Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) (2 page)

Without the constant stream of data about the outside world on my visual overlay I feel blinded. I try to guess where we are going by sight alone, but all the windows are blacked out except the windscreen and after a few blocks I lose track of our direction. I catch the occasional glimpse of an industrial shed or a truck with shipping containers. There is little traffic on the road. We must be down near the old port somewhere – this is not an area I’ve ever spent any time in, and in the last few years, since the sea level rise, it has changed dramatically.
 

After a long drive we pull up at a gate in a high-security, razor-wire-lined fence. Guards carrying machine guns look into the van and we are waved on through. Once inside, the man across from me opens the van door and asks me to step down. The other two follow. I find myself in the car park of a two-story, cream-brick building that looks like a mental institution. Blue bars cover small windows. I am led over to a glass entrance, past more security guards. My captors check in with another guard behind thick glass then pat me down and check the contents of my pockets. A loud buzz precedes the opening of a steel gate. I am taken to a small interrogation room, asked to sit down, then left alone.
 

I look around me. There is a two-way mirror. Security cameras are mounted on the ceiling. The walls are the same pale blue as the rest of the building. Time condenses and my mind goes into overdrive as I think about what to do. In the space of less than a minute, I’ve thought about the last ten years of my life and all the possible mistakes I could have made which led me here. I think about the genetically modified children, how the viruses they were designed to resist mutated and got out of control. I try once again to access the net, but I am still being blocked. At least my com itself is still working, and I monitor my vital signs. My heart rate is up. I breathe slowly. I must stay calm.
 

The door to the room opens and a tall man in a pair of suit pants and a white, pressed shirt but no jacket comes in. His hair is not short like the others, but is styled back in a thick wave. His face is angular but good-looking. He unlocks my handcuffs and offers me his hand which I shake with relief.
 

“I’m Don James,” the man says. “Michael Khan, isn’t it?”
 

“That’s right.”

“Welcome to ASIO.”

The Australian Security Intelligence Organization. So they still exist.

“ASIO?”

“That’s right. They didn’t tell you?”

“They didn’t tell me anything.”

Don chuckles briefly, as if at some private joke. “Well, never mind.”
 

“What am I doing here?”

“To be perfectly honest, Michael…” Don sits down in one of the chairs across from me, crossing one leg over the other and resting his elbow on it, cupping his chin in his hand and looking at me. “You’ve been involved in some fairly interesting business.”
 

“What business is that?” Playing dumb is my only strategy until I find out what they want.
 

Don stares at me, then uncrosses his legs and stands up again. He presses the tips of his fingers onto the tabletop. His knuckles start whitening. The flesh under his nails goes red.
 

“I think you have a pretty good idea what I’m talking about.” He stares at me with an unwavering determination, as if trying to see right through my skull and directly into my thoughts. I wonder if they’ve come up with an app which allows him to do that. At the very least I presume he’s measuring my biometrics and monitoring my gestures and facial expressions, just as I am doing to him. Although he gives away nothing.
 

I can feel the way my ventricles throb, opening up to draw in blood and squeezing down hard to spread it through my body. I hear a sound that I initially think are footsteps but then realize are my heartbeats. I wonder if I am going to have a heart attack. According to my com, my heart rate is over one hundred and twenty. I have to calm down. Although if they know about everything I’ve been involved in, a heart attack might be merciful. I imagine months if not years of solitary confinement. Torture, as they try to extract every last piece of information from me, even after I’ve told them everything.
 

Doubts open up inside my mind, threatening to tumble me into a dark, knowledge-less abyss. Who is really in charge of Gendigm, the organization I have been secretly working for? I have always considered them democratic, but there must be someone at the head, behind the scenes so they can never be implicated. There have been hints now and then that their supporters are everywhere, at every level of society. Presumably not in ASIO, or I wouldn’t be here. Unless I am their scapegoat.
 

“I think I need to see a lawyer.”

“All in good time.” Don smooths his hair back with one hand. “But before you do, you might like to listen to what I have to offer.”
 

“What’s that?” I grip the sides of my chair.
 

“A plea bargain.”

“What type of plea bargain?”
 

“You tell us everything you know, and we’ll make sure that you get off lightly. A lot more lightly than you will if you don’t tell us anything. Or if you get your lawyer involved in this.” His eyes narrow and I can see the thick lines of determination scarring his face.
 

“I have a right to a lawyer.”
 

“I’m afraid you don’t. So far, you haven’t been charged with anything.”

“Well, shouldn’t you charge me with something, then, before holding me?”
 

“In cases like yours, we can hold you for as long as we like.” Don seems pretty smug.
 

“What do you mean, cases like mine?” I feel the sweat emerge on the top of my brow, resist the urge to wipe it away. One of the fluorescent lights flickers and buzzes. My heart rate picks up again and I can see 124BPM in the top right of my visual overlay. Don’s is at a steady 60.
 

“Terrorism.” Don sits back down in his chair, clutching his armrests.
 

“I’m not sure I understand you. I’m a scientist. A geneticist. I’m involved in clinical trials, specifically to do with the immune system. I’ve done quite a bit of work for the government even, surely you know that. As far as I know, everything we do now in the regulated zone is perfectly safe, and anything even potentially risky is carried out in the de-reg zone. I thought the government wasn’t interested in what goes on there.”

“We’re not, unless it threatens people here.”

“It’s not in your jurisdiction.”
 

“We tend to look at it the same way as we do another country,” he says, as if explaining something to a child. “We have very little control over it, but if someone there starts doing something which threatens our safety here then we’ll do what we can to stop them.”

“And how do you think I’m doing that?”
 

“I think you know the answer to that question already, Michael.” He stands up and heads towards the door. “So, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a night to think about it. Let’s meet again in the morning and you can tell me if you’re ready to cooperate or not.”
 

He walks out and a few minutes later, a guard comes in and takes me to a small, artificially lit room where I am made to strip and change into an orange jumpsuit. I am led down another corridor lined with doors. Each door has a tiny window in it. Faces are pressed up against some. Gaunt eyes stare out at me, desperate, it seems, for even the sight of another human being. The guard presses his hand against a screen on the wall and, with a metallic click and a beep, the door to a cell opens, and I am guided inside. The guard removes my handcuffs then leaves.
 

The room is two meters by three, with nothing but a bed, a toilet and a basin in it. The only window is the one in the door looking back out into the corridor. The ceiling is high, nearly three meters, probably to stop people hanging themselves from the single, bare light globe that hangs down on a brown cord. The walls are made of concrete blocks, painted matte white. A tiny vent in the ceiling lets off a whiff of stale air.
 

After a complete inspection of the room, which takes less than ten seconds, I gulp some water from the basin, brush it over my face and through my hair, rub it against the back of my neck and sit down on the mattress. It’s bare apart from a thin blanket and a pillow. They obviously don’t want their prisoners getting too comfortable. I lie down on my back, pull the blanket over myself, and stare at the ceiling, but all I can see is Annie climbing out of our car and screaming after me.
 

C
HAPTER
T
WO

THAT NIGHT I can’t sleep. Paranoia starts playing tricks on my mind. I’m no longer even sure where I am. My breathing is heavy but I still feel as if I can’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. I stand up and pace around the room and then lie down again but it does no good. All I can think about is Annie. What she’s doing. If she’s okay. To distract myself, I think back to the time when we met. I force myself to imagine every detail, and as I do so I feel my breathing slow, my mind start to relax.
 

It was the first day of Year Ten. I was sitting in class, doodling in the margins of my English exercise book, when our teacher brought her in and introduced her to the class. She stood there quietly, dark eyes to the floor. I felt myself starting to warm as I glanced over her slender body, already mature, in a summer school uniform. Between the top of her socks and the hem of her dress I caught sight of the smooth white skin of her thighs. Being virtually friendless, the only spare seat in the room was next to me and my heart pounded as I waited for her to be seated in it.
 

Sure enough, a moment later, her black eyes were staring at me.
 

“Hi,” I whispered.
 

“Hi,” she whispered back. “I’m Annie.” She gave me a smile the likes of which no girl had ever given me before.
 

“I’m Michael.”
 

I spent the next hour and a half of class not daring to look across at her in case she disappeared, or I caught a look on her face which told me that she had suddenly become infected with the same opinion of me that most other girls in the school seemed to have.

After class it was Annie who spoke to me. I was even less articulate with girls than usual, but somehow she managed to get out of me where the school library was and, on the way there, the fact that my parents had died ten years earlier and that I was now living with my maternal grandparents. It was this piece of information that brought us together and cemented our friendship, at least for a while.
 

“That makes two of us,” Annie said, pawing through the novel section looking for the prescribed reading texts for English class: Robinson Crusoe and The Chocolate War.
 

I was just hanging around by then, not quite sure if I should stay or go.
 

“Your parents died too?” I said.
 

“No, silly.” She turned to me and gave me another one of her smiles. “My Dad left. That’s why we’re in this shit hole, if you’ll excuse my French. My grandparents live here and my mum wanted to be close to them.” She spoke with a mild English accent and was sophisticated in a way other girls in town weren’t. From that first day on I found myself obsessed with her in a way I’d never been obsessed with anyone else before.

By the following Friday, she was still talking to me and after school she asked me if I wanted to do something with her on the weekend. I knew that what most other kids did when they went on a date was to go to the local cinema where they could grope and kiss one another in the dark. It seemed too soon for such a daring plan, though. I wasn’t at all certain of my groping and kissing abilities, and the only movie which was playing was a re-run of an old
Terminator
movie which I thought probably wouldn’t interest her. Instead, I invited her to go swimming at the local lake, which was probably the single worst decision I had ever made in my life. There was a reason, I discovered, that young lovers sought the anonymity that the darkness of the cinema provided them with, rather than going to public places full of mocking rivals.
 

That Saturday morning, I took along an old bike, that I had found at my grandparent’s house, to Annie’s house, and gave it to her to ride. As it turned out, she wasn’t used to riding bikes, and the ten kilometer ride to the lake, which I did quite easily, almost killed her.
 

Eventually we made it, but when we arrived a brown Ford was parked next to the lake; it’s owners a group of boys in the year above me who often teased me for being a geek. I tried to sneak past them to the next swimming spot along, but they spotted me, and Annie by my side, and started calling out to us.
 

“Hey, lover boy, who’s your woman?”
 

We ignored them and walked on. We swam together, splashing around in the water, and I admired the water glistening and dripping off her pale skin. We sat on the bank and talked about our parents, and about Annie’s life in Sydney, where she used to live.
 

“Hopefully, I’m only going to be here for a few months,” she told me. “My mother’s trying to find a private school for me in Melbourne.”
 

After a few hours we were tired and we had forgotten to bring sunscreen and Annie, who was very pale, was starting to go red. I was afraid to walk past the boys again but there was no other way out of there.
 

Two of the boys stood up and approached us as we came near. One of these, Nick, was considered the most attractive guy in school.
 

“Hi, I’m Nick,” Nick said to Annie.

“I’m Annie,” she replied.
 

“You’re not going to make her ride all the way back into town are you
Michael
?” Nick pronounced my name as if it created a sour taste in his mouth.