The Games (15 page)

“Rings a bell. It’s the new super, right?”

“Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of research on it over the past several months, and the Brannin isn’t just the latest thing in computer tech. It’s a long step sideways in a direction nobody had ever thought to look before. I don’t think the Brannin should really even be called a computer. There’s very little to it that you can reach out and touch with your hand. Most of it exists in deep VR, and because of that, it’s not limited by physical size. Inside itself, it can be infinitely large or small. Instead of bytes made of zeros and ones, the Brannin uses light, on or off, and that’s the speed at which it computes. Something like six trillion floating-point operations per second, give or take.”

“Who’s counting?”

“You’d be surprised how seriously that record is taken.”

“And you’re going to tell me that the computer helped design the gladiator?”

“No, the Brannin didn’t just help. It did the design almost completely on its own. That’s where the original nucleotide base-pair sequence came from. Helix just provided the nuts and bolts.”

“Can’t you just make the inferences you need from the base-pair sequence?”

“It doesn’t work that way. The nucleotide map translates directly into an amino-acid map, but it gets sticky after that. Protein conformation is more important to protein function than the exact nucleotide read, and conformation is one of the hardest things to pull out of the raw data. Development is too interconnected to itself, and timing plays an important role.”

“Still, you should be able to cross-reference to other species.”

“No, we tried that. There were no matches. But a match might not have helped us much, anyway, unless it was exact. A single base-pair substitution that changes the shape of the resultant protein molecule can completely alter the expression of that gene. There are hundreds of examples of this. And beyond that, enzymatic function is more important even than conformation, and each enzyme is itself under genetic control, so the complexity exists in a feedback loop.”

“I’m beginning to understand. It’s like an algebra problem with a hundred variables.”

“Millions. At this point, it’s still impossible to make the leap from novel nucleotide sequence to resultant gene to physiological expression. It may always remain so. There’s too much structural noise between the three.”

“Well, you still have the computer. It designed the creature. Why do you need me to tell you what it already knows?”

“Because I think the computer has gone crazy.”

“Can computers go crazy?”

“The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

CHAPTER TEN

E
van stepped into his office and closed the door against the stares of the techs in the anteroom. His filing cabinets were overturned, his desk inside out, his stacks of digilogs scattered. Baskov’s men had gone through everything, leaving his office in complete disarray—in short, slightly more messy than usual.

He righted his swivel chair and slid into its familiarity. Only this time, the wailing of its overburdened hinges was missing. It had been so long. Much had changed.

How many weeks?
Seven, ten; he didn’t know. But he had been sure that he would never leave that hospital, never be free from the injections, or Baskov’s questions. He looked down at himself and saw half the man he had been.

The drugs they gave him made him too sick to eat, and he had lost whole chunks of himself. He felt naked without the slabs of fat that had cloaked his body for so many years. He was exposed, vulnerable, too small for his baggy skin, which now drooped and sagged around him. Maybe it had been longer than ten weeks. Maybe much longer.

What had they told his techs? He had no friends or family that would require an explanation for his absence, but what about the institute? What had they been told?

He glanced out the window, and the sky was darkening, fading to gray. He didn’t know whether night or a storm approached, but he
welcomed either. He welcomed the darkness and wanted to lose himself in it. He looked around for the light switch on the wall but couldn’t find it. The lighting panels had activated automatically when he entered the room.

He picked a desk drawer from the scatter on the floor and flung it upward toward the fluorescent panels. The cheap plastic shield caved, and the bulbs popped in a shower of glass on his head. Picking up the desk drawer, he stepped beneath the next light panel and flung the projectile again. Again, a shower of glass. He moved throughout the room until all the lights had gone blind and he could see only by the dying glow outside the window.

He thought of Pea as night descended. He sat in the clutter and let darkness fold around him. And when he could hold back no more, he wept.

S
ILAS MET
Baskov just outside the broad glass doorway. “Good afternoon,” he said, extending a hand.

Baskov shook it, nodded, then said, “I hear it’s a big day for our young Olympic hopeful.”

“Yes, it is. The trainer thinks it’s time for the first live meal. I thought it would be appropriate for someone from the commission to witness it, and frankly,” he added with a smile, “it will save me the trouble of writing a long-winded report about the event. Now
you
can report to the commission.”

“I’m sure the trouble will be more than worth it. I’m curious how it’s developing. My eyes and ears have been telling me some interesting stories.”

Silas led him inside and past the elevators. He hated the way Baskov always managed to mention his spies. He referenced them so casually, as if they were of no more interest than the weather. But Silas recognized the warning in Baskov’s informal banter: nothing could be kept secret.

“We’ve recently transferred the gladiator into its new pen,” Silas
said, then couldn’t resist: “though I’m certain that your eyes and ears have already informed you of the move.”

Baskov glanced at Silas as they walked.

“It outgrew its old living space,” Silas added.

“I know about that because I signed off on the construction project budget. I don’t even want to mention how much it cost.”

They turned left at the end of the hall and made their way down the final long corridor leading to the rear dome behind the building. At the door, Silas showed his badge to the armed guard and they stepped through.

His nostrils were immediately assaulted by the warm smells of life. It reminded him of the cat house at the Los Angeles Zoo. Tangy, pungent; it was the smell of a predator.

Bright sunlight filtered through steel mesh openings in the roof sixty feet above. Just ahead, a shell of iron bars separated them from the enclosure beyond. Silas lead Baskov toward the group that had gathered. Ben, Vidonia, and Dr. Nelson nodded their introductions.

“Where’s Tay?” Silas asked.

“Last-minute problem with the goat,” Vidonia said.

“Well, I’d have a problem, too, if I was the goat that had to go in there.” Ben pointed between the bars.

Against the far wall, several large, roughly hewn trees leaned at forty-five-degree angles with wide platforms connecting them at varying heights from the ground. Large wooden poles lay scattered in the straw that covered the floor of the enclosure. Thick ropes ran in sagging parabolas between points on the wall and the wooden poles. It all looked like a playground for some very rough, very big little boy.

“I don’t see our little friend,” Baskov said.

“It’s in an adjacent pen, but it isn’t so little anymore,” Silas said. “We thought it best to introduce the goat first.”

There was a loud clang. Then, as if on cue, a small black-and-white goat was pushed unceremoniously through a hatch in the far wall.

It fumbled around in the deep straw for several moments. Slowly, its ability to wallow around in the stuff improved, and the goat made
slow progress across the enclosure, jumping from spot to spot. Another clang grabbed the goat’s attention. It stopped, angling its head toward the sound.

The large metal door at the back of the enclosure slid slowly upward.

The gladiator lumbered in beneath it. The growth of the organism had been nothing short of amazing, and Silas couldn’t help but feel a wave of awe as the creature stepped into sight. Even hunched in a predatory stance, it stood easily six and a half feet tall—and it wasn’t done growing yet. The arms were thick with muscle, and the ears now stood round and erect atop the head, like a bat’s.

Only its eyes had not changed. Still large, gray, unreadable. Silas’s heart jolted in his chest when the gladiator bounded across the lake of straw and leaped to the lowest platform. There it sat, looking down at the goat, then out at the people, appearing for all the world like some fairy-tale monster come to life.

Its arms stretched wide from its body, and the wings unfurled from their hiding place against its back, extending twelve feet on either side. There was a rush of wind as the wings began to beat at the air. Silas felt the breeze on his cheek and turned to look at Baskov, who stood open-mouthed at the spectacle.

Silas turned his attention back to the creature in time to see it leap from the platform and drop, half gliding, to the straw next to the goat.

Bleating wildly, the goat sprang backward all the way to the bars. The gladiator’s wings snapped shut against its back as it took a long step forward. The frightened goat bleated again and tried to run past the gladiator on the right, but the gladiator flashed an arm out in front of it. The goat stopped just a half-dozen feet in front of Silas, pinned between the bars and the strange creature. The gladiator cocked its head sideways, looking at it. Slowly, it extended one taloned hand and touched the goat’s furry coat with its palm, almost a caress. The goat shrieked in fear and pulled away while the creature cocked its head in the other direction.

Much later, in the report he would have to write anyway, Silas would
not be able to recount what happened next except to say that in one moment the gladiator was sitting near its potential prey, and in the next, after a flash of motion, the goat was somehow partially disassembled in the gladiator’s bloody hands. Bright loops of intestine spilled out from the forward half of the goat as the gladiator raised the carcass up and bit off the head in a single crunch of bone.

It happened so fast.

Silas watched in silence as the creature fed. Minutes later, he was the first to speak. “Well, that was—”

The gladiator’s growl stopped him in mid-sentence. Its head snapped up as if offended by the interruption. An instant later, the uneaten portion of the goat slammed against the bars, splattering blood and bowels over him and those with the misfortune of standing too close to him.

Vidonia turned without a word and walked out. As Silas looked down at his fouled lab coat, the creature reared its head back and howled. To Silas, the howl sounded very much like laughter.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

H
er voice carried accusation in it, and something else. He tried to gauge her. They sat at the picnic tables just outside the lab, pushing food around on their plates.

He’d known there was something brewing beneath the surface for several weeks now. It was in the tone of her voice when she spoke of the project. It was in her careful choice of wording. Most of all, it was in the things she didn’t say.
Is she finally going to let it show? Is she finally going to say it?

They’d been talking for ten minutes now, circling the real point with their conversation. The wind had turned cold, and Silas raised his collar against the chill on his neck. Perhaps a lunch outside on the picnic tables hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

“What are you getting at?” he asked. He was tired of avoidance.

“I’m saying that it’s too bad it has to end up as so much pulpy sawdust at the bottom of the arena,” Vidonia said.

Silas studied her face.

“I’m saying that it’s too bad it has to die,” she said.

“It’s why it’s here in the first place.”

“I know. That doesn’t make it less of a stupid waste.”

“You have a problem with the gladiator competition?”

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation.

Silas looked at her.

“This is your project,” she said. “I understand that. But I don’t understand the kind of man that destroys his creations.”

“I don’t destroy them.”

“Yes, you do.”

“The competition does that.”

“And your project is part of that competition.”

“Without the competition, those creations you speak so highly of wouldn’t exist at all.”

“That creature you’ve made is like nothing else that has come before. It’s unique and should be studied, not thrown away in blood sport.”

“You
are
studying it.”

“For what? Even the winners usually die of their injuries. And the ones that don’t die are just put down later. There are no old gladiators.” She looked away into the wind, a soft expression on a sharp profile. She took a slow sip of her Coke. “All this talent, all this scientific knowledge, and all we can think to do with it is to build a better killer.”

Several wasps hovered in slow circles over the picnic table, attracted by the food and moving sluggishly in the cold air. He swatted at one that came too close and missed, sending it spinning in a wash of air. “Have you ever heard of the pit bull terrier?” he asked finally.

“What?”

“The pit bull terrier?”

“Some kind of dog?” she said. She seemed irritated by the off-subject question.

“I didn’t think you would have. It was finally outlawed about ten years ago, after decades of bans and regulation. Even back when they’d still been legal to own, insurance liability made it impractical to do so. Fanciers strove for years to rehabilitate the breed’s image, but too late, and with too little consistency, and the breed died of its own bad reputation.”

“So they’re extinct?”

“The
breed
is extinct. The genes no doubt still live on in mixed-breeds
and family pets all over the place—it’s hard to regulate that stuff, after all—but there’s no AKC recognition, and the moment you
call
a dog a pit bull, it’s illegal. So maybe you call it something else, give it a new name. Or maybe you don’t call it anything. But still, the breed—that old name—is dead.”