“Lena Holbrook?” Marcus replied. “What are you doing here? I’m looking for Raymond Mettler.”
“I live here, Marcus. Ray’s my husband. Why in the world would you be looking for him?” A long silence filled the space between them before Marcus could respond.
“That’s a very long story, Lena,” he said at last. “Can we go inside?”
Lena stood before the body scanner and the battered door creaked open. They slipped inside. The door closed behind them. They could hear the wind whistling through the shattered glass wall in the next room. Upon entering the great room, the first thing to strike them was the precipitous drop at the edge of the space. Lena felt lightheaded watching Marcus walk close to the brink. There were still beads of glass scattered about the room, making his footing all the more treacherous.
“Please be careful,” she said. “Come back inside. You’re making me nervous.”
Marcus was trying to put the pieces together and none of them fit. As improbable as it was that Ray Mettler was the man who’d bought his body and saved Corinne’s life, it was even more improbable that Lena Holbrook was his wife. Yet here she was at his apartment. He had no idea how much she knew about the contract between him and Ray or about the recent events at the Takana home.
When he turned around, Lena was sitting on the sofa on the opposite wall to the gaping opening. He came back inside, took a seat next to her, and took both her hands in his.
“I’m really glad to see you,” she said, her mouth wavering between smiles and sobs. “I’ve been so scared and so alone.”
“What happened to you?” Marcus asked.
Lena told him about the guard detail at the apartment, her abduction, the attempt on Ray’s life, and her escape from the Amazon-like SPUD who’d been left to guard her. Marcus listened through the filter of his own recent experience and decided that Ray and Lena had become targets of the same SPUD hating organization that had made an attempt on his life, and that Terra and her people, whoever they were, were trying to protect them. Now he struggled with how much he could tell Lena. She was one of the few people he felt he could trust.
“I came looking for your husband,” Marcus began, “because he saved Corinne’s life.” He paused, trying to feel his way through the story. “Someone firebombed our home,” he continued, “and Ray pulled Corinne out of the fire.”
“That’s impossible,” Lena said. “What would he have been doing at your home?”
“I’m not really sure,” Marcus lied. “I’m just glad he was there. He risked his life to save her.” He watched her face, trying to gauge how much she was reading between the lines. She seemed to be studying his face, in turn, for clues.
“So all this is about that?” she concluded. “The people who tried to kill you and Corinne are now after us, too?”
“It would seem so,” replied Marcus. “They think it was The Tribe of 23. Someone saw the man who threw the firebomb and he’s been identified as Samson, a SPUD under their control. They were after us because of our advocacy for SPUD rights. Now they’re after Ray for getting in the way of killing us.”
Marcus watched as Lena’s wheels turned. He was familiar with her observational skills and journalist’s intuition from their earlier encounter. Her forefinger lay across her mouth and her thumb against her jaw for nearly half a minute before she looked at him again.
“So who’s been trying to protect us?” she asked next. “They seem awfully invested in keeping Ray alive.”
Marcus deliberated and decided despite temptation against letting Lena in on the bigger picture.
“That’s a story for another time,” he said. “Now we have more immediate problems to solve. We can’t stay here much longer.”
The sound of the elevator stopping at their floor was barely audible in the pause between their words. Footsteps approached the door to the apartment. The door had been broken in when Ray was rescued, leaving it compromised and visibly damaged. Would it still hold? Lena and Marcus slipped behind the door to the bedroom and fell silent. With a resounding blow, the front door burst open. Then Samson was standing in the middle of the great room just a few feet away, looking all around the room. They held their breath as long as possible.
As soon as Lena exhaled, Samson whirled and headed straight for them. Marcus gambled that Samson was looking for him and would think he was alone. In one motion, he shoved Lena away from the opening and leapt out at Samson. The SPUD had superhuman strength, but Marcus was exceptionally strong for a human, having trained hard for years and having the advantage of the Transformation. He was also considerably taller than Samson.
The struggle went on for minutes before Samson prevailed. He dragged Marcus to the edge of the room and pulled him roughly to his feet by his armpits, preparing to throw him over the edge. Marcus got a second wind and clamped his huge hands onto Samson’s shoulders. The two teetered on the edge of the precipice, locked in combat as Lena watched from the wings.
33
BY THE TIME the hovercraft pulled up to the pier, Lena was long gone. The SPUD at the helm stepped out of the boat first, followed by Terra, Ray, and two other members of Terra’s team. They’d traced Lena’s trajectory when she was captured before she went dark and had concluded that she was being held somewhere along that section of the waterfront. If she’d been taken any farther by boat, it would have shown up on the satellite surveillance.
Ray had insisted on going along on the search. Terra objected at first, but he argued that his presence could be valuable if Lena activated her MELD and tried to contact him. He was also willing to be exchanged, if necessary, to save Lena, but that was never part of Terra’s plan. Lena had no value at all to the project. She was only looking for Lena in order to keep Ray from doing something reckless. Sacrificing him would be out of the question.
It didn’t take long for them to locate the tunnel. Once inside the massive gate, they saw footprints tracking in both directions across the muddy ground. The SPUD was the first to spot her clone lying inert in the shadows. She kneeled down beside her, touched her hand to her twin’s right cheek in an apparent gesture of tenderness, then ripped her face off and stomped on her head. Ray was horrified to see such an act of naked aggression perpetrated by a SPUD no matter whose side she was on.
There was no sign of Lena or of her other captors. If they took her with them, who was responsible for disabling the SPUD? So Lena may have escaped, but she would still be in danger from The Tribe of 23 unless they got to her first. Ray drew hope from the possibility that she’d managed to flee. Now they’d have to find her.
A more immediate problem faced them. Voices were coming from just beyond the gate. Lena’s other three captors had returned for her. Ray and his companions were trapped like ducks in an ancient shooting gallery. They all hit the ground, rolled to the edges of the tunnel and waited.
The huge gate creaked open. The three men were silhouetted against the sky. Terra’s team now had the advantage of darkness and surprise. The half-crazed SPUD moved first, rushing the intruders at full speed, her arms spread like wings. She took out two of them before the third, a man with reddish brown hair and beard, fired his weapon at point blank range and finished the job they’d started back at the apartment. He was able to flee before Terra’s team was upon him and was lost among the buildings that had earlier concealed Lena.
Terra and her team fanned out in pursuit, but failed to catch up with Hector Lasko. By the time she got back to the tunnel, Ray was long gone.
Once clear of the waterfront, Ray flagged down a taxi and headed for Sacramento and Powell on the outside chance that Lena had had the same idea. He wanted to go dark, but that would have prevented Lena from being able to contact him, aside from violating his contract and separating him from his lifeline, so he counted on his head start to buy him time.
When Ray arrived at his building, he had the driver stop halfway down the block on the side where the window of the apartment had been blown out. They got there ju
st in time to see two figures teetering on the edge of the opening. They were too far away to identify either. Ray could only see that one of them was very tall and the other had a shock of ash blonde hair.
Lena pulled the round stone from one pocket and the slingshot from another, placed the stone in the webbing, took aim, and prayed for an opening. Marcus’s back was facing her, his body obscuring Samson’s face. He bobbed momentarily away from the opening and Lena released the stone. It struck Samson square in the forehead. His arms flew apart, releasing Marcus, who dove into the room. Then Samson disappeared over the brink.
Watching from below, Ray saw one body falling from the window, arms and legs askew. Then a car parked just below the window rose in place, scooped the falling body from the air, and sped away.
Another car, a sleek silver hoverlimo, drove up the street, pulled up in front of the entrance, and waited. Ray decided to bide his time before risking entering the building. A few minutes later, Lena and Marcus, his hood covering his face, emerged, headed straight for the limo, and got in. The car pulled away and Ray followed for nine or ten blocks until it stopped in front of the Four Seasons Hotel. Lena and Marcus got out, followed by Marcus’s Secret Service agent.
Ray was so focused on the scene before him that he failed to notice Terra’s car pulling up behind him. She got out and tapped on the passenger window. Ray startled, then opened the window, greeting her with a sheepish grin.
“You certainly are a piece of work,” she said. “What the hell were you thinking going off without me?”
“I had to make sure Lena was safe,” he said. “I wasn’t sure that would be your priority.”
Terra realized that he was right. Ray was becoming a serious pain in the ass, but she had to give him points for caring so much about Lena that he would risk himself, his safety net notwithstanding.
“So what happens now?” asked Ray. “I’m still going in after her.”
“Our priorities now also rest inside,” answered Terra. “We have someone else in there to protect. It’s against my better judgment for you to come, but things have already gone way beyond the limits of our original plan. So come along.”
As they entered the hotel lobby, Ray saw the Artificial Cognition Conference on the electronic agenda projecting from the floor as it scrolled through the offerings of the week. The hotel would be packed with high profile cyberneticists and tight security. The man with the security detail who was with Lena might have been one of them.
A crowd was forming around someone near the elevators a little way in front of them. Someone was shouting for them to back off. The crowd parted and Ray saw that it was Lena and the stranger, whose hood was now down, revealing a gleaming head and regal looking visage, a face that Ray had once seen close up in the mirror. Marcus Takana.
34
RAY LUNGED TOWARD Marcus and Lena, but Terra’s hands gripped him by the shoulders and restrained him before either of them could see him.
“You two can’t ever meet,” she said. “You were never supposed to get this close.”
“Why not?” asked Ray. “What would happen if we met?”
“It’s just not part of the plan. He’s your future self. It would be like traveling through time and meeting up with another version of yourself. It changes everything.”
“Time travel’s science fiction,” countered Ray. “This is real life and we’re not the same people. It’s not like we’ll be upsetting the equilibrium of the universe.”
“It’s not gonna happen, Ray,” said Terra. “It doesn’t really matter why.” Terra wasn’t worried about upsetting the equilibrium of the physical world. She was more concerned about the emotional equilibrium that separated Ray’s life from Marcus’s. Who knew what would be the consequences of them seeing and talking with each other? And it was dangerous for them both to be in the same place, particularly when they both seemed to be under attack. The project could lose them both.
Terra accessed the hotel’s database and registered for two suites as far from Marcus’s as possible. She and her female colleague Kirti took one of them, while Ray shared the other suite with Terra’s male colleague, who slept on the sofa in the outer room between Ray and the front door.
“Sleep tight,” she told him before they parted for the night, “and don’t even think about trying anything funny. Travis here sleeps very lightly and he’s a lot faster than you.”
Once Terra was gone, Ray accessed the UDB and pulled up the hotel’s agenda for the next day. Marcus Takana was to be the keynote speaker at the Artificial Cognition Conference at ten o’clock the next morning. His speech was entitled “How Close to Human? Sharing Our Consciousness and Our Culture.” No wonder the security was so tight around the hotel. Marcus’s talk would be like a red flag to Hector Lasko and The Tribe of 23.
The next morning, Terra and Kirti were up early surveying the venue, while Travis kept an eye on Ray, who feigned sleep until Travis used the bathroom, then tiptoed out of the room. By the time Travis thought to check the bedroom and discovered his absence, Ray had melted into the crowd that was filling the veranda ballroom where Marcus was to speak. He stayed out of the line of sight of Terra and Kirti, who were scanning the room for any sign of Hector or Samson. The noise and bustle of the room made it easy for him to evade their notice.
When the moderator strode to the front of the stage and raised her arms in the air to get the crowd’s attention, the din gradually subsided and the sea of heads settled as the audience took their seats. Terra and Kirti, now exposed, stood toward the rear of the room near the exits while Marcus’s Secret Service agent stood guard in the wings to the left of the stage. Once the room was quiet, the moderator began to speak.
“Welcome to the 15th Annual Artificial Cognition Conference,” she began. “Our first speaker, Gwyneth Isaacs, will discuss advances in the life extension sciences. Please give a warm welcome to Dr. Isaacs.”
The moderator backed away from the center of the stage and a diminutive woman entered from the left and took possession of the crowd’s attention. When she began to speak, a resonant and commanding voice belied her small stature and wispy figure.
“We have spent the first half of this century,” she began, “looking for ways to arrest the aging process and to forestall the eventuality of death.” The audience was hushed, captivated by her presence.
“Despite all of our accumulated knowledge about cellular processes and genetics,” she continued, “the result of our quest has been mixed.” She gestured to the space to her right. A huge three dimensional model of a chromosome appeared in the space, rotating slowly on its axis, dwarfing the speaker in its shadow. Dr. Isaacs pointed her finger at one end of the structure and a tiny segment lit up at its tail.
“Most of our attention has gone to this structure, the telomere, which we’ve long believed holds the key to cellular aging.” She shook her head slowly. “But the little rascal’s turned out to be a terrible tease.” She paused while laughter rumbled through the audience.
“Our efforts to lengthen it in order to reverse cellular aging have inevitably led to the proliferation of cancerous growths and extended the life and resistance of pathogenic organisms.” She waved her right hand and the image of the giant chromosome dissolved. “Even worse,” she continued, “we’ve succeeded in finding cures for cancer, but they’ve all inevitably led to accelerated aging. Anything we do to address either process always seems to aggravate the other.” She took a few paces back and forth across the stage.
“The one exception has been the Methuselarity Transformation. If we harvest cells from young enough subjects before the aging process has advanced in earnest, we can preserve the length of the telomeres, arrest the aging of the cells, and recolonize the body with these immortalized stem cells without the unintended consequences that occur once the aging process has already set in. For most of us, of course, it’s already too late.” The crowd murmured in agreement.
“The Transformation has been a boon onl
y for those fortunate enough to be both young and wealthy. It has created a new divide in our society between those with the means to become immortal and a vast underclass of the mortal. While there are those among us who would ban it entirely in the interest of fairness, finding ways to extend it to the masses would be a far better solution.”
Dr. Isaacs went on to describe the advances that would make the Transformation affordable enough to offer it to whole generations. Overcoming the age limits that defined the candidates for the process, however, would remain elusive at least for a while. When she was finished and the applause subsided, the moderator again took the stage.
“This morning I am delighted to welcome a very special keynote speaker, a renowned inventor, icon of the environment, honored public servant, and advocate for the rights of all sentient beings to share equally as citizens of our world community. Please welcome Minister of Discovery Marcus Takana.”
Marcus strode to the middle of the stage amidst thundering applause. As the sound built to a crescendo, he raised his arms above his head palms forward and slowly lowered them. The applause faded away. As eager and adoring as was this audience, nobody was focused more intently on Marcus than Ray. Except for the momentary glimpse he’d stolen by the elevator the previous day, this was his first opportunity to linger on the image of his younger alter ego. He was struck by the combination of Marcus’s powerful presence and gentle countenance.
“Dr. Isaacs has just told us about advances in the science of life extension that will help us to correct a prominent injustice in our society so that all young adults will have an equal chance for a long life,” Marcus began. “This morning I would like to address another injustice, the inequality between two groups of sentient beings, those of us who are carbon based and those who are silicon based.” Ray heard the muffled sound of the bell tower next door beginning to chime the hour.
“It’s time we recognized that our silicon based brethren are imbued with life and deserve to share in all the benefits of our culture.”
The Methuselarity Transformation Page 19