7th Son, page 4
On January 1, thirty years ago, their sperm and eggs were removed from cryostorage, thawed, and prepared for eventual artificial insemination. The parents weren’t invited to the conception. Security was the overwhelming factor, of course—the project was Code Phantom . . . beyond Top Secret, beyond Eclipse Command.
Practicality also contributed to the decision. The father had been dead since 1967; the mother was then sixty-four years old. The lab-coat folk didn’t think the woman would have taken the birth in the best of spirits.
The conception was successful on the third attempt, and the zygote was implanted into a surrogate who was paid an astounding amount of money to not ask questions. After the child’s birth, it would be given to Dania and Hugh Sheridan, scientists working on the 7th Son project. Dania was one of the head technologists; Hugh was the lone child psychologist on the 7th Son staff. They would raise the child together as planned, in the way suggested by the scientists and the cadre of child specialists (who hadn’t the foggiest to what project they were contributing when they were questioned by Sheridan, Kleinman, and the rest). The goal: to make the child the most well-rounded person it could be; to encourage the youngster to excel in any hobby or academic interest it pursued, or was connived into pursuing, if need be. Love the child. Gently push the child. Introduce religion, culture, athletics, and art to the child. Let the child grow to be playful, curious, and serious.
It would need the most supportive childhood possible, after all, if it was to be destined for great things.
The Sheridans changed their last name to Smith and moved to Indianapolis, as ordered. Regular reports by the “Smiths” and the 7th Son support staff who’d also moved to Indy would keep the project’s leaders at the Virginia headquarters informed of the child’s progress after the birth.
That September 7, John Michael Smith was born.
A moment after John connected the dots—right after the impact of the words John Michael Smith was being collected and fired from his neurons—Dr. Mike attacked. The room’s silence was shattered by Mike’s scream. He was already climbing across the table before John realized what was happening.
Dr. Mike’s hair had quickly torn free from its blow-dried style and had descended onto his brow in thick, knife-shaped shards. His eyes bulged. His knees slid and slipped on the tabletop. One of his loafer-clad feet nearly kicked John in the face. The dude was fast and frantic, and on Kleinman in seconds.
He shook the geezer, screamed this was bullshit. Somewhere, one of the seven was shouting for help, another was cackling the word “conspiracy, conspiracy” in a singsong voice, another still was shouting to stop it stop it he’s trying to tell us something. At the end of the table, the priest whispered, “That’s my name,” over and over.
John sat there, disconnected, disbelieving, as if this were some improv performance in which he and these other players would smile and shake hands afterward. It felt like a dinner mystery. Yes, very much like that.
Lieutenant Chapman grabbed Dr. Mike from behind by the Brooks Brothers coat and yanked him off the table with one arm. Mike spilled to the floor, swearing and screaming. Chapman placed his .45 against the side of Mike’s head and cocked the hammer.
Dr. Mike stopped in midswing and stared into Chapman’s eyes. It was like hitting pause on a videotape, or watching two kids play freeze tag. Mike’s mouth hung open for a moment, his fist still in midair. Chapman dug the barrel into Dr. Mike’s temple—Are we all on the same page here? his eyes said—and Mike dropped his arm.
Chapman’s gun did not budge. Kleinman was up from the table, wiping his glasses furiously. General Hill stepped between Kleinman and the derailed assailant, his shadow sweeping over Dr. Mike like a thundercloud.
“I will not tolerate that behavior,” Hill said, his voice low and cold. “Not here. Not in my post. Do you understand me?”
Mike looked up and nodded. Chapman pulled the gun away and resumed his place by the door. Hill whirled around and pointed a dark finger at the rest of them. The fat lunatic stopped giggling.
“That goes for all of you. I’ll say this one time. Violence will not be tolerated here, in this room, in this facility. You’re wondering why you’re here. You’re hoping you’ve slid over into some Twilight Zone episode. You haven’t. This is real, and it’s only the beginning. So shut up. Listen to Dr. Kleinman.”
As Kleinman stepped tentatively back toward the table, Hill cleared his throat. “And if any of you so much as daydreams about attacking this man,” he said with an icy whisper, “I’ll take you down myself.”
The dude gargles crude oil, John thought.
Dr. Mike sullenly shuffled back to his seat, primly brushing his rumpled suit coat. Kleinman sat down and adjusted his spectacles.
“I know how all this must seem,” Kleinman said, and shook his head. “But you must trust the general and me.” He waved his hand across the table, from one side to the other, as if introducing two groups at a dinner party.
“John Michael Smith . . . meet John Michael Smith,” he said.
At the other end of the table, the priest began to cry. “What is this all about?” Father Thomas asked.
Kleinman offered him a tired, sympathetic smile.
“It’s about the greatest experiment ever conducted in the history of our species.”
Hugh and Dania Sheridan, now Smith, raised the boy in Meridian-Kessler, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Indianapolis. They followed the child-rearing plan outlined by the project leaders and encouraged Johnny Smith in every way they could.
Johnny was raised Catholic, just as his mother had been. Although Dania was an agnostic by the time she’d entered the 7th Son project and Hugh was an atheist who had suddenly found himself in a foxhole in the name of science, they created a more than convincing portrayal of the “casual Catholic” family. Dania baked cakes for the fish-fry cake wheel, Hugh helped set up booths at fund-raisers. They never pushed the Catechism down their son’s throat, but simply explained the core beliefs of Christianity and told Johnny there was a God if he believed there was one. They also taught their son religious tolerance: Judaism, Buddhism, a smidgen of shamanism, atheism.
Johnny took a shine to athletics early in life, thanks to his biological father’s abilities and the ordered encouragement of his adoptive parents. T-ball and YMCA soccer were early obsessions, but—as with most children raised in Indiana—basketball became the sport he enjoyed most. When Johnny was five, Hugh installed a wooden backboard on the rear side of the garage, facing the cobblestone alley. They practiced free throws before dinner, and Hugh would always place Johnny on his shoulders for a slam dunk just before they raced each other, laughing, back to the house to eat.
Thanks to Hugh’s former profession as a child psychologist, the couple explained complicated matters to the boy in terms he would understand. The family went to art galleries, attended operas and plays—potentially stodgy affairs for even the most patient of adults—and made those trips exciting for the child. Paintings were like windows into the mind, they’d say. Concerts and plays were like mythical creatures that lived for only a short time, disappeared, and were reborn at the next performance. Each incarnation was a little different, and that’s what made them special. Like the phoenix? Johnny had asked after seeing a performance of Peter Pan, and the parents had smiled proudly. That’s right. Just like the phoenix.
He grew up listening to 33s of Mozart and 45s of the Beach Boys. Dania would sing along and play accompaniment on the grand piano in the living room. Johnny liked it best when she’d bang out the thunderous opening chords of the Fifth Symphony and then suddenly nose-dive into “Roll Over Beethoven.” The connection was not lost on the boy. He laughed every time she did that. She did, too.
Finger paints gave way to watercolors; free throws to flip-wrist bank shots; trikes to bikes.
Class sizes were small at the private grade school Johnny attended, and thanks again to his biological proclivities and his parents’ unwavering encouragement, he excelled in all subjects. Johnny would become bored in his classes, but he never became a behavior problem. He simply wrote stories and long-division equations to keep occupied.
He was blond, beautiful, loved by his peers and teachers. He took karate classes and piano and guitar lessons. He played forward on the A team of his middle-school basketball team. He was an altar boy at his church. He traveled with his parents to the Indiana farmlands for picnics, and to nigh-magical places during summer vacations: Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, even Paris and London. His parents taught him the difference between confidence and egomania.
Through it all, the 7th Son team members were notified at least once a day of the boy’s progress. The Virginia team leaders gave guidance where necessary, but since they were now creating and testing the technology for the project’s Beta Phase, they had entrusted much of the daily business to the Indianapolis team. Pediatricians, family friends, occasional after-school tutors, and babysitters: many were 7th Son support staff, documenting the child’s progress from the outside looking in, nearly always confirming the data Dania and Hugh were sending to Virginia.
When he was twelve, Johnny received the Catholic sacrament of confirmation. After careful research, the boy selected Thomas, after St. Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint of scholars, as his confirmation name.
Johnny had no living grandparents. He was told Dania was an only child, and both sets of grandparents had died before he was born. The only family John knew of were a far-flung uncle named Karl, his father’s brother, and Karl’s wife, Jaclyn. John had never met them. His father had only one photograph of them, which he carried in his wallet: a tiny, out-of-focus Kodak print from the late sixties. In the picture, Karl and Jaclyn were sitting on a picnic table, laughing at the camera. Her long brown hair was blowing in the wind, forever frozen in a grainy blur. His large, dark sunglasses matched the color of his collar-length hair. Karl and Jaclyn sent postcards from wonderful places with strange names: Caracas, Panama, Newfoundland, Beijing . . . each a geography lesson waiting to be unearthed. Transfixed by such adventures, John asked what his uncle and aunt did for a living. They worked for the United Nations, Hugh explained.
John attended an exceptional public high school, excelled in his freshman honors classes, and was exposed to many of the races and religions that he’d learned about in his youth. He loved public school, loved the clashes of skin colors and lingo. He tried out for JV basketball and was accepted. Johnny also excelled in track-and-field hurdling. He fell for a girl and received his first kiss one October night at the high school’s homecoming game. They dated, if after-school McDonald’s shakes could be considered dating. One day, he playfully told his mother that he would marry Patty Ross. Dania told him to be careful about making such assumptions about the future. Lots of things could happen from here to there, Dania warned.
The next day, John’s parents were killed in a car accident.
The family was on its way to catch an evening showing of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Johnny would remember getting into the car, Dad turning on Lindstrom Lane, seeing the headlights rushing through the stoplight, rushing toward them . . . hearing his father slam his hand on the horn . . . the snarl of the oncoming engine . . . his mother’s shrieks.
He would open his eyes two years later in a strange city and meet his aunt and uncle for the first time.
They would tell him he had spent his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays in a coma.
The marine broke the silence:
“With all due respect, sir, I’d like to know exactly how you know the greatest-hits version of my childhood. How you know about ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and—”
“Your childhood?” said Jay, the thin man who’d fainted an hour ago. His voice was incredulous. “That’s my childhood.”
The giggling lunatic smacked his fat palm against the table. “Mine.”
Two voices in unison, Dr. Mike, the well-dressed psychologist, and Jack, the bearded geneticist: “And mine.”
John stared at them—stared at them staring at each other—and looked at Kleinman for a heartbeat, an infinity. He felt the tears well up in his eyes. Kleinman offered a gentle smile. This was a nightmare, John realized, a postcoital nap thanks to Saturday Sex with Sarah. Any second now he’d wake up, shake his head, and have a smoke, one of the last in the pack. Any second now. Anysecondnow.
He watched Thomas the priest clutch his rosary and shiver.
John wasn’t waking up.
Kleinman removed his glasses and looked at the seven of them, one by one. John, the ponytailed, lanky black sheep. Michael the marine, the warrior, body-perfection personified. Kilroy2.0, the obese, bespectacled lunatic hacker. Father Thomas, a hero at his parish in Oklahoma. Jack, the pudgy, bearded geneticist. Dr. Mike, the well-coiffed criminal psychologist on the cusp of micro-celebrity. Jay, the United Nations humanitarian.
Kleinman spoke to all of them now.
“This is going to be hardest part to believe, but you must, because we don’t have time for the alternative. You weren’t in a car accident sixteen years ago. Johnny Smith was drugged that night. At dinner. The car wreck was a ruse to create a memory of danger, to create a ‘splinter’ he could come back to later in life, to examine. Something to remember.
“Johnny Smith’s parents took him to the Indianapolis team, who in turn brought him here, to the Virginia facility.”
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Dr. Mike said.
“Shut up,” General Hill snarled.
“It sounds impossible, but John Smith’s memories,” Kleinman said, “all of them, every emotion he ever experienced during his first fourteen years—every fantasy, every dream, every prayer—were recorded and uploaded into the giant hypercomputer beneath this facility. There the memories of John Michael Smith were converted into electronic form, digital data stored for two years while Beta Phase began.”
Dr. Mike: “What the—”
“Shut up,” Hill said.
“With the blood samples we’d taken during those years of research, we retrieved John Smith’s DNA—entire genomes, complete chromosomal strands—and cloned him,” Kleinman said. “Cloned you. Seven times. In seven biotanks. All at the same time. During the two missing years in your memories—the two years you were told you were in a coma—we grew those seven clones to sixteen-year-old maturity using an accelerated growth process. We took those seven sons with their seven vacant minds . . . they had no life, and no life experiences to remember . . . and ‘downloaded’ John Smith’s childhood memories into their brains.
“You see, these clones weren’t just genetically identical. You were intellectually identical. Emotionally identical. You were the perfect, complete copies of John Smith ‘Alpha.’ The same memories, the same . . . human spirit, if you will.
“And so, each John Smith ‘Beta’ awoke in a city that was not Indianapolis. And each John Smith was told his parents were dead. Each of you had an Uncle Karl and Aunt Jaclyn to raise you, to physically rehabilitate you and to reintroduce you to society. We chose to blame the post-in-virtualvitro muscular state on atrophy caused by the coma. The ultimate goal? To have each clone go into a different career field.”
The men sat in silence for a moment now, processing what they’d just heard. Finally, a question from the pudgy, bearded clone.
“Why?”
“For many reasons, Jack. As a geneticist, you can probably anticipate my answer,” Kleinman said, “the most important being to ensure the cloning and memory retrieval and insertion technology worked. But many of us approached this as the ultimate nature-versus-nurture experiment.”
“My parents. They’re . . . they’re alive?” It was Father Thomas.
“The people you remember as your parents, yes, they’re actually alive,” Kleinman said. “Your mother is alive, yes. Your father, he’s here, in this facility.”
The group began to unhinge again; a common growl rose from the seven as their confusion spilled forth. Chapman, who stood beside the door, instinctively placed his hand on the butt of his sidearm. Dr. Mike’s voice rose above the rest. He stood up, red-faced. The spot where Chapman’s pistol muzzle had dug into his temple flared like a burner on an electric stove. His blue eyes blazed.
“Out! Out! Get me the hell out of here!” Mike screamed.
“Gentlemen, please—,” Kleinman began.
“Mom and Dad, here?” Father Thomas.
Giggles. Kilroy2.0.
“—the fuck out of here!” Dr. Mike shrieked.
General Hill took another step forward and pointed his finger at Mike. “Sit down.”
“Blow me.”
Hill rushed the table, but Michael stood up and stepped in front of the general. The marine’s muscles flexed gracefully, his hands raised in a cartoonish We come in peace pose. Hill stopped and looked the young man in the eyes.
“What do you want, marine?” Hill snarled.
“I just want to know what’s going on, sir.” Michael’s clipped, efficient tenor finally broke into a quiet desperation. “I want to know what the hell’s happening here.”
Hill forced a furious exhale through his nostrils and looked over at the old man. “Tell them, Kleinman.”
The old man removed his glasses and tossed them on the table.
“We need you to stop him. The man you were cloned from. John Smith Alpha.”
FOUR
The stars. It had been years since John had seen them so clearly. Miami smog, Miami lights—they killed the view of all but the strongest stars, even if you were gazing from the beach. Only Orion seemed brave enough to cut though South Florida’s midnight haze; only Venus was vibrant enough to shimmer from the horizon. To see stars like this, you had to be far from big-city lights. John reckoned they were probably in farm country.
