Fujimi stopped a few feet from the patrol car holding O’Keefe. He paused, reached into his pocket. He pulled out something small. He pointed it at the back of the cruiser. I cringed, and ran toward him, expecting the pop of a tiny pistol or some weapon. But nothing came. Fujimi stuffed the object back in his pocket and continued walking confidently away from the funeral home.
I stopped. Was this man insane?
But then a noise came from the cop car. Someone banged on the car windows—from the inside. O’Keefe’s hands and head slammed against the shatter-proof glass. The cop in the front seat burst out of the car and dashed around the side to the back door. I sprinted forward. A few papers fell out of the dossier, and I stooped and stuffed them in my pockets and ran forward.
“Suspect in cardiac arrest,” the officer said into his shoulder-radio. “Requesting ambulance immediately.”
He yanked open the door and O’Keefe spilled out headfirst to the pavement. His mouth was frothing, white eyes rolling back in his head.
“Officer, I’m a doctor—what happened to this man?”
“I don’t know—he was demanding to call his lawyer when he just started to shake and vomit,” the officer said, laying the reporter out on the asphalt.
“Let me see him.”
The cop backed off, and I set the dossier on the ground and crouched over the reporter. O’Keefe’s heart had indeed stopped. I began chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth, the life-giving rhythm. But the reporter was dying. The heartbeat had just ceased—the body was burning up. I felt at the jugular for a pulse, then pulled up the sleeve.
The Atman in the wrist glowed with a strange light. Lightly I touched a fingertip to it, and recoiled, cursing. It had burned me with heat, like a frying pan, on contact. I angled the wrist over. The screen was flashing, without a pattern at all. It was just a miasma of swirling colors, a visual chaos. It was doing something to O’Keefe. It was killing him. I stared for a second, but then I came to my senses. I tried a few more compressions and deep breaths, but it was no use.
The Atman kept flickering, like it was possessed. I had an idea.
“Officer, do you have a knife handy?”
“What do you need a knife for?” he said.
“I need to remove the man’s Atman. I think it’s killing him,” I said.
The cop frowned, then walked back to his cruiser. He came back with a jagged hunting knife, which he handed over.
“This is crazy, Doc,” the cop said.
I grabbed the blade and plunged it into the flesh around the Atman. Since O’Keefe’s heart had stopped already, the blood came as a mere trickle onto the pavement. I incised an inch beneath the skin, then angled the blade and sawed sideways. As I proceeded along the bone, I pried the device upward. Finally, at the edge of the machine, I yanked, and it came free with a sickening suctioning of flesh and muscle. The cop retched, covering his mouth with his hands. I tried to tug the Atman free of O’Keefe’s arm, but part of the implant was stuck fast. The blood was flowing faster again, hot and heavy. I glanced up. O’Keefe’s eyes were open. He blinked once. His mouth moved.
“What is it, O’Keefe?” I said, drawing close.
“Check…dossier,” O’Keefe said. “Meruda…experiments…”
“Take it easy, Jim. We need to get you to the hospital,” I said, shaking him. “But who is Meruda?”
O’Keefe’s eyes went wide, then blank, his face dropped limp. The blood stopped coursing out of his arm. I felt for a pulse. It was gone again. But now the Atman dimmed, slowed down, then went black. I did a few more chest compressions, but it was useless. Shaking my head, I reached out and closed the reporter’s eyes.
My hand brushed against something papery at his collar. I felt around, squinting in the half-darkness. My fingers closed on a familiar strip—it was another label with the same damned serial numbers.
BOW-137.
I yanked it off and pocketed it. Standing, I looked around. The cop was on the other side of the police car, doubled over, vomiting from the sight of the impromptu surgery. No one else was around; all was silent. I took a few steps toward the funeral home. But then I remembered the dossier I had left on the ground and turned on my heel.
It wasn’t there. I retraced my steps. I walked in a circle around the reporter’s body, listening to the cop’s sickening heaves. I searched the darkness for thieves in the shadows. I scoured the nearby bushes, I canvassed the slope of the lawn, looking down the rushing lights of the ultrahighway. But there was nothing—not a single stray page anywhere.
Someone had stolen it. I balled my fists and roared at the sky, I spat on my own face. I flailed back toward the funeral home. It could not be happening. The documents would have gotten me my job back, made life normal again. Who had taken them? Who had robbed me of my reprieve?
A shiver crested my spine, lighting up my brain. Only a few reasons could make someone interested enough in an old dossier of papers to steal them. They were important. They were damaging to someone or something. They held unnamable secrets. And they had to be removed. Someone had to make sure I didn’t even have the chance to try to read those old alphanumerics. Someone had been watching and waiting. They’d used O’Keefe’s death throes as the perfect distraction to swipe them from me. Someone had killed O’Keefe because he had decoded their secrets. Was it Fujimi’s weird gesture that did it—and if so, how? I held my head in my hands, mulling over the possibilities.
With a bustle, Mary came through the funeral-home door, laughing, glancing over her shoulder at Abbud, who followed her with a youthful spring in his step. She glanced at me, and the smile quickly melted off her face.
“Joe, what’s wrong?” she said, coming over to me. Her hand brushed my damp forehead.
“O’Keefe—he’s dead,” I said, gesturing behind me at the body.
“What?” she said, her hand covering her mouth.
“Is there anything we can do?” Abbud said, starting down the driveway.
“Absolutely nothing,” I said, ushering Mary toward our car. The big crowd of mourners started to stream out of the funeral home, and a crowd clustered near the reporter’s lifeless body.
“Come on, let’s go,” I whispered in Mary’s ear.
“Shouldn’t you wait for the police to take your statement?” Abbud hollered.
“I don’t think that would be wise,” I said, pointing at the vomiting officer, pulling Mary toward the car.
We climbed in the car and took off. As I pulled out the back exit onto a side-road, I noticed Abbud frantically waving his arms in the rearview mirror. But I only waved with the back of my hand and drove out the back exit, and onto the eastbound stretch of the ultrahighway. The sparkling holograms streamed by. Adoring How Low Can You Go audiences shimmered in the broadcast onto the night sky, their roar like an ocean. Every other ad sparkled with the vision of the release of the new generation of Atmans.
“You know you want it,” echoed Saxas’ voice across the valley.
“Joe, was that the reporter? The one who stole the Wetherspoon files? What happened to him? You didn’t…”
“I didn’t do anything to him,” I said. “He gave me the papers, but they were stolen by whoever did that to him.”
“Call the police, Joe! Call the hospital!”
“There’s nothing I can do, Mary. The reporter just died. I have no better explanation. But I will find out, I promise you that.”
She smacked my arm.
“Joseph Aloysius Barnes! Go back and find those papers! Right now!” Mary said.
I shook my head.
“They’re long gone, honey.”
She continued yelling. There was nothing I could do. In a way, she was right. Those papers were everything. But I knew they were gone. And I knew what I had to do. As I switched to the fast lane, a blotch against the black sky drifted across the rearview. I adjusted the mirror and glanced back. A gray plume of smoke was drifting upward from a thin high chimney on the funeral home’s roof. A
fter a mile, it faded into the depth of the night.
THE MONSTROUS INSTANTS OF HISTORY
U.S.A., 2087
The Atman blipped and pinged as with each finger stroke. I had never noticed the noises before. But as I sat in my first-floor bathroom, the door closed, those tiny tones suddenly seemed thunderous, soundwaves bounding off the tiles, breaking the trance of dawn. Mary was fast asleep upstairs, hooked blissfully into her gusting Dormus. I did not want to wake her; she needed her rest.
But I had not slept. Without my own Dormus, my body could not relax. My limbs were cramped, kinked in every position, with each toss and turn, over every minute of the interminable night. Each breath felt labored as I tried not to keep shifting, talking to myself. All I needed was a few hours of rest. But the reality of the past day corrupted every moment. There was no way to shut it all out. My neck tensed, and then I grew physically tired as my mind raced, still wide awake. Even as my muscles fell limp, the thoughts bounced and whirled in my brain. The nightmare of drowning in the river was gone. It was replaced by new hellish visions—these not dreams at all, but wakeful knowledge of the world I could not escape even for a night’s respite.
It was an unceasing kaleidoscope. The burning rubble of the school. The pallid bodies of plague victims in tiny apartments. The contorted death grimaces of Cruzen, Lamalade, and O’Keefe. The sonogram blob, my unborn child. The impassive glare of Yoshiro Fujimi. The sobs of Rothenberg’s widow over her husband’s freeze-dried corpse. The bureaucratic fingertapping of Suzanne Kranklein. The ominous bloom of green ooze flowing on the river current. The strange labels on dead people, on water-intake pipes and caskets. The stolen dossier—and the three pages I’d tucked and crumpled inside the pocket of my suitjacket.
And Meruda—whoever the hell she may be.
Finally, I gave up and left the sweaty bed. I went down to the kitchen, past the bay windows framing the sun’s rise. When I flipped on the kitchen light, I realized I was still wearing the suit from the funeral. My belt was still fastened. The only piece I had removed before crawling into bed was the jacket, which was still hanging on the back of a chair. I reached into its breast pocket.
The strange pages came out in my hand. I straightened them. The edge of one slit my finger, and I cursed, sucking at the sliver of blood as I held them up to my face. The papers were written in bureaucratic doublespeak, acronyms and euphemisms. I tried to read the old typeface with a rising sense of helplessness. A timeline, a newspaper clipping, and the blurry facsimile of an ID card. They may as well have been artifacts from an ancient civilization, words of a dead language gouged in a clay tablet. As my eyes rushed headlong through the pages they seemed more and more inscrutable.
I slammed my fist down. I walked over to the liquor cabinet, poured a whiskey, took a long swallow. Pulling an energy stick from a drawer, I cracked it and snorted deeply. I closed my eyes and breathed. I went over to the chair, sat down, took a deep breath, and tried again.
The first page was headed “Project 137.” It was the easiest to read, and as I focused, the daze of insomnia lifted. My eyes, so used to glowing screens, slowly were starting to reaccustom themselves to the old alphanumerics of the typewritten official documents in front of me, even as smudged as they were. But it was still a slog; the enumerated entries, the truncated words, the grand sweep of lost 20th century American history. At least there was a kind of guide: the handwritten annotations written in O’Keefe’s shaky ink along the margin.
And I started to understand. This was the key to absolutely everything.
1946 to 1948—Guatemala. U.S. government doctors intentionally infect hundreds of psychiatric patients with syphilis to watch the speed of their deaths, read the first entry.
“Nobody cares about lunatics. Especially foreign lunatics,” O’Keefe wrote in the margin.
Mid-1950s—St. Louis. Motorized blowers installed on city rooftops. Zinc cadmium sulfide and other undetermined agent spread among population. About 10,000 rare cancer cases determined by year 2000. Virtually all are poor African-Americans, read the second.
“Army project designed to test BW attack on impoverished Russian city, using Saint Louis ghetto as a model for Soviet Bloc housing,” O’Keefe added.
1960s—Project 112. DOD and CIA collaborate on BW and CW research formally for the first time, read the next one. Project is one of a numbered series; later officially shut down by the administration. But subsequent Projects retain essential superstructure for subsequent work. Gas release and dosing of water systems with psychotropics and spores carried out at intermittent times in scattered locations, including South Dakota, Nevada, and New Jersey. Murders, psychotic episodes, and suicides result from exposure.
“New Jersey is center of water dispersal tests of contagion starting in 1982, causing thousands of undocumented cases of physiological and psychological disease,” O’Keefe added, underlining every other word. “Autism and birth defects, and unexplained deaths, increase steadily. Garden State becomes known as a toxic wasteland, the butt of comedians’ jokes.”
My hair stood on end. New Jersey was in the middle of it all, reaching back to my parents and even my grandparents’ time. I swigged the whiskey, and I cracked another energy stick. I snorted and read on.
1970s—San Francisco dispersion experiments, New York subway population trials. Control group bacteria released in open city and in enclosed subterranean space to define control group of the spread among a mobile population. No effects studied initially. However, bacteria commingle with pollutants to become carcinogenic compounds. Cancer clusters and autoimmune ailments proliferate in 1980s. Death estimates conservatively placed at 375,000. But they likely exceed 2 million.
“Millions dead within cancer clusters—even as U.S. wages a ‘War on Cancer,’” was the trembling annotation, cut in thick ink, rage gushing from O’Keefe’s pen. The reporter had really given a shit about the common good, after all, I mused. I raised my glass to the ceiling and took another hit of the whiskey, saluting the now-deceased journalist. But I read on.
United States signs updated versions of Geneva Protocol in 1972 and 1993 banning research into Chemical Warfare and Biological Warfare—CW and BW.
“Liars had their fingers crossed behind their backs,” O’Keefe footnoted.
From 1980s onward into the first decades of the millennium, it continued, CW and BW research in the U.S. continues and expands, with mass aircraft dispersion of lithium particles also beginning in 1982. Funding increases in multiple sections of the defense budget, tucked within other fiscal items, and never as a single category scrutinized in audits. Research is described as defensive—first in the interest of counter-balancing the perceived threat of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. But then the Iron Curtain crumbles, and it’s another decade until Terrorism replaces Communism as the major threat to World Peace.
“One—ism is as good as another!” O’Keefe scribbled underneath.
Starting in the year 2001, Food and Drug Administration controls are relaxed by several successive acts of Congress, it continued. New frontiers in ingredients and synthetic additives are opened to the big manufacturers. Corporations progressively employ more dyes, taste enhancers, substitutes, preservatives, thickening agents, and emulsifiers which go untested just as long as side effects remain unreported. Using new electronic health databases, blood samples are surreptitiously taken and cataloged, creating an extensive pharmaco-anthropological study of the Americans’ serum from region to region.
“Strange they all got the same idea to study human serum at a population level at the same time…” O’Keefe wrote.
In the fall of 2018, Project 137 goes fully operational. Latest in the line of the Projects combining the CW and BW research, and the ambient population effects of air toxics, water purity and nutrition—all are conducted now at the most classified levels. The possibilities of determining environmental effects on disease, such as dietary effects on cancer, are nearly endless. The newly-christ
ened Bureau of Wellness becomes lead agency. They announce massive research into population-level health indicators. But behind it moves Project 137, sole inheritor of the U.S.’s work in BW and CW.
“The game is afoot,” O’Keefe wrote.
To be noted—the U.S. programs into CW and BW only really started with the end of World War II. Although limited research was conducted prior to 1945 at Fort Detrick in Maryland in response to the global Axis threat, it was only after the end of hostilities that the funding and the staffing began to envelop significant portions of the national defense budget. Use of hemorrhagic smallpox during the Korean War is first instance of American deployment. The sudden gains in technology and know-how in BW and CW starting in 1945 remain unexplained in official channels.
This board’s recommendation is to keep this information privileged in perpetuity.
The signature beneath it all was indistinct and faint, like it was a copy that had faded with reproduction after reproduction over the years. But I held it up to the light, squinting.
And I gasped.
Executive Summary prepared by:
Cornelius Wetherspoon, PhD, gastroenterology and geriatrics,
Saint Almachius Hospital, N.J., Bureau of Wellness satellite office, March 17, 2019.
The bastard had been playing me all along. He was in the thick of it more than anyone. I read the name again and again, as if I could be wrong about the name, or that it could be another Cornelius Wetherspoon. I balled my fist and thought about punching something. But instead, I tipped the glass back. I refilled it, drained it, and refilled again. I snapped an energy stick under my nose. I turned the page.
The second page carried the reproductions of two news stories. They were from the days of newspapers; my eyes had even more trouble with these blurrier items. There were no dates—but they clearly came from before I was born. Small headlines and tiny typeface. I could remember the last remaining newspapers from when I was a child, and I knew the editors had decided these were unimportant stories. They were afterthoughts; castaways tucked away in the throwaway back pages, stranded somewhere behind the obituaries and in front of the flimsy supermarket coupons.
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