UnDivided
Page 16
“Then be one now, because you deserve it. Be a child, if only for one night.”
The last person to suggest such a thing was Pastor Dan. The night before he was killed by an explosion that was meant for Lev.
Neither of them speak for a moment. If Elina is uncomfortable with the silence, she doesn’t show it. Then she begins to gently rub his back and sing to him in Arápache. Her voice is sweet, if not entirely on key. Lev has learned enough of the language to know what the song is about. It’s a lullaby, perhaps one she used to sing to Wil when he was very little. It speaks of the moon and the mountain. How the mountain pushes forth from the earth, reaching ever skyward in a vain attempt to grab the moon, but the mischievous moon keeps slipping behind the mountain’s peak to hide, remaining forever unattainable. Lev thinks of the challenge of his animal spirit—to bring down the moon—and he wonders if Elina even realizes what she’s singing. Not a lullaby, but a lament.
When she’s done, Lev’s eyes are closed, and he’s slowed his breathing to a gentle snuffle. Elina leaves, probably thinking he’s asleep, but he’s not. Lev will not sleep well tonight, if he sleeps at all. As much as he thought he wanted it, he is immune to a normal life and is addicted to a life of dangerous sway. He must make a difference out there. He must satisfy the hunger, elbowing himself a place at the feast.
The council dismissed his petition out of hand. Perhaps petitions are too tame an approach. Perhaps what Lev needs is a method that’s more extreme. He’s seen extreme. He’s lived it. He knows how to play with fire. Perhaps this time he can use what he knows to serve his own ends, not someone else’s.
He shares none of this with Elina, or Una, or with anyone else on the reservation. But silently and alone, he begins to plan.
Today he failed to change the world.
As for tomorrow, who can tell?
24 • Cam
Security at the Molokai complex is state-of-the-art and extreme. No one gets into the compound who doesn’t belong there. The outside fences are electrified and tranq-charged. The gates boast scanners that can sniff you and decode your DNA just as easily as tell your brand of deodorant. Only the best for Proactive Citizenry’s bioresearch facility. Unfortunately, all security systems are flawed and limited by the arrogance of whoever designed it. In this case, the designers were arrogant enough to think that they only needed to secure the place from people on the outside. No one counts on a fox that’s already inside the fence.
Newly tweaked and effectively remotivated, Camus Comprix is, for all intents and purposes, glitch-free. True, there may still be some issues, but in a few short days Cam will be the problem of the US military, and his issues will go with him. General Bodeker has not only purchased his physical self, but his emotional self as well. Not just his presence but his problems, whatever they turn out to be.
Cam goes for a daily run on the expansive grounds of the compound, where sugarcane and taro root still grow right up to the edge of cliffs overlooking the sea. It’s all still harvested and sold—Proactive Citizenry is all about employing local residents and paying them higher-than-standard wages to satisfy the organization’s need to feel they are Forward-Thinking for Humanity®. Roberta, and everyone else who is a part of Proactive Citizenry, seem to believe in the good work they’re doing. They also believe in getting extremely rich while doing it.
Cam doesn’t run alone. He’s not allowed. One of the guards, a particularly bouef one, always joins him. Safety in numbers. They weave along the path that runs at the edge of the fields that grow year round, harvested in staggered intervals. Some patches are clear-cut, others still green. As they move from a clear-cut area and into tall cane, Cam bursts into a sudden sprint, catching his jogging partner off guard. The path curves left, and as soon as he’s out of the guard’s view, Cam turns sharply, disappearing into the cane.
“Mr. Comprix!” he hears the guard shout. They all call him “Mister” here. Cam pushes on, knowing exactly where he’s going, trying to keep from knocking down the cane and creating an obvious path. The stiff leaves whip at his face as he barrels through, stinging, but he doesn’t care. For a moment he wonders if he’s miscalculated, and if he’ll come from the field into an unexpected ocean inlet, where he’d go flying off the edge of a cliff to his doom.
“Mr. Comprix!” No doubt his jogging companion is now talking into his ear piece, spreading the word that Cam is AWOL.
He comes to another path, a wider one, but crosses over it, into a thick copse of bamboo that grows much higher than the cane. The bamboo is dense and hard to push through. It’s there for one reason—to create an environmentally aesthetic façade for the facility behind it. In other words, to hide it. The place doesn’t appear on maps. It doesn’t even show up in satellite photos, at least not the ones available to the public. From the outside it appears to be just a warehouse—the way a movie studio soundstage is a warehouse: a large hollow building that can be redesigned on the inside to be whatever is needed at the time.
There’s no telling what Proactive Citizenry has tinkered and toyed with here. Perhaps this is where they began the great agave extinction by genetically engineering the agave-specific Cyan Snout weevil, but only after buying up massive quantities of tequila that now goes for thousands of dollars a bottle. Or maybe this is where they grafted new faces on people in the Witness Relocation Program—a lucrative government contract that they had for eight years until the program’s budget was cut, making it no longer worthwhile. Or maybe this is where they did all that intensive research that brought about the cure for muscular dystrophy. While the third one was something Proactive Citizenry widely publicized, the first two Cam found unexpectedly while hacking their computer system.
From Cam’s vantage point at the fence, he sees three FedEx trucks at the front entrance. Workers unload cargo. One of the drivers, in familiar purple-and-black shirt and shorts, hands a clipboard to none other than Roberta, who is there to sign for the delivery. Cam thinks it odd that Proactive Citizenry wouldn’t use their own private delivery trucks to shuttle this cargo from the airport, but then maybe the CEO of FedEx is on Proactive Citizenry’s board. After all, it’s the preferred philanthropic organization of corporate America. The more Cam considers it, the more he realizes it must be true. How ingenious! Why go to the mountain when you can use an existing infrastructure to move the mountain to you, one piece at a time?
Cam leaves, having seen what he needed to see. He heads back through the bamboo, takes a different route, cutting through the cane and taro, then onto the jogging path once more, completing his jog back to the house.
One of the ubiquitous guards stands there, not too pleased. “Found him,” he says into his earpiece, then to Cam, “Where’ve you been?”
“Shortcut through the sugarcane. Bad idea, though, the stuff hurts.” He wipes some blood from one of several small scratches on his face.
“Do us all a favor and stick to the path next time. We get crap every time you don’t toe the line.”
“Gotta make life interesting.”
“Dull is fine by me.”
As he goes up to take a shower, Cam considers what he had seen. Those could have been shipments of just about anything, except for one fact. The shipping containers were FedEx stasis packs. Refrigerated. Perfect for live organs, although they’re not usually used for that. But then, Proactive Citizenry knows how to do things without raising red flags. A FedEx plane flies in and out of Molokai daily. How many parts, Cam wonders, are flowing into this complex every day? With so much going in, it’s only a matter of time before things begin coming out. . . .
• • •
Roberta doesn’t trust Cam the way she used to—but like the designers of the security system, she trusts herself and her own ability not to be outwitted. Herein lies the problem of building someone smarter than yourself—because even with the nanite “worm” selectively routing his memory, Cam has no problem duplicating the holographic digital signature of her security badge. That’s
easy. The hard part is finding a way to convince the security computer that Roberta is in two places at once, because an identity signature pinging from two separate locations is certain to trip an alarm. In the end, he takes a different tack, and instead convinces the server that today is, in fact, yesterday. Since no one told the computer that there’s no such thing as time travel, it sees nothing out of the ordinary when history repeats itself in a different place.
The rear door of the secret facility—the factory hidden within the bamboo—opens as obediently as Aladdin’s cave to the correct “open sesame,” now that he has cloned Roberta’s badge.
Cam isn’t sure whether it would help or hinder him to know why he’s doing this. All he knows—and he knows this beyond a shadow of a doubt—is that The Girl whose love motivates him is worth it. The fact that he doesn’t know who she is anymore is irrelevant: His pretweaked self knew, and he trusts that self more than he trusts himself now.
It’s five thirty a.m. There are plenty of guards, but they’re anything but quiet, and he can hide long before they pass by on their routine patrols. There are also plenty of security cameras, but he already has the monitors running happy little video loops of quiet little hallways. The place is his to explore.
Using Roberta’s forged security card, he gains access into several rooms. They’re all the same. Long wards lined with empty beds, perhaps fifty in each. It’s in the fourth room he visits that he hits the jackpot.
In this room, the beds are occupied.
He had a suspicion of what he might see, but imagining it and seeing it are two different things.
In each bed is a rewind, like himself . . . and yet not like himself. Some still wear bandages, but others, whose healing is further along, have the bandages removed, so he can see their faces and much of their bodies. These rewinds bear none of the aesthetic grace that Cam does. They are sloppy and ugly, as if assembled with the perfunctory hand of a hack, or worse, an assembly line. There is no regard to symmetry, or to the balancing of skin tone. Seams cut at strange angles across each figure, and the scars are far worse than any scars Cam ever had. While his scars were treated to disappear over time, he suspects these will have no such treatment.
None of them have yet awakened. They are all in an induced state of preconsciousness—a sort of integration gestation. He suspects that they are being kept comatose much longer than Cam was, as their many parts heal themselves into living beings. This building is their womb, and Cam realizes that this is where he must have begun as well. As Cam walks down the aisle, looking to his left and right at these preconscious beings, he finds it hard to catch his breath, as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the room.
There is one thing they all share other than the commonality of their randomness. Each of them has a mark on the right ankle. At first he thinks they’re tattoos, but when he looks closer he sees that they’re actually seared into the skin. They’re brands. And they say PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY followed by a serial number. The one Cam examines is numbered 00042. The presence of three zeroes suggests they will eventually number in the tens of thousands.
I am the idea, thinks Cam, but they are the reality. And finally, he sees his place in all of this. He will be the face the world sees. The one they become comfortable with. The public image of the military rewind. He’ll be an officer, lauded and honored, and as such, he will not only open the door, but also pave the way for an army of rewinds. Perhaps it will start small. A special force called upon for a key maneuver somewhere in the world, for there are always American interests to protect somewhere, some violent insurgency that must be addressed. REWINDS SAVE THE DAY! the headlines will read. Just as people became complacent and comfortable with unwinding, they will do the same for rewinding. What a fine thing, people will say, that the unwanted bits of humanity can be reformed and repurposed to serve the greater good. Like the way unwanted pork parts can be ground and pressed and reformed into a tasty pimento loaf. Cam would be sick to his stomach, but he feels he doesn’t have the right, because now, more than ever before, he truly has the sense that his stomach is not his own.
“Cam?”
He turns to see Roberta standing at the entrance. Good. He’s glad she’s here.
“You didn’t have to sneak in here. I would have shown you, if you had asked.” Which is, of course, a lie—she already told him her work was top secret. His instinct is to point an accusing finger for the blatant hubris of what she’s done here, but instead, he plays his emotions close, hoping she doesn’t see the bile collecting within him, and he tells her calmly, “I could have asked, but I wanted to see them on my own terms.”
“And how do you feel about what you see?” She watches him closely, so he buries his fury and revulsion. Instead he allows only an acceptable amount of ambivalence to bubble to the surface. “I knew I wasn’t the be-all and end-all of your work . . . but to see it is . . .”
“Distressing?”
“Sobering,” he says. “And maybe a little enlightening.” He looks to the closest rewind, who stirs slightly in preconscious slumber. “Was an army always your plan?”
“Certainly not!” she says, a bit insulted by the suggestion. “But even my dreams must give way to reality. It was the military who expressed an interest in what we could do, the military who could afford to fund it. So here we are.”
And then Cam realizes that he’s the one who made all this possible. He’s the one who romanced General Bodeker and Senator Cobb. Of course, the military doesn’t need rewinds who can speak nine languages, recite poetry, and play the guitar. It needs rewinds who follow orders. Nonentities who are legally considered “property,” who don’t need to be paid, and who have no rights.
“You look pensive.” Roberta comes closer to get a good look at him. He doesn’t flinch or crack in the least.
“I was thinking how brilliant it is.”
“Really?”
“Soldiers who have no families to go back to? Whose entire identity begins with their military service? A stroke of genius! And I’ll bet you can tweak them the way you tweaked me—to find their greatest satisfaction in their service.”
Roberta smiles, but hesitantly. “I’m impressed that you’ve grasped the scope of this so quickly.”
“It’s . . . visionary,” Cam tells her. “Perhaps one day I’ll be the commanding officer of all my rewind brethren.”
“Perhaps you will be.”
He turns and walks casually to the door. Roberta walks beside him, watching him, always watching him. “Now that you know, you can put it to rest, and get on with your life. And it will be a glorious life, Cam. They need it to be. You must be seen as a prince among peasants, and General Bodeker knows that. You will want for nothing. You will be treated with respect. You will be happy.”
And so he beams for her, to project the impression that he already is happy. Roberta once told him his eyes came from a boy who could melt a girl’s heart with a single glance. She probably never considered how effectively they could be weaponized against her.
“It’s dawn,” Cam says. “I don’t know about you, but I’m up for an early breakfast.”
“Splendid. I’ll let the kitchen know when we get back to the mansion.”
As they leave, Cam turns to take one last look at the room full of preconscious rewinds.
These truly are my brothers and sisters, he thinks. And they must never be allowed to be born.
Part Four
* * *
This Lane Must Exit
HEADLINES . . .
* * *
National Geographic, May 4, 2014
SWAPPING YOUNG BLOOD FOR OLD REVERSES AGING
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140504-swapping-young-blood-for-old-reverses-aging/
* * *
BBC News–Scotland, June 24, 2014
WOMAN TO BE FIRST IN UK TO HAVE DOUBLE HAND TRANSPLANT
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-27999349
* * *
DOCTORS GROW NOSE ON MAN’S FOREHEAD
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/09/25/doctors-grow-nose-on-mans-forehead/
* * *
The Boston Globe, March 19, 2008
EX-DOCTOR CONFESSES TO STEALING BODY PARTS
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/03/19/ex_doctor_confesses_to_stealing_body_parts/
* * *
The Huffington Post, July 6, 2013
HUMAN HEAD TRANSPLANTS NOW POSSIBLE, ITALIAN NEUROSCIENTIST SAYS
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/head-transplant-italian-neuroscientist_n_3533391.html
25 • Starkey
Safe within the isolated power plant, Mason Michael Starkey luxuriates in his particular addiction. He knows he’s a junkie now. The chemical receptors of his brain have tuned to the ecstasy of power. It pumps through his veins, feeding his body and spirit so that he thrives in the kind of glory he never dared to imagine in the days before his unwind order. He should thank his adoptive parents for signing it, and setting in motion the gears that have turned him into something far better than what he was. The wayward stork has now become for all storks the new symbol of liberty.
Especially now that the old one has seen better days.
“Did you hear? They’re sending the Statue of Liberty’s old arm on tour,” Garson DeGrutte told him, “like they did with King Tut, and all that crap from the Titanic. Like people are gonna pay to see an old copper arm.”
“People will,” Starkey said, “because people are nuts. They’ll hold on to bits of the past like they’re still worth something.” Then he looked Garson in the eye. “What would you rather have: shreds of the past or the whole of the future?”