He steps out of the doorway and I join the physicians and genetic engineers spilling into the hallway.
Those who, I presume, have military experience salute a stately gray-haired woman. Ivan steps forward to shake her hand. “When is it going to be your turn to go under the laser, Mrs. President?”
I step to the front of the crowd and scan this tall, slender woman flanked by massive bodyguards in black suits. She grins mischievously at Ivan. “When am I getting my new body? When can I fly my invisible supercar in my bikini again?” She leans close and pats Ivan on his forearm. “After re-election.”
The pack around us laugh.
“Better put your order in now.” Ivan steps back. “I’d hate to have you wait in line.”
She turns toward me and extends her hand. “Dr. Verity, I suppose this is the first time we have met. I am President Veronica Sayder. Pleased to meet you.” I shake her hand, and she holds onto it firmly. “I’m also probably one of the first adults you’ve seen who’s actually living in her own body.” Her words spark embarrassed guffaws around us. “I cannot begin to tell you how glad I am that you are back. I’ve demanded weekly updates on the progress of the technology you pioneered, hoping that Dr. Wilkes could bring you back to sit at my table someday.”
She smiles broadly and I bow my head slightly. Her face looks so young. Has she dyed her hair gray to simply make her appear older and more mature for the office of the President? By the toned legs evident beneath her mini-skirt and the cleavage visible above her low-cut blouse, her features must be due to a generous affinity for plastic surgery.
“There will be a modest cost for the honor of having him sit at your table, Madam President.” The voice that comes from the rear of the crowd.
I turn. It’s Vlad Riddell, my lifelong attorney. Beside him, also barely recognizable, is Quaid Sandman, my financial guru. The horde of sycophants parts to allow me to greet my old friends who sport bodies unbelievably young and fit. “I know that voice better than I know that face!”
“Would you like to tag along with us, President Sayder?” Ivan gestures down the hall. “I’m about to give Dr. Verity his first tour of the part of the facility that bears his name—the Verity Wing. It’s closed to the public.”
She glances at one of her Secret Service agents, who nods in response. “I’d be honored.”
A plaque on the wall celebrates the founding of the New Body Research Center by “Dr. Ivan Wilkes and the late, revered, Dr. Raymond Verity.” That must be replaced. Just reading those words stirs up a deep fear of dying that I would give my right arm to forget. Even this unbelievably firm, muscular one.
Ivan leads us down a hall. We descend wide, circular stairs into a large foyer under a massive crystal chandelier.
“This is the public entrance to our facility, Raymond, Madam President.” Ivan begins to describe the quality of the chandelier and the massive stone columns supporting the circular stairs on each side of the foyer but an anxious commotion breaks out to my right. Someone has opened the large glass doors, allowing a raucous noise in front of the building to seep into the foyer. Outside the two-story-tall glass wall, a dozen people stand across the road, holding signs.
I frown. Dr. Wilkes clears his throat. “We have already purchased the land across the street, but we’re having a slight delay in the City Council approving our purchase of the city road. Apparently there’s a six-feet-wide free-speech zone beside city-owned streets and a pending lawsuit to keep it that way.”
Some of the protesters’ signs read “Personhood Now!” “Their Body, Their Choice,” and “Dupes Are People, Too.”
I whisper to Redd Cranton, “What’s a dupe?”
“Cloned humans have long been called dupes by the American public, a shorthand for genetic duplicates.”
Most of the protesters look simple and ordinary, but one of them clearly has no desire whatsoever to be winsome. He is a large, bald man with a black goatee. His thick arms are crisscrossed with chaotic tattoos. He holds a banner so large it appears to be half the size of a billboard. It displays a disgusting photograph of the face of a beautiful girl whose scalp is fileted open, and whose brain is showing. It reads, “New Body Butchers Repent!” Two police officers flank the brown-skinned beast of a man, who keeps a comfortable distance from the less intimidating and meeker church folk.
Ivan rests a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let them bother you, Raymond. We’ve filed a motion with the court to expedite the case. We need to increase the cushion between us and those fanatics.”
“Can we bypass the freak show?” The Secret Service personnel position themselves between the glass wall and the President.
“Yes, immediately. We have security, Madam President. We’re safe.” Ivan gives her an assuring nod. He points across the foyer to a hallway underneath the massive stone stairs opposite us. “This way.”
“Mankind evolves to godhood before their very eyes,” gripes Dr. Cranton, “with the elimination of disease at our fingertips, and those fanatics still go on about their heavenly tyrant. Makes no sense.” The ubiquitous cloud of residents and doctors sneer and shake their heads.
“Religion never does,” the President quips under her breath, “unless . . . ”
“Unless what?” I raise my brows.
She points heavenward. “Unless I can beat the dictator in an open and fair election. But He won’t take me up on my offer, and keeps condemning the angels to hell who lobby for democracy.”
She winks at me, prompting jovial chatter among those who follow in our wake.
“The press has helped us marginalize them.” Dr. Wilkes’ gaze darts between me and the glass wall to our right. “It’s actually been good for our stocks. Every time one of them says something stupid or threatens violence, the media makes a national story of it, and our stock price peaks.”
The President steps between her bodyguards as if this will conceal her identity from the view of the protesters through the glass doors and wall. “This exposure is unnecessary.” She quickens their pace. She reaches out and touches my hand. “Give me two weeks, and I’ll have all of them shut down . . . ”
“Ray!”
I recognize the voice, but cannot immediately place it. I turn. One of the front doors is open.
One of the protesters, an old lady with a cane, spry for her aged appearance, crosses the street and comes onto the property with an arthritic hop. “Ray! Brother!”
The briefcase-carrying businessman that opened the front door to enter the facility seems startled by the outburst behind him. The door slowly shuts, but not before the old lady reaches the entrance. Two security guards lunge at her. Four armed guards exit a room near the entrance. One of them taps a code on a keypad beside the door to lock it and the others stand guard, obstructing the entrance. Everyone turns to watch the guards outside frisk and handcuff the elderly trespasser on the rubber welcome mat in front of the entrance.
The President’s agents place their hands inside their jackets, presumably for quick access to their weapons if it becomes necessary.
“Let’s pick up the pace,” one of the President’s men insists.
I look into the eyes of the elderly protester, who is barely visible through the guards. “Tamara?”
“Your sister’s their ringleader,” Ivan snorts.
“No. Not Tamara.” She’s always been a firebrand with an impressive rhetoric, but a social leader?
“That woman,” Ivan points at her, “is the Joan of Arc of the radical Christian right. She leads massive protests all over the nation.”
My wife, who’s been in a one-way conversation with one of the President’s disinterested Secret Service guards, steps closer to me and whispers in my ear. “We’ll update you on everything that’s transpired with your crazy family later.”
The sign-holders across the street are visibly upset at the rough treatment of their leader at the glass doors.
When the doors are unlocked to let two more guards exit onto the
sidewalk to keep the protesters across the street at bay, Tamara’s cries echo more clearly.
“Ray! Ray! Owww!” She shrieks in pain from the guard’s twisting of her arms.
Ivan leads us down a long hall to an elevator large enough to fit half of our group of thirty. Once inside, Ivan places his palm on a metallic square, and a digital voice greets him, “Good morning, Dr. Ivan Wilkes.”
“Sixth floor.”
“Yes, sir.”
Morgan caresses my back warmly. “Everything’s fine. Her reputation will not mar yours.”
The elevator opens at the sixth floor in the blink of an eye with only a barely perceptible sensation of movement. Ivan leads us to a door and again puts his hand on a metal plate on the wall. He looks up at the camera overlooking the door, and the metallic door slides open with a space-age shoosh. “Madam President, we’re going to give you the modified tour, to avoid interaction with the staff and the dupes.” She looks disappointed at the news. “Since we have such a large group,” he adds. “Perhaps you can schedule a more intimate private tour at a later date, a VIP tour prepared for platinum investors.”
“Absolutely,” she smirks. “I’m as platinum as they come.”
Ivan continues rattling off his plans for our impromptu tour. We walk through two locked doors and find two men in pink surgical scrubs wheeling a young female patient down the hall toward us. She’s pulling against the wrist bonds that keep her arms tight against the side-bars of the gurney. Her feet are bound to the end of the gurney. She kicks and writhes as if she’s on a bed of nails. Her curly brown hair and high cheekbones are vaguely familiar, but one of the guards blocks my full view of her facial features.
“What is this?” I gesture toward the spectacle.
Ivan turns and holds up his hand. “All of you, wait here.” He stomps toward the two men holding onto the gurney. “I ordered that these guests have no contact whatsoever with personnel or dupes . . . ”
Since this wing of the hospital is named after me, I do not respect Ivan’s order to tarry.
When I get close enough, Ivan is asking one the guards, “How can that be?”
“You’re the doctor,” one of them replies. “We just follow orders.”
I look more closely at the young woman. “Savannah?” She has a vertical gash in her forehead that is dripping blood down the side of her face. I rush to her side. “Savannah!”
Ivan steps between me and the young woman, and tries to pry my hand off the side of the gurney. “That’s not your daughter.”
“What?!”
“It’s not your daughter.” His eyes are stern. I turn to her. She is looking at me with a strained countenance. Tears are streaming down her cheeks. She has a strip of adhesive tape over her mouth, but it does not silence her wails.
I gasp. “This is her replacement body, isn’t it?”
Ivan doesn’t answer. I clear my throat and attempt to calm my adrenaline rush to make my instinctive request more likely to be honored. “I’d like to watch her be sutured. I would love to see how you make wounds heal so quickly and inconspicuously as the scar on my forehead.” I turn toward one of the two men by the gurney, and motion toward her scalp laceration. “Do you have a gauze or something to put pressure on that . . . ”
“Wait! No.” The disapproving scowl on Ivan’s face troubles me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Raymond.”
Several conflicting emotions begin to thrash around in my mind, silencing me. Who’d want to spend two million ameros on a new body with a forehead scar, however slight? What are they going to do to her? This isn’t a microscopic embryo in a sterile petri dish or a growing human fetus in a chimera’s uterus—this is a real person.
“She started expressing emotion,” one of the male nurses says with a snarls, as if this were a forbidden crime. “Everything’s been thoroughly documented, sir. Her wound was self-inflicted when we separated her from a male.”
“Self-inflicted?” Ivan frowns.
“Accidental, but self-inflicted. She fought us . . . ”
It’s as if Ivan reads my thoughts. His head snaps back toward me. “They probably gave the puberty hormones too fast. This is our protocol for the eighth year . . . ”
“Eighth? She doesn’t look a day under sixteen.”
“It! Not, not she!” Ivan raises his voice like he’s angry at me, his gaze darting from me to the others who are approaching from behind. “This is a dupe. Ninety-two.” His condescending attitude is embarrassing me. My wife walks up beside me and rests her hand on my lower back. Ivan’s eyes fasten onto Morgan’s. “We’ll try again, Morgan. This is rare. Three percent . . . ”
“Just listen.” Morgan speaks as if she’s reminding a toddler not to eat with his fingers for the umpteenth time, like this is something I should have learned by now. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Raymond. This is not our daughter.” Surprisingly, there’s no sorrow in my wife’s cold stare as the girl who looks just like Savannah lies in horrific distress before us, bound and gagged in a pool of her blood, tears, and sweat.
The poor girl turns toward me, writhing and moaning, as if she’s trying to communicate with me. I long to hear her complaint, pitying her. I turn to the male nurse who was doing most of the talking. “You said she started expressing emotion. What’s wrong with that?”
“Shh. Please.” My wife’s whispered tone is harsh.
Ivan growls. “Now’s not a good time for you to ask such questions.”
“Don’t belittle me!” I hear the approaching footsteps of the President and the others behind me. “Remember who I am, Ivan.”
He nods dutifully. Good. I’ve put him in his place.
“This dupe has been harmed, and so we will follow our protocol for that.” Ivan turns away from me. “We are well within our 3% wastage rate, and we’re proud of that number. We medicate the dupes to make them more servile, so that they aren’t asking too many questions and don’t get violent, but accidents inevitably occur. The medication also prevents them from being attracted to each other, which is a problem with our accelerated growth and puberty protocol, especially in the seventh and eighth years . . . ”
Ivan is in his lecturing mode, waving his arms authoritatively as he speaks to President Sayder and the crowd of physicians and genetic engineers. Turning my question into an impromptu lecture takes the emotional volatility out of the situation and stimulates the intellect of those accustomed to prostrating their feelings before hard-to-please professors and preceptors. Everyone nods, affirming him as he sermonizes, as if his explanation makes perfect sense.
The emotions that flood into my mind, however, are swirling to make the perfect storm. The young woman looks exactly like my daughter did the day she slammed the door in my face, yet she is only eight. She is either in tremendous pain from the gash in her forehead, or has a staggering fear of the men who wheel her toward whatever discipline they have designated for dupes charged with inappropriate emotional outbursts. She is panicking in her bonds, weeping pitifully, thrashing uncontrollably.
Ivan appears troubled by the girl’s increasingly bizarre outburst. He turns to the nurses. “Please, sedate them before you wheel them away next time.”
“We usually do, sir, but . . . ”
He raises his palms to cut them off. “Please, no excuses.”
“Yes, sir.”
After a measured sigh, he coldly orders, “Get it out of here.” He motions his head toward the door. “And keep everyone away from us during our tour.”
He turns to Morgan. “We’ll have to start with a new embryo. I will call your daughter personally and apologize.”
“Please don’t.” Morgan shakes her head. “Savannah doesn’t even know I put in the order. This was my surprise to her . . . ”
Ivan frowns. “It’s almost time for the transfer, and you haven’t even told her yet?”
As my wife stutters her excuse, I look up at the two words on the mirrored door of the room into which the men wheel
ed the injured young woman.
Medical Waste.
4
THROUGH THE REMAINDER OF THE tour, I am silent and indifferent, quite unfeeling toward my wife and my colleagues. It is the only way I can get through it, my heart pains within me so. In my mind, I was euthanized against my will just this morning, and now I’ve been resurrected into a strange new world. I saw my elderly sister get thrown to the ground and arrested, shook hands with a gray-haired goddess who calls herself the President of the United States, felt a youthful stimulation from my wife’s touch and romantic words, and the first human clone I faced looks just like my daughter and was being wheeled away for termination. I am having a difficult time processing it all.
After the tour, a caravan of hover-limousines carries us all away to the White House for a dinner of cloned lobster and cloned filet mignon. This meat is heavenly, and doesn’t even raise the cholesterol, they tell me. But I can hardly take a bite. My wife keeps one hand on my shoulder or thigh during most of the meal. The President goes on and on about her plans to change the laws, alter the culture, and prepare the next generation for the New Body science.
“You will be to healthcare what Einstein was to relativity, Newton was to gravity, and marijuana was to migraines.” She has such a charming way with words, but in my generation she would have been as politically incorrect as a belt was to a brat’s buttocks.
Our company, I come to learn, remains volatile as long as the ethics of the New Body technology remain shaky under current law. All the breakthroughs may come to naught if some daring prosecutor or State Attorney files charges and a judge gives them credence. President Veronica Sayder was selected almost a decade ago by a panel of our platinum investors to be the lavishly-financed political savior of New Body science.
As the doctors mull over subtle nuances of various protocols of procedures I don’t even fully understand, Ivan and President Sayder step aside and have a one-on-one conversation for several minutes.
When they return, the President leans over the table and pats the back of my right hand. “Dr. Verity, I have an offer for you. Given that you’re decades behind on scientific achievement, and that Morgan said you were always interested in politics . . . ”—I glance at my wife, who winks at me—“I would like to employ you to be the face of the New Body science in pursuit of laxer laws.”
Body by Blood Page 3