“Yesterday?” Jonathan frowned.
Backmann nodded.
“It seems that she has been discovered. She sounded afraid and the transmission went down. But she got out information that we working on to confirm.”
“What was it that she managed to get out?”
“The coordinates that she gave is to point that is in orbit around the moon. Maybe they have discovered something there. We also managed to pick up a communication between Elisabeth and her dad that indicates that she managed to send him some information. What has happened with him we unfortunately don’t know” Backmann hesitated, “and there is something else too.”
Backmann glanced over at Jonathan.
“We have had Paco Sanchez inside the Tabula Rasa and infiltrate the organization. He has been on site for a little more than a month now and have forwarded lots of good information but now it seems like he’s gotten himself some problems.”
Jonathan raised an eyebrow. They had met several times and Jonathan liked him.
“Is Paco at Tabula Rasa?”
Backmann nodded.
“What kind of problems is he in?”
Backmann took a deep breath and let the air slowly leave him.
“For little more than a week ago all contact stopped. We had contact on a regular basis before that and everything seemed to go according to plan but he has missed the last two planned contacts and the situation is starting to look bleak.”
Marie looked doubtfully at Backmann.
“Didn’t he have any possibility to warn you if he was risking to be caught?”
Backmann shook his head.
“Yes, of course we’d decided the message he should send if he suspected that someone was on to him but that’s what the problem is. He never sent anything. One day we had contact with him, and then he did not say anything about risking getting caught, and next day it was like he vanished from the face of the earth.”
Jonathan looked at Backmann.
“Is there something we can do?”
Backmann shook his head.
“That must be pretty obvious. I want you to take a team and see how we’ll get out both our agent and Elisabeth and her dad from Tabula Rasa before they get caught and after that shall we focus our attention against those coordinates in space.”
*
Tabula Rasa, Madagascar.
2048-12-28
At first there was nothing and then there was something. Nothing and something at the same time. Nothing at all. No emotions, no thoughts or problems. Nothing. There was no being. No life. No death. Then, something, something else. He was dead but he was not, he was there but he was not. There was no time that he was in. There was not any now, nothing there, nothing behind, nothing ahead.
He was there but still he was not. A deep, pouring light embraced him. The veils in front of him danced around, around in big circles. He floated up through them and sank down again. He became a thought that struggled to get up out of the darkness but he fell back down again. Fell down in the dark. In the cold. The darkness embraced him and he floated in it. He allowed it to fill him up and let it penetrate his inside. He was outside time. It had no meaning to him. He was not in it. Did not hear its pulse, its heartbeats that slowly ate forwards. All the time forwards. Never backwards. Always forward. He rose. Sank. Small black stars glide up in the fogs and danced in front of him. A thought formed and rose to the surface. The smell of something unknown swept through him.
Am I alive?
He was this thought and this thought was him. The black stars rose and sunk and he looked at them. He was them too. And this thought.
Am I alive?
When he looked at the stars they dissolved in chaotic whirls, small black holes sucked them into themselves. The time was there. Ahead of him. He could feel it. Feel the taste. Feel the taste of metal. The darkness pulled him down but he struggled himself up. He was there. In the middle of the darkness. As a warrior that fighting the monsters of the abyss. The time. Rose. Sank. Forward, always forwards. Metal. More metal in his mouth. The pulse rose and fell in him. More thoughts took shape.
Do I exist?
The thoughts were shaping as a consciousness. He could feel how he took shape. He breathed.
Where am I?
Every breath became a stroke that took him closer to the dark surface. He took another stroke. Want to break through the dark, hard surface. Break through to the other side. The other side that he knew was there. Was there behind. Behind the hard. There was sound. Unknown sound that meant something to him but he did not understand what.
Swim. Come on now. Swim. You can do it. You are close now.
A voice. A voice spoke to him.
To me. It’s talking to me! I understand what it is saying.
“Adam, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”
Adam answered with his thought.
“Yes, I hear you. Who are you? I hear you.”
The voice continued its insisting question.
“Can you hear me, Adam? Are you there? Can you hear me?”
Adam shouted.
“Yes, I hear you, I’m telling you. Don’t you hear what I’m saying? I’m answering you. I hear you.”
The voice repeated itself.
“Answer, Adam, answer me.”
Is my name Adam?
He focused all his power and stretched every thought in his consciousness and every muscle in his body and answered.
“I hear you.”
He was in darkness, he opened his eyes and he was in the light. His eyes saw for the first time. He saw but what he saw he did not know. His eyes blinked and focused on the shapeless mass in front of him. Slowly the shapeless mass became sharper around the edges and came more and more in focus. The mass pulled together into a face. A man’s face. That spoke to him. A voice was heard.
“Doctor, all the signs look good. His pulse is within the limits and his vital signs is holding. I think we are ready for the last part.” an anonymous technician sat hidden behind several screens.
Doctor Weng-Li nodded. He studied the clone that laid on the examining table in front of him.
“Of course everything looks good. It is Adam that comes. Adam is the firstborn. He is the first of a whole generation super humans. The ultimate man.”
Pride bubbled inside of him.
* * *
Dr Weng-Li had struggled for this for several years, endless attempts that had not given any results. All the different ideas that he had tried had not resulted in anything except the repugnant work to clean up afterwards. In front of him stood seven large glass containers in the round room. They stood in a half circle a meter apart and in six of the containers there was a clone that seemed to be floating. Every clone was surrounded of thousands of liters of an experimental synthetic amniotic fluid.
Dr Weng-Li had been the one who had developed the special formula that they needed for the latest generation of clones. He had created more than twenty generations since he came to Tabula Rasa, some more successful than others. Vendrick had persuaded him to come there and continue his career when the scandal had exploded in Hong-Kong where he lived before. It was in another life, almost as it had happened to somebody else.
He had been a professor at one of Hong-Kong’s most prestigious universities and had a respectable career. As the university world is conservative he was forced to keep some parts of his life in the dark. During the days he was a university professor, at nights he was Myiago-san, a rapist that made parts of Hong-Kong unsafe. He had managed to evade the law for several years but in the end his luck had run out.
One of his victims had managed to get away and had alerted the police that a man had attacked her and that he had a gold tooth and a characteristic, thin scar just above his right eye. But as she had been a prostitute, the police had not believed her and dismissed her accusations. But a senior chief at the university, that for a long time had held a grudge against him, had in a quiet way initiated an unofficial investigation.
It had not resulted in any hard evidence against Weng-Li from the investigation but his situation had still become unsustainable. His students’ tattled and whispered and different rumors went around. In the end, during a lecture, he had been attacked by a group of women who had rushed into the lecture room, thrown eggs and screamed at him. Weng-Li had been forced to flee and the scandal was a fact.
After a couple of terrible weeks, he had received a call from somebody with a job offer. Dr Weng-Li had been sitting in a shabby hotel room in Shanghai and after further two calls, he and the unknown voice made an appointment. They had met the day after and he had gotten the surprise of his life when John Vendrick III had showed up to their meeting.
Two days later Weng-Li had arrived to Tabula Rasa and his gratitude had been infinite. He had been given the task to create the next generation of humans that would pick up the relay baton that seemed to have been dropped by the current mankind.
Dr Weng-Li’s work area was as a biological engineer. It was an area that had exploded in frantic effort in the last decade. Researchers around the world with dubious moral unofficially competed to become the first who succeeded to develop a complete human clone. The treaty from 2032 had intended to limit and regulate the research within the area but the development progressed so fast that much of the protocol was already out of date when it went in force. This resulted in that several research groups around the world had continued their experiments.
Together with his team, Dr Weng-Li had gotten farthest. And now he had succeeded. He had created a living, breathing clone that was superior ordinary humans in every way. They were stronger, faster and smarter than the grey mass that humanity was made of.
A constant increasing chaos of environmental destruction, an exceptional surge of consumption of the natural resources, melting icecaps in the Artic and Antarctica and an ever more demanding world population had taken the earth to the edge of disaster.
It was Dr Weng-Lis conviction that doom was approaching fast. And he had to do something. By the grace of God, he had gotten the chance. John had taken him under his wings and given him the opportunity to create something new. A new world order. An order based upon balance and equilibrium. An order that came from the understanding that finite resources had to be cared for and to find a sustainable development was the most important challenge that mankind was facing. It was either that or the earth would go under within the foreseeable future. He nodded absently and signaled to the technician in the background.
“Continue with initial configuration.”
He pulled out a keyboard and entered a few commands. In front of him, Adam started to move like in a dream when the system initiated the creation of a human that the world never had seen before. Artificial intelligence configured Adams brain and mind so it learned all the skills he was predetermined to have. Combat training, scientific knowledge and space information was a fraction of the knowledge that poured into the clone’s brain.
During the following hours the remaining six brothers of Adan were born and Dr Weng-Li nodded contently at his days’ work and he worked to confirm that all the clones had gone through birth in a good way. The strong smell of synthetic amniotic fluid was nothing that affected the good doctor. Extensive examinations and a whole battery of tests were conducted. There were a couple of minor adjustments of three clones, but in general he was surprised how well the process had elapsed. He had been joined by Dr Ln'geem, who in practice acted as his right hand.
Both doctors worked quickly and efficiently. They stood at the crescent shaped desk that was placed in the middle of the sterile room. The seven large containers were now empty. The strong light from the ceiling lights reflected in the white tiles that the floor and walls were covered with. In front of each container stood a long, examining table of metal and on each one of the examining tables laid a clone. The clone’s bodies shined in the sharp light and a weak, irregular, dripping sound of synthetic amniotic fluid that hit the tiles was heard.
Dr Ln’geem looked submissively at Dr Weng-Li.
“It looks good, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it seems like all the subjects went through the genesis process without any bigger problems.”
“On two, three and seven we have made adjustments. Do you agree?”
“Yes. Two, three and seven.”
They continued to work in silence. They had achieved something amazing. Never before in the history of mankind it had attempted and succeeded in creating as many as seven clones at once where all survived and all passed the initial configuration so well.
“Are we ready for the next phase?”
Dr Weng-Li nodded and together the doctors went out through a door to an adjacent room. That room was circular and the bare walls sloped steeply upwards and outwards. About four meters up on the wall something protruded that resembled a balcony. The two doctors went up on a staircase that led up to the balcony and stood there and looked down with great interest.
Below them the clones came in through the same door and walked in one after the other into the room. The clones walked in a line as if they were marching to an inaudible rhythm. The door slid silently back and closed. You could not almost see where the door had been.
The clones stood evenly distributed in a circle in the room a couple of meters apart. Each one of their bodies was a biological masterpiece. The researchers at Tabula Rasa had access to the latest synthetic drugs and had used these on part of the population in different experiments to continue the evolution of mankind to the next generation who would dominate the earth. Dr Ln’geem looked at Dr Weng-Li that pulled his lips back in a shark-like smile and showed his gold tooth.
*
Space
2048-12-28
Contact had established. After such a long time it had finally been successful. Contact. It was what the spheres were meant to do. That was what their goal. Contact with living organisms, with intelligent organisms.
The spheres came from another part of universe, in another time. They were designed by intelligent species that created them to find a way to escape their dying surroundings and preserve knowledge. Eons of time ago another universe had been everything and it had been filled with living creatures that had been born, lived and died. When it had aged the living creatures had designed these spheres that could transform its physical being into radiation and back again.
It was an attempt to forward the knowledge to the next creation that would follow theirs. And now again, it had succeeded. It was the seventh time that the spheres had registered intelligent life. They had travelled through eternities of time and space and most of them had perished in the Big Bang that created this universe.
They had come to earth hundreds of years ago because they had discovered that the planet contained intelligent life. The spheres had sent several hundreds of smaller spores, which were smaller versions of the spheres, which had traveled down to the surface to establish contact. And they had succeeded. At least in the beginning. They had established contact with intelligent creatures on a couple of places on the planet’s surface and in the beginning their mission had gone well. Just as it had done on other places in this universe.
But something had gone wrong. This time the contact had not evolved as the earlier ones. Exactly what it was that happened this time was not clear but it had affected them so much that they were forced to call it off.
The reaction from the people that had gotten in contact with them had not been what the spores were prepared for. In the beginning, humans had reacted with joy and gratitude but it had not taken long until those feelings had turned into hate and fear. Instead of developing the contact with the humans the spores had been forced to flee. It was something unique and the spores had reacted with frustration and decided to leave. The decision had been taken and was sent out to all the spores but a few of them had gone against the decision and had hidden themselves deep down on the planet’s surface while the rest had left the planet.
*
; Tabula Rasa, Madagascar
2048-12-28
Richard Snow was tired and worried. He had spent the whole day down by the sonoluminescence reactors on the lowest level in Primus. It was a physical, heavy work and today he was more tired than he usual. He was not a young man anymore and his body ached, especially the backside of his left leg.
He massaged it while he walked to get the pain to let go and he felt his own smell of sweat. He walked in one of the long corridors that led up from Primus to Gaudium, where his apartment was. It was not in the best part of Tabula Rasa that he lived but that was the way it was. The color on the walls had seen its best days, small paint flakes loosened and created patterns as they reached up against the ceiling. The under dimensioned air-conditioning struggled to bring in fresh air and the strained vents loud wheezing was intrusive.
A not so fresh smell filled his nose and he moved forward. The cleaning robots that had as a task to keep the inner environment at Tabula Rasa clean and tidy did not pass by these areas as often as the nicer ones.
Even within Tabula Rasa there were class differences. But he was used to it. One day he would manage to get away from here. He would move on. Forward. Upwards. He shook his head while he stepped to the side and let two elderly ladies pass in the narrow corridor. His backpack slid off to the side and he pulled it back.
The conversation with Elisabeth had worried him, it was not like her to call and be agitated like that. And what was that all about that she had told him to pack? It had not happened before. His thoughts kept grinding in his head and he frantically tried to understand what had happened. He blinked in suprisement and saw that he had arrived to his apartment. He had not noticed that he had arrived.
Richard sighed and put the hand against the door. It was cold under his hand. The built-in sensor reacted on his palm print and the door slid to the side. He was met by the voice of Barry Manilow. The holocube was in the backpack and he gently put it down when he closed the door. He did not know if Marina, his girlfriend, was at home. They had been arguing when he left and even if he did not remember exactly what it was they were arguing about, he knew that they would continue when he got home. He was just about to take the holocube out of the backpack when a female voice came out of the bedroom.
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