F Paul Wilson - Sims 05 (16 page)

 
          
“Fan
out!” Luca shouted. “They could still be in the building!”

 
          
He
doubted it, but that might be just what they wanted him to do: figure they’d
taken off and go on a wild search through the streets, leaving them safe right
here, laughing at him. That was what they’d expect him to do, only this time he
wouldn’t.

 
          
“Everyone
take a floor, take a hall,
go
from room to room. Look
for a baby, a newborn baby girl.”

 
          
Luca
kicked back through the operating room doors and grabbed the old guard by his
collar.
“The nursery!
Where’s the nursery?”

 
          
“Th-third
floor,” the old man cried, cringing.

 
          
“Take
me there!”

 
          
A
few minutes later he was standing before a plate-glass window, staring at the
rows of bassinets, only half a dozen of them occupied. To his right a
frightened new mother cried out and asked him what was
wrong.
He ignored her.

 
          
These babies, all so human looking.
But that didn’t mean the
sim baby couldn’t be among them. No way to tell. The safest thing would be to
kill all the girls, but he didn’t know if he could do such a thing.

 
          
Movement
on the screen of the monitor over the nurse’s station at the rear of the
nursery caught his eye. The sim operation film…the one Lowery had supposedly
shot up…it was still playing. Suddenly the film cut off and a man appeared.
Luca knew that face…the Reverend Eckert! Somehow he’d got hold of the film.
Eckert was broadcasting it all over the world!

 
          
Luca
turned and began a stumbling trot back toward the elevators.
Only
one thing to do now.

 
          
Run.

 
          
MANHATTAN

 
          
It’s
over, Mercer Sinclair thought as he turned away from his plasma screen TV and
staggered to his living room window. He stared out over the oddly silent
Fifth Avenue
at the pale, dawn-lit shadows of
Central Park
. We’re done.

 
          
He
hadn’t been able to sleep so he’d turned on the TV and begun channel surfing.
He’d paused when he recognized Reverend Eckert’s face—that damn fool seemed to
be on some channel somewhere every hour of the day and night—and stayed when he
heard him rant about a sim giving birth to a half-human baby. And then he’d shown
the birth.

 
          
Portero
and SIRG had failed.
Miserably.
And worse, the sim
baby was a girl,
an all too human-looking girl
.

 
          
What
do I do now?
he
wondered, his gaze wandering to the
squatting granite mass of the
Metropolitan
Museum
a few blocks uptown. The markets were
closed today in the
US
and most of
Europe
, and the trading day had already ended in
Asia
. But when the
Pacific Rim
markets reopened later tonight, SimGen
stock would go into freefall.

 
          
Money
wasn’t the issue; even without SimGen he was worth more than he could spend in
a dozen lifetimes. No, it was the company itself that mattered. He’d devoted
his life to building SimGen. It was his child, his only family, and now the
wild dogs he’d kept at bay for so long would leap upon her and tear her to
pieces.

 
          
Mercer
thought of the .38 caliber revolver he kept in the drawer by the bed. Maybe
that would be the best way, the easiest way. Better that than—

 
          
He
stopped.

 
          
What
am I thinking? It’s not over! I’ll fight this! Stonewall any questions, deny
any and all allegations. Sims are my property, and it will take
years—decades!—before someone can say otherwise. And that someone will be the
Supreme Court of the
United States
, because that’s how far I’ll take it. And
I’ll win that fight.

 
          
Oh,
no. This is not over.

 
          
FAR
HILLS, NJ

 
          
Ellis
stared at the screen, fascinated, shouting, “They’ve done it! They’ve done it!”

 
          
He
didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He didn’t know what tomorrow would
bring, or even what the rest of today would hold, but everything in his life
was going to be different from now on. If nothing else, today promised a
brighter future for the
sims
of the world.

 
          
His
phone rang. “Ellis,” said a deep voice he immediately recognized.

 
          
“Zero!
Congratulations! I just saw the film of the birth.
Tragic about poor Meerm, but uploading the film to Eckert was a brilliant move.
Where are you?”

 
          
“At the front gate.”

 
          
That
startled Ellis. And something about Zero’s voice wasn’t right. “I’ll open it
right away. Have you got the baby with you?”

 
          
“No.
But I have questions.
A lot of questions.”

 
          
Ellis’s
stomach plunged: He’d been dreading this moment, dreading it for decades. “Yes,
I suppose you do. I’ll open the gate.”

 
          
He
pressed a button on a wall unit that operated the gate mechanism,
then
went to a front window to watch a black van climb the
long winding driveway to the house. The cook and the maid had the day off; he’d
planned to visit Robbie and Julie later, but he might have to delay that.

 
          
Ellis
stepped outside as the van pulled to a stop before the front door. Zero
alighted immediately and Ellis was surprised to see that he’d removed his mask,
his simian features naked to the world. He walked past Ellis without a word,
without a handshake, without even eye contact, and stepped into the foyer. A
man and a woman emerged—Romy Cadman and Patrick Sullivan, looking perplexed.
Ellis introduced himself and welcomed them. The last to debark were Kek and an
aging sim, but they did not approach.

 
          
“You
two are welcome inside,” he said.

 
          
“No,
sir,” said the sim. “We stay. Good air.”

 
          
“As you wish.”

 
          
As
Tome and the mandrilla wandered out onto the frosty lawn, Ellis stepped back
inside and faced his guests.

 
          
“Can
I offer anyone some—
”

 
          
“You’ve
seen the film,” Zero said, his voice thick. “Meerm’s baby is a girl, a very
human-looking girl. Dr. Cannon told me she should look more like a sim and she
told me why. She also gave me a possible explanation for why the baby looks so
human. She didn’t want to believe it and neither do I. Do you know what I’m
talking about?”

 
          
“Yes,
I believe I do.”

 
          
“Then
tell me it’s not true!”

 
          
“I
only wish I could.”

 
          
Zero
lunged toward him, teeth bared, hands clawing forward. Ellis braced himself for
the impact.

 
          
“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 over-wound 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.”