GeneSix (20 page)

Quentin said, “I saw what you did with the coffee.”

The man was suddenly defensive. “I didn’t do nothin’.”

Mandy said, “We saw you heat up the coffee with just a touch of your finger.”

“Look, lady, I don’t know what you think you saw, but I’m just sitting here..,”

His words died away when he realized the sugar bowl was hanging in mid-air in front of his nose.

Quentin said, “Would you like a sugar? Perhaps two?”

“You’re like me,” the man said. “Both of you?”

Quentin allowed the sugar bowl to descend gently to the bar. “We need your help. We’re recruiting a small band of people for a special mission.”

“What kind of mission?”

“In the long run, to save mankind. But first,” Quentin glanced toward the television, “we need your help in pulling off a little jail break.”

April Hollister lounged in bed, one side of her face buried in a pillow, as she watched the smartest man in the world sleep. His hair was tousled like it had been exposed to a strong wind all night. She could not help but smile.

He opened one eye, and glanced at her.

“Are you staring at me again?” he said.

“Nope. Well, maybe.” She said through her smile.

He groaned. “It’s morning, isn’t it?”

She nodded cheerfully. “Has been for a while.”

He shut his eye. “Morning comes too early. I have to try and do something about that.”

“I think it’s so cute. The smartest man in the world is not a morning person.”

“All these brain cells need more sleep.”

The bed was king sized, with a dark wooden headboard rising at the corners into swirling spires. Scott had a touch of old-world taste in him. The rest of the room was spartan, though. Not a lot of floor space. The walls were of smooth concrete, painted a soft light green by April because she thought earth tones would add a sense of warmth to the place. There were no windows, as beyond the walls was solid rock. There were bookshelves, though. Scott had dozens of books, on things like molecular biology and theoretical physics. He could read one entire text book in half an hour. He also had DVD’s of things like Star Trek and Battlestar. And, of course, Firefly. A true geek could not be without his Firefly DVD’s. And the Serenity movie.

One wall was actually holographic. It could fade into nothingness, and reveal a closet holding a few clothes, mostly jeans and t-shirts and a couple lab coats. And the requisite long brown coat, which he had bought at a sci-fi convention a few years earlier. The floor space of the hidden closet was entirely made up of boxes of comics.

April had quarters of her own, but they spent hardly any time there, as Scott’s bed was bigger.

She said, “Mastermind. That’s what we should call you, as a code name.”

“Please don’t.” He was holding one hand over his eyes, as though he might be able to somehow block out the day and get a little more sleep.

“No, seriously.” She propped herself up on one elbow. “We’ve been trying to come up with a code name for you. I’m Angel Girl. Rick is the Comet. Chuck is Freeze Guy. Jake is Captain Courageous.”

“He hates that name, you know.” Scott began rubbing his eyes, as though the morning somehow actually hurt.

She giggled. “Yeah. I know.”

“You’re cruel, in your own cute way, you know that?”

“You weren’t complaining last night.”

Though his eyes were shut, he could hear the light touch of evil in her otherwise angelic grin. He decided to say nothing. Witty repartees required thought, and it was far too early for thought.

April said, “Sammy needs a code name, too. We’re thinking about Photon. Or Mainframe. Or Mister Data.”

“Why do we need code names?”

“Because they’re fun, silly.”

Scott forced both eyes open, and glanced at a small stand at the side of the bed. A digital display read 7:36.

“April, it’s the middle of the freaking night.”

She said, “No, it’s not. It’s time to get up. Embrace the day. I have to hit our new gym and do some running, and then it’ll be time for a fruit smoothie. Usually Jake shares one with me. Sometimes Rick, too. And Sammy likes them.”

“A fruit smoothie? All I can think about this time of day is hot, black coffee.” Scott resumed rubbing his eyes. “And don’t wear yourself out doing all that running. Remember, we have a mission starting this afternoon."

“I won’t wear myself out. I’ll probably only do twenty laps.”

“Twenty laps?” He opened his eyes to look at her again. “You can actually run twenty whole laps?”

“It’s the equivalent of only a couple kilometers.” She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “Come on. You should join me. It’d be good for you.”

He opened one bleary eye to look at her, and was about to reply that running laps this time of day should be considered criminal, when he discovered, despite the bleariness of his vision, that she was completely sans clothing. That’s right, he realized. The previous night’s activities left had them both in such a state.

He found there was one thing that seemed to wake him up even more quickly than coffee. He grabbed her by an arm and playfully pulled her back to him. “How about you run those laps right in here, with me?”

Sammy had begun life as a photon computer, embedded in the shell of an old, early-generation Macintosh computer. Now, however, he had a body. Something Scott had designed.

When Sammy looked in the mirror, what he saw looking back at him could easily pass for a human male, maybe thirty years old. Dark brown hair, a light complexion. Gray eyes. This face could even grown a beard. Sammy actually had to shave every morning. Facially, if seen in the right light, and with a little imagination, and if you weren’t looking to closely, he thought he might almost look a little like Nathan Fillion. Maybe.

It was not a nuts-and-bolts android body, with pulleys and gears and such. This was so close to a living organism, Sammy doubted if the average human physician could tell the difference at first glance. Or even second glance. Synthetic blood ran through synthetic arteries and veins, providing oxygen which fueled synthetic skin cells and bone cells and muscle cells. The draw-back was if Sammy cut himself shaving, he tended to bleed a sort of bluish fluid, but what the hell? He now had a nervous system. He had a sense of taste that, as far as Scott could tell, approximated the human sense.

Sammy could have a beer with the guys. He found his favorite was Pabst, to which Chuck said, “Maybe Scott needs to adjust those synthetic taste buds a little.”

Everyone at the complex had a job, and Sammy’s was still the same as it had been before. However, where before he had run everything remotely from within his old Mac casing, he now sat in a chair and pushed buttons and watched view screens.

His brain was still a photon computer, running on enough gigabytes to choke an elephant. He could run many functions at once, though he was finding he could not run as many as before. Small price to pay for being more human, he supposed.

He was also stronger than the average human. He could lift a man with one arm. And he had super-human endurance. Scott had built in these things specifically as an added defense should Sammy ever find himself in a life-threatening situation. And Jake knew a thing or two about martial arts, and was teaching Sammy efficient ways to use his strength and speed.

Since Sammy could no longer really function as the central computer for the complex, he and Scott had built another. This one was less high-tech than Sammy, functioning on more of a traditional processor. If they kept building photonic computers, Sammy thought, all of which would eventually gain sentience and then ask for a more human body, they would never get any work done (Scott had told Sammy he had a warped sense of humor, which convinced Sammy he would fit in fine as a member of the team). This new computer had to have a huge processor, as things like maintaining a teleportation field required a load of memory. Sammy and Scott had designed innovations such as sub-micro circuitry, but still the computer required a lot of room. Jake had burrowed a new chamber beneath them the size of a basketball court, and the new computer filled most of the space.

They had built a small alcove off the main laboratory, to serve as a terminal to the new central computer, and this was now Sammy’s primary workplace. Fifteen monitors were mounted to the alcove wall, where he could glance at them. Because of his ability to do serious multi-tasking, he could actually keep an eye on all of them almost simultaneously. Before him was a keyboard, though the computer also accepted voice commands.

At the moment, he was powering up a teleportation field that would be used for today’s mission. It was taking it a while to power up because they would not only be teleporting, they would also be time traveling and dimension hopping, and such things required an enormous amount of power.

They would traveling be to the distant past of the alternate Earth Scott had been observing for some time. This Earth seemed to be exactly like ours in every way, even in the shape of its continents, except that it had experienced a recent ice age, and only now the glaciers were receding. Humans existed there, but in limited numbers. Those in the wintry tundra and early forests of their Europe and North America were living in stone age conditions. In the North Africa area, which seemed to have weather more like Canada on our Earth, a civilization similar to old Egypt was starting up.

This provided a great opportunity to observe the development of early human civilization. It also might provide an answer to the question – why, on this alternate Earth, where conditions were so similar to ours, had another ice age struck?

Sammy hypothesized the answer might lie in a crater in the area of what would be Quebec on our world. The crater was huge, and observational satellites Scott had launched into their atmosphere suggested it might be maybe seven thousand years old.

As soon as Scott got enough coffee into himself to get his super brain functioning, he would join Sammy and they would prepare the final protocols for departure.

Scott would be taking Jake with him, and Rick and April. They expected to be gone no more than a few hours, but this would be the first time a living human had actually stepped into the past, except for the brief trial run Scott had given the device a week earlier.

Sammy had to admit, he found the whole thing quite exciting. He would like to accompany them, but someone had to remain behind and monitor the mission, and he was the best suited for this. And Chuck was remaining behind to provide security for their home base. Scott wanted Sammy’s full focus to be on monitoring the mission.

“I don’t mind staying behind,” Chuck said to Sammy, when he learned he wouldn’t be joining the time travelers. “My ability would probably be useless there, anyway, unless they wanted to start another ice age. I’ll be much more valuable here.”

“You just want to be within reach of the beer cooler.”

Chuck shrugged. “Well, I do have my priorities.”

The time travelers would first be beamed to the alternate universe, and from there, backward in time. A two-step process. They could not be beamed to the exact mountaintop point that corresponded with the location of this facility, because on the alternate Earth, glaciers covered this entire mountain range. They would have to be beamed to another location, and this complicated matters a little. Required many more computations.

On another screen, Sammy was monitoring atmospheric conditions on the alternate Earth. He and Scott had also launched some weather satellites. Lightning storms tended to muck with teleportation fields, so they wanted to beam into an area where the sky was clear. The data was arriving in the form of binary code, which Sammy and Scott could both read more easily than the average human could read words on a page, but no one else at the complex was fluent in binary, so Sammy was having the central computer translate it all into English.

On yet another screen, a baseball game was in progress. The Yomiuri Giants were taking on the Yakuit Swallows. This time of day, the only baseball being played was in Japan, but that was fine with Sammy - he was fluent in Japanese, as well as a couple dozen other languages. He was developing a serious obsession with baseball, with all of its multi-layered intricacies, and found its fascination to be never-ending.

Sammy was also hacking into FBI computers and communications, monitoring chatter. He was only half-listening, as the computer chirped out binary code into a receiver built into his head, but the computer was programmed to alert him to certain catch phrases and words. Specifically, anything relating to Quentin Jeffries or Mandy Waid or Kimberly Stratton or Peter LaSalle. Also, anything relating to an apparent meta-human who seemed to be operating out of both Boston and New York, as a self-styled vigilante. News reports on this meta-human had begun to surface a few months after this facility became operational. None of the reports were all that conclusive, but it seemed this meta-human had some sort of ability to become immaterial, possibly like April, but he also seemed to have some sort of telepathic ability. Attention had been drawn to him when he had rescued a child from a kidnapper, a few months earlier. He operated only at night, and seemed to focusing his vigilante activities on everything from large scale drug trafficking to breaking up muggings. The cops were trying to find him, but were having zero luck. The F.B.I. had been brought in, and they weren’t doing much better. News reports were referring to him either as
The Great Darkness
.