Sims (60 page)

“Zero, no!” Romy cried.

Her voice seemed to pull him back. He turned away and leaned a hand against the wall.

“Monster!” The word came out half growl, half sob. “How could you?”

“I didn't. At least not knowingly.”

“Can someone tell me what this is all about?” Romy said.

“Yes,” Ellis replied. “I suppose it's time I told someone. Let's all sit down and I'll try to explain.”

He led them to the two-story cherrywood library that housed the book collection that had once been a pride, but had long ago stopped meaning anything. Romy and Patrick took a couch. Zero dropped into a wingback leather chair and stared at the floor; the pale morning light through the tall windows washed out what little color was left in his face. Ellis remained standing. This was going to be too painful to tell sitting down. He needed to be up, moving about to release the tension coiled like an overwound spring in his chest.

He wished Zero were alone, but Zero might wind up telling Romy and Patrick anyway, so it was better they all heard it firsthand.

“I've lied to you, Zero. Lied to you from the day you were old enough to understand. You're not a mutant sim. You're the very first viable sim. We designated you ‘Sim Zero.' Your cells provided the source material that was modified and remodified into the creatures we now call sims. All sims are your descendants, Zero. You are the sim Adam.”

Ellis heard Romy gasp, heard Patrick mutter, “Oh, man!” But he was watching Zero.

Zero looked up, fixed him a moment with his yellow irises, then looked away again. “And who is
my
Adam?”

“That's a longer, more complicated story. But
I
was lied to long before you were, Zero. To see the whole picture, we have to go back to the early days when my brother and I were plowing all our capital and everything we could borrow into germline engineering a commercially useful chimp-human hybrid. We weren't looking to create a labor force then. We had other uses in mind—antibodies and xenografts were high on our list. We could see success down the road but we needed more funding. To get it, we made a deal with the Devil.

“Mercer approached the Pentagon with a plan to co-develop an aggressive warrior-type simian-human hybrid along with the more docile strain we wanted to market for commercial use. The World Trade Towers were still standing then, but everyone in the military accepted that sooner or later we'd be at war again in the Middle East. So the generals jumped at the plan. But they realized the outrage that would arise when the public learned that the army was creating gonzo animal warriors and training them to kill humans—what if they got loose?—so they cloaked their involvement under layers of security and bureaucracy.

“A wing of Army Intelligence was created to develop and train these hybrids as warriors; it was given the innocuous name of Social Impact Studies Group. SIRG in turn created Manassas Ventures as a conduit for the funds funneled to our new company, SimGen. To make this look like a real venture capital deal, the head of SIRG, a colonel named Conrad Landon, demanded that Manassas get a piece of SimGen in return for the investment. We agreed, not knowing at the time that we'd be mortgaging our souls.

“But even with all these millions in funding, the transgenic road to a sim-human hybrid was fraught with obstacles, and at times seemed impassable. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, embryo splitting, and germline modifications are routine procedures now, but not then. We found we were able to increase the intelligence of apes, mandrills, and baboons by only small degrees, which did not make the Pentagon happy. And we were also running into walls trying to ‘upgrade' the chimp genome closer to human. We were swapping genes from our own cells into chimp germlines and making a hideous mess of it. With a string of failures and the Pentagon breathing down our necks, I was cracking under the pressure.”

Ellis sighed, remembering and regretting his decision to take a sabbatical at that time. Merce had been enraged, screaming that he was jeopardizing both their futures, but Ellis had made up his mind. He'd recently wed Judy
and already their marriage was in trouble because he was never home. So for his own sanity and the sake of his marriage, he'd left his brother to work alone while they flew to France and rented a little house in Provence. It had temporarily saved his marriage, but it ruined the rest of his life.

“So I took a breather to rest and recoup. I intended to stay a month but that stretched into two, then three, then longer. I shouldn't have gone at all. I've done many foolish things in my life, but the most foolish was trusting my brother to work alone.”

SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ

Darryl Lister had been waiting twenty minutes in Portero's undersized backwoods shack. How did he stand this crummy, uncomfortable furniture? The guy lived like a refugee.

But not for too much longer.

He heard a car pull up outside and gestured to Venisi, one of the two men he'd brought with him, to check the window. He looked out and nodded.

Okay. Portero was here. Darryl took a deep breath. He'd been steeling himself for this moment since the word had come down a few hours ago. Now that it was here he wanted to get it over with. They'd been through a lot, Portero and he, but the time had come to put the past aside and deal with the present.

Darryl pointed to either side of the front door; Venisi and Markham nodded, drew their pistols, and moved into position.

He's seen my car, he thought. He'll be expecting me, but not them.

A few seconds later Portero stepped through, dressed in black BDU shirt and pants, his face tight, obviously ready for a confrontation. He immediately spotted his two extra guests and his hand darted toward his sidearm, but stopped halfway.

“Let's not do anything precipitous, Portero,” Darryl said.

Portero glanced around the room. “Maria?”

“She's in the bedroom. She didn't feel a thing.”

Portero squeezed his eyes shut. “You didn't have to—”

“Yes, I did.” Markham had held her down while Venisi put a bullet through her brain. She'd looked very peaceful when Darryl had looked in on her. “And it's your fault. If you'd dumped her when I told you, she'd still be alive now, but you're bigger than the rules, aren't you, Portero. Now hold still while these two gentlemen search you.”

Darryl had warned his two men about Portero. He'd seen the guy in action—tough, fast, vicious—and didn't want any slipups. Venisi covered him while Markham removed Portero's pistol from his holster and did the pat down.

“What's this all about?”

“Clean-up time. The time when you tie up the loose ends, mop up the floor, close the door, and walk away.”

When Markham was done, he nodded.

“You're telling me I'm a loose end?”

“Eminently so.”

Portero looked at the ceiling. “I see.”

Darryl had to admire his composure. No breakdown, no begging. But he'd expected no less. If he kept this up, the next five minutes would be bearable.

“The Old Man found out about Snyder and Grimes,” Darryl told him. “I had to say you hid their deaths from me as well.”

That had been one hairy meeting. The Old Man had just received word that the DoD had reversed its approval for Operation Guillotine—soon as the Pentagon heard about the sim's baby, it decided it wanted nothing to do with monkey commandos—and he was in a frothing rage. For a few bladder-clenching moments there Darryl had thought he might be scheduled for a one-way ride into the woods, but he'd managed to shift all the blame to Portero.

“Snyder and Grimes brought your loss total to six men—five KIA and one Section Eight. But that's only part of the reason I'm here.” He gestured toward the door. “Let's step outside.”

Portero led the way, followed by Venisi and Markham. Darryl brought up the rear.

“It's all falling apart,” he said as he ejected the clip from the pistol that had been used on Maria. “The sweetest arrangement ever—
ever
—is tumbling down around us. All because you didn't do your job. So now we have to fall back. Covering our tracks isn't going to be enough. We have to erase them.”

One by one he began removing the .45 caliber rounds from the clip.

“For instance, as we speak, there's an inferno raging in the middle of an Idaho nowhere, roasting a lot of monkey meat. When the arson squad, or whoever eventually gets the job, starts to sift through the ashes, they're going to have a lot of questions, but no answers.”

When he got down to the last round, he left it in the clip and pocketed the others.

“Since no clean-up can be guaranteed perfect, another aspect of the process is to provide plausible deniability for the high-ups should the dogs come sniffing their way. That means removing the weak or the too-visible links in the chain. You, unfortunately, fall into both those categories.”

“I thought we were friends.”

“We were. But this goes beyond friendship. It's not like I have a choice, so don't make this harder than it already is. You botched a number of crucial ops and, worse, made a spectacle of yourself at that hospital this morning.”

Darryl watched him bristle at this, but Portero said nothing. Couldn't blame him. Why talk? Nothing he said would change anything.

“And because I brought you in, it falls to me to usher you out.”

Darryl checked the pistol to make sure the chamber was empty, then wiped it and the clip clean with a handkerchief. He handed both to Portero.

“So . . . it's time. After all we've been through, I feel it's only fair to offer you a chance to do the right thing.”

Portero took a deep breath, then nodded and accepted the weapon.

“I'd like to do it alone.”

“I think we'd all prefer that.” Darryl gestured to the trees. “Do it in the woods.” That was where Darryl had planned to leave the body anyway. It might be months before anyone found it, if ever. “But don't try anything cute, Portero. Stay in sight. I'm giving you the option to go out like a man. Try to run and we'll hunt you down like a dog.”

Another nod from Portero as he stared at the pistol and the clip in his hands, then he turned and walked into the trees.

“Spread out,” Darryl told Venisi and Markham in a low voice. “Triangulate on him. Keep him in sight. He starts to run, take him down.”

But Portero acted the good soldier. He walked about a hundred feet along a path into the trees, stopped beside a big oak. He faced them and raised the pistol to the side of his head.

Jesus, he's looking right at us.

Darryl's instinct was to turn away, but he forced himself to watch.

The shot
cracked
through the chill air, Portero's head jerked to the left, and his body collapsed into the brush.

Darryl let out a breath. Done. Clean and neat.

He gestured to Venisi and Markham. “Check him out. If he's still breathing, finish him.”

He'd heard of people surviving some outrageous head wounds. And with the way things had been going for Portero lately, who knew? He might have botched this too.

FAR HILLS, NJ

“When I returned after six months away in France,” Ellis told his audience of three, “refreshed, renewed, ready to work, I discovered that Mercer had made a staggering leap in our research. He presented me with six surrogate mothers, all recently implanted with human-chimp hybrid embryos. We hired obstetricians to watch them carefully through their pregnancies, but to our dismay, one after another miscarried until only one was left. But her fetus was a tough cookie. It held on, and in her thirty-eighth week she delivered a living hybrid infant: Sim Zero.”

Patrick said, “By any chance was her name Alice Fredericks?”

“Why, yes,” Ellis said, startled to hear that name after so many years. “I believe it was. How on earth—?”

“We've met.” He turned to Zero. “We've spoken to your mother, Zero.”

“She's not my mother,” he snapped without looking up. “I don't
have
a mother.”

“He's right, Patrick,” Ellis said. “Zero was grown by cloning techniques from a recombinantly hybridized nucleus. But when Mercer saw Zero he said that he'd overdone it: He'd swapped in too much human genetic material.

“He explained to me how, among many other changes, he'd deleted the two chimp chromosomes that millions of years ago fused to form human chromosome 2, and replaced them with a human chromosome 2. He'd also ‘cleaned up' the hybrid genome by removing loads of junk DNA—deleting AT-rich regions, shortening CpG islands—along with codons and minisatellites; he even managed to remove an entire chromosome that may have
performed some useful function in the past but was now just taking up space.

“So Zero wound up with a largely junk-free twenty-two-pair genome—one shorter than human, two shorter than the chimp's. Mercer told me he did it to make the splicing easier, but I later learned he had a more sinister reason.

“However we both agreed that Zero was too human. The public would never accept the merchandising of something that looked so much like themselves. To make a commercially viable laborer, we'd have to swap back some of the chimp genes he'd removed.”

He noticed Romy's hate-filled look. “I fully deserve your opprobrium, Ms. Cadman. But please understand, I was a different person then: young, drunk with the egomaniacal power to shape and create, never looking beyond the next splice. That was why I went blindly along with Mercer's solution to work backward from Zero: Use his cells as a starting point and swap back some of the chimp genes he'd removed. I was ablaze with excitement at the possibilities opening before me. And because I trusted my younger brother, I didn't ask the questions I should have.

“So we worked back from Zero with great success. Seeing that success, and realizing that its own future was tied to SimGen's, SIRG started gathering information on any public official who might have a say in the legalization of sims. When we introduced the species, SIRG contacted those who voiced opposition. When blackmail wasn't an option, SIRG's field operatives went to work using intimidation and violence. It was SIRG's behind-the-scenes manipulations that resulted in the classification of sims as neither humans nor animals but property—SimGen's property.