Kill Switch (4 page)

Greene nodded. Twice in the last sixteen months Prospero had built small electronic devices that, from things the father let slip, had great potential for military application. Greene did not understand the science, even when Prospero tried to explain it to him. Something about a short-range field disruptor and something else about a beam regulator. Whatever they were. Oscar Bell had been extremely excited about both, and from the things Greene had picked up, was able to obtain contracts to develop them for the Department of Defense.

Prospero had been mostly indifferent to the devices, labeling them as “junk,” and ultimately disregarding them because they did not help him in his “work.” He said one was a by-product and the other was an interesting side effect. Greene was trying to determine what that work was, convinced it was a key factor in understanding Prospero.

Overall, Oscar Bell was openly obsessed with his son's genius. Bell talked about almost nothing else, and that was disturbing to Greene. He did not know how this would play out over time. Bell was the least pleasant man Greene had ever met. He was acquisitive, demanding, inflexible, and probably cruel in many ways. His household staff was terrified of him and there was a high turnover rate among them. Bell was the kind of man who had no real friends and instead relied on maintaining a network of acquaintances whose shared agendas were based on financial reward rather than personal enrichment.

“I guess you know,” said Prospero, “that Dad hates me because I actually believe in something. He thinks it's a distraction. He accused me of losing focus.”

“Do you believe, Prospero?” asked Greene, surprised. “You've told me on numerous occasions that you reject the idea of the Judeo-Christian version of God. You said that Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha were all con men. Those are your words.”

“I know. I was only ten, so that was the best I could phrase it at the time.”

Greene had to suppress a smile. He said, “Would you care to restate your position?”

Prospero shot him a sly look. “Let's just say that I've opened my mind to other possibilities.”

“What possibilities? Is it something your mother suggested?”

The boy seemed surprised by that. “What? No. She's a loon.”

“Then what?”

Prospero shrugged. “Something else. I'm not ready to talk about it.” He paused, considering, then changed the subject. “Do you remember the dream I had last Christmas? About having brothers and sisters?”

“Of course. You said that you believed there were at least fifty other children like you.”

“Exactly like me. Same face,” said Prospero. “Even the girls looked like me. We were all in a big room. Not a school exactly and not a hospital. A little of both. It was a horrible place, though. The people who worked there hated us. No … no, that's wrong. They were afraid of us.”

“So you told me. Why do you bring it up now?”

The boy looked at his hands for a moment. “I dreamed about one of them again. Last night, I mean. In my dreams most of my brothers and sisters were dead. All but one. A sister.”

Greene said nothing. He'd asked Oscar Bell about this and had been told, very curtly, to mind his own business. The encounter, and the boy's persistent dreams, reinforced Greene's suspicion that Prospero was adopted.

“What can you recall about her?” asked Greene, but Prospero shrugged.

“Not much. She was sad. She was older in my dream. Grown up. And she was sad. She'd been hurt. Shot, I think. She didn't die but she was sad because she couldn't have babies.” The boy knotted and unknotted his fingers. “That was all there was to the dream, but it was so real. More real than us talking right now. I don't think it was just a dream. I think I do have a sister and that she's out there somewhere. And … she looks exactly like me. Not like clones. Something else…”

His voice trailed off.

“Very well. Have you ever shared these dreams with your father?”

“No. I tried once and he smacked me across the face.”

“That was two years ago,” said Greene. “Your father told me that he'd hit you and that he was very sorry. Perhaps you could try to talk to him again. If not about your dreams, then perhaps about your relationship? About your feelings about his focus on your scientific achievements.”

“Share? With Dad?” Prospero laughed. “Dad doesn't talk to me. Not unless it's to ask what I'm working on and how it could be used.”

“Used?”

“You know what I mean,” snapped Prospero. “Daddy-dear's always fishing for the next shiny toy to sell to the military. You think all of this—the mansion, the cars, the private jet, all that crap—comes from what he makes in the private sector? Please. It's all military contracts and he's always after me to come up with something because he's tapped out when it comes to his own genius.”

“You're only a boy.”

Prospero gave him a withering look. “We both know that's not really true.”

In that moment the boy sounded like an old man. There was a world-weariness unearned by the number of years he'd already lived. It was in his eyes, too.

“So, no,” concluded Prospero, “Dad doesn't say a lot to me. Not the way people do.”

“Your father is a reticent man,” said Greene. “Do you know that word? Reticence?”

“Of course I do. And it doesn't really fit him. Dad's simply an asshole.”

“He's your father. You shouldn't speak like that about him.”

“Really? You want me to start self-editing in therapy?”

Greene flinched. “Fair enough. My apologies.”

“Dad hates me,” said Prospero.

“You must know that's not true,” said Greene.

Prospero gave him a pitying look. “Of course it is.”

They went back and forth on that for a bit, but Greene knew it was an argument he could not win. Perhaps “contempt” was not the best word to describe how Oscar Bell treated his son, but it was close and everyone knew it. The father even intimated as much, telling Greene in private that “If it wasn't for his brains, the kid wouldn't be worth the money it takes to feed him. I sure as shit can't take him out anywhere. After what he did at the science fair? No way.”

At a national science fair for grade-school kids, an eight-year-old Prospero took out his penis and urinated all over the judges' table, all the while loudly proclaiming that they weren't smart enough to judge a competition for the smelliest dog turd. It was not an isolated incident. Oscar Bell had been forced to write a lot of checks to mollify the judges, the school, and, Greene suspected, the press.

“I don't want to talk about Dad anymore,” declared Prospero.

Greene accepted it, recognizing that particular tone in the boy's voice. “What would you like to talk about? We have plenty of time. I see you've added something new to your hoodie.”

Prospero raised a hand and touched the tangle of tentacles that he'd drawn with such care on the gray cloth and down onto the green jacket.

“Is that from something you read?” asked Greene. “Or from a video game?”

“I don't play video games anymore.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“They're designed to encourage failure,” said Prospero. “The game levels get more difficult and complicated and you waste a lot of time beating them.”

“Isn't that the point of those games? Overcoming obstacles and—”

“No. The point of those games is to addict people to playing them and make them desperate to win. But each time you beat a level your ‘reward' is another even more difficult level. Addiction isn't growth. The game designers make them for sheep. I'm not a sheep because sheep are for slaughter.”

“Prospero … have you been having thoughts of hurting yourself?”

“No, and don't be stupid. You know that's not what I meant. I said I was not a sheep.” The boy paused. “Look, if the game designers wanted smarter kids to play there would be something better at the end of the last level than some cheap ‘you won' graphic bullshit. I don't have time to waste on games. It's not what I care about.”

Prospero once more touched the tentacles he'd drawn on his hood. He shrugged again.

Greene asked, “What is that thing? If it's not from a game, then where did you come up with it?”

There was a long pause during which Prospero's fingers traced the lines of ink on the gray cloth hood. When he spoke his voice was soft, distant, the way people spoke sometimes when they were quoting something that was deeply important to them. “‘A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.'”

“What is that quote? Is it from a book?”

Prospero shrugged. “It doesn't matter. I know you're recording this. You can look it up later. All that matters is that it's something someone dreamed once and wrote down. Don't focus on the messenger, pay attention to the message.”

“And what is the message?”

Prospero burned off nearly a full minute before he answered. During that time he reached up and pulled the hood forward so that the shadows now obscured his entire face.

“People are afraid of the Devil. They think the Antichrist is going to come and go mano a mano with Jesus, blah blah blah. That's bullshit. You're a Jew, so I know you don't believe it. Or, maybe you're an atheist and really don't buy into any of that apocalyptic bullshit.”

Greene said, “My personal beliefs are irrelevant to this conversation, Prospero. The question is what do you believe?”

Instead of answering that question directly, the boy asked, “How would you answer if I said,
‘Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn'
?”

“I have no idea what that is or what it might mean.”

“It's a prayer I learned in my dreams.”

“I would like to talk to you about your dreams, Prospero. You know I've always found them fascinating.”

Prospero leaned his face out of the shadows and the smile he wore made Dr. Greene actually recoil. It was a smile filled with strange lights and ugly promises. It was not a smile Greene had ever seen on the boy's face before, or on any human face. It was less sane than the Joker from Batman, and less wholesome than the toothy grin of a shark. It was so sudden and so intense and so wholly unexpected that Greene flinched.

“Dr. Greene,” said the boy, “I'll miss you when I leave this world.”

 

CHAPTER FOUR

THE VINSON MASSIF

THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS

ANTARCTICA

AUGUST 19, 10:17
P.M.

The LC-130 did a pass so we could take a good look at Gateway. The scattered buildings looked like tiny cardboard boxes, the kind Christmas ornaments come in. Small and fragile. As we swept up and around for the approach to the icy landing strip, I had a panoramic view of Antarctica. I've been in a lot of Mother Earth's terrains—deserts, rain forests, caverns, grassy plains, and congested cities—but nothing ever gave me the feeling of absolute desolation that I got from the landscape below. There was white and white and white, but mixed into that were a thousand shades of gray and blue. The total absence of the warmer colors made me feel cold even in the pressurized and heated cabin of the plane. I could already feel the toothy bite of that wind.

Suddenly Bug was in our ears. “Got some stuff and I don't think you're going to like it.”

“We're in Antarctica, Bug,” I said. “Our expectations are already pretty low.”

“Yeah, even so,” he said. “There are so many darn layers to this thing. They really went out of their way to hide it. They tried to keep the whole thing totally off the public radar, but with the ice caps melting there are too many people looking at the poles. So they have a cover story for when they need it.”

“Which is?”

“Studying the Antarctic Big Bang. Before you ask, I had to look that up, too,” said Bug. “Apparently a few years ago planetary scientists found evidence of a meteor impact that was earlier and a lot bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. They say it caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history, the Permian-Triassic. We're talking two hundred and fifty million years ago. There's a crater on the eastern side of the continent that's something like three hundred miles wide. The impact was so massive that it might have caused the breakup of the supercontinent of Gondwana. They've taken a lot of samples from meteor debris and it looks like the meteor was actually a chunk of rock knocked out of the surface of Mars by an asteroid that smacked it during the Permian Age. And there are some scientists who say that there was an even earlier impact about a billion years ago.”

“You're saying Gateway was set up to study Martian rock?” I asked.

“Well … on paper, yeah,” said Bug. “With a bias toward looking for microbes that might prove the existence of life on Mars. The colonists they're planning to send need to know stuff like that. But that's only the cover story, and it's the same cover story the Russians and Chinese used when they set up shop. The problem is that when I go deeper what I find are files marked VBO.”

VBO means “verbal briefing only.” All pertinent information is to be relayed in person. Nothing written. Or if there are papers they're typed old school and photocopied. Nothing in a searchable database. Nothing e-mailed. Ever since some skittish types in the DoD and Congress got wind of MindReader there are more and more VBO files popping up. It's making me cranky.

“This is fascinating as shit, Bug,” I groused, “but it doesn't tell me what I need to know. Find out who is writing checks for this thing and tell Mr. Church that I want interrogators making life unpleasant for them until I know why I'm about to freeze my nuts off.”