by Joseph John
Beyond the lounge area, a security checkpoint prevented unrestricted access to the rest of the facility. A pair of armed and uniformed guards stood as they approached.
“Sir,” one of them said with a nod.
“Gentlemen,” Dodd said as he stepped through the scanner.
Emma followed on his heels and ignored the obtrusive leers of the guards as they looked her up and down. Gentlemen my ass, she thought.
She and Dodd continued along a narrow corridor beyond. Their footsteps echoed like the peal of distant thunder.
“The Alpha has been in cryostasis for a long time,” Dodd said. “Even though we scratched him into the win column, he wasn’t exactly ready for prime time. He had…flaws. So it was like, in case of emergency, break glass. And, well…” Dodd turned his hands palms up.
They stopped in front of an elevator. Its metallic surface reflected shiny versions of their mirrored alter egos. Dodd pressed his palm against a biometric scanner set into the wall.
“What do you mean, he wasn’t ready for prime time?” Emma asked.
The elevator opened, and Dodd stepped inside.
“What flaws?”
The door began to shut between them. Chad reached out and stopped it. “Coming?”
Emma crossed her arms. “What flaws?”
“You’ll see. Come on.”
Emma sighed and stepped across the threshold into the elevator. The door closed, and they began their descent. Time stretched on like an endless plain, and when at last the elevator slowed and drifted to a stop, she envisioned the door opening on a blast of heat that took her breath away and a fiery landscape where the souls of the damned whiled away the hours in eternal torment.
But instead of fire and brimstone, an enormous laboratory stretched before them. Countless rows of steel workbenches and cabinets lined the sprawling room. Test tubes, beakers, and other glassware stood at attention in neat rows on the shelves. Nanoscopes and hologram projectors perched upon the countertops, aligned with precise symmetry. A series of touchscreen displays served as a backdrop for each workstation, where ranks of scientists dressed in white lab coats went about their research, bent over various apparatuses or sweeping their arms like orchestra conductors as they manipulated various windows on multi-touch interfaces. Still others hurried about the room like stagehands. Their toil had a choreographed familiarity, and the drone of conversation rose and fell like the buzz of insects in tall grass.
Above them, the entire ceiling glowed. Its sterile light reflected off the plain tile floor and concrete walls, both of which had the same somber white hue. A wall of quantum processors and stacks of geopbyte drives purred with an electric life near the back of the room.
Refrigeration units and other electronic equipment filled the gaps between the cabinetry and shelving that stretched the length of the other walls. No space wasted, it had an aesthetic of optimized practicality.
Conversations around them died and faded away like stars in the morning sky. Dodd strode toward one of the lab coats, a rail thin man with a mop of black hair.
“They’re here,” the lab coat said to himself, oblivious to Dodd and Emma behind him and to the silence that had fallen over the room. “I know they’re here, but goddamn if I can find them.”
He adjusted the settings on an electronic nanoscope, and a holographic image appeared on the countertop and sharpened into focus. Virtual green tendrils undulated like a bed of seaweed. He leaned forward and squinted at them.
The image scrolled with the lateral and vertical movement of his hand, which he held palm down and fingers splayed above the countertop. He used both hands to zoom in on a tendril, examining every inch of it before moving to the next.
Dodd cleared his throat, and the lab coat jumped and spun around, eyes wide. One was a deep emerald color. The other, a synthetic implant, was pale blue.
“Mr. Dodd!” He mopped at his brow with a handkerchief. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“This your latest project?” Dodd asked, nodding at the hologram.
“I’ve been at it for days,” the lab coat said, “searching for telltale splotches of red, like a spatter of paint or the flat rash of measles in a proverbial haystack. It’s mind-numbing work.”
“What’re you working on?” Emma asked.
The lab coat shrugged. “The cure for mortality and whatever.”
“Unfortunately, it’ll have to keep,” Dodd said. “What’s the status of the Alpha?”
The lab coat glanced at Emma.
Dodd gave a dismissive wave. “She’s got clearance.”
“Emma Tyler.” She extended a hand.
“Bernd Hoefler.” They shook. His palm was hot and sweaty, but his grip was firm enough.
“Hoef’s the head of R&D,” Dodd said.
“I’m just the guy whose head rolls if anything goes wrong.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Dodd said. “The man’s a damn genius. What’s the status of the Alpha?”
Hoefler turned toward the steel vault door at the opposite end of the room. Two massive rods stretched its width, and a five-spoke handle protruded from its center like the wheel of a ship.
“Hoef?” Dodd prompted.
“The Alpha is stable.”
“I need him ready.”
“Ready?” Hoefler frowned. “Ready for what?”
“Ready to go,” Dodd said. “As an active operative.”
Hoefler’s eyes widened. He raised his hands like a man surrendering. “I said he’s stable, not field ready.”
“Then get him ready.”
“But—”
“This isn’t a debate,” Dodd said. “Get him ready. Now.”
Hoefler’s gaze fixed on the steel door of the vault, a wrought and inanimate thing forged with indifference and dispassion. He sighed, trudged back to his workstation, and thumbed the comms on his touchscreen. “The chief wants the Alpha prepped,” he said. His strained voice echoed from the other workstations. “Let’s get to it. Elliot, you and Connor come with me. Everyone else, start the reanimation protocol.”
He plodded toward the vault and dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief again. Two other scientists fell in beside him, their lab coats trailing out like white flags. Emma and Dodd followed. Behind them, the room whirled into a clamor of activity.
On the wall, a biometric scanner abutted the door. Hoefler leaned into it, and a red light oscillated over his synthetic eye. The scanner beeped and whirred, and its light changed to green. A hollow thunk reverberated from the vault.
The wheel spun beneath Hoefler’s hands, and the steel rods retracted. He tugged on the handle, straining against the weight of the door.
“Little help here,” he said through gritted teeth.
Emma and the others joined in, feet scrabbling for purchase on the tile as they heaved against the door. It cracked open with a hiss of escaping air, and a frigid gust swirled around them. Their breath plumed from their lips like roiling smoke, and they stepped over the threshold into the cold darkness beyond.
The dim glow of electronics lit the room. Mist drifted across the floor and eddied around their ankles as they shuffled forward. A row of massive, cylindrical capsules lined the back wall, each over ten feet high and constructed of a dull-gray alloy. Corrugated metal tubing and rubber hoses snaked out from their sides and twined into various instrument panels mounted on the wall behind them. A glass door bounded by a steel frame spanned the front of each capsule. A yellow-green glow emanated from behind the glass, which had for the most part frosted over. But behind the rime, humanoid silhouettes waited, motionless.
Hoefler led them toward a capsule near the rear of the room and checked its digital readout.
“Cryostasis is stable,” he said. “All vitals within tolerance.”
Condensation glistened and rolled down the capsule like emotionless tears. Emma puffed steam with each exhalation, staring at the figure inside.
Hoefler wiped his forehead one last time wi
th his handkerchief.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s get this thing out of here.”
They went to work preparing the capsule for transport, detaching it from the facility’s infrastructure and reattaching it to a portable power unit. Over the speakers, the other scientists ran through the checklist for the reanimation protocol like astronauts preparing for takeoff.
“Oxygen stable at seventeen percent.”
“Heart rate eight BPM and rising.”
“Temperature negative one twenty-five and rising.”
To Dodd, Hoefler said, “We’ll take him to containment. There’s a break room by the elevators. You can wait there, and I’ll let you know when he’s ready.”
“How long?”
“Give me an hour to get him prepped.”
Dodd nodded and left the room through the open vault door, and Emma followed him.
A row of four vending machines filled the break room with a Zen-like hum. She whiled away the time on her smartphone, catching up on e-mails and the latest company directives and reports while slumped in a chair at a round table with a napkin dispenser for a centerpiece.
Dodd was like a caged lion. He’d sit for a minute or two, tapping and scrolling on his smartphone, and then he’d get up and pace around the room and glare through the window at the lab before returning to his seat. A minute or two later, he’d be right back at it again, pacing around and glaring through the window.
When the door finally swung open and Hoefler stuck his head in the room, Dodd leapt to his feet. “About goddamn time,” he said. “How’s the Alpha? Is he ready?”
“Core temperature is stabilized,” Hoefler said. “Cognitive functions seem intact. Physiologically, he’s doing better than expected.”
“Excellent.”
“Psychologically is another story.”
Dodd shrugged. “We’ll take what we can get. I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. Let’s see him.”
Hoefler led them to a back room separated from the main laboratory by an airlock. His synthetic eye got them through the first door. They stepped inside, and it shut behind them like a vacuum-sealed jar. Air hissed into the cramped compartment, and they waited for the pressure to equalize.
“You two wait here,” Dodd said. “I’m gonna talk to him alone.”
“You think that’s wise?” Hoefler asked.
“I think it’s safer. Shit hits the fan, you know what to do.”
Dodd pressed his palm to the biometric scanner. It beeped, and the inner-airlock slid up with a whoosh. He stepped through, and the door closed behind him. It had a rectangular porthole at eye level that reminded Emma of the slots guards slid trays of slop through to prisoners in solitary. She stepped forward and peered through the glass.
The scene had a bleak and aseptic quality—no pictures or decorations, no clutter. Everything shiny and wiped clean. A hospital bed lay perpendicular to one wall. Dodd approached it, his steps slow and cautious, as if he were approaching the edge of a cliff.
The Alpha reclined in the bed, his head elevated. A blanket covered his legs and pooled around his waist. Electrodes and wires snaked out from beneath his hospital gown, and needles connected to plastic tubing pumped God knew what into his veins.
Dodd stopped at the foot of the bed. The Alpha wore a plain silver necklace. He tilted his head at an exaggerated angle and regarded Dodd without expression. Emma shuddered.
“Dodd said he had flaws,” she said.
From behind her, Hoefler sighed. In the silence that followed, he removed a handkerchief from his lab coat like a magician preparing for a parlor trick, but instead of flourishing it and producing a dove or a bouquet of roses from thin air, he blotted at his forehead and stuffed the kerchief back into his pocket. Finally he spoke.
“I’d been with the company about ten years before I signed on to Project Phoenix. Back then it was all theoretical modeling and analysis—which means a bunch of PhDs sitting around, twiddling their thumbs. None of us had any idea what we were doing. Pure luck we ever progressed beyond theory. I stumbled upon a news article about a little girl in Missouri diagnosed with Werner syndrome.”
Emma glanced at him and cocked an eyebrow.
“It’s a premature aging disorder. Extremely rare, we’re talking like one in ten million. In essence, she was an eight-year-old child trapped in the body of a thirtysomething adult. It’s caused by a mutation in the WRN gene. We used that mutation to artificially accelerate the aging process—kind of like an on-off switch, but really cranking up the juice. Granted, on a cellular level, it’s different than traditional aging, but we isolated and eliminated the negative side effects.
“Same with the physiological improvements. By this point, we’d mapped over three billion nucleotides of our sample genome, which allowed us to target and manipulate specific genes. We wanted better, faster, and stronger, and that’s what we got.
“On the other hand, it took some time to solve the issues with brain function. That little girl from Missouri may have looked thirty, but she still had the cognitive ability of an eight-year-old. Same deal with our initial trials. They functioned at about the level of an intellectually disabled turnip.
“We used three-dimensional brain scans to identify synaptic patterns and correlate them by function. Then we replicated those patterns to induce knowledge by sending electrical impulses through the visual cortex. In essence, we created knowledge without the tedium of learning.
“But without learning, there’s no memory. Imagine an amnesiac. He can walk, talk, tie his shoes, even solve nonlinear differential equations if that’s his bag. He knows how to do these things but is unaware how he knows because he has no memory of learning them. That was one problem with our initial trials. But there was another problem. A much bigger problem.
“We were so focused on physiology and cognition we failed to consider psychology—things like emotion, empathy, morality. It was so obvious in hindsight, but you know what they say. We had our first win, and we were itching to begin the alpha phase of testing.”
On the other side of the glass, the Alpha’s head turned toward Emma. He raised one hand and curled his fingers up and down in an obscene parody of a wave.
“Isn’t he dangerous?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Hoefler said. “Extremely dangerous. We created a psychopathic amnesiac in the body of a man—no, in the body of a superman. We didn’t realize how badly things had gone until he carved his doctor’s face off with a scalpel. We found him afterward, sitting on the edge of his bed and examining the skin like a bloody mask, calm as a clam. He told us he wanted to know what made the doctor smile. And the worst part? The doctor was lying on the floor, and he was alive. God help me, that image will be burned into my brain for as long as I live. Eventually, we figured out how to create actual memories in the limbic system, which incidentally is tied to emotional development.”
“So after that, you could implant memories in the Alpha?” Emma asked.
Hoefler shook his head. “He wasn’t built that way. He remembers new experiences because his hippocampus transfers them from short-term to long-term memory. But it rejected anything we tried to implant directly into long-term storage. Unfortunately, that also applied to our attempts to create an emotional response.”
Through the window, Dodd stepped toward the Alpha. He put a hand on the rail alongside the bed. His lips moved, the words inaudible through the door. She asked, “What’d he mean about if shit hits the fan, you know what to do?”
“The Alpha’s wearing a graphene choker,” Hoefler said. “Graphene is an allotrope of carbon. It’s a hundred times stronger than steel, and we can activate it remotely from anywhere at any time.”
“What happens when it’s activated?”
“It tightens until—well, instantaneous decapitation.”
Emma studied the Alpha. The resemblance sent a shiver down her spine. He was a mirror image of Echo-7, except this version stared with dead eyes. She shook her head.
“And I was going to live with this thing.”
“Oh, no. Echo-7 is nothing like the Alpha,” Hoefler said. “He has memory, emotion, empathy. They may be identical physically, but they’re two different sides of a coin.”
“They’re clones, doctor,” Emma said. “They’re still the same coin.”
There’d been a security camera. They had a video of him. That explained why the police showed up in Effingham. Someone recognized him—most likely the hotel clerk—and called it in. Which meant the standoff outside wasn’t some bureaucratic miscommunication, because the men the police ran into weren’t FBI, CIA, or any other three-lettered acronymic wing of the government.
They were the ones who’d fabricated memories of a life in Amarillo and a wife he’d never married. They’d pursued him across the country like murderous shadows. And a lifetime ago, a stranger had warned him about them in a New York City restaurant.
But who they were or why they were after him remained an enigma, and he put little credence in the tangled knot of his backstory. Throw in his visions of Vietnam, and the questions were piling up with no answers in sight.
In light of the video from the charging station, he needed to stay out of the public eye. But this wasn’t something he could ride out like a bad storm, and he’d lose if he tried to go it alone. Considering he had one person in the world he trusted, the decision was easy. Shawn Jaffe set New York City as his destination in the compact’s navigation system and drove.
By the time he reached its outskirts, the shadows had lengthened and distorted, as if the world was melting away. Beneath their smears of darkness, traffic clogged the arterial streets, a gridlock in all directions. New York City had a serious case of high cholesterol, and someday it would find itself facedown in a fast food joint, crammed into one of those plastic booths, cheeks swollen like a hamster’s, face turning a curious shade of corpse-gray.
Shawn Jaffe inched forward. He strummed his thumbs on the steering wheel as he searched for a place to park. Curbside was no use, but he spotted a parking garage ahead on the right. He signaled and forced his way into the adjacent lane. Horns blared like the howls of angry beasts. He gave a sorry-about-that wave and rolled over the sidewalk. The flow of pedestrians swelled around the compact’s front bumper, and he inched forward until he broke through the surface tension of the crowd. A boom barrier rose in a vertical arc, and he drove beneath it into the gloomy viscera of the garage.