REVELATION: Book One of THE RECARN CHRONICLES (20 page)

“I wish we could make love right now.”

“So do I honey, but we really must get a move on.”

Karen released her grip on her husband.

“OK. I’ve already got a bag packed. Just in case of emergency.
I don’t know what kind of emergency I was expecting but since you
died I’ve had to be prepared for anything. We need to grab some
stuff for the girls. I’ll pack for Michelle. She’s becoming a young
woman and I know what kind of things she needs. You can pack for
Caitlin.”

Maurice walked hesitantly into his youngest daughter’s room.
The walls of the room were lilac, his daughter’s favourite colour,
as were the duvet and pillows. The invention of programmable wall
design had been a godsend to many a parent. Children changed their
favourite colour at the drop of a hat and redecorating the
old-fashioned way with brush and paint was both time consuming and
expensive. Now all that was required was to choose the colour or
design and select it using the controls on the integrated light
switch. You could even integrate cartoon characters into the design
by selecting the right settings. Caitlin was still his baby. She
had had her seventh birthday a couple of weeks earlier and about
twenty birthday cards were attached to the walls. Of course,
nowadays fewer cards were sent but to a seven year old there was
nothing to match feeling a real plastic birthday card in your
hands.

Maurice went to the fitted wardrobe and put some clothes into
a holdall. His wife called from the other room.

“Don’t forget Mr. Boo…”

Of course there was no way they could leave Mr. Boo behind. He
had been with Caitlin all the time she was in the hospital and was
part of the family. They lived in a world full of technology but
Caitlin loved that fluffy tiger and wouldn’t settle if he wasn’t
with her. Maurice and Karen had given Mr. Boo to Caitlin when she
had first been diagnosed with kidney problems and had tried to
explain to her that he was really Tigger from the Winnie the Pooh
stories but she had insisted on calling him Mr. Boo. They could no
more leave Mr. Boo behind than Caitlin herself.

The two parents left the bedrooms at the same time and trotted
downstairs. Maurice gave the brothers the thumbs up.

“We’re ready.”

Karen was still not sure exactly what was going on but she
knew her husband was back and that she loved him. If abandoning
their house meant that the family would be together again, then
abandon her home she would.

“The girls are at school. I’ll fetch them out of their
classrooms and they can ride in the second car with me. I don’t
want them to see their dad just yet – it’d probably freak them out.
I almost freaked out, myself.”

She paused.

“You may have noticed.”

Maurice was desperate to see his girls again but he could see
that it was the best thing to do, so he didn’t try to force the
issue. He was just overjoyed at the thought of the family being
together again.

As the cars sped off Karen looked out of the tailgate window,
a single tear nestling in her eye.

“Goodbye house. I doubt I’ll ever see you again.”

Maurice was amazed at how calmly his wife was taking all this.
Her husband had essentially returned from the dead – no
reincarnation involved – and she had been told that she must uproot
the family and leave her old life behind. He himself could hardly
believe that he was sitting next to his wife, squeezing her hand as
if to prove to himself that she was really there.

They decided to pick up Michelle first as being the elder of
the two girls it would be easier to explain to her what was
happening. Once Michelle was out of the school, she and Karen got
into the second car and they headed to Caitlin’s school.

At first Michelle wasn’t impressed with the idea of leaving
her friends behind but she trusted her mum. It helped that Maurice
was now a member of One Life– teenagers don’t often think their
parents are cool, but having a dad in the resistance gained him
some brownie points.

“So dad’s in the other car?”

“Yes.”

“When can I see him?”

“Later.”

“Why can’t I see him now? I want to see him now”

“We’ll pick up Caitlin first, and then when we’re safe – when
we arrive wherever these people are taking us – then we’ll see Dad
again.”

“Where are we going?”

“Honestly Michelle. I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s somewhere
safe. Your father said that if we didn’t go with them we’d be in
danger. I trust him to do what’s best for the family. He has always
put us first in the past. Even when he faked his own death, it was
to keep us safe. I don’t see why he would change now.”

“Well I want to see him as soon as possible. I want to check
that he’s real, not some hologram or something.”

Karen thought back to that shared kiss in the bedroom when
they were supposed to have been packing, and smiled.

“Believe me, Michelle. Believe me. Your dad is real
enough.”

Ami Durand, an advertising
executive who worked in the City was very happy. If she could
whistle, she would have been whistling as she walked. She was also
very pregnant, almost to the point where she looked like she was
about to burst. She had just come from a final medical health check
before the imminent birth of her daughter and everything was
looking good.

She was in no hurry to go
home. It was a beautiful spring day; the trees were full of white
and pink blossom and she was literally full of the joys of spring.
Her husband, Michel, a systems analyst in the City, was at work.
There was no reason not to stop at the nearest Costa Coffee shop
and indulge herself with a Mocha Latte and a slice of layered
carrot cake. She had no more engagements that day.

A few minutes later she
pushed open the door of the Costa Coffee shop in Covent Garden. She
ordered her snack and the young woman behind the counter, a very
pleasant Polish girl, told her to take a seat and that she would
bring her drink and cake over to her. She loved pampering herself
in this way, and she had to make the most of it because when the
baby arrived her free time would no doubt be precious; she would no
longer be the mistress of her own destiny. But she didn’t mind –
she was really looking forward to the birth of her first child, to
the Durand family being a family of three; Michel, herself, and
baby Adele. Life was going to be perfect.

The Polish waitress walked
over and offered her a napkin, bending over towards Ami’s face as
she did so. Ami was a little disturbed at how close the waitress
was to her, invading her personal space, but didn’t say anything.
She thought she saw the waitress blow onto the napkin but surely
she must have been imagining it. Why would the waitress do such a
thing?

She finished her Latte and
cake and started to make her way to the station to catch the train
home, but she noticed that she was feeling somewhat hot and
flushed. Her mouth felt dry and she was convinced that her eyesight
was becoming blurry. She decided to take a taxi home instead and
hailed the next empty cab to come along the road. London cabs were
distinctive as ever, with one major difference – they were
driverless. The whole country could actually be full of driverless
cars – the technology was readily available – but the British
public still enjoyed driving and had resisted strongly any measures
to force them to abandon this pleasure, even though the
installation of self-drive technology had been made mandatory. The
ONP was able to force almost all its policies upon the population
but opposition to the sanctity of driving their own cars had been
much stronger than expected and the Government had decided to a
compromise and insisted upon self-driving cars that still needed a
human driver to be present, although the human was there merely for
the sake of appearances. However, London cabs were the exception
and the taxis were completely automated.

The external speaker of the
cab crackled into life.

“Where to, love?”

Normally Ami would have
thought it ridiculous how the taxi company tried to give the
impression that taking a cab was still a charming nostalgic
experience, as it had been in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first century, but she was feeling too ill to worry about
such things.

“Wez Dealing
please.”

The speaker
responded.

“I’m sorry love. I didn’t
quite catch the address.”

“Maddolay, Wez Dealing,
please.”

“Sorry. Could you repeat
that address more clearly, please?”

The controller at the taxi
headquarters thought that perhaps the customer was drunk, although
she didn’t let it bother her. She was pretty good at deciphering
slurred and drunken speech but this customer’s slurring was worse
than normal. Ami summoned all the coordination that she could find
and spoke forcefully.

“Mattock. Lane. West.
Ealing. Please.”

“Address recognised. You may
enter the vehicle.”

As the taxi cruised along
the roads, taking its almost unconscious passenger home, Ami was so
glad to be sitting down. Her legs were feeling like jelly. When she
got out of the cab, having finally scanned her credit card through
the payment machine after three failed attempts, she opened the
garden gate and started staggering up the garden path. Two men
approached her from behind.

“You need to come with us,
Mrs. Durand.”

The two men moved alongside
her, one either side, and took hold of her arms to support
her.

“Where are we
going?”

“Somewhere where you’ll soon
feel a lot better.”

It was a struggle to speak
but for some reason she felt an obligation to go with these
strangers to wherever they wanted to take her. They took her to
their van that had followed the taxi and one of them slid open the
side door whilst the other guided her inside. Ami passed out on the
metal floor.

Forty-five minutes later she
was on a trolley, being pushed along sterile corridors and through
a door marked Lab A1. She felt much better now, physically, but
couldn’t find any strength to resist her captors. Indeed, she felt
that she wanted to please them and was willing to do whatever they
said. She couldn’t remember her name or what she had been doing
earlier in the morning, but she knew that these people wanted her
to help them, and so she should do whatever they wanted her to do.
She slid off the trolley and stood still, waiting for the next
instructions. A stern looking, grey-haired man in a white lab-coat
spoke to her in a soft voice that belied his appearance.

“Please take off your
clothes. All of them. And then lay down on the metal table in front
of you.”

Ami did as she was told, not
even considering the fact that she was in a strange place,
surrounded by strange people, and that the request to strip off her
clothes was entirely inappropriate. She took off her designer
maternity dress and stood there in her bra and panties.

“All your clothes
please.”

Ami apologised and took off
the rest of her underwear before settling herself on the same table
that had been the final resting place of the anonymous homeless
girl seven years earlier, when the first successful guided soul
transfer had taken place.

However, this time there was
no human volunteer in the transparent chamber at the other end of
the transference equipment. That particular experiment had been
repeated many times and was now considered to be scientifically
viable and verifiable. This was a different experiment entirely as
the baby inside Ami’s womb already had a soul and this experiment
would be even more macabre than the previous ones.

Cloning technology had come
along in leaps and bounds since the first successful cloning of
Dolly the sheep in 1996. Limbs, eyes, organs could now be grown and
transplanted back into their original stem cell donors – this was
now common practice for those who could afford the process. The
first adult human had been cloned a year earlier, the ethical
obstacles that had prevented such processes taking place earlier
being overcome by the relentless political momentum of the ONP, The
clone in the receiving chamber had the appearance of a twenty year
old woman, although she had only actually been alive for twenty
days.

Thomas was impatient and was
expecting a lot from the cloning team, but there was still the
problem of the waiting period whilst the clone baby matured. If the
growth rate couldn’t be accelerated, then it served no purpose as
far as Thomas was concerned. He needed an adult clone into which to
transfer his soul; there was no advantage in transferring his soul
into a baby and then waiting twenty years or so whilst the clone
matured. That wouldn’t change things at all and would give Nathan
ample opportunity to take back his crown. Thomas wasn’t getting any
younger and he needed this technology to work so he ensured that
more and more resources were poured into the project, paid for by
higher taxation, increasing profits retained and available to The
Order.