F Paul Wilson - Sims 05 (17 page)

 
          
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.

 
          
“And
I confess that I knew all this—not all the details, but the general plan—and I
approved, thinking,
Why
should we allow these small
minds to block the road to the future? Mercer and I were like gods, leading the
way to a new world.
To hell with anyone who dared stand in
our way.”

 
          
Ellis
stopped, took a breath. “I believe I was crazy then, suffering from some sort
of monomaniacal mental derangement. But eventually I sobered. When all the
legal hurdles had been cleared and the labor markets across the globe were
clamoring for
sims
, sims, and more sims, when my
personal net worth exceeded that of some small nations, when I finally had time
to look back and reflect on how I arrived at my position, I became suspicious.

 
          
“Something
was gnawing at my subconscious and wouldn’t let up. So I went back to the
source, to Zero, who was still alive; the basic research center’s only
permanent resident. I took an oral scraping of his cells and started checking
his DNA.
Mercer’s
‘cleaning up’ of Zero’s genome may
have made the splicing easier, but I realized then that it also removed links
back to the source DNA. After exhaustive efforts, working in secret, I
eventually traced Zero’s DNA back to its origin.”

 
          
Ellis
looked around at the three faces fixed on his. Yes, even Zero had lifted his
head for this.

 
          
Could
he say it? Could he push these words past his lips? He had to. He’d come too
far to turn back.

 
          
“That
source DNA didn’t belong to a chimpanzee. It belonged to me.”

 
          
Romy’s
voice was barely audible.
“Oh…dear…God!”

 
          
Patrick
was speechless, staring in slack-jawed shock.

 
          
And
Zero had closed his eyes.

 
          
Ellis
spoke past the lump in his throat. “I confronted Mercer and, after strident
initial denials, he reluctantly confirmed it: Zero had been fashioned from one
of my cells. My brother had lied to me about adding too many human genes to a
chimp genome to make Zero; the truth was he’d swapped chimp genes into my
genome. And from there I unwittingly helped him in further devolving Zero’s
genome to create the
sims
.”

 
          
“You’re
telling me,” Patrick said, sputtering, “telling us …that…that a sim is not a
recombinantly evolved chimp…it’s a recombinantly devolved human being? Tome is
a human being who’s been genetically adulterated and then farmed out as a
slave? I…I…” He raised his hands,
then
let them drop.

 
          
Ellis
understood. There were no words for what he and Mercer had done.

 
          
Romy
was silent, tears streaming down her cheeks as she stared at Zero.

 
          
“Then
I am—or was—a man?” Zero said, eyes open now, his too human features tortured.
“But I’m really not a man, am I. I’m a thing.
A freak!”

 
          
“Zero,
don’t!” Romy sobbed.

 
          
But
Zero went on, glaring at Ellis. “What have you done to me?”

 
          
Ellis
could barely hear his own voice.
“The unforgivable.
The unconscionable.
The unspeakable.
But I didn’t know, Zero.”

 
          
“That’s
a little convenient, don’t you think?” Romy said, the edge on her voice
slashing at him. “’Fess up: You didn’t want to know.”

 
          
“Maybe
you’re right. But I do know I’ve been trying to undo this ever since I found
out. Until this moment, Mercer and I have been the only two who’ve known the
truth. Not even Colonel Landon of SIRG knows. What astonished me then, and what
I still find incomprehensible, is how Mercer could know all along that the
sims
he was leasing to the world as slaves were his cloned
half brothers, and not be bothered a bit.”

 
          
“But
you didn’t go public,” Patrick said. “You didn’t even quit the company.”

 
          
“I
wanted to dissolve the company, but Mercer and SIRG controlled too much stock.
I couldn’t go public with what I knew because I had children by then and I’d
been instrumental in creating the
sims
. If the truth
got out I’d be seen as a monster on a par with Mengele, and my children would
be seen as offspring of a monster.

 
          
“I
was trapped, and SIRG knew it, but just in case I had second thoughts, my
daughter Julie disappeared for half a day. She wasn’t harmed, in fact she had a
nice time with the lady who took her to an amusement park, but the message was
too clear. To protect myself I hid a number of computer disks revealing
everything; they’ll be released to all the media in the event of my death. SIRG
and I entered a cold-war state of mutually assured destruction, but it was too
much for me. Knowing I’d been instrumental in a monumental atrocity made me
unfit for human companionship. And since I couldn’t tell anyone, not even my
wife, my marriage fell apart.

 
          
“So
I dedicated myself to the only solution I could think of: a
Quixotic
quest to develop a true chimp-origin sim to replace the human-origin sims in
circulation. But I’ve found it impossible. I don’t think it can be done.

 
          
“But
all the while, Zero had been growing up in the sealed-off section of basic
research. Mercer had forgotten about him until Harry Carstairs casually
mentioned him. Mercer decided he was a liability, the Missing Link between
sims
and humans. He ordered Zero destroyed—sacrificed, put
down, like any other lab specimen that had outlived its usefulness.

 
          
“When
I heard I told Mercer I’d take care of it. But I had no intention of allowing
Zero to be killed. I was suddenly energized. In Zero I saw a chance to bring
SimGen down. Instead of administering a lethal injection, I spirited him off. I
financed him, setting him up as the nemesis of SimGen, a fifth column to turn
people against the use of
sims
. I saw him as a way to
put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. And Zero was more than willing
to help liberate his brother
sims
.

 
          
“Now Meerm’s baby will accomplish that.
What I’d hoped for
was to put SimGen out of business with all of its secrets intact. That might
not be possible now, seeing as the baby is a girl.”

 
          
“Why
is that so important?” Patrick said. “I saw Dr. Cannon react when I told her it
was a beautiful girl.”

 
          
“It’s
too complicated to delve into here. Just let me say that in an X-dominated
hybrid genome with a human father and a sim mother, the mother’s non-native
genes—that is, the minority derived from another species—would be largely
suppressed. Even though they’re there in the genotype, they don’t show up in
the phenotype. In other words, if
sims
had been truly
derived from chimps, Meerm’s daughter would have retained significant chimp
features. But because the substrate of Meerm’s genome was human, the chimp
genes didn’t have a chance. That’s why, in spite of
all the
added chimp DNA, she gave us a beautiful, pink, human-looking baby.”

 
          
Romy
said, “Then I guess your dirty little secret won’t be a secret much longer.”

 
          
“That
will be up to you three, of course. The fact that the baby’s a girl will cause
people who know genetics to question whether there might be more human DNA in
sims
than anyone ever imagined, but I doubt they’ll be able
to prove anything. And their questions will be drowned out in the tidal wave of
protests against the cloning of more
sims
. Thanks to
Reverend Eckert the world has watched the birth of a baby born of the union of
man and sim. And after seeing that, the movement to have them reclassified as
Hominidae will gain unstoppable momentum.”

 
          
He
turned to Zero and felt the lump grow in his throat again.

 
          
“And
you, Zero, are a man. The finest, most noble man I’ve ever known. And you can
live as a man. Whatever you want of mine is yours, Zero. I don’t know whether
to call you brother or son, but like it or not, I’m part of you. We’re
related.”

 
          
Zero
stared at the bookshelves, saying nothing.