Genesis Alpha

by Rune Michaels

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Rune Michaels

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole

  or in part in any form.

  Book design by Mike Rosamilia

  The text for this book is set in Aldine401BT.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-1886-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-1886-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-44241-991-9

  To Kjartan

  for his love, support, humor, panic treatment, and plot rescues—and never-ending patience with “researching” computer games

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to—

  My editor, Ginee Seo, and her assistant editor, Jordan Brown, for all their brilliant insights, suggestions, good humor, and patient hand-holding.

  My agent, George Nicholson, for his faith and encouragement.

  Everybody behind the scenes at Simon & Schuster, whose names I may not know but whose hard work and enthusiasm I appreciate.

  Pam and Sarah, first readers and first critics, for patiently following me all the way from the first draft.

  Ola, who responded graciously to panicked, last-minute medical questions.

  Þórunn, who provided helpful insights into cat midwifery.

  Jón Bjarni and Sigrún, who gave me excellent feedback through critiquecircle.com, and Sara Elísabet, for being Sara.

  And my family: Tristan and Tamíla whose purring keeps me sane, and Kjartan, who knows a million loving ways to tell me to stop whining and start writing.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  We were playing a computer game the day it happened.

  Genesis Alpha. It’s the greatest game ever invented, and it’s huge, a whole universe filled with thousands of people from all over the world. It’s got everything: space battles and swordfights, aliens and elves, planets and cities and underground systems. I can play for hours every day, especially when my brother Max joins me.

  I play at home after school, Max from a computer lab somewhere on campus. He’s older than me, and he’s away at college, so mostly we keep in touch through the game.

  We fought Kreepz that day. They had enslaved the entire population of Yartan 3. The slaves were kept in caves deep underground, mining precious metals from the earth. So there was a lot of treasure to be had, yartanite and black diamonds.

  The underground cave system was huge, but apart from the big gangsters at the entrance, the Kreepz guards down below weren’t all that tough. So we split up. Alezander—that’s Max’s character name—took care of the east side while I did the west side. Alezander had his Bloodstone axe, and I had my broadsword. That’s the coolest thing about Genesis Alpha. You can fly around in a spaceship and run around cities with a machine gun, but when you go down on a primitive planet, you wear old-fashioned chain-mail armor and wield a sword or a crossbow. It’s got the best of all worlds.

  I shot through the tunnels, killed a lot of Kreepz, and opened any locked doors I came across, freeing the slaves. They thanked me and rushed off, out of the caves and toward freedom. I emptied out the whole area, filling my bags with stuff. Then I went back to the entrance, still littered with the bones of the gangster Kreepz, and waited for Alezander.

  We always split everything even. That’s how Max wanted it, although it really would be fair that he got the bigger half because he’s been playing Genesis Alpha longer and his character is bigger and stronger than mine. But Max always said it was too much bother, so we’d just put the loot in one big pile, pick out any good items we wanted to keep, sell the rest, and split the cash.

  Alezander never returned.

  He was still online, but he didn’t respond when I sent him an instant message. So I returned into the caves to search for him.

  Alezander was standing still in one of the guard cells, surrounded by Kreepz bones, and one small Kreepz was hitting him but not doing any damage. I quickly finished it off and then checked out Alezander.

  Alezander was there, but Max wasn’t. If you turn off your computer without logging off first, you freeze inside the game, like a statue, and if you don’t return to the game quickly, moss starts growing on you. It’s really funny. If you stay away a long time, the statue gets splattered with bird droppings and graffiti and eventually starts to crumble. No moss had started growing on Alezander yet, but his eyes had frozen; he no longer blinked. So I knew he’d been disconnected.

  I wasn’t worried. It’s not like it had never happened before. Max would have friends come over and drag him away from the computer and he would just hit the off button, wouldn’t even spare the time to say good-bye. Or he’d be playing in class and suddenly have to hide what he was doing from the teacher. It’s really frustrating when he drops off without warning when we’re in the middle of something important, and this time we’d planned to use the treasure from this mission to raise some cash for more mines and ammo, then fly directly to another place, Toxic Mountain, where we had unfinished business from last weekend.

  Not today. I kicked Max’s statue and went back to my spaceship for a solo mission.

  A couple of hours later the phone rang. Downstairs, Mom answered.

  And everything changed.

  “My God, Max, what happened?” Mom yelled into the phone, loud enough to carry upstairs and into my room despite the closed door, loud enough to break through my concentration. Max hardly ever phones home and Mom hardly ever yells, so I knew right away something was wrong. I ran out of the ruined city with a horde of mad Milas shooting at me, jumped into my spaceship, and locked it up. Then I made my way out of my room to the top of the stairs, listening.

  Mom was standing at the old desk by the kitchen, where they keep an old-fashioned phone, with a rotary dial and everything. She said something to Max, but I didn’t hear. Dad appeared at the door to the kitchen, holding his favorite mug. Max got it for him for Father’s Day once. It has a picture of Freud on it, and it says “Sometimes coffee is just coffee. Except when it’s tea.”

  “What?” Dad asked when he saw the look on Mom’s face. A few drops sloshed over the rim of the mug as he hurried over to her. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  Mom shook her head at him and turned away, hunching over the phone. “Max” was the only thing I could make out. She talked urgently, but her voice was too low to carry. Then she hung up and put both hands on the desk, leaning over it as she took deep breaths.

  “What? Laura, what did he say?” Dad asked. I inched toward the stairs. “Is Max okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom said faintly.

  “What did he say?”

  �
��He’s . . . he’s been . . . arrested.”

  I gasped. One time Alezander got locked up in a prison cell on the Dak colony. I nearly got killed before the militia guards surrendered, but no explosives worked on that door. I had to pay a fortune for special bioengineered lock picks.

  Dad’s mug rattled as it hit the table. “Arrested? For what?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say. He didn’t say anything. He sounded . . . so scared and confused. He said to get him a lawyer.” Mom clutched her head with both hands, looking wildly up at Dad. “Do we know a lawyer?”

  I went with them to the police station. I didn’t ask permission, just followed them and sat in the back of the car, silent. It worked. They knew I was there, but they were too busy thinking about Max and didn’t bother telling me to stay behind.

  “What could it be about?” Mom said. She was sitting in the passenger seat. Mom tends to drive too fast under normal circumstances, so when she’s upset it’s not a good idea for her to drive at all. “Drugs, Jack? Do you think he’s doing drugs?”

  Max, doing drugs? I grinned at the thought, and I must have made a sound because Dad frowned at me in the rearview mirror. But it was funny. Max doesn’t even drink, he never has. He thinks it’s stupid to ingest something that makes your mind go all weird. He says he wants to be in control of his own brain, all the time.

  Then we got to the jail and nothing was funny anymore.

  Max has been in custody three weeks now. That’s almost a month.

  A lot can happen in a month.

  Like my birthday, not that anyone noticed. I’m thirteen now.

  I was twelve when the girl died.

  Back when it all started, I was one of ten.

  Well—it might have been nine. Or seven. Or eleven. I don’t know.

  But one of ten sounds good, so that’s what I’ve always imagined.

  Ten embryos, three days after the gametes—my mother’s egg and my father’s sperm—had merged inside a test tube. Ten clusters of maybe eight cells in a petri dish in a sterile white laboratory, filled with people in white coats hunched over scientific equipment.

  They were looking at me.

  Me, and my nine sisters and brothers—only not really brothers and sisters because they were only undifferentiated cells, not people yet.

  I always imagine my mother being one of the people in the white coats, because she is a biologist, and she worked at that lab. But she wasn’t. She was at home, filled with hormones and anxiety, waiting for me, hoping for me.

  I know how it happened. I’ve read about it, and Mom has explained, and I see it so clearly in my head that it’s almost like I was there.

  Well, I was there. I just didn’t have eyes or hands or a heart or a brain or anything yet. I was only a small bubble of DNA.

  The biologists removed one cell from each of us, teased one cell away from the others. They put each tiny cell through genetic tests, examining the nucleus carefully, checking if any of us matched my brother. The scientists were my mother’s colleagues—her friends—and they knew how important this was. So they must have been excited to find me, probably smiled down at me through the electron microscope, thrilled with being able to help my mom.

  So they let me grow some more and then they put me inside my mother’s womb. My cells kept multiplying, and I became more than an embryo. My heart and brain started to develop, I got elbows and toes and webbed fingers and a tail. Later I lost my tail, grew eyelids and fingerprints, I breathed water, sucked my thumb and got hiccups that made my mother laugh at Max’s bedside, his eyes wide as Mom placed his hand on her stomach and he felt me kick into his palm.

  At eight months—eight instead of nine, because my brother couldn’t wait any longer—they cut my mother open, and I was born, a whole baby, a person. My brother’s savior.

  I saved my brother’s life the day I was born. Minutes after I was pulled into the world, they took the blood from my umbilical cord, then they extracted the stem cells and injected them into him, to replace the cells that had already been killed by chemotherapy and radiation.

  It worked. My cells cured him. It’s been thirteen years, and he’s not sick now, he doesn’t have a deadly disease, he’s alive and healthy.

  Without me, he wouldn’t exist. Without him, I wouldn’t exist.

  That makes us more than brothers.

  We sat in a waiting room with peeling yellow paint. We sat in an office with police detectives asking questions. They questioned me too, lots of questions about Max, what we did together, which games we played, who his friends were, until Dad got up and yelled that we’d better get a lawyer for us too. By that time the reporters had found out, but Max’s lawyer found us a back exit, so we got out of there okay.

  There’s silence in the car on the way home. It’s late and we’re all exhausted yet so wired, the atmosphere vibrates with tension.

  We didn’t even get to see Max.

  I stare out the window at the shadows dancing on the sidewalk, and I start thinking about the view from my booster seat, back when I was little. I loved to pretend I was bigger and sit in the regular seat, even though that meant I barely saw out the window and would get carsick. Sometimes Max let me switch with him, and our parents wouldn’t notice, or they would act like they didn’t notice. I loved that. I’d sit there, pretending to be a big kid, straining to see out the window, while Max would hunker on my booster seat, his head almost touching the ceiling, and whenever our eyes met we’d grin, knowing we were sharing a secret right there behind our parents’ backs. It was a silly game, but we liked secrets. I loved sharing a secret with my big brother.

  I can’t believe this is happening to us.

  I know what Max is accused of. When the girl was found, it was all over the news for ages. I know her name, I’ve seen her smile and laugh in home movie clips shown on television, and I know what happened to her. She lived not far from here, and when they found her body, a couple of months ago, it was a huge story.

  It can’t be true that Max did that. You have to be evil to do something like that.

  If Max were evil, I would know. It can’t be possible to live with someone, to grow up with someone, and not know they’re that evil.

  If Max were evil, when would it have happened?

  In the second grade? The seventh grade? In high school? At college?

  What makes people evil?

  I can’t think of anything that would turn a good person into a bad person, so I begin to wonder if some people are simply born bad. Then I start seeing babies in my head, crawling around with knives in their hands and evil sneers on their chubby faces, and that seems ridiculous too.

  It’s impossible. It has to be a mistake. Evil is something nameless, faceless, something dark and sinister and alien. Or something ugly and twisted, like the monsters I meet in Genesis Alpha. Evil can’t be something that lives in your house, that smiles and laughs and always find you the coolest birthday present.

  Mom and Dad are talking in the front seat, fast and furiously. About lawyers, the press, a plan, a strategy, and I hear them both take deep breaths, and they frequently remind each other not to panic. I lean my head against the cool window, close my eyes, and let their voices wash over me, my mind filtering out the words so I hear only the tone, like the rise and fall of a melody.

  I’ll have to play Genesis Alpha alone this weekend. Somehow that’s worst of all. Max and I always play together weekends. It’s a tradition. Saturday morning we wake up early, I at home, he at college, and we play from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. Mom doesn’t like how much time I spend online. She keeps trying to restrict my gaming time, but Max came up with this plan. “Teenagers like to sleep until noon,” he told me, grinning. “Just let Mom think you’re sleeping in, and she won’t bother you. Use headphones so she won’t hear the audio, and wear your pajamas. That way you can say you just woke up if they come bug you.”

  It’s funny, because I remember the way Mom used to moan ab
out how Max would sleep past noon if she let him, and for a moment I wonder if he was really playing computer games back then.

  I clench my hands and want to punch the bad thoughts away. I don’t know why they sneak into my head like this. This is Max. My brother. He’s the victim of some terrible police mistake. It could just as well have happened to me, or to anyone.

  “You okay back there, Josh?” Dad asks, and Mom twists around in her seat to look at me.

  I nod. “Sure. Just tired.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Mom says. “Tomorrow will be better.” She tries to smile at me, her face stiff with anxiety. “You’ve been great today, honey. Very brave through all this, and I know it must be scary.”

  I pull a face at my half-invisible image in the window and want to tell them I’m not a little kid anymore. I know what happened to Karen Crosse—I’ve followed the news. It was horrible, and it was real, nothing at all like horror movies, when you know it’s all fake. I’m used to that kind of violence, the fake kind. I’ve read books with blood and gore on every page and played computer games where brains splatter all over the screen.

  I’m not a big fan of those, though. I prefer big adventure games with a story line as well as action, adventures, and lots of good and evil. When you first start playing Genesis Alpha, you’re completely neutral. Not good, not evil. What you become depends on how you play the game, which decisions you make. The game forces you to choose. Sometimes you need to do evil things to get a special item or enter a place or something. Like in the quest to get the Seal of Fire, you need to break into a citizen’s house, and if you can’t sneak past the people in there, they’ll attack you for breaking into their house and then you have to kill them if you want to finish the quest. So I’ve tried it plenty of times. I don’t like it very much. It just feels wrong.

  Alezander prefers being good too. He doesn’t go around slaying wandering animals or peaceful citizens, like some people do. Just enemies or bad guys. I let out a breath as I realize how important this is. It’s almost like evidence. If Max were a psychopathic killer, he’d like to do evil things, and Alezander would be evil too. But I guess the police wouldn’t think that was good enough proof.