by Jaxon Reed
Noam Friedman, aka Simon Cybershot in Metro-X, pulled himself out of the drawer and stood up. Naked, his body still displayed traces of glue-gel stuck to his skin. The plans for a full bio-analysis were scheduled for the following morning, and morticians had applied the appropriate chemical solutions to dissolve the gel.
The morgue looked deserted. Outside the door, few people were present. On a stand in the corner, clothes from other corpses were placed in a large bag for disposal. Friedman walked to it, unsteady at first but slowly gaining his balance. He dug through the bag and found some pants and a shirt. He put them on. He tried some shoes. They were too big, but he wore them anyway.
Now dressed and more fully revived, he approached the door. It had a lock-from-the-inside style latch. He pushed on the handle, and it opened for him.
The view switches, the cameras following him out the building. He walked past a night cleaning crew, who ignored him. The front door is programmed to keep people out, not in, and he exited to the street.
The last few seconds of footage show him walking down the sidewalk into the night, until he leaves the camera’s range.
Epilogue
Two guards looked up, startled, as the facility’s front door opened without warning. Sophie Charvet walked in with a group of men behind her. She wore a thin black jacket over a white tanktop, black nylon tights, and black leather hiking boots. Instead of a purse, she carried a simple leather backpack over her shoulders, also black.
The men with her looked like college students on a European vacation. Everybody carried large backpacks. Charvet seemed to be their field guide for a local tour.
Before the guards could ask for identification, she said, “This place is being shut down. Court edict.”
She pointed to a bank of computers, black metal cubes the size of bowling balls, and barked out orders to the men. “Destroy all servers, beyond recovery.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
A handful of them went to work, yanking the machines out of their moorings, placing them in a metal tub someone brought out of their backpack. Somebody else pulled out a container of acid and proceeded to pour it on top of the machines. They bubbled and hissed, dissolving in the tub.
A man ran into the room wearing a white lab coat. He said, “What are you doing? What’s going on? What happened to the computers?”
Charvet said, “Court edict. We’re destroying everything. This place no longer exists.”
The scientist’s face blanched. He said, “And my people? Do we no longer exist?”
Charvet patted him gently on the cheek, but her look remained deadly serious. She said, “Not yet. Now, show me where the remaining items you were working on are located.”
He turned back toward the door and walked to it. Charvet jerked her head, and a couple of men approached her. They pulled flamethrowers out of their backpacks and everyone followed the scientist.
They walked down a hall and the scientist stopped at another doorway. He said, “This is where most of the embryos are stored. It’s a refrigerated unit.”
Charvet said, “Most?”
“I keep the two most promising ones in my office.”
She nodded and turned to the men behind her. She said, “Destroy everything.”
The scientist’s eyes grew wide. He said, “Those cells are irreplaceable! We don’t have access to the subject’s ova anymore!”
“Show me your office,” Sophie said.
For a moment it appeared he might consider resisting. She stretched her shoulders back so he could see the sidearm under her jacket.
She said, “I remind you, we are under an edict.”
He took a deep breath and capitulated. He nodded, and turned to lead her down the hall. Behind them the men opened refrigerator doors, unhooked their flame throwers, and spewed streams of fire into the room.
The scientist stopped at another doorway and it opened at the press of his palm against a scanner. Inside, the small space held a desk with a computer terminal and a storage locker.
Charvet said, “Open the locker.”
He nodded compliantly, pressing his hand against the locker’s pad. Inside were two small white spheres, the size of cue balls. One was marked “Embryo 18 - girl,” the other “Embryo 19 - girl.”
“No refrigeration for these two?”
He shook his head and said, “These are portable cryo-units. They can last indefinitely, so long as the power supply remains active.”
“Very good. I suggest you leave, I’m going to place a grenade in here.”
A look of alarm appeared on his face mixed with grief. He said, “This is my life’s work. It’s our life’s work. Many of us have devoted years to this project. The Courts decided a century ago to pursue this idea. We can’t just give it up like this!”
“Listen to me. You are to forget all of this. You know nothing about crossing the bloodlines of powerful cunning folk, do you understand me? You never heard of Phoebe Renard or her son Jacques, or your co-worker Michel Caron. If any hint of your involvement ever comes out, you will be suicided immediately under Court edict. Do you understand me?”
He nodded reluctantly.
She said, “Now, leave. You don’t want to see this.”
He nodded again and stepped out of the room. When the door shut, Sophie picked up the two white spheres and smiled. She slipped them into her backpack.
She shrugged and said, “Who knows? The Court might change its mind someday.”
Sophie took out a grenade. She twisted the timer to activate it, set it on the desk and exited the room.
THE END
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Historical Notes
The Vehm Gericht really existed. They were a vigilante response to lack of civil authority for a certain period when the Holy Roman Empire held little sway north of the Alps. At their height they expanded to other Germanic states, with a philosophy that fit in well with the area’s general resistance to outside rule.
The Courts tended to address issues Crown and Church were less willing to tackle, and maintained secrecy very well. Formally abolished by Napoleon’s brother when he took over Westphalia in the early 1800s, they never regained their former stature, at least publicly. Modern fiction has popularized other secret societies from the era, notably the Knights Templar, but the Courts of Westphalia remain comparatively obscure.
Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Rudolf’s death, along with his lover’s in 1889, really occurred and it remains something of a mystery. All the odd later details also occurred. While Rudolf has been overshadowed by Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination, he has nonetheless found his way into random bits of popular culture.
The Wandering Jew is perhaps one of the oldest persistent urban legends, first mentioned by the Apostle John in the final chapter of his Gospel. John writes that following Jesus’s resurrection, he spoke with Peter and delivered the famous command to “feed my sheep.” Peter noticed John listening in on the conversation. He said, “What about him, Lord?”
At that point, Jesus said, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? As for you, follow me.” John ends the book by noting some believers took Jesus’s words to mean that John personally would not die until Christ returned. But John refuted that notion by reiterating that Jesus said, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?” (All quotes are from the New Living Translation.)
Indeed, many historians agree John died at a ripe old age somewhere around the end of the first century AD, shortly after writing the Book of Revelation on the prison island of Patmos. But the rumor of somebody staying alive until Christ returned did not die. It morphed into a story of Jesus cursing a Jew with that fate.
This story has issues
as well, beside a lack of historical documentation and no mention of it in the Gospels. Jesus was fond of blessing people rather than cursing them. He did get angry with moneychangers and chased them out of the Temple, and he did curse a fig tree that had no fruit. But other interactions involved blessings and healings. In fact, his prayer for the (mostly Jewish) crowd at his crucifixion was that their actions would not be held against them on Judgment Day because they did not know what they were doing.
Nonetheless, as the story goes he cursed one of the Jews in the crowd to walk upon the face of the earth until he returns.
The Wandering Jew story gained widespread credibility in Europe during the 14th century. He became something of a medieval Forrest Gump, with eyewitnesses placing him at many historical events. Bear in mind that Europe had a healthy Jewish minority at the time. It stands to reason that some Jews were present in the crowds at these events. How the eyewitnesses knew the man they saw was the Wandering Jew was never fully explained.
The Wandering Jew increasingly found his way into fiction as the modern era dawned. Dumas, Shelley, Dickens and Hawthorne among many others, featured him or at least mentioned him in various books, poems and plays.
In German he is known as The Eternal Jew. Never passing an opportunity to vilify the Jews, Hitler sanctioned a film by Goebbels in 1940 by that name, which was virulently anti-Semitic.
Following World War II, considerably more works of fiction featured him or had characters based on the notion of an inability to die, such as Heinlein’s Lazarus Long. Other works have freely adapted and modified the idea. Sometimes these had twists such as the Casca fantasy series by Barry Sadler, featuring a Roman soldier cursed to centuries of waging war after spearing Jesus on the cross.
In recent years, the Wandering Jew maintains a strong hold in folklore, fiction, and the popular imagination. John’s closing comments in his Gospel serve as a reminder that some ideas, if not people, truly never die.
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Other books by Jaxon Reed:
The Redwood Trilogy
The Empathic Detective: A Mystery Thriller
Ghostsuit: An Empathic Detective Novel
Thieves and Wizards (The Forlorn Dagger Book 1)
Pirates and Wizards (The Forlorn Dagger Book 2)
Tiff in Time (The Fae Killers Book 1)
Ghost of a Chance (The Fae Killers Book 2)
Rick or Treat (The Fae Killers Book 3)