Kingdom (2 page)

Okay, now, listen: Two weeks ago, I met O’Donnell at the venerable Coney Island hot dog luncheonette here in Wormtown. I gave him the essay to read while I fetched us lunch. As usual, there was a long line and by the time I got back to our booth, O’Donnell had his head thrown back and was sort of giggling to himself.

I put his plate in front of him and asked, “What’s wrong? You don’t like it?”

He shook his head at me for a while and then said, “I forgot all about that shit.”

I slid into my side of the booth and asked, “What shit?”

“All that stuff,” he said, “About Gaki. And the crazy Japanese brothers. And their underground studio bunker.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I thought you knew,” he said. “I really thought that, by now, you knew.”

“Knew what?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

“I made all that shit up.”

In retrospect, I regret throwing my hot dog at him and storming out of the place. It was a juvenile and wasteful gesture. And it prevented me from asking where the original biopunk manga really came from. And, more importantly, how many of those “news stories” with which he’d bombarded me over the years he’d also invented. And, now that I think about it, who he was, and where he’d been, and why he so enjoyed blurring the lines between fiction and fact wherever he went.

Like I said, all I really know about the guy are some peculiar anecdotes. And I have no idea which ones, if any, contain some degree of veracity. For example, I wonder, today, if O’Donnell was kidding me when he told of his plans to get a bar-code tattoo, the scanning of which would allow instant download of his novel. (In fact, now that I think about it, I’m wondering if that fashion model wife and toddler son that I met last year are genuine …
or did the trickster rent some talented actors for the evening—just to mess with me?)

Of course, in the end, I suppose it doesn’t much matter who Anderson O’Donnell is or what is and is not true in his personal history. What matters is this introductory visit to the ever-expanding world of Tiber City. Be careful as you walk its streets. Remain always alert. Don’t take any candy from strangers. And guard your genetic material as if it were your life.

–Exodus 32:1

All around the child, the land was dying.

From every corner of the burnt-out urban slum drifting past the car’s bulletproof window, lights glared back at the girl. But these were empty lights that cast shadows everywhere, illuminating only the impossibly angular features of nameless faces staring down at her from the cracked screens of broken digital billboards.

This fading, pale light eclipsed all the stars the girl had once learned about in school; neon corporate logos were the new constellations by which lost men now sought direction. In this final century, there was no night and there was no day. Instead, an artificial twilight was perpetually draped over the city like a shroud. And it was through this twilight that the girl watched the slum burn.

The girl knew nothing of the slum’s history; she knew nothing of the men who, years ago, came out of the desert, their black SUVs cleaving toward the edge of the continent in a blur of chrome and steel and exhaust, offering the people who lived in these forgotten slums free medical treatment, performing procedures and delivering vaccinations that would otherwise forever remain inaccessible, distant as the skyscrapers and towers twinkling on the horizon; she did not know that these strange men had demanded nothing in return, no pound of flesh—they offered only charity.

Or so the people of the shantytown had thought until tonight, when the same SUVs brought different men to the slums, men who carried machetes and guns and covered their faces. These men swept through the slum, bringing death and the oblivion of the desert with them.

The girl tried to turn away. She did not want to see the rows of men lined up, awaiting execution; she did not want to hear the screams as women and
children were fed to the flame; she did not want to smell the roasting human flesh.

The girl looked across the car at her father. Why had he brought her to this place?

He only smiled.

As the car pulled away from the burning slum, the girl, with tears streaming down her face and the smell of charred flesh in her nostrils, watched as hunched figures appeared at the edge of the slums, and, moving through the darkness, began dragging several of the burnt bodies back into the desert.

The American Southwest
Nov. 15, 1986
2 a.m.

T
he elevator raced past the research dormitories and the corporate soldiers’ barracks, past the replica of Central Park and down into the earth. When it finally glided to a soundless halt, Jonathan Campbell stepped out into the seventh and final level of the Morrison Biotech arcology’s research facilities.

It had been three years since Project Exodus had gone underground, since Campbell and Morrison had struck their bargain. It had been almost as long since Campbell had visited these lower laboratories that Morrison marked as his own. The two men labored separately, their results synchronized by the massive mainframe computers that linked every corner of the corporate arcology. Much of the work Morrison performed in these underground labs had been indispensable to the work Campbell performed aboveground. And so, for many months, Campbell did not question the origin of his former pupil’s data: What did that matter when they were within a fingertip of curing so many of God’s mistakes?

Yet the whispers had grown darker in the recent months: hushed rumors of trucks coming and going in the dead of night, urban jungles swallowing
children whole, Mexican immigrants vanishing from the lands surrounding the arcology—the Chihuahuan desert. As a man who had devoted his life to science, Campbell could no longer bear the uncertainty.

Although the corridor outside the elevator was deserted, Campbell’s presence would not go undetected. Security cameras craned their necks, silently transmitting a detailed bio-scan of Campbell to five different security control centers, and, inevitably, to Morrison himself. The hallway itself was little more than a tight white tunnel, funneling visitors toward a single steel doorway no more than 40 feet from the entrance to the elevator. All around Campbell the walls seemed alive with the sounds of industry: Unseen machinery hummed and whirred, greedily consuming the glut of megavoltage pumped daily into the building by thousands of miles of fiber-optic arteries. Yet as Campbell forced himself toward the door, the hallway went silent, as if the building itself was waiting for him to open the door.

Campbell punched in his security code, his fingers trembling as he entered the five digits. His code would work; he knew Morrison no longer considered him a threat. The keypad flashed red, then green and then, as he expected, the door to Morrison’s research sector slid open with a barely audible hiss. Campbell stepped through the doorway, the closed circuit camera above him straining to follow his every movement. One by one, the overhead lights in the laboratory came to life, flooding the room with a harsh light. For a moment, Campbell was blinded. When the room came into focus, he screamed.

Vague approximations of human beings, sealed away in suspended animation chambers, lined the two opposite sides of the laboratory. Strange limbs protruded from the torsos of some of the creatures; others had two mouths and no eyes. Some seemed to be infected with diseases the Western world had not known for centuries. Yet, all were still alive, staring at Campbell, mute agony plastered across their faces.

Campbell stumbled deeper into the laboratory. All around him machines continued to record data on their subjects, running experiments throughout the night. Morrison had not attempted to conceal anything from Campbell: Morrison had won; there was no longer any need for secrecy between the two men. Campbell threw up twice, hard, the smell of vomit mingling with the antiseptic already in the air. All the while, Morrison’s creatures continued to watch him.

When Campbell stopped retching, he noticed something he had not seen when he first entered the room: a row of incubators in the far right corner.

“No…” Campbell whispered.

Inside the incubators were four tiny babies, each one’s accelerated skeletal system growth stretching the infant’s skin until bones began to grind up through the flesh. Germline manipulation, accelerated growth experimentation: Campbell instantly realized that Morrison had taken Exodus beyond even his darkest fears. And staring into the incubator below him, Campbell knew he was responsible. So he ran; into the hallway and back up the elevator, lurching through the main lobby and out the front door, the ruined sky above the arcology pressing down upon him.

Tiber City: Glimmer District
Aug. 26, 2015
1:15 a.m.

I
n a single, hard gesture, Dylan Fitzgerald leaned forward over the table and snorted a thick line of coke off its smooth black surface. The coke belonged to a guy with a greasy ponytail who was sitting across the table from Dylan, and who looked at least 15 years older than everyone else at the party that night. Dylan’s old college roommates, Chase Kale and Mikey Divert, were also at the table, which was one of several arranged into a casual formation around the edges of a massive infinity pool on the rooftop of an overpriced apartment some 60-odd stories above the clogged streets of Tiber City’s Glimmer district.

Dressed in a Savile Row suit that had once belonged to his father, Dylan was attending his 24th birthday party. He was not sure, however, of the name of the host, let alone the names of half the guests, and no one, except for ponytail guy, had offered him a “happy birthday.” And ponytail guy had spent the last 30 minutes trying to recruit Dylan for an Internet reality show, which was not exactly the kind of birthday surprise he was hoping for.

Still, Dylan was trying to pay attention to the ponytail guy’s spiel—he had promised Chase and Mikey he would listen, so he sat at the table, hoovering
up the free blow and staring at the guy’s ponytail as it bobbed up and down like a thick rat’s tail. But guys like ponytail had been trying out their tired hustle on him for years and Dylan felt his attention wandering away from the table, over the side of the roof, and out across the city skyline.

Corporate insignias and digitalized billboards stared back at him, offering a barrage of focus group-approved advertisements and imagery. Dylan shifted in his chair and adjusted the Ray-Bans he was wearing; he was growing restless, an anxiousness that was partially the result of doing too much of the less-than-stellar blow heaped in front of him like frankincense and myrrh for the midnight messiah and partially because, as Dylan’s glare strafed the skyline, there was no T. J. Eckleburg, no invitation to Disappear Here—nothing concrete upon which he could focus his discontent—only images exploding across the sides of skyscrapers before vanishing seconds later. Dylan struggled to concentrate on a single message, a single instruction, but found that impossible; the billboards and video monitors were changing too quickly, image replacing image replacing image. Immediate recall of specifics was impossible but later, when he was wandering the antiseptic aisles of a grocery store, some otherwise inaccessible alcove of his brain would awaken and drive him to purchase a new product he did not need, let alone even particularly like.

A hand pressed against his shoulder, causing Dylan to startle. He looked around the table and saw Chase, Mikey, and the ponytail looking at him, waiting for him to say something. Snippets of conversations from the party continued to drift out of the loft apartment and onto the rooftop: Two guys were both trying to explain to a girl the benefits of Sony’s new 1620i resolution televisions, as though whoever provided the most coherent explanation of this important technological breakthrough would be inside her a few hours from now. For a moment Dylan was acutely aware that this was a possibility; that he was living in an age where the resolution of a man’s television set and his ability to covey the importance of such resolution constituted natural selection.

“The naked eye can’t even detect the difference,” Dylan mumbled.

“What?”