by Bill Ransom
“Anyway,” Sonja said, “we’re still being recorded and studied and I’m positive that they will never allow us to leave here alive.”
Harry sat at the table and inhaled the fragrant steam from the food.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “the food’s probably safe. They’ll want to keep us in good shape during this experiment, or whatever. I’m not doing those, though.”
Harry indicated the two pink capsules in their paper cup.
“That’s transparent. If they want me to take their bogus antidote, they’ll have to give it to me the same way they gave me the original. I’m here, but I’m not helping.”
With that, he raised a middle finger to one of the lenses and dug into his bowl of hot milkrice and honey.
Chapter 22
Joshua Casey waited in his Spartan outer office and monitored the arrival of his father at the lift pad. As usual, the facility’s work stood still while staff and Innocents alike turned out for a glimpse of the Master in the flesh.
“Look there,” Casey said.
He zoomed the monitor to focus on a large dark stain under the chopper’s left-hand skid.
“Is that what I think it is?” Shirley asked.
Casey grunted acknowledgment.
“Another Meltdown,” he said, and glanced at the time on his screen. “The Sabbath starts in three hours and no one out there is working!”
“The Master always lifts morale,” Shirley reminded him. “Next week’s production will make up for it.”
“The sooner he’s secured in here, the better,” Casey said. “If there’s a Meltdown while he’s here, the whole world will know about it.”
Casey tapped the peel to indicate the Master’s entourage— personal secretary, bodyguard and historian. Everything he did or said was documented for his next book or film or sermon. Documentation, for Joshua Casey, was the enemy. No one in this entourage, including his father, had been permitted below Level One. Only the Master knew that the facility went deeper than Level Two, and even he did not know details of what transpired there.
“See the others to their quarters,” Casey said. “Have the Master brought directly to me.”
“Yes, Joshua.”
Casey refocused on his father’s craggy face, its lean lines belying his thick thatch of gray hair. That face of authority and wisdom had imprinted forever into the awareness of nearly three quarters of the population of the globe through the webs. No pang of conscience, no guilt at all, shadowed that face or those clear, blue eyes.
It’s because I do the dirty work and keep it to myself, Casey thought.
Keeping the children to himself, keeping the Meltdowns to himself, would be nearly impossible. His best bet was quickly sequestering his father for a briefing.
The customary bowl and towels were laid out on the side table for foot-washing, and a beaker of fresh ice water stood ready on the serving tray. The Master would stay over for the entire Sabbath, which was an honor and a joy for the ViraVax staff, but a source of great apprehension for Joshua Casey.
Calvin Casey was a tough act to follow, and Joshua had been following him all his life. Calvin started in Christian industry with JIL—the “Jesus Is Lord Gas Station and Mini-Mart” chain—in the mid-1980s. By the turn of the millennium his Children of Eden had put a leash on the oil companies through their distribution bottleneck. Other gas stations burned in a decade of civil embroilments, but the Jesus Is Lord Gas Stations and Mini-Marts stood firmly in the grip of the faithful, who subsidized their protection and low prices with their tithes.
Joshua Casey grew up with faith healers, vegetarianism and high colonics. His long-simmering scorn for traditional medicine had not been tempered in the least by his experiences in the bio-engineering field. He delighted not a whit when they accepted the products of his research. Medicine was always behind research, tugging at its coattails, bogging it down. Joshua Casey was ahead of the best and he intended to stay ahead. He knew what his assistants whispered about him, he knew everything that transpired around him. Information was his forte, whether gossip or codons.
Now there was this matter of Dajaj Mishwe, and an international political disruption that threatened to turn the spotlight on ViraVax, the Children of Eden, on Joshua Casey himself.
These incidents must be made to disappear.
What Mishwe had done to create these two children was nothing more than a genetic midwifery, and Mishwe flirted with blasphemy when he indicated otherwise. Indiscretion was forgivable, blasphemy was not.
Mishwe’s passions, such that they were, needed to be redirected into his work.
His assigned work.
Dajaj Mishwe still had great value to Casey, to ViraVax and to the Children of Eden, in spite of what he’d done. Removing him altogether would not be an irreparable loss, but without a ready replacement it would cause a major inconvenience. And Joshua Casey suspected that removing Mishwe might leave certain experimental programs undirected, programs like Meltdown, which was dangerously close to going rogue.
I have been distracted lately, Casey admitted. I was careless to let Mishwe act on his own.
Marte Chang was Casey’s distraction. He had restricted her to offices and quarters on Level One, and to the lab/production facilities allotted to her on Level Two. Still, there was the chance of an accidental encounter with the children or with Mishwe’s other handiwork, and that would ruin everything.
Casey placed himself at stalemate: he needed Mishwe, he wanted Chang and he was stuck with two kidnapped teenagers.
He closed out the lift pad monitor and rotated holographics of a half dozen likely viral structures at his desktop workstation. This helped him think out more than one solution at once. He marked out linkage points and coded in the proteins that he wanted placed there. He sought a viral construct that would reverse the Meltdown response once it was initiated. Nothing here looked especially promising, but Mishwe could try them out on that squad that picked up the children. There would have to be an explanation, of course, but he had time for that.
So soon after the Bartlett case, too, he thought. This will require considerable thought.
Red Bartlett had been careless, therefore a great waste. Casey did not want to throw good money after bad.
He caught himself scratching at his scalp.
Somebody could coax a virus into tinkering a gene to regenerate hair, he thought.
He visualized three simple solutions to try, noted the sequences in his Sidekick and vowed to give them to one of the techs as a bonus one day. On a slow day, it might even get the Agency off his back.
But Joshua Casey would not tease it out himself. He had bigger fish to fry than engineering a living line of cosmetics. Even if it were ready today, he would never allow himself to receive any inoculation, knowing what he himself had perpetrated on the unwitting laboratory of the world.
He shook his head, trying to rid it of distraction. Those two children quartered in decon posed the greatest threat ViraVax ever faced, thanks to Mishwe.
He just couldn’t wait, Casey thought.
He knew, as Mishwe knew, that they had already waited plenty long enough.
This was not the way!
They could have gathered the materials they needed a thousand other ways, then raised a covey of fetuses in the privacy of Level Five, in the wombs of the Innocents, and no one would be the wiser.
But Mishwe had never wanted this to be a lab procedure. He’d wanted to see how the children would fare in the real world. He wondered whether their offspring would be viable. Offspring of the first AVA-initiated clones would be stage three of the process begun years ago with a viral infection that significantly altered Colonel Toledo’s and Red Bartlett’s spermatic structures.
Casey had to admit that his heart rate rose significantly at the prospect of stage three. He could imagine the kids now, drugged and naked in their quarters, under the voyeuristic electronic eye of Dajaj Mishwe. That must be changed immediately, of course.
/> Joshua Casey tried not to scratch at his scalp.
Primitive, he thought. Disgustingly primitive.
His recent hair transplant represented to him all of the inelegant butchery of modern medicine, the pompous witchcraft that had tried to charm him into its fold. The baldness represented something that was out of his control, and Casey needed control. This matter with the teenagers was proof enough of that.
These particular adolescents were clones, products of only one “parent” via the machinations of artificial viral agents. Therefore, it was possible that, like the Innocents, they had no souls and whatever became of them required no pang of conscience.
But the storm over their disappearance demanded an intricate defense.
Casey’s attention shifted to the cool, sensuous image of Marte Chang. She would be here forever, he was sure of that now. So much the better if it were voluntary, and enthusiastic. Anything less would bring the Agency down on him, and he was not yet far enough along in his plan to risk that.
Shirley Good would have to be dealt with in time, he could see that, too. She belonged to ViraVax and her accommodation would be simple. Shirley was one of the saved, however, and that made Casey squirm a little.
The answer will come, in time, he thought.
If things didn’t work out with Chang, he would give her to Mishwe as his “special assistant.” Special assistants did not last long in Mishwe’s care, but they inevitably proved an invaluable source of hard data.
Casey turned his thoughts to Mishwe and his young subjects. Dajaj Mishwe had been, unquestionably, the most valuable tool in the ViraVax facility. In the beginning, when Casey had the idea of ideas, Mishwe had been the technician to make it happen. Casey had marveled then at his father’s foresight in seeking out and training intelligent loners and orphans.
Everything that Joshua Casey had wanted to accomplish in bio-engineering depended on one thing—reliable and repeated access to the body, an immune system override.
Or a disguise.
Casey needed something set up inside, something resident in the body itself, undetected by the immune system and ready to be called into action at his bidding.
That crude kernel of an idea was formulated at a time when big-money grants focused on immune disorders. Casey had been ahead of them all along in theory, but when his father delivered him the virogeneticist, Dajaj Mishwe, idea became substance.
Hackers, Casey recalled. It all started with hackers.
He’d known what he had wanted to do for the world long before he knew how to do it. He’d wanted to engineer a humanity that was worthy of repopulating the Garden of Eden, and on the way to that goal he wanted a humanity that would either work to restore Eden or get out of his way. To do that, he needed a key to the body’s various mechanisms without triggering its immune system. Then he needed the right pair of hands to carry it off. Mishwe had those hands.
In those days Casey thought of himself as a hacker—not a computer hacker, but a gene hacker. The most important thing to a hacker was “getting in,” gaining entrance to a system. Casey was smart enough to conceptualize a viral sequence, an artificial viral agent, he called it, that could be introduced into a body through common procedures—flu shots, communion wafers, childhood inoculations. Casey called this stage formatting.
The Formatting AVA prepared the body to receive any further materials that Casey might prepare for it. He was a man who thought ahead. He and Mishwe invented the rest at leisure, knowing that his gateway was clear and his security perfect.
Casey acknowledged that pride was one of the more dangerous sins. Nevertheless, he allowed himself pride in knowing more about virology and gene-shifting than most professional virologists, and as a chief executive officer he had a lot more power. Money, filtered through the Children of Eden, was no object.
Casey was the first to consider monoclonal antibodies as stepping-stones rather than stumbling blocks. By engineering the proper hybridomas that produced the proper antibodies, he came up with a multistage biological lockpick that could also become a time bomb, at his whim.
And now Mishwe had surprised him, just when things were moving so smoothly that he’d thought surprise impossible. Mishwe’s experiment with the teenagers had never been authorized, had been a whim, albeit a successful one, and Casey knew now that he should have ended it fifteen years ago.
Casey spoke to his console.
“Shirley.”
“Here,” she answered. “What is it?”
“Get me the status of the two packages that Mishwe brought in, please.”
“On-screen or in person?”
There would be plenty of data in the system soon enough. He knew that the Agency did its share of eavesdropping, and he wanted to be sure that everything within the system was secure, even from them.
“Better bring it here,” he said. “Priority.”
“Will do,” she said. “And, Joshua, there’s something else.”
Shirley never called him Joshua except in their most intimate moments. He scratched his scalp again.
“What?”
“The Chang woman. She’s very unhappy, and she spends all of her spare time running search programs on our system.”
“She’s young, bright, bored and lonely,” Casey said. “We have to prove to her that we’re her family now. Her Sunspots will be up and running soon, then she’ll be gone. We’ve been over this—”
“Why are you so quick to take her side?” Shirley interrupted. “I’m telling you that my flags are up. We don’t know what she’ll find. Bartlett’s log is somewhere in the system, and we haven’t been able to find it ourselves. . . .”
“You’re right,” he said, more to shut her off than out of conviction. “I’ll watch it. Meanwhile, tag everything that her system finds.”
“I already have,” she said, her voice a little too smug to suit him.
His Sidekick beeped and his daily report from the Agency began its scroll down his viewscreen. He routed it to the mainframe in his inner office for review later. He preferred to tackle the Agency’s prose at night, when he tried to wind down for sleep. Casey did not take medicines, chemicals or inoculations of any kind, but he had found that the Agency’s doublespeak experts could lull him to sleep in moments.
Two Innocents shuffled through his doorway, Daniel and Louisa. They pushed their small cart over the threshold and nodded. He acknowledged them but did not speak—it merely encouraged their chatter and distracted them from their chores.
Mishwe spoke with them often. Indeed, the little emotion that Mishwe squandered on the world went out to these soulless ones. Mishwe was their “Angel”, and Casey had to admit that he got good work out of them.
Daniel poured two glasses of ice water and unwrapped Casey’s tiny loaf of hot bread while Louisa emptied his wastebasket of its one crumpled page.
“She’s naked,” Daniel said, giggling, and Casey looked up.
“Who’s naked?”
“The girl.” He pointed towards the decon elevators. “Naked, naked.”
Louisa chimed in, hard to understand around her thick tongue.
“Naked boy, too,” she said. “Bad boy.”
Her expression, like Daniel’s, was all smiles. “Bad boy” was merely rhetorical, what they expected him to think of it. They were right.
What the hell is security doing? Showing them off to the whole world?
Perhaps this was Mishwe’s idea of insurance—not everyone who saw them could be disappeared, and neither could the children.
“You will not speak of what you have seen to anyone,” he ordered. “Forget the boy and girl. I want both of you to set up the Master’s quarters immediately. Repeat.”
Daniel repeated the orders, counting on his fingers. “Forget the boy and girl. Set up for the Master.”
Daniel’s expression showed that he was very pleased with himself, and Louisa looked equally pleased, though all she had done was dust the same spot on his desk over and over.
“Very good,” Casey said, and dismissed them with a wave of his hand.
He hoped that these two were the only ones to have contact with the children. It would make the inevitable unpleasantness to come much, much cleaner.
Mishwe put the children into decon without consulting Casey. This infuriated Casey at first, but he saw the wisdom and the inevitability of it now. At least there would be minimal chance of cross-contamination.
All traffic took place topside, from the lift pad. Limited as that traffic was, it still provided an exposure, and any glimpse of those kids would be the end of ViraVax.
Yes, Casey nodded to himself, we’re committed.
Mishwe would pay, one way or another.
Mishwe knew he’d never let them go, he thought. He knows that I can’t let them go, either.
Mishwe had his indiscretions, but in his fifteen years at ViraVax they had always occurred down below, threatening no one.
He must feel strongly about these children, Casey admitted.
Mishwe felt strongly about the Innocents, too. He treated them like his own children, and they flocked to him wherever he walked in the facility. Casey was surprised at this revelation, surprised to the point of alarm. Mishwe seldom showed interest in anything beyond his science.
Dear God, he prayed, make the solution to this problem clear and quick so that Your work can proceed unhindered. . . .
“Dr. Casey. . . .”
Casey started at the woman’s voice behind him, then flushed as he hurriedly donned his cap to protect his scabby scalp from view.
“What is it?” he snapped.
He projected his voice, already louder than most, and paralyzed Marte Chang in his doorway. Casey produced a reassuring smile and motioned her inside. He noted her glance at the holographics and dismissed them with the flick of a key. He cleared a stack of enlargements from the only other chair. His outer office was small, meant for clutter. Clutter said you were busy, took up space, kept people from staying long. Level One was the only place that Casey was concerned about appearances.