Michelle thanked Trudi for the information, pulled a hand-gun from where it was tucked into the back of her jeans, set the pulse to kill in one swift movement, and shot Trudi in the forehead. The chair stopped her from falling backwards so the dead clone just slumped forward, lifeless.
“Bloody hell Michelle. You made me jump then, girl.”
“I had to make it quick, as much for my sake as for hers. Flavio and Rachel… take her to the local ST centre. Ask for Ali. Tell him we’ve got a Jane Doe to be disposed of. He doesn’t need to know that she’s a clone. You can’t tell just by looking at her.”
A large black plastic sheet was brought in from one of the farm’s outbuildings and Trudi’s lifeless body was wrapped up in it. Flavio and Rachel put her in the boot of the SUV and drove off in the direction of the nearest town. Michelle raised a hand and gave a discreet wave goodbye.
“Bye Trudi. Better luck next life.”
Chapter 25
11 a.m. Thursday, 24th October, 2058
Érica should have been at school, even though it was her seventh birthday, but she had woken up that morning with a crippling headache. She liked school, so her mother knew that it wasn’t just a childish ruse to spend the day at home.
If the headaches had been just simple headaches, Érica could probably have coped, but they were accompanied by hallucinations of a past life. Her parents thought that she just had an overactive imagination but as the days passed, Érica realized that they were actually memories. At first she only remembered being an old man, but the next time that she had a headache, it was accompanied by visions of a symbol of an eye encased in a triangle. She had no idea what it meant but she knew that it was important. Day by day, headache by headache, she began to remember more and more of her past life. After a fortnight had passed she was fully aware of who she had been in a past life and that she felt a duty, an unswerving determination, to return to that life to take control of the Illuminati once more.
As always, the challenge lay in getting back to England. She had always managed it before and the reason for this is that she had always planned her return well in advance. She may only be seven years old but the memories of her past lives were very strong. Not all Recarns had strong recollections of their past lives – some had only fleeting glimpses of who they had once been – but many, like Érica had excellent powers of recall. She remembered being Nathan Smith, just as Nathan had remembered being Hans von Strohm, the son of a German carpenter, who had in turn remembered a past life as Valli Kapoor, the daughter of a poverty-stricken seamstress in Jaipur, India. No matter how difficult it may seem to make her way back to the UK, she had always managed to do so.
Érica knew that this time, the key to her return to England was to study hard. This wouldn’t be a chore; in all her previous lives she had always been a good student.
Chapter 26
11 a.m. Thursday, 24th October, 2058
Thomas was feeling stressed. He could see the clock ticking away the years, months, weeks, days until he could expect a challenge for the Pindar’s seat of power. Nathan was out there somewhere, plotting his return to the throne of the Illuminati. For generations Nathan had gone through the process of abdication of his position of power and the installation of an acting Pindar to hold the reins until he returned. For generations Nathan had successfully retrieved his rightful place at the head of the organisation. This time would be different.
He had no idea where or who Nathan was. But he was fully aware that he must be approaching his seventh birthday if he had not already reached it. Nathan would become a Recarn soon – if he were not already – and Thomas knew that from that point on, Nathan’s sole purpose would be to plan his successful return. He may be but a child at the moment, but he should not be underestimated. He had experience, almost three centuries of experience, of planning and dealing with similar situations.
Thomas’s disease was becoming more and more of an inconvenience too. His arm and leg muscles had weakened to the point where it took real grit and determination to move around, even with the help of crutches. By resting the top of each crutch under his armpit and gripping the crutch as tightly as he could between his arm and his torso, he had found a way to move the crutch forward by thrusting his chest in a diagonal direction, thus forcing the crutch to settle in a more forward position. This was obviously very time consuming – indeed exhausting – but Thomas wasn’t a quitter.
If he had been an ordinary man, in an ordinary job, perhaps he would have taken the route of self-termination and hopefully have been reincarnated into a new healthy body to escape this torture. But he wasn’t an ordinary man, he was the Pindar, and if he did so he would be throwing away everything that he was working towards. He would – just as Nathan had done – be born into unknown circumstances anywhere on the planet and, more importantly, he would create a vacuum in the leadership of the Illuminati that could cause untold chaos and conflict. He did feel some pangs of loyalty to the Illuminati even though he was mostly fuelled by personal ambition. The Order had been good to him. And when Nathan returned – as he surely would – it would be much easier for him to reclaim his position of Pindar, if he hadn’t made too many enemies within The Order.
Thomas looked at the clock on the wall of the hotel room. Time was advancing at the normal rate although if it were in his power he would make time pass quicker on this particular day. He decided to listen to some Pink Floyd on his iPod. The music was almost ninety years old but had lost none of its power. Other bands came and went, the members of Pink Floyd were now memories but their music lived on, timeless. Track six, ‘Us and Them’, had just started playing when Alison, his highly efficient personal assistant knocked and entered the room.
“Excuse me sir, but the delivery you have been waiting for has arrived.”
Immediately Thomas’s stress disappeared.
“Thank you Alison. Please show them into the reception room. Tell them I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Thomas would have liked to have been able to stride or even run to the reception room, but his limbs were feeling particularly weak that day and his breathing wasn’t all that he would have liked it to be either. He had fought the disease long enough and had been foolhardy in that he wouldn’t accept the use of a wheelchair, preferring to struggle with the crutches. He had started the day, just as most other days, in poor health but he wouldn’t finish it in the same condition.
A few minutes later he dragged his body into the reception room where three people were waiting for him; two installation engineers and one male nurse. On the large table that stood in the middle of the room was an open box, inside of which lay a battleship grey exoskeleton suit. This is what he had been waiting for. This is what would release him from the chains with which Muscular Dystrophy had bound him and would allow him to fly again – metaphorically speaking, of course.
The suit had the appearance of very fine chain mail, and was designed to hug the skin tightly. As one of the engineers explained, the suction cup feeling would disappear after a couple of days, when the skin became used to being constantly touched. The suit was also made up of thousands of tiny receivers which received electrical impulses from the brain via a wire-free implant to a micro-receiver situated at the back of the collar. The collar was higher than Thomas would have liked but this was necessary to discreetly hide the electrical inputs that would assist the muscular movements of Thomas’s internal organs, such as his lungs and throat muscles, making it easier to breathe, speak, and swallow. It was this respiratory problem that had made Thomas finally invest in the very expensive, state-of-the-art bio suit, although it was an easily affordable option considering his position in the Illuminati.
The engineers set about their task of applying the suit to Thomas’s body.
“It’s easier if you just relax sir. We just need to place your limbs and torso inside the relevant parts of the bio-suit. If you could bear with us for a few minutes. I know it’s a strange feeling – being helple
ss like this – but in a few more minutes you’ll feel anything but helpless.”
Once the leg and arm coverings were in place the second engineer swiped an icon on the portable calibration equipment and Thomas felt a tightening feeling all over his body, as if someone were trying to remove his skin.
“Nothing to worry about sir. As I said, the suction-cup feeling will diminish and disappear in a couple of days or so. It’ll be like wearing contact lenses - after a short while you don’t even notice that they’re in your eyes.”
The limbs and torso had locked together using micro-docking tags and all that remained was to attach the electrical inputs that would stimulate and assist his internal muscles. This was why the nurse was necessary. The procedure wasn’t excessively painful – no worse than having a regular injection – but it was invasive, so a qualified medical assistant was required to be on hand. Thomas flinched a little when the inputs pierced the skin at the back of his neck, but it was an inconvenience worth suffering in order to walk, talk, and breathe properly again. Once the inputs were in place there was only one more thing to do.
“The final thing we need to do is to attach these small and unobtrusive energy packs to your knee and elbow joints. As you walk along or use your arms, these little beauties will use the momentum to charge the main distribution pack that we’ll attach to your right hip.”
The installation of the bio-suit now complete, Thomas wondered what was next.
“So, now what do we do? Do you have to turn it on or something?”
“No sir. When all the pieces are installed correctly, the suit is automatically switched on. Try it sir. Think yourself off that table and standing on your own two feet.”
It sounded a little ridiculous and Thomas felt a little embarrassed to be trying his first steps in front of other people.
“Come on, sir. No need to be embarrassed. Take the suit for a test-drive.”
Thomas concentrated hard on the thought of getting off the table. His legs started to twitch a little.
“You’re trying too hard, sir. Try to just let the idea flow through your body.”
This time Thomas didn’t concentrate so hard, instead just allowing the thought of getting off the table to move around his body and flow into the muscles. Before he knew it, he was sitting upright on the table. Thomas smiled a rare smile.
“How did it do that? How did I do that?”
The other engineer explained.
“Your brain sent a message to the tiny receivers in the suit, which in turn did two things. First, thousands of electrical messages were sent to the relevant muscles to prepare them to work. Then a miniature but sufficiently powerful magnetic force from the suit actually pulled the relevant limb to the correct position. Put normal clothes over the bio-suit and nobody will even know that you’re using one. Except for the high collar. That can’t be helped. But we’re working on it.”
“Can I walk around?”
“Try it. You may be a little wobbly at first, but pretty soon you’ll be walking around picking up things just like you used to before you got sick.”
Thomas eased himself off the table and stood up. This was a good sign. He didn’t feel at all like he was going to fall over. He took a couple of tentative steps. It felt good to walk without crutches again. He borrowed a mobile phone from his assistant and threw it across the room onto a deep green sofa. He walked over to the sofa, picked up the phone, and returned it to its rightful owner.
“Thank you gentlemen, Thank you for your excellent work. My assistant will show you out.”
“Thank you sir. Any problems, just give us a call and we’ll come right out and fix it for you. Have a nice life.”
Thomas was pleased with himself. He felt more secure in his position now that his disability wasn’t so prominent. There wasn’t anything wrong with being disabled of course and The Order took great pains to assist those who had physical impediments – if they were considered by The Order to be useful members of society. If not, well… the less said about that the better.
Yes, this suit would do very well until his scientists found a way to halt the infernal aggressive aging of human clones.
Chapter 27
3 p.m. Sunday, 3rd April, 2067
The laboratory was buzzing with excitement. For almost ten years a steady succession of adult human to adult clones had been produced, each one created carrying with it the hope that this one would age normally, that this one would overcome the problem of accelerated aging. So many Recarns had volunteered to occupy clones only to have their lives taken away from them early by the passage of time, which didn’t so much as walk alongside them but galloped ahead and dragged them in its wake.
Something was different this time. There were rumors that there was a clone who hadn’t only passed the previous record of ninety-seven days of life, but smashed it to smithereens.
Jayden 007 had been created four years earlier in 2063. The process had been no different from any of the other human to adult clone experiments except for one thing, the anti-aging hormone had been applied at the age of twenty-five days. He was the beneficiary of a mistake, a human error that led one of the adult clones to age more slowly than the others. The clone in question had been forgotten about and instead of having the growth inhibiting hormone injected on his twentieth day of life, he received the GHIH on his twenty-second day of existence. He survived 150 days and eventually succumbed to the same aging defects as his predecessors but it took him longer to reach his death-date. This led researchers to think that perhaps they had found the right dosage a while ago, but that the age of application was a factor, a variable that they had somehow overlooked. It wasn’t necessary for the clone to be a baby; the transfer just had to take place at the correct age – not after twenty days of accelerated growth. If the GHIH was applied at that stage of the clone’s development, from that day on it would age at the normal human rate.
More human souls were transferred to adult clones, and the GHIH applied at various ages from 22 days onward. All the clones aged slower than their predecessors but the post-dosage acceleration still existed. One by one, all the clones fell prey to old age, far sooner than the average human would have been expected to – illnesses and accidents notwithstanding. The two clones who were transferred at 24 days and 26 days lasted longer than most, both taking three hundred days for their bodies to turn against them and kill them.
And then there was Jayden 007.
Jayden 007 wasn’t anything special to look at. He had brown, wavy hair and big brown eyes. He was short and looked a bit podgy. His smile wouldn’t light up a room, but he had a very pleasant demeanor. His donor soul was similarly unremarkable and was very happy with the body that he now inhabited.
But the thing that made Jayden 007 stand out as someone very special was that the clone had been given his soul 1,440 days ago; He had been living for four years and his twenty-five year old body now showed only four years of aging. Jayden 007 was the first clone to return to a normal growth rate.
Footsteps could be heard in the corridor. The doors swished open and Thomas McCall strode purposefully into the room. He was now 77 years old and those years could be seen in his face. His body and his mobility, however, belied his age. The bio suit that he had been wearing for the past nine years was extremely efficient and allowed his seventy-seven year old body to move around like that of a man at least forty years younger. He strode over to where Jayden 007 was sitting, reading an e-book. He tapped on the e-reader.
“Wake up!”
Jayden put his tablet on the arm of the chair and, realising that he was being addressed by someone with authority, stood up.
“Yes Sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Erm… I was transferred in 2063 so that would make me around 29 years old now.”
“Around 29 years old.”
“Yes. Around 29 years old now, sir. My clone sitter can give you the exact details.”
“And who are you?”
<
br /> “Now or before, sir?”
“Both.”
“Now they call me Jayden 007 although I don’t really like the number being added to my name; it makes me feel like I’m a product.”
“You are a product, Jayden 007. Live with it. Who were you before?”
“I was Jayden Anderson, a stock-control officer.”
“Do you remember everything about your past lives?”
“Yes Sir. How far do you want me to go back?”
“Your last four lives will do.”
“OK. I was Jayden Anderson – as I just said – and before that I was Iska Ancheta, a Filipino prostitute. I was killed by a violent punter. Before that, I was Bethanee Schulhoff, a public prosecutor in Germany. I died in my sleep. That was a good life. I enjoyed that one. Then before Bethanee, I was Herbert Gould. I was a judge on the U.S. court circuit. I got shot dead by the wife of a man I had just sent to prison. I like the legal professions, though they can be a bit dangerous.”
Thomas turned to one of his assistants.
“Check the database.”
The assistant verified that the potted history was correct. Thomas smiled. A rare event in recent times. In fact, the last time anybody remembered seeing Thomas smile was when he first put on the bio suit. He turned to the doctor who was in charge of Jayden 007’s welfare.
REVELATION: Book One of THE RECARN CHRONICLES Page 17