei walking back from the small copse of woods on the horizon.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“Nothing really. I mean it’s not even actually funny, it’s just, well, when I was visualising what the future would be like, you know, even before the whole cryopreservation thing even occurred to me, well, I never imagined that in the last part of the twenty-first century people would still need to be heading into the woods to have a shit.”
“You’re right, there was not anything funny,” the girl said, then flashed a tiny smile to prove that she had got the point. “What’s Philip doing? Is he ok this morning?”
“Yeah, you know, what happened yesterday shook us all up a bit. I think he’s trying to make amends a little now, bury the hatchet and that.”
“‘Bury the hatchet’? I wish you would speak English rather than constantly slipping into these quaint idioms. I take it you mean he feels rather indebted and wants a fresh start?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Good,” she said, and began walking with a noticeable spring in her stride. “Maybe he will forget to be an arrogant pig from today and start to deal with things properly. I have more pressing issues than Mr Brading’s vanity and chauvinism.”
Mathew ran slightly to catch up with Rei, and felt his chest tighten as he reached alongside the girl and walked beside her. “He’s listening to a memo on the c-pac from Deon. It came a couple of days ago, but I haven’t been listening to it recently, what with everything that’s happened. I was expecting him to contact us directly, you know, not leave messages for himself.”
“Is it about the boat?”
“Don’t think so.”
“I hope that he’s managed to arrange things.”
“Yeah, well that’s what Philip’s checking now.”
“Ok, let’s leave him to do that and we can organise some breakfast from the food we’ve still got.”
“Heard anything from Deon?” asked Rei as she approached the car where Philip was still working on something.
“Not really,” Philip replied. “Mathew got this message, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense and there’s a heap of it. I need to go through the whole lot before I can really tell anything. I’m still looking into the Walden Centre. I’m getting updates from Justine, this girl I know, and I may have been making a little progress. Meanwhile, I’ve linked Mathew’s c-pac to mine and it’s filtering out a synopsis of the conversations sent at the moment.”
“Ok. So what have you got about Warwick?” Rei asked as Philip worked on a series of paper notes that spilled out of his case and over the seat of the car.
“Not much, although the problems at the Walden are obviously taking their toll.” Rei lifted an eyebrow in curiosity. “It seems that you’re not the only one to leave the clinic. Dr Malik must have been pushed, or left, ’cos he’s setting up business on his own. He must have got some cash together earlier because for some reason he doesn’t seem to have had any Walden shares. They’ll be worthless now anyway if he had.”
“Oh, Malik won’t have Walden shares.”
“No? How come?”
“Because he is not an employee. He’s a freelance consultant. He worked exclusively for the Walden, but he remained off the pay role.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, I had a look at the consultants’ pay when I was there. I knew a girl who worked directly for Warwick in payroll and I
got her to forward me the amounts that the consultants were paid. It sounds a bit mercenary, I’m afraid, but I thought at one time that maybe I should stay in Europe when I qualified, but seeing the pay I decided against it, which is why I was only on a short-term British visa. But I noticed Malik because he was paid a great deal more than the regular surgeons, and his tax coding was different. So I checked and found out that he was freelance. So any money he has would not be linked to the clinic, and he’d be free to set up a practise on his own quite easily. He is a top consultant and both highly paid and respected.”
“Well he must have been very highly paid, ’cos he’s in process of setting up a clinic in north London worth about 170 million bucks.”
“What? He can’t have that sort of money, can he?”
“Well, that’s what he’s done, and if he hasn’t got the cash he knows someone who has, ’cos the information that Justine has just sent me doesn’t show any bank involvement.”
“What sort of money does a top consultant get?” asked Mathew.
“Not enough to put 170 million into their own clinic,” said Rei without looking over.
“So where’s the money from?”
“Well, at a guess,” speculated Philip, “I’d say he needed someone who’s got a lot of spare money from investments, no ongoing investment programme, wants to invest into a new medical clinic and is one hundred per cent sure that any research undertaken there is going to bring in the bucks.”
“Are you saying that Warwick is his investor?” asked Rei.
“Well, it’s certainly possible.”
“Why would they do that, when Warwick came so close to losing everything through Walden?”
Philip collected his thoughts and tried to explain his theory as it grew. “Well, I don’t have any real proof of this at the moment, but I have a scenario that I think fits. Suppose they worked together on this from the start, and Rei you know more about the medical profession than I do, so stop me if this doesn’t work. But they start working on resuscitating the bodies they’ve inherited through Live Right, and somehow work out this way of using these to grow body parts. The patients are never brought round into consciousness, they’re just being used as hosts, and the organs from them cloned and farmed. Which would normally be completely illegal, but in the case of people who died before the legislation of 2027, it wouldn’t apply, technically.”
“What happened in 2027?” asked Mathew, trying to follow the flow.
“It was declared illegal to use proxy or cadaverous artificially maintained hosts for harvesting denotable third party organs or tissue within a 50 year period,” Rei enlightened him.
Philip went on: “It meant that you couldn’t use people who had died for transplants unless you used their original organs. So growing organs artificially became illegal, although technically there wasn’t any law banning it directly. The 50 year period was seen as ample to discourage anyone keeping corpses for the purpose, but of course they didn’t take cryopreservation into account.”
“Right,” nodded Mathew. “And how do you know all this?”
“’Cos I’ve just spent the last few weeks learning everything I can on the subject. I’m writing about this, remember. Was everyone’s attention span like this in the twentieth century?” Philip gave a sly wink to Rei, making sure that Mathew caught it too. He was quite proud of how medically adroit and articulate he’d become of late. “Actually, I started looking into different members of staff at the Walden when you suggested that Warwick was the victim of a scam. He’s covered his tracks fairly well, but this Malik guy kept coming up, so I followed that path.”
“But rather than being the victim, Warwick is actually working alongside Malik, yeah?”
“Right, so Warwick works with Malik on the practicalities of this human harvesting process, keeping the whole thing secret, and using the cash from the Walden Centre to fund it. Which is why there’s so much money missing from their real accounts, the public accounts are falsified, by the way, Rei. The clinic didn’t make anything like the money its employees thought it was making. Once they’ve got the process perfected, and probably even tried it a few times on patients, then they’re ready to launch it publicly. Some of the patients that have been through the system will probably have organs created in this way. Have there been any people that you can think of who recovered when they shouldn’t have, or vice versa?”
Rei thought for a second. “Oh my God. The kid I worked with, George. He had complete organ failure, but we were never told where the new organs came from, but normally pseudogenetic tissue won’t reject, and his did. He could have been a test recipient.”
“Quite possibly,” carried on Philip. “So they’ve got this system in place, but they’re running short of money, perhaps it took longer than they expected. They can’t advertise for investors, because it’s not quite legal, or at least not enough for anyone to want to put their name to it. So, they use the technology to actually resuscitate someone.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, enter Mathew. And suddenly the clinic’s in the spotlight and the shares are through the roof. Trouble is, they want to keep their process a lot more low key. So they decide to just wait til Mathew dies, unfortunately he does really well and starts making a full recovery.”
“Why’s that unfortunate?”
“Well for you it’s not, but for Warwick it is ’cos he’s got the world’s press everywhere, and being the egotistical bastard that he is he can’t keep it as quiet as he should, so he basks in it a while. Then he realises that Mathew may just get well enough to leave and that’s going to get a lot of interest in the clinic as a cryonic centre. But as we’ve already seen from Live Right, it’s not really a viably lucrative business. So what happens? The star patient dies, the interest in the clinic causes this to happen in a glare of publicity, the company collapses, and is sold off by Medical International at a huge loss, which, by the way, is in the process of happening. Meanwhile, Warwick has sold his shares at an inflated price and made an absolute fortune. He invests anonymously in Malik’s new clinic, having bought everything they need from the Walden via Medical International, and probably having pulled some of the frozen stiffs with them. Sorry Mathew, no offence meant.”
“Yeah, none taken. I’m a frozen stiff.”
“You know what I mean. So now they start up again, only this time Malik’s the visible face of it, and they’ve got stacks of free cash, access to cheap equipment, and I expect a client base of customers willing to pay for treatment by Malik, but unhappy at staying with the Walden. Malik’s got the kudos of being involved in your resuscitation, but hasn’t been tainted by the project’s end. So they can start targeting the Far Eastern market, which was always where the Walden Centre made its real money, and can practise without the publicity that the Walden had attracted. I should have seen this earlier, it’s an old trick.”
“So they run the company into the ground then just re-open with, basically just a different name on their letterheads?” said Mathew.
“Excepting that no one’s had names on ‘letterheads’ for 50 years, yeah. Smoke and mirrors, it all happens when you’re looking the wrong way.”
“But why me?”
“I don’t suppose there was a reason; you were just lucky; or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint.”
“Actually Mathew would be an ideal choice as a test patient,” Rei added. “They would ideally need someone relatively young, but of course most younger deaths were often as the result of accidents. Mathew had a congenital condition, so they might have stayed clear of using his organs for tissue re-growth or using him as a host, just in case there were any inherent defects that may have been passed on; but he was a well-documented patient, with a death that occurred in clinical conditions. If he’d been in an accident, for example, his organs and tissue would be usable, but his stem-cells could be damaged, and in many accidents, especially the automobile crashes that were so common in the twentieth century, the impact would re
sult in frontal lobe damage.”
“And what would that mean? In layman’s terms.”
“Anyone resuscitated with that sort of damage to their brains would have severe personality problems.”
“Like what?” asked Mathew anxiously.
“Calm down, you haven’t had your frontal lobes damaged, pal. I suspect that all of your personality defects were there before any of this happened.”
“Philip’s right, Mathew, this would only have happened if you’d had a severe physical trauma. The occasional memory loss and flashbacks that you have are just your brain adjusting to a uniquely strange situation. Frontal lobe damage would not allow you to be the person you were before, you would be anything from callous and unemotional, to being in a permanent vegetative state, depending on the extent of the damage. Which is why you are a better candidate for a high-profile resuscitation than many other patients. An accident victim would not suit this at all. I think the problem was that you made a better recovery than they ever expected. The anticipation, even by the time I joined the team, was that your recovery would be extremely long and slow, more akin to that of a coma recovery, where the patient has to re-learn practically everything, and that takes months or even years, if it happens at all. They would have assumed that you would not be communicative or peripatetic for between eight fourteen months after the initial procedure.”
“This part of the operation probably all happened much quicker than Warwick planned then,” Philip speculated. “And maybe a little more contentious than they imagined. There’s a full discussion with the Ethics Commission and just about every religious and social leader in the country on the 1st of June, so it’s still being investigated even after they’ve announced your death.”
The Relic Keeper Page 28