The Hallowed Cure, page 41
“I do, Grant. I do, because I believe your moral judgment is perhaps the most reliable I’ve ever come across. You’ve proven that to me time and again.”
I thought back to the night I singlehandedly slaughtered Jack Griffyn’s security team. I remembered the night I pounded Malcolm Knox’s head into the ground until I made it into paste, and how cathartic it had felt to do that. “You don’t know everything I’ve done.”
“Of course I do. You’ve struggled to live on almost nothing.
You’ve had more money than you could ever spend. You’ve done some truly reprehensible things and many others that were truly heroic. You have a range of experiences I do not, Grant, and your judgment, having lived those, is what I need. Also, your list of accomplishments is quite impressive.”
“What accomplishments?” I asked. “Not dying?”
“You’re the reason the surviving Mutes are alive.”
That was exaggerating. “I pushed a button. I nearly started another war.”
“You chose to revive Skye. You saved her despite the fact that everyone wanted to kill her. And ultimately, you chose to make peace with the Mutes when we could have wiped each other out.
Neither Skye nor any of the Mutes alive today would be alive if you hadn’t fought as hard as you possibly could to ensure that happened, and you did it while hating their guts.”
“I never hated them,” I said cautiously. “I just hated the ones trying to eat my friends.”
“As for the people Doctor Sharpe infected with panacea cells on Neo Tao Payoh, your judgment there was also correct. While some died, almost thirty-nine thousand people lived because you saw past what they were to what they could be. Even the clones respect all you did. Your leadership is why we didn’t end up killing each other.”
I felt really uncomfortable with Caitlyn putting the lives of all these people on my shoulders. Anyone with a pulse and a conscience would have made the same decisions. I was just the guy unfortunate enough to be forced to make some hard calls at a really inconvenient time.
“So your track record with making the right decision when faced with truly hard questions is why I’m asking you,” Caitlyn said. “I don’t need Mia’s bright outlook on the best of humanity, and I don’t need Hahna’s callous nihilism. I need a balance between those. You.”
“Well, damn,” I said. “How am I supposed to respond to that?”
“Simply tell me what you would do,” Caitlyn said. “If I set this egg in that pool and accept the messenger’s offer, we’ll unlock a new chapter of evolution for humanity. We’ll advance our knowledge and technology by millennia, but once we do so, there’s no undoing it.”
“It’s like nukes,” I agreed, as I thought back over the history I’d read since I had the luxury not to starve. “Once we figured out how to make those, we could never unmake them.”
“It’s far worse,” Caitlyn said. “Nuclear war might wipe out humanity, but the planet would go on. Eventually, new life would develop. That’s not the case with this drone.”
“Seriously?”
“Once we learn the secrets this messenger offers, we will have the power to not just destroy us, but everything. We could reduce our planet to a lifeless, dusty ball of rock.”
“Sure,” I said. “I get that.”
“So?” Caitlyn prompted.
I considered all I knew and what I still needed to know. “How does it work? You said if we take the offer, the drone will teach us how to cure diseases and aging and all that other stuff you’ve mentioned, along with other secrets I can’t even guess. So does it ...
write it down?”
“The drone will share information the same way it spoke with me in that pool seven years ago. As it grows, it will share its memories with me. I’ll know what it knows, in stages.”
I looked to the pool. I thought about it for a moment or so. “All right. Let’s do it.”
Caitlyn blinked. “What?”
“You should do it,” I said. “Take the deal.”
She watched me with wide eyes. “And you don’t want to think that over a bit more?”
“If it was anyone else asking, I’d say toss that thing into the sea, but it’s you.”
Caitlyn stared at me as if I’d just asked to jump out of a helo. She looked genuinely frightened by what I’d just asked her to do. Yet she’d asked my opinion, hadn’t she?
“You’re getting the memories,” I said. “You’re deciding how they’re used, and you made the right call to keep the alien thing under wraps. We won’t tell anyone we’re making breakthroughs because an alien told us. We’ll just tell them you’re brilliant, or the people in your lab are brilliant. That way, no one tries to steal the drone.”
“I’m not comfortable with becoming a gatekeeper,” Caitlyn said.
“I’d be deciding what revelations we offer humanity and which we don’t. I’m not qualified to make that decision.”
“Now who’s underestimating themselves? You’re smart. You care about people. I like how you do things. You won’t misuse whatever we get out of this deal, and while it will be misused by someone, someday, you’ll be around to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up.
Moreover, you’ll use it to help everyone, not just those rich fucks in Hatten.”
“I’d certainly try to help everyone,” Caitlyn said. “The whole world.
But ... Grant...”
“I trust you to make the right call. That’s why you asked me, right? And if you aren’t sure what the right call is, you can ask me again. Or anyone else in our little circle.”
“Right.” She breathed deep. “I won’t be making these decisions alone.”
“I think we could help everyone,” I added. “Sometimes, humanity sucks, but we’re also pretty great sometimes. It comes down to who’s in charge. If we do this, we can at least say we tried to help everyone and failed. If we don’t, we’re saying we had the opportunity to help everyone and didn’t.”
“It sounds like such a simple choice when you phrase it like that.”
“That’s just how I see it,” I said. “Also, it’s not like we’re dooming humanity if we get it wrong. We’ve already invented a whole bunch of ways to blow ourselves up.”
“So ... you’re saying because we’re already quite capable of destroying ourselves in other ways, adding yet one more possible way to wipe out humanity doesn’t make things worse?”
“Pretty much.” I looked to the pool. “What were you thinking about doing?”
“I was this close to tossing it in the sea.”
“Good thing I was here,” I agreed. “This is me saving humanity for what, the third time? I get a medal for this one, right? Or at least a raise.”
Caitlyn ruefully shook her head. “We’ll do it, and damn the consequences. If we really can help everyone, we have to try.”
“So when do we tell the others?”
“I suppose tonight would be good,” Caitlyn said. “Unless you have plans.”
“Nothing I can’t cancel. Also, I’m going to have to tell Mia as soon as I get home or she’ll call off the wedding. I doubt we can get our deposit back at this point.”
Caitlyn knelt at the edge of the small pool of panacea and dropped the plain white cel into it. It sank out of sight. I expected something dramatic, but it just vanished.
She stood. “I haven’t let that thing out of my sight for seven years. I’ve grappled with this decision for seven years. Even now, I’m not sure I did the right thing.”
“I am,” I said. “So don’t worry about it.”
Caitlyn turned and impulsively gripped my hand. “Let’s go.”
I glanced past her. “It just sits in there?”
“It’s already dissolved. It will be days before it begins to grow into a messenger. There’s nothing else to be done right now, and I’ll ensure no one can access this level but those we trust. As for what we do next, well ... I suppose we’ll make the world better. Or blow it up.”
I squeezed her hand, dropped it, and walked toward the elevator with her beside me. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re going to make a good mom.”
She smiled as we walked toward the elevator. “Just so we’re clear, I’m not it’s mother.”
“Oh?”
“You are,” Caitlyn said. “You decided I should toss it in there, so you get to raise it.”
I stopped at once. “Not a chance in hell.”
Caitlyn laughed, a light, relieved laugh that made me warmer than I expected. “It’s a drone, Grant. It doesn’t actually require anything but a place to grow. When it’s ready, it’ll share its memories with me, and at that point ... we’ll figure out who else to share them with.”
As we rode back up to the surface in the elevator together, it was tough not to second guess what increasingly felt like a snap decision. Still, we had to try to make life better for our people if we could. Everyone on the entire planet, not just those in Dios.
Panacea might have caused a lot of damage, but it also gave me superpowers and saved my life. I certainly wasn’t going to let Jack, Lindsay, and Sharpe have the final say in how we used the stuff.
We’d do that now. We’d make that decision.
And thanks to Mia, I’d actually live long enough to see if just I’d destroyed the world.
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Document Outline
Copyright
Contents
ALSO IN SERIES:
1. I Make Crappy Plans
2. We Are So Dead
3. In a Totally Platonic Way, But Still
4. They Look So Cute Together
5. Oh, My Beautiful Complexion
6. I Recognize a Sunk Cost Fallacy When I See One
7. We Got So Busy I Forgot to Mention That
8. It’s Always Something With You, Isn’t It?
9. Next Time, Don’t Kidnap My Friends
10. All It Will Take Is One Bad Day
11. Keeping You Alive Is Such a Pain
12. Do You Really Have So Little Faith In Me?
13. Should I Knock?
14. No Trouble
15. That Didn’t Look Fun
16. Is The Alternative Floating Out to Sea and Starving?
17. Take As Much Time As You Need
18. I Did This To Myself, Didn’t I?
19. Unless You Plan to Spend All Your Time Having Sex Instead
20. Or Are We Done Co-Existing For The Day?
21. There’s Nothing Wrong With Being Proud of Your Talents
22. I Hear It’s Great For Your Skin
23. What Was Your First Clue?
24. We’ll Kill Him Later
25. You All Get I’ve Never Seen a Zombie Movie, Right?
26. This is Absolutely Not My Fault
27. You Got a Plan to Salvage Them, Doc?
28. Dude, Don’t Ask Me If We Should Murder Someone
29. No One’s Becoming a God Today
30. Still Can’t Believe Your Middle Name Is Dean
31. If That Will Make You Feel More Optimistic, Then Yes
32. No, I’m Being Quite Rational
33. Want to Go Meet Your Clone?
34. I Was This Close To Tossing It Into the Sea
Thank you for reading The Hallowed Cure
T.E. Bakutis, The Hallowed Cure
