Her tone informs me that she is sincerely proud of my accomplishments, and means to encourage me, but her points make me blush with shame.
“You bore the brunt of the opposition while your severest critics lined up to walk in your footsteps, basking in your shadow. Your chipped and dented shield led the way for all of Ivan’s work. You always focused on what was best for humankind, and look where we are!”
She comes around to stand beside me, giving me a full view of her genetically perfected and toned body. She flashes that girlish, innocent grin that she knows I find so irresistible. “Imagine a world with no wrinkles or sags, no age spots, no gray hair, no diseases, no defects, and no physical imperfection. No death. Imagine, babe.” She throws her arms around me and presses her body into mine, whispering in my ear, “Just imagine.”
“And no Mary Nell.”
My depressing words are like a bucket full of ice water on her spark. “Oh, what’s the matter with you? Ivan needs to check your testosterone or something!”
She jerks away from me and sinks back into the Jacuzzi with a splash. She and I sulk for a moment, though for different reasons. She grieves the reluctance of her antiquated husband to accept the new world that infatuates her so. I begin to mourn the imminent death of the defective granddaughter I have never met.
6
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND, PRESIDENT SAYDER. Why does the contract compensate so meagerly? I made more as a researcher, even before cloning really took off.” I turn to Morgan, who sits beside me on the yacht’s upper deck. We are in our white bath gowns after an early breakfast.
“Why would Quaid and Vlad agree to this?” Morgan wonders aloud.
“Dr. Verity, let me explain the political realities.” The President pauses for a long moment to collect her thoughts. Her Secret Service agents and the helicopter’s pilots are enjoying a moment’s repose in the pool hall, upon the President’s insistence. She sits across from us in a bright orange blouse and miniskirt, stretching her golden brown legs up on a second chair to take advantage of the blissful sunshine. “What would you purchase if you had, say, twenty billion ameros of credit over and beyond your present income?”
“Twenty billion?” I raise my eyebrows. That’s a lot of buying power. With the predictable hyperinflation annexed to the government’s blitzing printing presses, certainly “a billion is the new million,” as Quaid likes to say, though he’s certainly exaggerating. But twenty billion is still quite a load of spending credit. I glance at my wife, who blushes at the thought of so much. “I’d buy a large, sparsely populated island in the Pacific, build a perpetually self-sustaining estate on it with an airport, and a bigger jet to ferry us there.”
The President chuckles. She pushes her grayish brown bangs over her ears and turns her face up toward the sun.
Morgan adds, “A jet with a pool. And a theater. Plus, more servants, more jewelry, more pampering and traveling, you know.”
“Of course,” the President nods. “The necessities of the higher life.”
Morgan grins as she swirls her Chardonnay. “Absolutely.”
Morgan stretches an empty wine glass toward the President to invite her to have a drink, and the President politely rejects it. Though she does take the offer as an invitation to greater informality. She fetches a pair of sunglasses from inside the small purse she has beside her.
“Rather than give you twenty billion ameros for your island,” she dons her glasses, “and your jet for your luxurious getaways, on which you would pay over half in taxes, and which would reflect negatively on my administration, why not just pay you a meager salary and give your corporation the island of your dreams by executive order to study the composition of the sand?”
“The composition of the sand?”
“The taxpayers are paying for stupider things. Just send me a letter every year stating your results are inconclusive, and we’re even.”
I hold my countenance firm. What are the unmentioned conditions of this plush deal?
Morgan smiles ear-to-ear, oblivious to the fine print of contracts. “That, that sounds so good.” Morgan laughs giddily, unable to conceal her shameless glee. “Maldives.” Her head snaps toward me. “I want an island in the Maldives.”
“Too far away,” I snap.
“Caribbean, then,” she quips. “Away from the cruise lanes.”
The President’s confident smirk at our exchange indicates that she knows she has the deal sealed. “Now you know why Quaid and Vlad approved, Dr. Verity.”
Morgan reaches forward and pats the President’s hand. “Just call him Raymond, please. Or Ray.”
Morgan’s cheeks blush with childish enthusiasm as she pours herself a fresh glass. I sigh and force a smile at the President. If only my wife would just be quiet and conceal her elation a bit. Playing hard-to-get always gets you the better deal. When talking these kind of numbers, however, it is difficult to conceal the gaiety.
“It’s a blank check for you, Raymond.” The President removes her sunglasses and leans in toward me. “I’ll give you whatever you want in the world, if it is possible, by executive order, as long as I can find some way to justify it on paper, and you give me three to six hours a week of interviews that we will schedule on major networks for the next four to six months.”
Morgan looks at me longingly. I hold my peace. What about the potential public backlash of any negative press? How would it affect my company’s stock? Would it frighten away clients?
“Will you sign it?” The President leans forward.
Can I trust her? Veronica Sayder is an ambitious, power-hungry Godzilla of a politician who will stop at nothing to increase her kingdom and subjugate her enemies. There is no right or wrong to her, no conscience or law that would keep her in check. How do I know she will keep her word?
“Of course he’ll sign it.” Morgan appears irritated at my hesitancy.
I study the President for a moment. With my burgeoning popularity and influence, it would be a risky venture for her to disappoint me.
The President lifts a handheld computer from her purse and extends it toward me. I look for a place to sign, or a stylus. My wife clears her throat, embarrassed. “Just press your index finger against it, Ray.”
“Oh.” I have a discomfiting déjà vu at the thought of signing a legal document, remembering what happened to me soon after the last document I signed near the end of my last life, but my thoughts are more pleasantly consumed with what I’m going to demand from the President.
President Sayder hands me a tiny silver CD in a clear plastic case. “Now, partner,” she grins, “personally read through these proposed laws carefully. Your fingerprint is required to open the file, as this is not a job to be delegated to a subordinate.”
“I understand.” I immediately insert the CD into my laptop and open the file.
“This is classic Hegelian strategy. My initial proposals are on top, and under them are the congressional compromises that will follow on the heels of the rejection of my initial proposals. There will be many proposed compromises, but one will be endorsed by the moderate Republican Speaker of the House.” She motions to my laptop. “It’s labeled 4A. That compromise is what you need to vehemently defend. This will put you at bitter odds with me on my initial proposals.”
“Bitter odds? With you?”
I scroll down to the 4A section.
President Sayder grins mischievously, and shrugs. “That’s okay, no hard feelings. This strategy is thoroughly vetted and amazingly effective. The Republican opposition in the House and the Senate are predictable, and their counter-proposals to mine are equally predictable.”
Morgan, leaning forward to read the opening sentence of the preamble, appears as stumped as I am. “This reads like an anti-cloning law. You want him to defend this?”
“Vigorously. It may read like an anti-cloning law in the preamble, but the preamble isn’t law, it’s rhetoric. The preamble’s bait. What this law will actually do, what we’re trying to
conceal from the suckers—that’s the hook. The goal is to gradually get the public in general, Republicans and independents in particular, to accept the dehumanization of dupes as the lesser of two evils, and to compassionately regulate the termination of dupes in terms that ultimately support our aims.”
I nod, but Morgan still looks confused. I point to the title of the first bill on the face sheet. “Morgan, listen, the President’s administration is going to propose simply legalizing cloning without any legal protection for clones.”
“Right,” President Sayder agrees. “Dogs will have more rights.”
I turn to Morgan, “The political right’s going to oppose her, of course.”
Morgan nods. “Of course.”
“Then these compromised bills will be offered by respected Republicans. But in the very wording of the Republican counter-proposals, cloning will be legalized, dupes will be dehumanized, and citizens will be declared the owners of their own genome and all technological tweaks of it.”
Morgan nods. “I see. So you’re actually writing the Republican counter-proposals? You can do that?”
The President nods as she leans back in her chair. “And the judges are already lined up to support the law against predictable lawsuits, thus establishing strong judicial precedent for the future.” The President sighs and points to the bubbling Jacuzzi beside us. “May I?”
I gulp and turn to Morgan, who raises her eyebrows.
“Please,” Morgan purrs.
The President stands and shrugs out of her blouse and miniskirt, revealing a bathing suit every bit as revealing as my wife’s. She was prepared for this. She struts confidently to the Jacuzzi, oblivious to the four eyeballs that are fastened on her. After seeing the fitness of this woman’s physique and her flawless skin, I realize she must be dyeing her hair gray. That’s why she’s in no rush to get a dupe. She steps into the bubbling water and gasps at the heat.
“Ooh, nice. Come on in,” she beckons.
My wife, feeling more comfortable with the President’s exposure, sheds her cotton bath gown and almost trips on the way to the Jacuzzi, spilling her wine.
“Plenty more where that came from,” she laughs.
“I think I’ll have that drink now.” The President sinks lower into the tub until the water completely covers her shoulders.
Morgan pulls a bottle of chilled Chardonnay out of the cooler and pours all three of us a glass.
I join them and the President continues to enlighten me about our campaign. “I may oppose you with fiery rhetoric,” she warns me. “I might call you a right-wing nutcase, a Bible-thumping fanatic even.” A mischievous turn-up of the corners of her cherry-red, lipstick-coated lips informs me just how much she enjoys this subterfuge. “My utter condemnation of you before the media is all calculated to give you hero status on the right. When you support these Republican-sponsored bills as the lesser-of-two-evils over my proposals, getting them passed will be so easy. We’ll shake hands at the signing, I, with a tear in my eye as if I’m betraying my principles and my socialist constituents, and you with a victorious grin.”
“You conniving devil,” Morgan grins.
I am speechless. I’m sitting in the Jacuzzi on my yacht on the calm, eastern rim of the Chesapeake Bay with my wife and the President of the United States, discussing how we are going to trick the political right into championing our aims.
“This is a strange new world indeed.”
The President shakes her head side to side. “This is classic politics, Ray. Not new at all. Who do you think’s funded more abortions, promoted more open gays and transgenders to public office, lobbied harder for legalizing gay relationships, funded more taxpayer-subsidized birth control, more irreligious art and films? Not the Democrats and Marxists. All you’ve got to do is propose something more radical than what you really want, and the right, as unprincipled as they are, will lead their constituents to fight tooth and nail for what you really wanted all along.”
My wife has a smile on her face ear to ear. She extends her wine glass to the President and they clink them. “Brilliant. Isn’t it brilliant, Ray?”
I nod and extend my glass. “Undeniably.”
7
“THANK YOU FOR JOINING US for tonight’s edition of Hot Seat Live.” The flamboyant Hispanic host with a well-manicured five o’clock shadow speaks into the camera as we take our seats in sofas around the coffee table on the studio platform.
The studio stage is back-dropped with a fleet of screens displaying the 3-D images of the major headlines of the day. There’s the looped image of a starving African baby getting the newly-improved Ebola vaccine. There’s a clip of rioting on several Alabama college campuses during their governor’s speech announcing restriction of over-the-counter abortion pills. There’s an image of President Sayder speaking in front of the White House beside a clip of me testifying before the Congressional Health Committee.
“The left will be on the hot seat tonight,” the host continues. “The President’s Press Secretary, Aaron Little, will defend the Administration’s legislative proposal to legalize cloning, declared by the President to be the most daring law since Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Practically speaking, cloning is already legal, given that no state has ever prosecuted those who clone humans in violation of a dozen ambitious state laws and a weak, decades-old federal law. The President would like to more vigorously protect American’s rights over their own genome, and establish a consistent standard nationwide. On the right, we have the President of the Pro-Life Legislative League, Jim Cobb. He surprised many last week by openly condemning Alabama State Attorney David Mease’s decision to defy a federal judge and put out a warrant for the arrest of David Starr, the CEO of the Birmingham-based Mirror Mirror Cloning Company.”
This information is not new, but a chill runs through me that seems to go as deep as my bones. David Starr was a Columbia University trained geneticist who became my apprentice just a few years before my cancer diagnosis. His brilliance in cloning genetically modified non-human mammals was notorious. Rather than risk him becoming my competition in the New Body science, I brought him on as a well-paid apprentice. Incrementally, I was able to quash his initial objections to cloning humans. He simply couldn’t deny the potential for good. I taught him everything about human cloning and genetic modification of the human genome, but terminating “defectives” was a line he refused to cross. His business operated as a subsidiary of my company, making the bulk of its income from our consults. However, when the cost of sustaining his genetic defectives began to swallow a large portion of his company’s profit, it became a financial decision for him. They outsourced the termination of 243 genetically defective cloned humans, effectively emptying the dormitory he had built to care for them. His profits sky-rocketed after that. Presently, we do all of the cerebral-ocular transfers at our center in Baltimore, but they and several other subsidiary research companies help tremendously with the cloning.
“Also on the right,”—I will never get used to hearing that—“we have Dr. Raymond Verity, the first physician to successfully clone a human and nurture it to birth, co-founder of the New Body Research Center, and the first person in suspended animation to be successfully transplanted into a new body. Dr. Verity has surprisingly switched tables and now condemns the President’s proposal.”
It’s been a couple of months since my interviews began and, although I have been thoroughly prepared under the tutelage of the President’s world-class debate team, when the lights get bright and the show host introduces me to the American public before the cameras, my left eye gets a slight twitch, my heart palpitates, and my palms sweat. I so much prefer pre-recorded broadcasts, as I trust the editors to remove my jumbled phrases and make me look good. Live shows have an unpredictable element that unnerves me, like walking in the dark in a strange room.
“Dr. Verity, I can’t tell you what a privilege it is to have you on our show. You are truly an American icon.”
His flattery sets me at ease. I nod at the host, who sits across from me on a couch. “Thank you, Michael.”
The small studio audience of a hundred briefly applaud.
“What no one suspected is that you would be on the right of this debate, opposing President Sayder’s attempt to legalize cloning. Why would you turn your back on the scientific work you pioneered?”
Good. He’s asking the questions I was told he would ask. No surprises.
“I’m not, Michael.” I lean back and rest my right arm on the back of the couch. “I’m trying to save it. What the President proposes is insanely radical. A major news network poll released last week found 89% of Americans believe that the unfettered federal legalization of cloning would make the federal government the ultimate owner of every cell in our bodies, and 94% are convinced that cloning should not be taxpayer-funded.”
I look into the camera that has the red light underneath it, the active camera. “If we cannot own ourselves, we can’t own anything. Our body is our property. So is our salary, and if we don’t want to fund cloning, we shouldn’t be coerced by the IRS to do so.” I turn to the studio audience. “President Sayder wants to tell you what you can and cannot do with your own cells and your own hard-earned wealth. Cloning is working to save lives without federal intervention, and it is being regulated by the states to protect our rights. Federal government”—I place both hands on my chest—“hands off!”
The studio audience vigorously applauds my prepared introductory speech.
“Dupes are already being created,” the President’s Press Secretary interjects between sips of his cappuccino in his blue Hot Seat Live mug, “and new bodies daily replace old ones, you being a prime example. We cannot let unelected judges make all the decisions for us, basing their decisions on inconsistent and often contradictory standards. Fifty states creating fifty sets of rules opens the way to abuse and exploitation.”
The host asks Aaron Little, “So, the President wishes to protect the industry from abuses, just like Dr. Verity and Mr. Cobb?”
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