COSMOS magazine

Wednesday, July 24

The new nordamericano student with the special advanced syllabus jerked at his desk, fell forward moaning. His teacher rushed to his side. Oh no, not another attack for that poor boy! Pushed too hard! His mother, Mrs. Peters, had explained about his terrible brain tumour, and its miraculous remission, may the saints be praised for their kindness! He'd been doing so well at his Spanish!

"Look at me, Ricky." The child was breathing in gasps, muttering, eyes rolled up. She spoke in English. "What is it, son?"

Lourdes Martinez couldn't make out the mumbling. "Quick, Maria, the nurse. Get the nurse. Right now! And you, Laura, tell the Principal's office. Get them to call Ricky Peters' Mom. Hurry!"

"Roberta," Ricky seemed to be mumbling. He was shivering and shaking. "He killed her," he said in English. "It's Roberta this time."

"There, there, son." Mrs. Martinez tightened her arm about his shoulders. "Nobody's hurt. It's... it's a bad dream, that's all."

Richard Peters sobbed.

Wednesday, July 24

In the steamy Texas afternoon, Wayne heard the news from a floating ball of light. His teeth bared to the heavens, he uttered a scream of such wrathful rage that the few derelicts not already terrified by his uncanny familiar scrambled into the shadows and huddled there. He stood panting.

"Blick! Rutherford! Bastard, I kill you filthy!"

The machine spoke in his ear.

"Find him for me, partner. Tell me where he's hiding. He owes me."

A small woman crept closer. "Mr. Elliot, the King says that you should try to—"

He raised his hand to her, caught himself in time, face contorted, lowered it. "Sorry, Betsy-Anne." He shook his head like a confused animal. "I'm sorry, I've been making a fuss. Tell Curt I'm heading off for a while."

The ball of light hung above him like a halo of wrath.

Wednesday, July 24

Jill sat beside her son's bed, drained of emotion. He lay there before her, yet he seemed in another world. His temperature was normal, his muscle tone relaxed. He spoke to her and Paul when they addressed him, then shushed them and went back to muttering into the machine at his throat. It looked like something from a very cheap and cheesy sci-fi show from half a century earlier—Captain Video, maybe, according to Paul, whose aging father in distant Australia was an aficionado. Just another of Alex's contraptions, and not as disturbing, in fact, as the globes that spun in two directions at once as they flew across the room like tiny balloons entrapping a firefly. The thing was palpably a communicator of some sort, that much was clear. And Alex was striving with all his appalling immature genius to prevent a murder.

To save a human soul, she thought, and her eyes felt hot.

"It's just revenge, Wayne," he was saying in his half-hypnotic drone. "It'd be murder. I know they killed her, but if you kill Blick you'll be no better than he is. This isn't why Paul created the auxosome, partner. It's to help us live, not help us kill. Mom, can I have some Pepsi, my throat's awful dry."

"I'll get it," Paul said, and his clear voice seemed shockingly loud in the bedroom.

"I'm pretty sure she's dead," Alex said to his throat machine. "But then you were dead, for a while. Maybe she'll come back."

Tears ran in a fresh flood down Jill's cheeks, and she held his hand very tightly. It was impossible to believe that he was in communication with the beast who had tried to kill them, who had blown an innocent guard to death and done his best to slay Drew Chang. It was impossible to credit that Wayne Elliot had truly died and returned to life, despite Alex's muffled testimony. On-line in Paul's borrowed lab, belatedly, they had read the Houston newspaper reports. Fatally shot at point-blank range by police. Body identified by fingerprints (no mention, it's true, of the extra fingers and their anomalous prints) and by the murderer's widow. Googling, they turned up an odd spot in a local community blog a couple of days later about a body vanishing from the morgue where, reading between the lines, Elliot must have been taken for autopsy. She and Paul had decided that Blick's hand was at work here. It was a chilling thought. With Wayne's corpse, Blick's biochemists could surely recover the auxosome—and not the new, improved version, but the incomplete genome with its need for protein regulation.

And Alex had set them back on their heels a second time with his claim that Wayne was alive, after all, and in urgent need of his final regulator shot.

It was entirely typical of a child's mind, she told herself, that Alex would make the desperate, wishful leap from Wayne's post-mortem recovery to a conviction that his beloved Roberta might also return from the dead. Assuming she was dead, and that all this was not a fevered fantasy of a mind disordered by a genetically engineered intrusion nobody had ever trialled in clinical tests.

"Here's your soda, chief," Paul said, and placed the frothing can in Alex's slack hand. The finger tightened and the can went up to his lips. He drank, and brown foam trickled from the corners of his speaking mouth. Jill mopped the Pepsi before it stained the pillow, and tried to stop weeping.

"Hey, Mom, come on, it's not the end of the world!"

The scamp was sitting up, looking at her with teasing eyes.

"Oh, Alex!"

"Hey, don't get mooshy on me. Listen, we have to get the laptop fired up, I think I can find Roberta. What you always say, Mom: Enquiring minds want to know." He grinned, afire. "Wayne and mine, that is."

"You think she's—"

"She's got the auxosome, same as Wayne." The child lifted his gaze and clawed his hands. "Remember this, Mom?" Alex uttered a classic Dr. Frankenstein laugh which didn't quite work with his treble voice. "'She's alive! Ha ha ha ha! She's alive!''

Jill burst out laughing, despite herself. "You're so bad! This is our friend we're mocking!"

He shrugged, lowered his eyebrows, grew serious. "She's in trouble if that bad man has her. I have to lead Wayne there as fast as possible. Then try to keep him from going Rambo on their asses."

"Alex!" Paul said, and stifled a snort. "Where do you hear such language?"

"Guess you don't listen to MTV any more, doc. Come on, folks, it's Googlin' time!"

Wednesday, July 24

The body was stretched on a surgically aseptic sheet of linen, atop a sheet of rubber and heavy duty steel beneath that. It was not a mortuary autopsy table, nor was it an operating theatre table. No anaesthetic apparatus cluttered the site. Bright racks of lamps shone down on the naked, supine body of a middle-aged woman with a fatal external lesion across the left side of her throat, slashing her carotid artery. From her pallor it was evident that she had bled out quickly, lost pints of blood before the wound site closed with unusually rapid clotting. Incredibly, by simple inspection it was apparent that this corpse was.. well, repairing the trauma site. Cleaned of dirt and grit and lightly sutured after arrival at the covert medical technology facility two blocks from Texas State University, the wound was almost visibly closing, like a digital recording of the healing process run at exaggerated speed.

"It's not unusual for fundamental metabolic activity to continue for minutes, hours or even days after cessation of brain activity," said the military pathologist in green scrubs and plastic face mask. He held a gleaming scalpel, poised in the air as if he were considering a subtle argument during dinner. "This case, though, is thoroughly anomalous. I don't suppose you'd care to let me in on the background. Mr. Blick?"

"She had a... call it a syndrome." Blick was pleased with the coinage. "A man suffering the same condition was shot once, with the bullet grazing his scalp. He died instantly."

"That can happen," the pathologist said. "Shock, bleeding out. Head wounds bleed very copiously."

"Quite. My staff arranged for the remains to be transported to this lab but the damned incompetent medical examiner in Houston—" His savage tone rang in his own ears, in this confined space; he paused, drew a deep breath. "The body was shipped to the crematorium in error. Or so they claim. Covering their damned asses, more likely."

"Oh? Well, one thing I can assure you of, sir. It didn't get up and walk away."

Blick snarled, seized up a scalpel from the tray beside the table, slashed once deeply across the abdomen of the dead woman. Flesh parted; only a thin seepage of plasma exited the new wound. The pathologist stiffened. His temporary employer said, "In fact, doctor, I believe that's precisely what happened. I think the fucking corpse got up and ran away. And now I have no idea where the murderous prick is."

Wednesday, July 24

Wayne stood at the feeder entrance to Interstate 35, at the lights. A big eighteen wheeler squealed air-brakes, idled at the red behind a Korean sports car the same colour as the light. He walked back, reached up, slapped his hand three times, brutally hard, on the door. The guy in his high seat stared in disbelieving wrath, snapped off his seat belt, hit the lock release. The light switched to green and the speedster zoomed off. Wayne flung the door open and dragged the trucker out. The man could not believe what was happening. He was half again as big as his assailant and he fell like a sack of shit. He bounced on his buttocks, swarmed furiously to his feet, grabbed up at Wayne. A floating pale bulb of light dashed itself in his eyes. He swiped at it, tumbled again, and Wayne was in the truck seat in a vaulting leap, one hand on the wheel, the other on the gear shift. His feet went to clutch and accelerator as if the truck had been designed for him. The eighteen wheeler jerked once, groaningly accelerated toward the feeder ramp. In the big mirror he saw the outraged trucker running after him up the ramp, arms waving, falling behind as the rig's 500 horsepower diesel overcame its inertia. Wayne's eyes flicked to the big dashboard, found the radio. He clicked through the stations, pushed up the volume. Roy Orbison, "Ride Away'. He sang along with violent intensity, gunning his way north toward San Marcos. "Big motor wind up, ride away from here."

Roy, my man. Big bad bike, he thought, banging his hand on the wheel, what I need. This is too damn slow. Forty five minutes. Shit. Need a chopper, he told himself, tearing along the freeway. I wonder if the kid can arrange that for me.

Wednesday, July 24

"Our instruments confirm your guess, Mr. Blick. This woman is in an unprecedented state of arrest. From your testimony I accept that she received the fatal wound five hours ago; from my study, I find that she is poised in a kind of... how shall I put it... no man's land."

"She's undead."

The pathologist allowed himself a smile. "A fortuitous turn of phrase, sir. One might indeed—"

"There was nothing accidental about my phrasing."

"I'm sorry?"

"'Fortuitous' doesn't mean 'fortunate', you pompous jackass. It means 'by chance'."

The pathologist stared, face white with anger above his mask. "I see. How interesting. I am indebted to you once more, Mr. Blick. May we turn now from the niceties of grammar to the business at hand?"

"Lexicon, not grammar, you insufferable—" Blick broke off. He felt disoriented, as sick as a dog. "I'm sorry, this situation has me on edge. Beyond the edge, to tell the truth." He had never killed before, not by his own hand; it was intensely galling to think that he might not be a natural murderer after all. "You're telling me she can be revived?"

"The woman is badly dehydrated. She lost a lot of blood."

"I know," Blick said. "Quite a lot of it soaked through the suit I was wearing." He glanced at his hands. The pathologist stared in fresh distress, plainly unable to believe what his reason told him he'd just heard. Let the bastard think what he likes, Blick told himself. I pay him enough. "I'm not Jack the Ripper," he said. "An unfortunate accident. You think you can get her back?"

The pathologist pressed a button. "Get me four litres of AB, stat. And have another eight ready." He moved with deft competence to the head of the table, found a cannula, inserted it into the limp arm of the corpse, taped it. "Let's see, shall we? This would be worth a Nobel Prize."

"Only if anyone learned of it," Blick said sedately. "And nobody shall."

"Of course, sir." The door banged open, and two scrub nurses rushed to the table with bags of whole blood and a portable stand. The line of red flowed downward, entered the corpse's arm, slowly flushed the nearly dormant tissues.

A phone buzzed discreetly. One of the nurses answered in a mutter, passed the handset to Blick with a gloved hand. "The lab, sir."

"There seems to be some mistake, Mr. Blick," the genetics specialist told him. "The human from whom this tissue sample was drawn is a polyploidy syndrome of a kind I've never seen before. He or she should be badly deformed, almost certainly retarded."

Blick shook his head. "'He?' She's a brilliant business woman in excellent physical condition."

"That's why I suggest that a mistake's been made, sir. Are you sure the tissue sample—"

"I'm quite certain. You're telling me she has an extra chromosome?"

"These cells are anomalous, and they seem to display a detached 47th and 48th chromosome pair, that's right, sir. In size they're somewhat larger than a Y, which would make this subject a variant on XXY Klinefelter male with hypogonadism—"

"She's a woman, trust me." Blick's detached gaze travelled down the naked white body.

"Alternatively, there might be a duplicate chromosome 22 pair, which codes principally for structural ribosomal RNAs and—"

"No. Shut up." In a taut voice, Blick said, "I see what he's done. It's an artificial chromosome!"

He understood now the immensity of what he held. The logic of it burst with clarity across his mind like a blazoned set of headlines for the end of the world. "Gibson transfects his subjects somatically with a tailored cocktail of maintenance enzyme code. Christ! The audacity!"

The geneticist remained silent for a moment. Then she said, "We're running a polymerase chain reaction right now. We'll have sufficient PCR copies of the anomalous strand within hours, and you'll receive a complete sequence display and print-out by—"

"Do it. Thank you, Lois, good work."

He placed the handset back in its cradle. The tips of his fingers tingled, as if his body had been anaesthetised. He felt ill. It could not be remorse, surely?

The white flesh on the table grew pink. After twenty minutes the pathologist applied cardiac paddles. Roberta Treadwell gasped, coughed, sat up convulsively, clutched at her damaged throat. The scalpel slash across her belly started to bleed in earnest.