The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (15 page)

The throw of a switch. A shower of fluorescence. Twin tubes of fuzzy illumination hanging from the ceiling. His eyes won’t focus. Only his ears hold a hard edge.

“Don’t bother to get up,” a deep male voice says with ironic pleasantry. “I just thought I’d check in and see how you’re doing.”

The owner of the voice avoids Johnny’s cone of vision.

“Ah yes. I dare say you’ve looked better.”

The voice comes from his right and not far off. Johnny strains to identify it, but fails. A
stranger.

“Say, what’s this?”

A switch flips. The respirator stops. A terrible silence sets in.

From deep within Johnny’s limbic recesses, alarms begin to scream. Respiration has ceased. Asphyxiation has begun. The screams beget echoes, and the echoes spawn yet more echoes.

The respirator comes back on. “Whoops. I never was very good with gadgets.”

Johnny can feel a cool mist of sweat crawl across his face.

The lights go out. A door shuts. A lock clicks. Then a second lock.

“Now, tell me again why we’re doing this,” the Bird demands as he comes down the hall of the safe house near Street Party headquarters. “Why not a little duct tape and some plastic handcuffs? This is a real pain in the ass.”

“He’s a very clever fellow,” Green answers. “I don’t want to take any chances.”

“So why did you grab him?”

“He posed a problem, and I need some time to figure out a solution.” Green fails to mention that part of the problem is that Dr. Anslow might share what he knows with people like the Bird in an effort to negotiate his release. The hemlock treatment eliminates this possibility.

The Bird shrugs in resignation. “Well, the sooner he’s gone, the better. Good night.”

“Good night.” Green watches the Bird walk out the door. The man is a real annoyance, but a necessary one. Not permanently, however. Because time may now be on Green’s side in ways he’d never even considered.

He doesn’t just bury the past. He cremates it. The memories, the recountings, the recollections never have a chance to fester and molder. They become ashes, anonymous dust. Like they never had any form or substance at all.

Rachel marvels repeatedly at Green’s ability to pull this trick out of his political hat, only this time, the trick is on her. They sit opposite each other at the meeting table in his office, where the morning sun casts brilliant stripes of light through the blinds. They discuss his upcoming schedule, just as if they’d never been to the South War Front, or seen Johnny’s horrific video, or listened to his proposition.

“So what’s up?” he asks cheerfully.

“Tomorrow, you’re back on the road. You have the rally out at the Expo Center this afternoon, and then we have you in transit the next day, then in Cincinnati, then Cleveland.”

“Cleveland? Aren’t we going to do something with the Healing Group while I’m there?”

“Yes, we are. You’re out in a Zero Zone for a couple of hours before you go to the stadium. We’ll do it right in front of their offices.”

“Good. We need to do more of this kind of thing. I need to start building a credibility base when it comes to foreign policy and international relations.”

Rachel nods. The Healing Group is the Chinese equivalent of the old U.S. Peace Corps. They work in areas of the United States and Europe where all employment outside the service sector has fallen to zero and stayed there. The so-called Zero Zones, where a lucky few wait on tables and everyone else wallows somewhere below subsistence level.

“And what do we have after that?”

Rachel consults her laptop. “We have maybe a half dozen other events under development, but not completely firmed up yet.”

“Good. I want you to send me the dates. We may have to plan around them. If everything works out, I just might take a little time off.”

Rachel goes to full alert. Green has never taken any time off, never.

Green offers an amused smile. He’s a master at reading people, and she’s no exception. “You look a little shocked.”

“I don’t ever remember you doing anything like this.”

“And that’s exactly why it’s a good idea,” Green says as he heads out the door.

She pushes back from her laptop. He’s giving himself room to move. He’s formulating some kind of contingency plan.

Whatever Johnny told him in the bar last night has put an invisible set of gears in motion. But what are they grinding toward?

***

“So this is it. Right?” asks Lieutenant James Siefert as he types a password into the computer in an isolated cubicle within the Portland Police Headquarters. He’s clearly not happy with the deal.

“This is it,” Lane promises.

“We’re even.”

“We’re even,” Lane assures him.

“After this, you’re on your own.”

Lane nods to Lieutenant James Siefert of the Portland Police Department. “I’m on my own.”

Siefert gets up and looks at his watch as Lane slides into the chair. “You’ve got ten minutes,” he tells Lane. “And remember, you can only leave with what’s in your head. No notes. No storage devices. If you try, you’re dead meat from here to DC.”

“Got it.”

“See you then.”

Lane looks at the screen, which displays the portal for the National Security Database, or NSD. No one hides from the NSD. If you’re not in here, you’re either dead or well on the way.

Lane already knows where he wants to go. There’s no use trying from the Mount Tabor end. He doesn’t have names or a company. The Institute for the Study of Genetic Disorders is a different matter. The board members and top layer of management are all publicly available and he’d memorized their names before coming here. So now it’s time to get personal. Where do these people live? How do they relate to one another?

Five minutes later, he has a commonality: Pinecrest, a gated community south of the city, with a Class 10 security rating, the very highest. Lane uses the remaining five minutes to bounce around to some of the other major biotech players up at the Medplex. Sure enough, Pinecrest keeps popping up.

He leans back. All these people see one another at the same grocery store, the same cocktail parties, the same golf course and pool. Such is the insular nature of living behind a gate. It’s a dangerous pain in the ass to leave and go anywhere else during your free time.

“Time’s up. Get what you need?” Lane turns. Siefert. Right on schedule.

Lane nods. “Got it.”

Thomas Zed sits at the counter in the bathroom of his private quarters, his stomach ablaze with indigestion. He shakes a bottle filled with a prescribed fluid and takes three teaspoons. In the mirror, he beholds a shrunken figure with a buzzard neck and eroded head poking out of a silk bathrobe. His face records the history of a series of losing battles against extreme old age, the skin etched with tiny trenches, foxholes, and craters.

Some years back, the most critical battle had come to a disastrous end. The third clone, the last one, was stillborn, just like the others. An entire warehouse of nearly priceless replacement parts gone forever.

At first, the clone solution had seemed so promising. Young, healthy organs with no rejection problems. He was pushing one hundred ten when the technology first became feasible, and he wasted no time. All three clones were implanted in the same time frame, one in the United States, one in Europe, and one in South America. The surrogate mothers who lent their wombs to the effort were generously compensated, and agreed to surrender the babies at birth.

The gamble was clear. The organs would not be usable until the clones reached their middle teens, and by then, Zed would be pushing the limits of human survival. But for a man in his position, it was relatively cheap insurance.

But time wasn’t the only gamble. There was another scientific question that was almost completely overlooked during the original furor over the human potential of cloning.

The general principle of cloning seemed simple enough. You first conditioned a cell from the donor so that its replication cycle was synchronized with a receiving embryo, from which you removed the existing genes. You then inserted the donor’s genes, and let the embryo begin the billions of divisions that would turn it into an exact physical copy of the donor. A parasitic ride on the genetic expressway to fully formed life.

But in practice, it wasn’t quite that simple. One basic assumption was that the DNA strand one starts with in the embryo remains precisely the same through every division on the way to producing a fully formed infant. Given this assumption, the donor genes held a perfect, unadulterated chromosomal blueprint for reconstructing the donor. But it turned out that the blueprint was only half the story, and didn’t include the construction process. It seemed that you also had consider all the molecular factors that turned the genes on and off, factors that had a blueprint all their own, a complicated blueprint that changed over time. If you didn’t get it right, the resulting clone was a biological catastrophe. It seldom survived the gestation period, and was riddled with defects and disease even if it did. And so it was with the three clones of Thomas Zed.

Zed reaches in a drawer, pulls out another plastic bottle, and shakes out a single pill. Human growth hormone, hGH, recently cast in a new form that allows it to be taken orally. As he swallows the pill, he contemplates its curative powers. hGH is a substance pumped out of the pituitary gland in minute amounts but with great power and influence over the body’s growth and maturity. Also known as somatotropin, hGH stimulates growth in children, causing their cells to divide on the journey to adulthood. From deep in the brain, the pituitary squeezes out minute spurts of hGH during the first few hours of sleep, when the child dreams of lizards in meadows or ships setting sail on meringue seas. It moves with great chemical stealth through the circulatory system and vanishes after just a few minutes. But it leaves a trail of other telltale compounds in its wake, evidence of the march toward full physical realization.

Then, at maturity, the pituitary throttles back. Its anterior lobe slowly diminishes its output of hGH as the years roll by. Denied the fuel of youth, the body slowly succumbs. Muscles wither, bones ossify, tissue regeneration slows, and excess weight piles on.

Naturally, there was great speculation about what would happen if hGH levels could be elevated in the aging. Would it be the magic bullet? The great hormonal elixir? For twenty years, its molecular structure remained hidden from view but finally yielded to persistent research. Even then, it could be extracted only from pituitaries of recently deceased humans and only in extremely small quantities. The juice of life, squeezed from the newly dead. A biochemical transmogrification of the first order. The tiny amounts available were used exclusively to treat victims of natural growth disorders.

Still, the speculation over the magic bullet persisted. Another ten years passed before hGH could be produced through recombinant DNA technology, and that’s when the situation suddenly changed. Now there was more than enough hGH to go around. While the bullet was something less than magic, hGH produced definite physical reversals in aging subjects. Demand soared while the medical community held its ground, restricting use to people with clinically defined growth deficiencies. The barrier to supply became increasingly porous, and hGH began to leak through to those with the means and the international mobility to take advantage. An ideal situation for the likes of Thomas Zed, who financed an entire clinic devoted to no one other than himself. A carefully synthesized cocktail was created specifically for his personal use, a hormonal brew of potent force. At its core was .2 milligrams of genetically engineered hGH, a low-enough dose to avoid side effects such as high blood pressure and carpal tunnel. Thrown in for good measure were various amounts of pregnenolone, thyroid, testosterone, and progesterone. After six months, significant amounts of fat evaporated from his belly, and additional muscle mass thickened his arms and legs. His cholesterol dropped and his cardiovascular stamina soared.

Now, as he stands before the mirror and swallows the pill, it seems like a little beacon of
vitality descending into his belly, although Zed knows that’s just his imagination. hGH has bought him time, but not eternity. Recently, it was discovered that other chemical systems within his body had exposed the fraudulent behavior induced by the hGH. The arrow of time was now finding ways to pierce his pharmaceutical armor, to thaw the frozen clock and set it in motion once more.

His legs are tiring, but he fights the feeling and rests his palms on the countertop. The nurse will come to check on him soon, and he doesn’t want to be seen slumped, exhausted, in bed at such an early hour.

The pigs. The pigs should have done it, but he’d lost that battle, too.

Through cloning and various other techniques, pigs were developed with major organs specifically tailored for human transplant: hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers. The core organs that drive the system of life. Young, fresh, and serviceable.

And in Zed’s case, desperately needed. He already had a borrowed heart. And a borrowed kidney. But he’d lived so long that these organs were rapidly aging of their own accord, and he needed fresh ones.

Much work had been done to optimize serviceability of the pig’s organs in the human host and to minimize the problem of rejection. In fact, each recipient could now have their very own pig, customized for the specific quirks of their particular physical profile. Several of these porcine organ farms were reserved for Zed, who stood by cautiously as others underwent the transplants for the first time. And once again, catastrophe intervened. The prions struck.

Prions are more a shape than a thing: a series of molecular wrinkles and twists that produce a devastating pattern of destruction. They lurk in the biological labyrinths beneath the world of parasites, bacteria, rickettsia, and viruses. A prion is a preacher of chemical perversion, teaching normal proteins how to reinvent themselves by folding in an aberrant manner. The new converts then spread the word to their neighbors, until entire cells are gradually glutted with a twisted new order.