The external speaker of the cab crackled into life.
“Where to, love?”
Normally Ami would have thought it ridiculous how the taxi company tried to give the impression that taking a cab was still a charming nostalgic experience, as it had been in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but she was feeling too ill to worry about such things.
“Wez Dealing please.”
The speaker responded.
“I’m sorry love. I didn’t quite catch the address.”
“Maddolay, Wez Dealing, please.”
“Sorry. Could you repeat that address more clearly, please?”
The controller at the taxi headquarters thought that perhaps the customer was drunk, although she didn’t let it bother her. She was pretty good at deciphering slurred and drunken speech but this customer’s slurring was worse than normal. Ami summoned all the coordination that she could find and spoke forcefully.
“Mattock. Lane. West. Ealing. Please.”
“Address recognised. You may enter the vehicle.”
As the taxi cruised along the roads, taking its almost unconscious passenger home, Ami was so glad to be sitting down. Her legs were feeling like jelly. When she got out of the cab, having finally scanned her credit card through the payment machine after three failed attempts, she opened the garden gate and started staggering up the garden path. Two men approached her from behind.
“You need to come with us, Mrs. Durand.”
The two men moved alongside her, one either side, and took hold of her arms to support her.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere where you’ll soon feel a lot better.”
It was a struggle to speak but for some reason she felt an obligation to go with these strangers to wherever they wanted to take her. They took her to their van that had followed the taxi and one of them slid open the side door whilst the other guided her inside. Ami passed out on the metal floor.
Forty-five minutes later she was on a trolley, being pushed along sterile corridors and through a door marked Lab A1. She felt much better now, physically, but couldn’t find any strength to resist her captors. Indeed, she felt that she wanted to please them and was willing to do whatever they said. She couldn’t remember her name or what she had been doing earlier in the morning, but she knew that these people wanted her to help them, and so she should do whatever they wanted her to do. She slid off the trolley and stood still, waiting for the next instructions. A stern looking, grey-haired man in a white lab-coat spoke to her in a soft voice that belied his appearance.
“Please take off your clothes. All of them. And then lay down on the metal table in front of you.”
Ami did as she was told, not even considering the fact that she was in a strange place, surrounded by strange people, and that the request to strip off her clothes was entirely inappropriate. She took off her designer maternity dress and stood there in her bra and panties.
“All your clothes please.”
Ami apologised and took off the rest of her underwear before settling herself on the same table that had been the final resting place of the anonymous homeless girl seven years earlier, when the first successful guided soul transfer had taken place.
However, this time there was no human volunteer in the transparent chamber at the other end of the transference equipment. That particular experiment had been repeated many times and was now considered to be scientifically viable and verifiable. This was a different experiment entirely as the baby inside Ami’s womb already had a soul and this experiment would be even more macabre than the previous ones.
Cloning technology had come along in leaps and bounds since the first successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996. Limbs, eyes, organs could now be grown and transplanted back into their original stem cell donors – this was now common practice for those who could afford the process. The first adult human had been cloned a year earlier, the ethical obstacles that had prevented such processes taking place earlier being overcome by the relentless political momentum of the ONP, The clone in the receiving chamber had the appearance of a twenty year old woman, although she had only actually been alive for twenty days.
Thomas was impatient and was expecting a lot from the cloning team, but there was still the problem of the waiting period whilst the clone baby matured. If the growth rate couldn’t be accelerated, then it served no purpose as far as Thomas was concerned. He needed an adult clone into which to transfer his soul; there was no advantage in transferring his soul into a baby and then waiting twenty years or so whilst the clone matured. That wouldn’t change things at all and would give Nathan ample opportunity to take back his crown. Thomas wasn’t getting any younger and he needed this technology to work so he ensured that more and more resources were poured into the project, paid for by higher taxation, increasing profits retained and available to The Order.
Scientists had recently experienced a breakthrough. Doctors had used the human growth hormone (HGH) for decades to treat growth deficiencies in children and adults, but had been unable to gain any positive reaction when implanted into clone babies. In fact, initially there had been no effect whatsoever. But when the research scientists increased the dosage of HGH to what should have been intolerable levels they recorded the first positive signs of accelerated growth in clone babies.
Their euphoria was, however, short-lived. The growth rate of the babies increased significantly until they were faced with a clone baby that was growing at a rate of one year’s physical maturity every twenty-four hours. Unfortunately the scientists hadn’t managed to find a way to slow down the growth rate and after eighty days they were left with an eighty day old clone that looked like an eighty year old human, and that died soon after. The obvious solution would be to apply an equal measure of a growth inhibiting hormone (GHIH) on the twentieth day, halting the unnatural rate of growth and leaving a twenty day old clone (with the appearance of a twenty year old adult) who would then continue to grow at the normal human growth rate. This had been unsuccessful so far but Thomas demanded that experiments to transfer a human soul into an adult clone should continue, regardless. He wasn’t concerned that the clone would probably only live another sixty days. He certainly didn’t consider the clones as people.
The clone was physically sound. It could move its limbs, it could breathe unaided, and it could blink its eyes when necessary. All the normal involuntary actions that we humans do without even thinking, the clone could also do. It was a beautiful specimen, with long blond hair, full rounded breasts, a slim waist, perfectly proportioned hips and long legs that many women would be rightfully envious of. In fact, it was the spitting image of a young university student, Trudi DeWitt, who had been plucked off the street in the same manner as Ami, and whose ashes were now part of the atmosphere, having served their latest purpose of providing energy to the National Power Grid. If they could have seen it Trudi’s parents would have sworn that this body in the other half of the soul transference appliance was indeed their daughter, but the clone was missing one important component. It didn’t have a soul. It was a shell, acting upon basic instinctive impulses.
Todd Jones had been present at the first ever successful soul transfer experiment and had been involved in almost all experiments since. He often wondered what had happened to his colleague, Wolzenik but he didn’t miss him. Wolzenik’s sudden disappearance had left a vacancy for a senior lab technician, a position which he gratefully accepted.
Professor Ivanov took his surgical scalpel and drew it across Ami’s belly, pressing harder until a gaping wound opened up. Blood trickled down her body and through the 1cm holes into a drip-tray below. She had passed out. The professor drew the baby from its mother’s womb, having first clamped off the umbilical cord. This was probably unnecessary, bearing in mind what was to follow, but it had become a habit for the doctor to do this.
The baby was placed into the donor incubator and the lid closed, the rubber seals preventing unwanted air fr
om entering or leaving. A button was pressed and the air was sucked out of the baby’s incubator. The new-born started to show the same symptoms as Ray Greenway had seven years earlier; she didn’t survive very long. Her mother had already died from severe loss of blood.
The activity monitors picked up movement from the baby’s soul – it was leaving the body. The same network of airlocks guided the released soul into the incubator where the clone was waiting.
“Professor! The soul has completed the transfer. The clone has a soul. We’ve done it!”
The professor looked over his spectacles at his subordinate.
“You mean I’ve done it Jones. I’ve done it. Not we.”
“Of course sir.”
The professor addressed the rest of his staff.
“OK. Well done everybody. Cunningham – tell the Clone Care team to come and collect this new creation. She may only live a couple more months but there’s a lot of information we can gain by observing her. Riddle, you can dispose of the baby, and Watson – you can get rid of the mother. Jones will supervise you. He’s quite the expert now. Bryant, you and Young can clean up in here. I’m going to my office and shall celebrate with an excellent twelve year-old Scotch whisky.”
Chapter 22
9 p.m. Friday, 3rd May, 2058
The clone observation team were busy making their laboratory as clean and orderly as possible. They had received a message that the Pindar himself, Thomas McCall, would be paying them a visit, an event that didn't happen often and was akin to a royal visit. A young bespectacled man in a crisp white lab coat slid through the door, stopping sharply when the soles of his shoes suddenly gained traction.
"He's here! Look busy!"
Just as employees had done for decades when facing a visit from top management, people opened spreadsheets on their computers and picked up their interactive clip-boards in an effort to look industrious. Actually the laboratory staff had plenty of time to prepare themselves before Thomas hauled his way into the laboratory, placing his crutches before him and all but dragging his legs behind him. It was an ungainly way of moving around but Thomas was determined not to give in and resort to the use of a wheelchair. He was greeted by a smiling Professor Ingram, the head of the Clone Development and Observation department.
"Mr. Pindar, sir. Welcome to our humble abode."
Thomas returned neither the smile nor the pleasantry.
"Where's the clone then? I don't have all day."
He was led to a corner of the room where a fifty-nine year old woman was laying in an oversized cot. The young woman of twenty years of age that had received the baby's soul had been replaced by an older version of herself - still attractive, but with a few lines that had been given to her by the aging process, and more than a few grey hairs. The oversized nappy that she wore was a stark reminder that this was still - in essence - a baby, complete with a baby's physical and mental limitations, unable to fend for herself, unable to do anything other than what all fifty-nine day old babies can do... sleep, cry, eat (although having teeth the clone was able to eat normal food), and fill her nappy.
Thomas turned to Professor Ingram.
“That’s it, is it? Billions of pounds of research money and all you can show me is a giant baby?”
“We are making progress, sir.”
“What progress? I can’t see any bloody progress.”
“With your authorisation, I’d like to try approaching the problem from a slightly different angle.”
"What angle would that be?"
"Well sir, perhaps we should try passing a soul into a very young clone, perhaps - I hesitate to use the word – a baby. Maybe the clone needs a soul from the start, not added later. The adult clones look mature, but they’re like a computer without an operating system. Totally useless. Look at Trudi 001."
"Trudi 001?"
“We assign a unique identifier to them according to the name of the original stem cell donor. This is the first clone grown from a donor named Trudi. I don’t know what her surname was.”
“And I’m not interested in her surname, or how you catalogue the products.”
"The donor will have to be a Recarn, but we’re having trouble getting volunteers; people are fine about soul-transference from human to human – after all, that’s just a natural part of the life process, but moving the soul into a clone – a clone that has unresolvable problems as yet, that’s frightening people off.”
“Why does the donor need to be a Recarn?”
“Because, sir, we Recarns remember our past lives when we are seven years old. The point of the project is to transfer a Recarn soul into a clone, is it not? If the donor is a Recarn, it will understand our objectives better and can give us a valuable insight into the process. But, as I said, getting Recarn volunteers is proving difficult these days.”
Thomas didn’t much care for the attitude of Professor Ingram. He found it condescending. The man was an employee, not even a member of the Illuminati. Did he think that he would let a little thing like a shortage of volunteers get in the way of progress?
"I don’t see a problem, Professor Ingram. We're surrounded by Recarns here."
"But we need to find a volunteer, someone who is willing to die for the cause. Volunteers can be hard to come by. I’d certainly think twice about volunteering. Even though I understand the project’s importance."
"A volunteer? Do you seriously think that we need volunteers? That’s easily resolved. Thank you for volunteering Professor Ingram. Guards restrain this man!"
Two armed guards rushed into the room, forced Professor Ingram's hands behind his back and bound his wrists with malleable hand cuffs which moulded themselves into perfectly fitting one piece wrist restraints, which could only be opened with the correct solvent. Professor Ingram started to panic.
"But you need me. I'm in charge of this unit."
"Not anymore you're not, Ingram. You're nothing more than a glorified baby-sitter and nappy-changer. Anybody can do your job."
Thomas turned to Professor Ingram's chief assistant who was standing with his mouth open, as if he were catching flies. The guards and their prisoner left the room.
"What's your name?"
"Parsons, sir, Colin Parsons."
"Well, Colin Parsons, you're Professor Colin Parsons now. You're in charge."
The newly promoted Professor Parsons had always wanted promotion but he was unsure how to react to this sudden career advancement and could only stutter his gratitude. Thomas continued.
"Professor Parsons. Do you have any new-born clones in stock?"
Parsons had recovered his composure. We are expecting to have three clone babies ready in three days’ time, sir."
"Excellent. I want at least one prepped for soul transference as soon as it is ready."
"Yes sir. Thank you sir."
Thomas made a rather clumsy 360° turn; he was glad that he wouldn’t have to rely on his crutches for much longer. He made his way out of the laboratory, flanked by the two remaining guards.
Professor Parsons ordered an assistant to check the clone inventory.
“What are the product IDs of the three products due on Monday?”
“Carlos 004, Peter 003, and Trudi 002, professor.”
“Let’s keep it in the family. Assign Trudi 002 for the human adult to clone baby transference at 10 a.m. on Monday morning. Professor Ingram always had an eye for the women. Now he can be one”
Chapter 23
10 a.m. Monday, 6th May, 2058
Professor Ingram was wheeled into the laboratory, strapped to the trolley and flanked by two armed guards. He was naked except for a light sheet that covered him, not to preserve his modesty but to spare the blushes of any non-medical staff that they may pass in the corridors. The straps binding him were fastened very tightly in order to limit his movements and he was also gagged to prevent him from crying out. The Transfer team would have liked to have sedated him, but they couldn’t risk anything chemical affecting the e
xperiment; everything had to be scientifically perfect. They didn’t know how Professor Ingo would react when placed in the donation capsule; perhaps he would be resigned to his fate and succumb to what was about to happen to him, or perhaps he would struggle and endanger both the laboratory staff and the delicate equipment that was used in these experiments. They would have to cross that bridge when they came to it. The calibration of dosage of the Human Growth Hormone was critical to the experiment and they couldn’t risk adding a third variable. That was why they also had four security men in the laboratory, ready to subdue him at the slightest hint of violent behaviour.
Professor Ingram was a scientist and having analysed the possibilities of escape, and finding them to be non-existent, he didn’t see the point of fighting. Even if he did manage to make a break for it there would still be the two armed guards outside the door. Besides, he knew that he’d be reborn in another body; it wouldn’t be the complete end of him, just this particular life.
REVELATION: Book One of THE RECARN CHRONICLES Page 15