Wilkes stares at the resident for a long moment. “Have we met somewhere else before? Before your residency?”
The resident ignores the question, walks slowly to the machine, and receives the nod from the anesthesiologist, who sits at the head of the beds, monitoring the vitals between newspaper articles.
Dr. Porter reaches for the button, but then hesitates. He slides his right sterile, gloved hand under his green scrub shirt and unveils a small 3-D printed pistol, non-metallic—which explains how he got it through the metal detectors that all are required to walk through as they enter the facility.
Jeremy Porter coolly takes aim at the anesthesiologist. Blam!
Then Dr. Wilkes. Blam!
Then the four nurses. Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! All forehead shots.
He’s a crack shot, and there’s no place to hide. I raise my trembling hands as Dr. Wilkes’ blood pours out of a hole in his head onto my shoes. I gasp for fear. Here I am again. “No.”
He pulls the trigger slowly. The hammer rises, threatening.
“Please!”
His eyes are wide, and his brow smooth. His gaze pierces me like determined lasers, unaffected by my humble begging and a violent, thrashing seizure of one of the dying nurses behind him. I clench my hands and plead with him. “Please, don’t.”
His aim remains steady. I close my eyes in preparation for the end.
I am not ready.
Click. His magazine is empty.
He aims at the head of the elderly patient on the gurney. Click.
The door swooshes open and a guard shouts, “Put down the weapon!”
Boy, they got here fast.
Jeremy Porter sighs, as if regretting he has run out of bullets. He slowly sets down his weapon. He falls to his knees and places his gloved hands behind his head as four armed security guards rush him. I just stand there, my hands still raised to the sky. They frisk the suspect and handcuff him.
Two surgical residents from down the hall sprint into the room only to confirm the obvious. Everybody’s dead with forehead wounds, everybody except the two patients—the dupe and the elderly patient. And me.
“Dr. Verity,” a nurse addresses me. “Do you mind extubating the patient and the dupe and taking them to recovery?”
“Why did he do that?”
“I don’t know, Doctor. Will you?” She points at the patients. “Please? Everyone else is in surgery. Or should I have one of the residents do it? It’ll be a good distraction from the trauma you’ve just experienced, sir. Help us.”
“Of course.” The trauma that so arrested my senses was not just seeing six people get shot in the head—it was the experience of thinking I was next, of seeing the black hole of that expertly-aimed barrel fixed between my eyes. I am in that cold hospital bed again, with my wife and friends all gathered solemnly around, yet so alone. Helplessly losing everything, even the pulse in my arteries, staring hopelessly into a black hole of the great unknown, overwhelmingly convinced of hell simply by my fear of it.
Fortunately, intubation procedures and supplies have not changed much over the last three decades, so removing the breathing tubes is easy. I discontinue the anesthesia drips and extubate the elderly host first. Before I can finish extubating the dupe, the elderly host wakes up and looks around the room, confused.
“She’s awake already. Be still, Mrs. Pennington.” A nurse tries to remove the wrist ties that keep the surgical patients from moving their arms during procedures. The patient gags and writhes. “Mrs. Pennington, you’ll be all right. There was a complication, but you’ll be all right.”
As soon as I remove the breathing tube from the dupe’s airway, she awakes. She is bright-eyed and alert. I remove her wrist bonds and she sits up to look around the room. A nurse covers her naked torso with a green drape.
“Where am I?” The dupe woman speaks surprisingly normal English. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect them to communicate so clearly.
I step to the side of the bed to hold her hand. Her palms are sweaty. This is only my second face-to-face contact with a dupe.
“I was told I would be processed out of here. That I would be free.”
“Free?”
I glance at the nurse beside me. The nurse gives a carefully worded explanation of the delay in her processing.
Jeremy Porter grunts uncomfortably as the security guards pull him to his feet.
“Jeremy Porter! Why did you do that?” I rush at him and shake his shoulders.
The security guards attempt to pull me away from him as Jeremy looks deep into my eyes. “Ask Redd Cranton about his pet.”
The young dupe’s gaze fastens on the handcuffed murderer. Her eyes widen. “Thirty-One?”
His eyes soften when he sees her. “I tried to save you. I’m so sorry.” His tone is melancholic, as if he’s saying goodbye to his lover for the last time. “At least they paid for it.”
“What, what do you mean?”
“You fight ‘em if you can.”
A guard smacks him in the back of the head, and orders him to shut his mouth as he is shoved out the door.
The dupe begins to cry. “Where am I? What’s going on? Did Thirty-One mean for me to fight you?”
I open my mouth to answer her, but cannot find an answer worth giving. The nurses relieve me of my dumb-founded speechlessness when they wheel the gurneys of the demented Mrs. Pennington and her dupe to the recovery room, careful to avoid the pools of blood on the sterile floor.
Soon enough, the police and the investigators begin to cordon off the crime scene for photographs and fingerprints. I am grilled for about an hour by several investigators.
When they finally let me go, I find a nurse outside of the surgical suite. I look through the window into the surgery room. The puddles of red blood have begun to darken to maroon.
The nurse touches my arm. “Are you okay, Dr. Verity?”
“What will become of Mrs. Pennington and her dupe?”
“Another doc will complete the surgery once the on-call anesthesiologist arrives. Why don’t you go home, Doctor? There’s no need for you to stay here.”
I head back to Redd Cranton’s office in a stupor, longing to speak to him. He’s not there. I find him in the doctor’s lounge, on his nanophone, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He turns toward me.
“Dr. Verity! I’m so sorry.” He reaches for the soft spot behind his ear. “Call you later, Pamela. Gotta go.” He taps his nano and walks to sit on the couch. He lifts his feet onto the coffee table. “Ray, I thought for sure you would have gone home by now. Have a seat.”
I remain standing. “Tell me about your pet, Redd.”
He stares at me, blank-faced. “What?”
“The resident that shot Dr. Wilkes, and all those people, when I asked him why he did it, he said to ask you about your pet.”
With his jaw agape, he stands and rushes from the room, pale-faced, without another word. I follow him. “What are you not telling me, Dr. Cranton?”
He ignores me and banks into the stairwell toward the physicians’ parking lot. “Did anyone else hear Jeremy Porter say that?”
“Yes. He said it in front of the guards. I told the investigators everything that happened.”
“I’ve got to go to the police station and speak to him.”
“Why?”
He stops as two med students climbing the stairs come near. “Follow me, Ray.”
He steps out onto the post-surgical floor, pokes his head into a nearby patient room, and finding it empty, he repeats, “Come here.”
I follow him into the room.
He shuts the door behind me. “I adopted this one, this dupe.”
“The woman?”
“No, the resident.”
“Jeremy Porter?”
“He escaped from my custody about three years ago. I didn’t recognize him because he’s matured.”
“You mean, you adopted him like a son? You can do that?”
“No, a
nd no. I adopted him like a servant. His host died. He was due to be recycled. I decided to keep him. I gave him an education. He learned faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. I, I cared for him. I kept him in my home for my own personal enjoyment, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. What do you mean, ‘personal enjoyment’?”
“Oh, come on, Doc. Wake up! Do you know how vast the child sex ring is in the northeast, and how many thousands of people are in on it?” He stretches a trembling hand toward me, as if to keep me at a distance. “There are millions to be made. Millions. People you know, actors, industry leaders, mayors, senators . . . ”
“You’re peddling dupes in the child sex ring? Redd, are you molesting children?”
“Come on, Ray! They’re dupes, not children!”
“It’s a child sex ring, you said so yourself. Tell me how it’s a child when you want to rape him but a dupe when you want to sell him or kill him? How convenient for you!”
“Shh. Keep your voice down.”
“You know I can’t let you get away with this.”
He turns away from me toward the television, reaches for the remote and flips it on, tuning in to a news channel. “I am protected, or I wouldn’t have told you.”
“Protected by whom?”
He ignores my question and turns up the volume on the news story.
I snatch the remote out of his hand and turn the TV off. “Protected by whom?”
He begins to walk from the room, but I grab his sleeve and prevent him from leaving. “Did Dr. Wilkes know what you did?”
“Of course, he knew.”
“Jeremy Porter knew the girl, uh, the dupe. It appeared he cared about her and was trying to defend her.”
“I brought him back here for baby-sitting. And athletic training.” Dr. Cranton jerked his lab coat out of my grasp. “What are you doing in the locked wing anyway?”
“Right now, with Dr. Wilkes dead, I’m the sole owner of this facility. I’ll decide who goes where. Right now, you’re going to take me on the tour that Dr. Wilkes wasn’t able to finish.”
“A tour? I need to go to the police station and try to bribe Thirty-One into keeping his mouth shut.”
“Dream on. Right now, you’re going to take me on this tour. I want to see what’s going on here.”
Dr. Cranton points up, toward the Verity Wing on the fourth floor. “Right now? After what’s happened?”
I point to the door. “Let’s go.” He shrugs and leads me from the room. “And if you take another dupe away from this facility, you’re fired.”
“I saved that boy’s life, Dr. Verity.”
“Boy?”
“Dupe.”
“You didn’t save anyone. You just murdered him slowly.”
19
“THIS IS THE WORKOUT ROOM, where dupes spend about six hours a day, depending on the host’s demands.”
We are on the second floor of the Verity wing, completely dark with the exception of a large, dimly-illuminated square on the floor in the middle of the room, taking up the vast majority of the square footage. We stand on the square panel of thick glass and look down at thirty of the most beautiful figures in the world, clothed in tight white spandex, stretching, sprinting, lifting heavy weights. There’s a track around the gym, where five men appear to be concluding a race.
“These are seven and eight year-old dupes, made mature through hormone manipulation.”
At first, I think I have misunderstood him. “You mean, these are children?”
He glares at me disapprovingly, a tic above his left eye. “No. They’re dupes. Non-persons. Why can’t you get that through your . . . ”
Discretion gets the better of him and he finally bites his tongue.
His condescension flips a switch in my mind, and I go from intrigued colleague to offended superior. “I’m not one of your med students, Dr. Redd Cranton! You will speak to me like I am your employer.”
He sighs. Then he mumbles, “My apologies, Dr. Verity. Livin’ the god-life can go to your head; make you think the whole world exists to do your bidding.” He pauses, his eyes searching the room below us through the glass as if looking for someone. “I can’t believe Dr. Wilkes is gone. He’s been the brains of this facility since, well, since you were iced. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like around here without him. Are you sure you don’t want to take the day off to mourn?”
“No, and you aren’t either.” My eyes scour the facility, almost fearfully, searching for a dupe that looks like me or my wife. Having a genetically identical dupe here makes me nervous, like meeting a twin who you know’s going to be executed so you can harvest his organs. With my increasingly sensitive conscience, it’ll be easier to live with my next body if I never have to meet the one who was born with it.
I point at a man who holds in both hands what looks like a remote controlled device. He stretches it toward a tall man who has just lost the race around the track.
“Who’s that?”
“The big guy with the remote?”
I nod.
“That’s Whip. If my memory serves me correctly, he used to be called Eighteen.”
“Eighteen?”
“They’re given random numbers, from one to 100. We don’t want to develop a sense of seniority among the older dupes. We have about ten trainers, all dupes, extra clones derived from particularly large, athletically-gifted donors. They are genetically altered to make them stronger, less compassionate, and more severe. Sympathy is not a good quality for training Olympic-quality athletes. We haven’t processed any of the trainers. We just keep them working. We’ll probably replace them in their mid-40s, if and when they get weak or soft. Whip coaches the running exercises.”
The loser of the race gets on his hands and knees upon Whip’s order. Whip presses a button and the dupe falls to his face, writhing in pain. I cannot hear anything in our soundproof room, but from the way the other dupes around him turn toward him, I suspect he is screaming.
“What’s he doing to him?”
Redd grins mischievously. “Motivation. Like a bit in a horse’s mouth or, better worded, a whip on the horse’s hip.” He looks at me and taps his temple. “We can make them do whatever we want by way of these precisely planted cerebral probes. Hit the right button on the remote, and you can create a cerebral stimulus that is excruciating. No physical damage, and no lasting cerebral damage. It’s the equivalent of a brief, massive migraine. It truly is excruciating, and can coerce the stubbornest dupe to do whatever you want.”
“When’s he going to quit?” My face burns at such unapologetic cruelty. Finally, after what seems like 30 seconds of unmitigated torture, the trainer lets go of the button. Without giving him a moment’s rest, he prods the dupe to his feet. The dupe complies and stands at attention, his sweating face still contorted in pain. The trainer orders him once again to the starting line for another race.
Almost half the dupes have dark skin, appearing Arabic in origin. Some of the wealthiest people in the world are from the oil-rich lands in the Middle East, so I am not surprised.
“Let’s go, Redd.”
“Wait, check this out. Look how much weight this curvy chick can squat.”
“No, let’s go.” I lead him from the room.
“I’ll show you the tanning rooms. This is where most of the Caucasians spend thirty minutes every day.” He walks across the floor of a similarly darkened room dimly lit by the huge glass square in the center of the room. We look down at nude dupes reclining under tanning lights. He stops to gawk at a young man that looks to be about twelve, which is six years old in dupe years.
“You’re sick, Redd.”
I lead him through an exit.
Obviously offended at my reproof, he is less talkative as he takes me through the sleeping areas, separated into female and male barracks. Anticipating more sex-obsessed comments, I quicken my pace and bank around a corner and slam into a girl who holds a broom.
This girl, who looks abou
t ten, falls and lands awkwardly. “Ow!” She has landed on her wrist, which appears to be crooked. “Oh no . . . ”
“I’m sorry.” I bend down to tend to her.
“Oh, you did it now, Sixty-Two.” Dr. Cranton plants his hands on his hips, like an easily-offended mother scolding a child before a spanking. Given his enthusiastic half-grin and his forced furrowed brow, I suspect he’s trying to appear angrier than he genuinely feels.
I palpate her thumb metacarpal. “You’ll be all right. It’s a simple fracture.” I look into her eyes. “What’s your name?”
She winces in pain as Dr. Cranton speaks up before she’s able to respond. “I told you her name. Sixty-Two.” He takes a step closer to her. “You should have been more careful.”
“It was my fault. We need to get some ice on this quickly.” I’m holding her arm, trying to help her to her feet, when the young girl suddenly recoils, squealing in pain. Initially, I think that I’m the source of her pain. Then I realize what Cranton’s doing. He has unveiled a small black remote from his lab coat pocket. He is pointing it at her, pressing a button.
“Quit! What are you doing? It wasn’t her fault, Redd.”
“You can’t be soft on this job, Doc. If you want a pet to pity, go to the animal shelter and adopt a cat. This is a business, and we cannot have dupes carelessly”—he rotates a button to increase the intensity—“roaming the halls, carelessly crashing into CEOs,”—he moves it up again—“carelessly breaking bones and carelessly ruining our investment!”
She screams, falls to her back, and breaks out in a sweat.
I stand and snatch the remote from him.
He stretches his hand toward me. “Don’t be childish. Give it back, Dr. Verity.”
I press the button and bury the remote in my front pants pocket, and then bend down to help the girl to her feet. “Take us to the clinic to set this bone.”
“Set the bone?”
“Yes. It’s a simple fracture. There’s no break in the skin. Her body will still be perfect.”
The girl’s clothes are drenched from her diaphoresis from the remotely-activated pain.
“I suppose you’re right.” He leads me down the hall. “Let’s fix it. Maybe we’ll get away with it and the donor will never know.”
Body by Blood Page 12