7th Son, page 11
“We manufactured the car accident, just as we did with your progenitor,” Kleinman said. “Sedated Jane—”
“Jane Michelle Smith.”
“Indeed, and attempted to record her memories. Unlike your procedure, we’d chosen to begin the cloning process before Jane’s ‘accident.’ Hence, these Betas.”
John shuddered. “But something went wrong.”
“Yes.”
“And you couldn’t download the memories into the children’s brains.”
“Correct.”
“And so you kept these brainless clones alive. Extracted them from the Womb, but couldn’t bring yourself to study them like you did Gene the Wonder Chimp.”
“Of course not. We’re not monsters.”
John looked into Kleinman’s eyes. “And what happened to Jane Smith? Is she still alive?”
The doctor did not blink. “Presumably. She woke from her coma as a ward of the state. The window for optimal LTP execution had concluded. We had one opportunity. We failed. We have not followed her progess since.”
“Right,” John said, his voice emotionless, stoned. “You’re not monsters. Excuse me while I get the hell away from you, you terrifying bastard.”
John trotted back to the group, desperate to be far from the machine and the mad doctor who’d created it. The other Beta clones stood around a peculiar contraption, listening to Durbin’s speech.
Again, since John’s frame of reference was now leaving the solar system, he gazed at the device and thought immediately of the laboratory from a Frankenstein movie. It was small—six soda-can-size, black cylinders, bolted together, with electrical wires crisscrossing its surface. Atop these cylinders was a tiny metal plate, no bigger than a deck of playing cards.
The metal plate was a bed. A tiny bed. With tiny leather restraints hailing from the “floor”—the top of the wire-wrapped canisters.
“Huh” was all John could muster.
“. . . as I mentioned, most of these dead ends regarding the upload and download of memories were, hah, forgettable,” Durbin was saying. “Outright failures. But one of them must be mentioned here. We think John Alpha may have recently exploited it.”
Durbin tapped a section of his tablet PC’s screen, and it displayed a new page. John found himself suddenly, desperately, craving a cigarette.
“The first upload/download of a Memory Totality occurred in 1982, on a laboratory mouse,” Durbin explained, staring down at his notes. He nodded to the device before them. John imagined the animal bound to this tiny bed. “Its memories were uploaded, encoded as binary code, and stored in a portion of one of the lab’s Q-Cray hard drives, just as planned. Success. Until.”
The clones looked at one another, their eyes wary.
“Until what?” asked Michael, the marine.
Durbin shifted from foot to foot, suddenly nervous. “Until the scientists observed the animal after the procedure. The MemR/I process did something more than just record the memories. It created an electrical . . . ah. An electrical kickback, for lack of a better term.”
John felt a bead of sweat slip down the nape of his neck. “What does that mean?” he heard himself ask.
“It, ah . . .” Durbin swiped a hand across his forehead. “The hardware apparently sent an electric shock wave through the animal’s brain nanoseconds after the Memory Totality upload was complete. The recording was successful, but in the process there was an anomaly. A bioelectric hiccup. Feedback. It, ah, it erased the mouse’s memories in its brain.”
Erased? John thought.
“Erased?”
Yeah, what he said—whoever the hell that was.
“Complete neural erasure,” Durbin said. “Immediate catatonia. The brain tissue appeared to be healthy, but . . . nothing. No brain activity. No memories. Nothing was left. It was a vacuum.”
John placed his hands over his face. Too much. Too much. He closed his eyes. He felt his calloused fingertips tremor against his eyebrows.
To his left, a grim chuckle. It was Michael. “A neutron bomb for the brain,” the marine said.
“I don’t get it,” Jack said.
“Neutron bombs were the big military R-and-D project of the late 1950s,” Michael said, glancing at General Hill for approval. He got it. “Basically, the blast destroys organic material but leaves buildings, roads, and vehicles intact. Whoever survived could march in and literally claim the spoils of war.”
Dr. Mike: “And your point is?”
“My point, Doc, is this hiccup thing zapped the software, but kept the hard drive,” Michael said. “The lights are on, but nobody’s home. Right, Durbin?”
The younger man nodded. “The team soon recognized what had happened—the Memory Totality had been successfully uploaded, but something had gone wrong. The intent of recording Memory Totality was never to excavate and remove memories from the brain; it was simply supposed to copy them. According to the archived report, the team chose to reverse the data on the spot. They chose to download those copied memories back into the mouse’s mind.”
“Why?” Father Thomas.
“To bring Algernon back from the vegetable patch,” John replied.
God, that little bed. The chimps. The first Betas. The Womb. The field of supercomputers. He felt faint.
Durbin cleared his throat and tapped his screen. “Ironically, the download was completely successful. The mouse regained consciousness. Dr. Berman, Dr. Kleinman, and the other team leaders knew something had gone wrong with the upload process, but according to the report, they also believed they had discovered a temporary solution: simply download a copy of the Memory Totality back into the traumatized brain, to ‘restart’ the animal’s consciousness. The animal would be fine.”
“But we were wrong.” Another voice. Kleinman’s. “Let’s head back. You’ll want to be sitting for what’s to come.”
“What a fucking shock,” John heard himself say.
The group returned to the Ops center, and the clones resumed their spots around the mahogany table. Durbin stood behind the lectern once more, though the facility’s leader currently had the floor.
“The download didn’t take,” Kleinman finally explained. “The animal was fine for a few hours, and then it died suddenly. Quite suddenly. Our dissection of the brain revealed a kind of neural atrophy. Swift, catastrophic . . . neurons collapsing in on each other, brain tissue all but rotting inside the skull. It was as if the brain had been overloaded in some way, blown like a fuse.”
Kinda like me right now, John thought.
“We deduced, after further experimentation, that it wasn’t our uploading that had caused the trauma,” Kleinman continued. “And it wasn’t the downloading procedure, either. It was that unintentional blast of bioelectric feedback that occurred immediately after the recording process. It was like a neural lightning storm, screaming across the mouse’s brain. It left a characteristic microscopic damage signature.”
“Poor Algernon,” Kilroy2.0 said.
“At first, the mouse’s neurons appeared to be undamaged,” Kleinman said. “But they were. Their ‘run time’ was diminished by a thousandfold, maybe more. When we decided to download those memories back into the mouse’s brain, we didn’t know the brain would later break down from the shock wave’s trauma.
“I’m sure you want to know what this has to do with Dania Sheridan, your mother. Here it is. Dania was the memory specialist who identified the source of that shock wave. While her official role at this point in the project was to raise John Alpha in Indianapolis, she analyzed the dissection and hardware report data and pinpointed the cause. She also put us on the path to solving the problem. She was brilliant. It took some time, but we were able to adjust our technology to prevent other cases of this accidental memory erasure.
“But it was Dania who first suggested that our tragic misstep could have other applications. Military applications, to be frank. It was Dania who realized that the shock-wave pulse could be easily replicated and used again and again. She called the phenomenon a NEPTH-charge. Neuro Erasure Pulse Technology Hardware. We deliberately ignored her enthusiasm for the discovery; our goal was to perfect the Memory Totality upload/download process for 7th Son. But when she retired from 7th Son five years ago, Dania began pursuing the study of this technology and its uses for the Department of Defense. She’s apparently made significant breakthroughs and improvements, if you could call them that. Make no mistake: NEPTH-charge decimates a human mind. It erases a person’s Memory Totality.”
“Why would that be useful?” Jay asked.
Kleinman’s eyebrows peered over his trifocals in that grandfatherly manner that John greatly mistrusted. “To replace it with a completely different human Memory Totality, of course. Even if the brain would fall apart weeks later. John Alpha likely kidnapped Dania to obtain the secrets of NEPTH-charge.”
The clones sat in silence, pondering what they’d just heard.
“Mind control,” Michael said finally.
“Oh, no, Captain,” Kleinman said, turning to the marine. “No. Mind control is warping another’s preexisting will. There is no will after a NEPTH-charge; there is only vacancy. This is body control. Think of it as taking a videotape filled with your favorite television shows—one that you’ve clearly labeled, of course—and then magnetizing it, erasing it. Now you decide to tape new shows, completely different footage. On the outside, the videocassette looks the same. Same label, same handwriting . . . but now there is very different content lurking inside. Do you understand how useful this technology could be to a terrorist?”
John looked at Kleinman—then at the clones. Suddenly . . .
Holy
. . . the pieces . . .
motherfucking
. . . fell together.
shit.
“Jesse Fowler,” he said. “The kid. Alpha nabbed the kid. He—”
“—tore the kid’s mind to pieces and put new memories inside,” Father Thomas said, nodding slowly. “A new program, like he said. With new instructions. To kill President Griffin.”
“Christ Almighty,” Jack said. He looked up at Durbin, who was still standing behind the lectern like a Hall of Presidents mannequin. “Is that right? Is that true?”
Durbin nodded again. “That’s what we suspect. As Kleinman said, the NEPTH-charge leaves a damage signature. We found evidence of that damage in the Fowler boy’s autopsy images. Fowler’s sudden death also matches the NEPTH-charge MO: the child was placed under maximum security in Camp N— . . . ah, an undisclosed facility after the assassination. He was under twenty-four/seven surveillance. He died within a week. Complete neural shutdown.”
“Just like the mouse,” Kilroy2.0 said.
Dr. Mike rolled his eyes. “It sounds like all this blah-blah talkie-talk is leading up to something,” he said, smirking. “So is that the punch line? That John Alpha has NEPTH-charge technology and used it on a kid to kill the president?”
Durbin shook his head. “There’s more. If Alpha’s alive and has NEPTH-charge technology, this might not be the punch line. It might be the setup for something bigger. Imagine being able to erase a man’s memories with a few electrodes to the head and the press of a button. Imagine being able to erase an entire family’s memories. Or a neighborhood’s. Get the picture?”
“Not with all your elliptical bullshit,” Dr. Mike said.
From the table, General Hill cleared his throat. “You’re not putting the pieces together, son. NEPTH-charge isn’t the only technology Alpha has. He must have MemR/I recording capability as well. What good is erasing a man’s mind if you have nothing with which to replace it? He had to put something in the Fowler boy’s brain. Maybe it was Alpha’s own Memory Totality that was planted in the kid’s mind. Maybe it was someone else’s, an accomplice’s. We don’t know. And we don’t know how he acquired these secrets. Either Alpha stole the secrets of NEPTH-charge and the MemR/I system from our data archives before he escaped, or he learned about Dania’s NEPTH research for the DoD. You want it straight? Here it is: A kid with an A tattooed in his ear killed the president, and the woman who knows the most about NEPTH-charge has been kidnapped. With that kind of technology at his disposal, we think Alpha’s just warming up.”
So government secrets aren’t so secret if you’re determined, and when the world thinks you’re dead, John mused. Security holes the size of the Pacific. Could it get any worse?
“Alpha undoubtedly has cloning technology, too,” Kleinman said.
Hello, other shoe.
Jack flinched; Michael let out a low whistle. “What makes you think that, hoss?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Kleinman said. “Four years ago, we found his body just weeks after he vanished from the 7th Son project. Complete with the A tattoo on the tragus. But the body must have been a plant—a genetically identical clone. If it weren’t for the matching tattoo inside Jesse Fowler’s ear, I’d think the person behind the president’s death was someone else. But I’m convinced it’s Alpha. And I’m convinced he’s had the potential to clone humans since his escape.”
“This is the part where you tell us that no organization, other than 7th Son, can clone people,” Jack said.
“Not to our knowledge,” Kleinman replied.
“Which means he had help from the inside,” Dr. Mike said, nodding furiously. “He was using the Womb, and the hypercomputer.”
General Hill frowned. “No. The Womb and the MemR/I Array are our crown jewels. We monitor keystrokes and processor activity on all the computers on the Womb level. I’ve checked the logs from the past twenty years. The last time anyone used the Womb computers—and cloning chambers—was sixteen years ago, when you seven were born. If Alpha cloned himself, he didn’t do it here. I would’ve known.”
“So he had help from the outside,” Dr. Mike shot back. “We all took the walk down memory lane this morning. That stuff would take years to build. And it would’ve been done off-site.”
“Alpha is a very clever boy,” Kilroy2.0 said.
“We’re looking into that,” Hill said, “but the trail’s cold. Remember, we didn’t realize Alpha was alive until three weeks ago.”
“So he faked his death by killing himself—his cloned self—to keep you guys from finding him,” Michael said, his eyes wide. “So he could hide in plain sight. Plan. But plan what, exactly?”
“A conspiracy,” said Father Thomas.
Kilroy2.0 nodded his head in agreement, then stuck a finger back into his ear and jiggled it.
Jay eyed Durbin.
“So a man who’s supposed to be dead has the world’s most dangerous toys at his disposal—no thanks to any of you,” Jay said, his voice high. “But why would Alpha want to kill the president? If he already had the brain-erase technology, why did he kidnap Dani— ah, screw it. What does he want with our mother? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does,” Dr. Mike said. “I don’t know the how or the why, but I’ve got a good idea of the what. All signs point to revenge. He wants sweet, delicious revenge. Revenge on 7th Son, maybe revenge on the government. You reap what you sow.”
The video screens behind Durbin suddenly flashed on again. John looked at the young man behind the lectern . . . and at the glowing screen with an image of a thin, neon-green horizontal line cutting through its center.
“We think he wants more than that, Doctor,” Durbin said. “What you’re about to hear was found on a USB thumbdrive at Ms. Sheridan’s home. We think John Alpha wants you—all of you—to find him.”
Durbin pressed a button on the laptop, and when John heard the noises pour from the overhead speakers, he forgot about NEPTH-charges and MemR/I chambers. His flesh began to crawl, crawl as it did around the campfire when he was a boy, crawl as it did when he had first heard that flashlight chant . . . Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary.
The green line shimmered and transformed into arcs and valleys, jagged mountaintops and abyssal trenches. The overhead speakers sang, matching the neon sound waves displayed on-screen. There were no words. Just sounds.
Deee-deee . . . deeeeeee . . . deeeeee . . . deee-deee-deee . . . deeeee . . .
“The file on the drive read, ‘For the Betas,’ ” Durbin said.
deee-deee-deee . . .
“Sounds like Morse code,” Michael said.
deeeee . . .
But not to John. John thought it sounded like the voice of a ghost.
Very much like a ghost.
TWELVE
Charles Caine was surrounded by the warm comforts of the limousine, but he flipped up the collar of his overcoat as the car pulled up in front of the Washington Hospital Center. Better to be safe than sorry, he thought. Or sniffly. Visible weakness was a bad thing on the Hill.
Especially these days.
A Secret Service agent opened the door from outside. The brisk air rushed inside, and Caine winced. From beside him, Carl Sigler, his chief aide, barked a quick “Goddamn.”
“We’re ready when you are, Mr. Vice President,” the agent said.
Caine put on his smile. “Let’s do it.” The Chattanooga accent had mostly left his voice—thirty-three years on the Hill does that to a man—but a hint of it remained to please the folks back home. “I’ll freeze my balls off if we don’t.”
Charles Caine, appointed vice president two weeks ago, stepped out of the car into the sunlight and into the flashbulbs, the microphones, the well-coiffed reporters with their slender faces and shark’s teeth. The Pack. Pudgy men with bazooka video cameras . . . Barbie-doll Botoxed TV news reporters . . . newspapermen wearing ties (as if that disguise made them respectable). All crying for his attention. All ambulance chasers, as far as he was concerned.
Caine smiled. And waved. And smiled.
The Pack’s questions were a raucous spaghetti plate of nearly indistinguishable voices—
How are you feeling, Mr. Vice President?
Any surprises from the doctor?
Hypertension?
Any leads in the investigation?
About the Iraqi-pipeline saboteurs . . .
