But Synthates allowed freedom. A female Synthate aged to appear in her fifteenth year was an acceptable outlet for his drives. And many men felt the same way, so that the Synthate 14-16 Age class had become quite popular. But soon various groups began to complain that this might encourage that same interest toward naturals of a similar age. Calhoun thought this was ridiculous, since allowing the use of a Synthate 14-16 gave him an outlet for his desire. Still, many felt uncomfortable with the idea of a female in her fifteenth year being taken sexually by a man, regardless of whether she were born in a laboratory or not.
So the C-16 Bill was passed, which made it a finable offense for a company to produce a Synthate that appeared to be less than sixteen years of age. As a result, many of the reputable labs ceased their production of these Synthate models.
“Shall I ask her to come in?” Minton ventured.
Calhoun laced his fingers together. “Of course. Let’s hope she is acceptable.”
His assistant opened the door and motioned to someone in the hallway. Calhoun stared, and then slowly a smile crept across his face. A creature of amazing beauty stepped into his office. She was tall and blond, with a curving physique accentuated by the black silk dress that clung to the contours of her hips. In one hand she held a black handbag, which she rested against the side of her leg.
She smiled demurely at him and said, “Thank you for seeing me.”
She was older than he usually requested, but she had a flawless beauty never found in the natural world. Genico had done amazing work. Her genetic structure must have taken years to develop, and was perfectly expressed in the Synthate female before him.
Calhoun cleared his throat. “Mr. Minton?”
“Yes, sir?” his assistant asked from the open doorway.
“Bring around my car,” Calhoun said. “I have business to attend to and I’ll be out of the office for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Very well, sir.”
Calhoun turned his attention back toward the woman. “You are marvelous looking.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Who made you?”
“Genico.”
“They’ve done well.”
Overcome with lust, he approached her and wrestled his hand through her hair and forced her head back. Her eyes flared with surprise. He kissed her roughly, awkwardly on the mouth, then on the neck and chest.
“Wouldn’t you rather be in private, sir?” she said.
“I can’t wait to open such a generous gift as you,” he panted.
“But your reputation,” she said.
Calhoun hesitated at this, pulled back and wiped the back of his hand across his wet lips.
“When we’re alone, I’ll make you very happy,” she said, and ran a finger down his chest. “I promise you.”
He stared at her greedily. “I guess I can wait to unwrap you a little longer.”
Minton appeared again in the doorway, keeping his eyes on the floor. “The car is ready, sir.”
“Yes, yes, let’s go then, shall we?” Calhoun said. He placed his hand against the Synthate’s back and together they walked out of the SFU station. Calhoun’s black Mercedes was parked by the curb in the front of the building; the darkly tinted windows reflected the mass of concrete and glass of the SFU headquarters. Minton stopped on the sidewalk, as Calhoun opened the rear door of the Mercedes and ushered the Synthate inside.
She sat next to him on the vehicle’s leather interior. The tinted divider between the passenger seats and the driver rose as the car pulled away from the curb. Calhoun placed his hand on her knee and then awkwardly rubbed the inside of her thigh. She smiled at him and said, “I have something for you.”
“Another surprise?”
“Something like that.”
The Synthate moved with incredible quickness. Something sharp pressed against Calhoun’s neck. Surprised, he looked down to see a knife held to his throat. He smiled.
“You dumb Synth,” Calhoun said. “You’re dead.”
“We’re all dead eventually.”
“What do you want?”
“Genetic handscan IDs. And before you open your mouth and say something stupid, I know you have them, and I know you sell them.”
“You think that will save you? We’ll still find you. All of you.”
With an almost casual motion, she brought the knife up and sliced Calhoun’s cheek. He felt a searing pain, and then the wetness of his blood as it ran freely down his cheek. Instinctively he reached up toward the cut, and the knife sliced his other cheek.
“Let it bleed,” she said. “Move your hand again and you’ll lose an ear.”
Calhoun shuddered. The Mercedes continued to drive. He wondered who was behind the wheel. Then the edge of the knife was at his throat again.
He knew exactly what she wanted. And it was going to be of no use to her. As soon as she let him go, he would shut down all handscan IDs on the grid. If she impersonated anyone’s DNA, the crushers would know.
“I’ll give it to you.” Calhoun reached into his jacket pocket and removed a black neoprene glove layered with genetic line scans.
“How does it work?” She took the device from him.
“Put it over your hand. It layers your palm with a temporary natural skin spray. Can fool any crusher touch screen. Only lasts a few hours.”
The woman turned away from him and reached into her purse. Her hand moved quickly toward her mouth, and then she turned back. Strapped over her face was a small black mask. Calhoun recoiled in surprise.
In her hand was a white metal canister that began to hiss a plume of white gas.
“What are you doing?” Calhoun said in stark terror. “What is this?”
She didn’t answer, and instead tilted the canister so that the gas hit Calhoun in the face. Immediately he felt his head go heavy. He swiped at the canister, tried to knock it from her hand, but his movement was weak, inaccurate.
She looked at him closely and he felt a prick in his arm, surprised to see she had stuck him with a needle. She patted his hand and smiled.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re one of us now.”
He turned to open the door, to escape the blackness that crept in on him, but everything folded over. Something seemed to shut down, trapping him, the air heavy and close with nothing but darkness.
SFU Chief William Calhoun awoke on hard concrete. He was in a small cell with damp floors and a door of iron bars. A wooden table stood in the corner, on top of which was an old rotary phone. Somewhere metal clanged, and someone screamed in pain. A pile of clothes lay on the floor in the corner. He stood unsteadily, bracing himself against the wall.
Where was he?
He closed his eyes and the world faded to familiar blackness. His head throbbed with pain. Slowly he began to remember what had happened. There had been a Synthate female. A gift sent over by Genico. She had come to his office. Then his car had picked them up. The knife to his throat. And the gas. The sweet tingling odor of gas. Calhoun opened his eyes, furious now. Outside he heard a low rumbling explosion.
He would find them. He would destroy them all. Even if a hundred thousand Synthates expired in the process. The genetic companies were enormous; profits could suffer.
Calhoun looked down at himself, surprised to see he was wearing some kind of military uniform. The outfit was a drab green, with a darker green collar and shoulder straps with some sort of insignia over his chest. On his feet were black, military-style boots.
He looked closer at the insignia. It was a stylized eagle, both wings stretched out, its fierce-looking beak caught in profile. Below the talons, a familiar symbol.
A swastika. He was wearing the uniform of a WWII-era German infantry soldier.
The cell trembled again from some outside explosion. He heard a deep roar that sounded like ocean waves. The overhead lamp flickered. The telephone rang. Calhoun held the receiver to his ear. A voice came on the line. Male. Unknown.
“Hello,
William,” the voice said.
“Who is this?”
“You once took someone very important to me. Her name was Dolce. And you killed her. And for that, I’m going to kill you.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Jack Saxton.”
The name was familiar. Calhoun’s mind retreated back in time. Back to when Calhoun and his crushers had entered an apartment and found a Synthate impersonating a natural. He thought of the woman they had found as well. He couldn’t remember her name anymore. But he knew they had been doing their duty.
“Wait a minute, I never touched her,” Calhoun blurted out.
“You took everything from me. I want you to feel what I have felt.”
Calhoun’s chest tightened in anger and fear. “Now you listen to me! I was doing my job. And when I get out of here, everyone you know, everything you love . . . I will make it my mission to hunt them down and kill them. Do you understand?”
“Look in the mirror. Welcome to your next life.”
The phone clicked and went dead.
“Hello? Hello?”
Calhoun listened to the hiss of static, then the dial tone. Fear spread, radiating out from his stomach, out along his arms to the tips of his fingers. He glanced around the cell again, this time seeing a small mirror that hung from the concrete wall. Slowly he moved to stand in front of it. Someone else’s reflection stared back.
He moved toward the reflection. Then he pulled back in confusion. The face in the glass was not his. He touched his nose, his cheeks, his chin. All different. He had been given a new face. Now his skin was tighter. He looked younger. His eyes had changed from hazel to blue, his hair from brown to dusty blond. And above this new face, on the mirror itself, words in red had been scratched upon the glass.
You are one of us now.
Someone had changed his code. They had modified him somehow while he was unconscious. Given him a genetic facelift. Angry voices resounded from the hallway. Calhoun moved toward the door of his cell and peeked through the bars. A long hallway stretched down and at the far end SFU troops, bulky with Kevlar body armor and carrying Galil assault rifles, were systematically opening up cell doors and pulling out Synthates dressed in Nazi uniforms.
“Let’s go, time to fight,” one of the crushers said.
“Hey! Down here,” Calhoun called out.
Immediately one of the soldiers responded, turned toward Calhoun, and raised his Galil rifle. Calhoun took a step back, surprised. “I am Section Chief William Calhoun. Put that rifle down, soldier.”
“Don’t speak to me,” the crusher said as he advanced toward Calhoun.
“Now wait a minute here, soldier,” Calhoun said, “you don’t know who you’re talking to.”
The cell door opened and the crusher advanced.
“Shut your mouth. Do not speak unless spoken to!”
The rifle butt struck Calhoun hard, just below the rib cage. The blow knocked him backward; air vacated his lungs. He staggered and dropped to one knee. Hands grabbed him roughly by the neck and slammed him against the wall. He opened his mouth to protest, but he could do nothing but gasp for breath.
He was surrounded by crushers, their hostile stares foreign to him now. A lieutenant kept one hand wrapped around Calhoun’s throat. Then, with the other, he jabbed a genetic marker test into Calhoun’s mouth. Calhoun gagged as the cold metal snatched a layer of skin from inside his cheek.
The lieutenant checked the marker monitor and turned to one of the crushers. “Synthate 3420394.”
The crusher checked a small vidBoard in his hand. “He’s on the list.”
The lieutenant pulled his hand away from Calhoun’s throat. “Put him in.”
Soldiers grabbed Calhoun under his arms and dragged him off the wall toward a line of waiting Synthates. Calhoun jerked his body, caught his breath and yelled, “Wait a minute! I’m Section Chief William Calhoun.”
“And I’m fucking Abraham Lincoln,” someone said with laughter from behind, just before a hand smacked Calhoun hard on the back of his head.
“This isn’t right!”
Calhoun and the Synthates were forced to shuffle walk down the long hallway before being crowded into a freight elevator. A line of crushers held the mass of men at gunpoint.
“Time to fight,” one of the crushers said. He held a large duffel bag, which he threw into the car. The bag struck Calhoun in the chest, then fell to the ground. The doors of the freight elevator closed and immediately the car began to carry them upward.
“Get that bag open,” one of the Synthates said. Hands reached down and unzipped the bag. Weapons appeared. Luger pistols, blunt-nosed submachine guns, rifles, even a flamethrower. Someone began distributing the small arsenal around the elevator car.
“What’s happening?” Calhoun asked a Synthate nearby with an elephant bioprint wearing the same uniform, the German eagle bearing a swastika stitched to the chest.
“Reinforcements.”
“Reinforcements for what?”
“The Games. We’re the cannon fodder,” the Synthate said.
They really thought he was a Synthate. His own crushers didn’t recognize him. The genetic reader had marked him as a Synthate. Someone had modified his genetic code. Someone had changed his DNA and now he was completely unrecognizable.
Around him, Synthates loaded their weapons and began to shift uncomfortably. Above them sounded machine gun fire, then another explosion. An enormous crowd cheered. The elevator car jerked to a halt. A siren blared and the doors opened. There was a push behind him of men and Calhoun was forced forward into the open. He squinted in blinding light. Slowly his eyes refocused. He stood at the edge of a gutted wasteland. The shells of buildings stretched ahead of him, brick structures whittled down to frames and piles of crumbling rubble. Roads had been turned to dirt and mud, pocked with craters the size of automobiles.
An explosion sounded terribly loud and Calhoun cringed, covering his ears with his hands. To his right, a dusty metal tank, a black swastika imprinted on its side, fired into the rubble of buildings. Its squat body shook as fire tore from the single turret. Figures in faded gray-green camouflage, armed with machine guns, huddled beneath cover.
In the distance, men in brown ducked between buildings, approaching under the protection of gunfire. The corner of a building burst into flames, and the low thunder rolled across the field of battle. Calhoun turned away from the men and stared into a massive crowd of people that stretched out of sight behind a thick wall of Plexiglas. The crowd responded to the rolling fire on the field as they rose to their feet and cheered. Overhead, a massive eyeScreen cut to an image of the building as it collapsed into rubble.
Terrified, Calhoun ran across the field and dived behind the corner of another structure. Three dead Synthates lay in the crater next to him. Calhoun shrieked and pulled himself away from the bodies. He stared wildly around. His analytical mind clicked into place and he recognized his location. He was on the German side during the fall of Berlin. Gunfire fire minced the dirt around him and he screamed as pain exploded in his right leg. Blood poured from the bullet wound and he clenched his teeth.
Above him, booted feet scraped against the rubble, and he turned to see a massive Synthate in a Russian infantry uniform silhouetted against the stadium lighting. The Synthate held a rifle, a long bayonet affixed to the end. Expressionless, the Synthate took a step toward Calhoun.
Calhoun held up his hand. “Wait, there’s a mistake. I’m a natural. I don’t belong here.”
Without a word, the Synthate thrust the bayonet forward. Calhoun felt incredible pain in his gut and looked down to see the metal knife pushed into him up to the barrel of the rifle. The Synthate twisted the rifle and Calhoun felt his insides turn. Then the bayonet was yanked out, bits of flesh and blood still clinging to its shiny metal side.
Calhoun stared at his destroyed body. Then he burped warm blood and collapsed to his knees. The pain was unbearable. Then it gradually faded. All
senses flowed out of him, through his belly and onto rough ground. Everything he’d ever known, his entire life, slowly caked the earth red, to the roaring applause of the crowd.
CHAPTER 45
A fleet of yellow taxis made slow progress along Fifth Avenue. The evening air had grown cool, the ambient heat from the sidewalk already siphoned off by the grid to illuminate the street lamps that hung along Central Park near the edge of the dome. Night Comfort’s silk dress fluttered against her body as she stepped from a taxi. The driver had been a Synthate, his bioprint a clipper ship, sails billowing along his neck.
Her own bioprint was concealed with skin spray. In the Synthate code, this was an action punishable by fifty stuns. But if she were caught tonight, that would be the least of her problems.
Ahead of her, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was long and tall, its elegant limestone façade a beacon of humanity. Whatever that was.
“Without art,” Jack stood next to her, looking up at the museum, “the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
“The world has certainly become unbearable.”
“Time to get some art,” Jack said as he handed her an invitation. “Are you ready?”
Night Comfort nodded. “Are you?”
“We all are.”
She turned and kissed him on the cheek, then quickly crossed the street.
A large crowd had gathered on either side of a red carpet that extended down the stairs. She joined the throng and lost herself in the stir of people, slipping into the anonymity of the crowd. Her invitation had been paid for with a generous donation to the evening’s fund-raising cause, and layered over the skin of her palm was a forged touch ID they had gotten from Calhoun.
The guard scanned her palm and the information returned came back natural. Night Comfort stepped inside the soaring neoclassical Great Hall. Inside the lobby, waiters were circulating glasses of champagne. Night Comfort took one, then headed through a set of doors. Pausing to admire a set of Egyptian sarcophagi, she took a sip of her drink, bent down, and placed on the ground a modified bottle cap. She stood, moved further down the hallway, stopped again in front of a set of papyrus pages, bent down, and placed a second cap on the polished wood floor.
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