Regardless of his orders to keep the news of Kumari’s death quiet, reports of the strangers returning with the search party and an unknown covered body swiftly flourished through the Commonage. Restless with speculation, a neighbor of Kumari’s family knocked on their door close to dawn and asked if they knew anything about the mysterious goings on. Kumari’s mother and father confessed they’d heard nothing, and after closing the door the unhealthiest imaginings froze their hearts.
Kumari’s family had joined the Commonage shortly after Kumari’s ninth birthday, just when the girl’s precociousness and raw intelligence had started to burn bright. Insatiably curious about everything, Kumari soon lapped her young peers at the Commonage conservatory in nearly every conceivable subject. With her feeling marginally ostracized by the other conservatory children for her gifts, once she turned eleven, her parents thought perhaps private tutorage might be the better option for her, and they sought Sébastien’s guidance.
Sébastien was familiar with the child. After giving Kumari a series of tests he was so impressed by the girl’s aptitude and IQ that he told her parents he would be delighted to attend to her studies directly. Like most who discover their child is gifted, Kumari’s parents were thrilled, and together they made sure the girl took her additional academic responsibilities seriously.
When they didn’t find her in her room, Kumari’s parents fell into a stasis of dread, until Sébastien came to their door and ripped their world to pieces.
“We’ve no idea why she was out along the cliffs,” Sébastien continues as he sits across from them. “Of course we’re looking into it, but tell me, did Kumari—”
Kumari’s father looks at him blankly. “No.”
“No, what?”
“No, we’ve no idea why she was out there. Climbing gear you said?”
“Yes. Hooks of hammered metal and line.”
“But Kumari doesn’t do things like that.”
“I know.”
“Of course, rope is easily had around here, but she’s never been a physical type of girl. When she was small my daughter was always afraid of heights. I couldn’t even lift her onto my shoulders without her throwing a fit. Why would she—” A raw impatience briefly coagulates and then passes. “After dinner, we talked about her lessons, what she’d been reading, you know, things that you’ve given her, but she told us she was tired. She said goodnight and went straight to her room.”
Sébastien looks to Kumari’s mother perched on the edge of her chair. Earlier when he arrived and shared the horrible news, naturally the woman broke down. It’s strange, but now she manages her shock by silently knitting from a woven reed basket of yarn on the floor. They talk over the fervid clicking of knitting needles.
Chick-a-chick-a-chick-a…
Sébastien desperately wants to examine Kumari’s room to pick through her things for clues or a secreted-away journal or perhaps even a second needle drive. Kumari’s father cups the back of his wife’s head.
“For her to run away like this…”
Sébastien bends forward. “We don’t know that she was running away.”
“But you just said she had supplies,” Kumari’s father says.
“I did. But if she was running away, she must’ve given you two some inkling.”
Kumari’s father quells a creeping palsy in his voice. “We had dinner together like we always do in the commissary. Nothing seemed wrong. No, I don’t think we had any indication at all.”
“Did she seem upset lately?”
Chick-a-chick-a-chick-a…
“No.”
“More reserved?”
Chick-a-chick-a-chick-a…
“Not at all.”
Sébastien stands. “Well, then. As our operational guidelines stipulate, I’ve scheduled Kumari’s interment for later today so now might be the appropriate time for you to go and see her before Dr. Corella prepares her.”
Chick-a-chick-a-chick-a
—the knitting stops.
Kumari’s parents look up.
“Go now,” Sébastien says.
There is no reluctance. With venerate and almost liturgical meekness, Kumari’s parents rise to their feet and do exactly as instructed. When they leave, the two don’t even bother with a final look back. As soon as they close the outer door, Sébastien rubs his face and groans.
Thank God for TAM, he thinks.
It’s been a night for the ages.
Working with sensible care and reminding himself to think craftily as a young girl might, Sébastien spends the next half hour methodically probing and examining every square inch of Kumari’s bedroom and the rest of the family’s quarters. He looks beneath rugs, unscrews and peers behind each switch plate on the walls, and opens every cupboard and container he can find. As with all Commonagers’ quarters, the rooms and cupboard materials are frugal and orderly arranged, but he is unable to locate any incriminating evidence whatsoever. In her parents’ bedroom, he notices a jewelry box on a bureau and replaces the necklaces, bracelets, and rings Kumari took, and checks the time on a clock. Thoroughly frustrated, Sébastien is about to head out, when he sees something he hadn’t noticed earlier and stops. Slipped between the balls of yarn in her mother’s knitting basket is a small folded slip of yellow paper.
Sébastien crosses to the basket and snatches the paper up. A part of him hopes it’s a pattern instruction or some sort of darning guide, but when he sees that the yellow paper has an unmolested seal of tape with a heart drawn on it, he hooks a finger and rips the paper open.
Papa, Mama
There is so much to say, and I don’t know where to begin.
Remember when you told me how Sébastien recruited you to join the Commonage? How you believed, deep down, that his intention was to design a place for people who yearned for a fresh start and for those who believed the world had gone mad? None of that it is true. Sébastien and Dr. Corella have lied to you… to everyone.
I know it sounds crazy, but the Commonage is being used as a five-year early trial facility for a drug compound called TAM. Unable to ethically or legally study the applications of TAM because of its brain-altering properties, Dr. Corella and Sébastien have been using adult Commonagers as test subjects. Within months, if not sooner, their plan is to sell their findings to the highest bidder. It breaks my heart to tell you that both of you’ve been exposed to the TAM compound under the guise of a vaccination series just after our family’s arrival years back. All adults have been exposed to it, and once the second treatment is administered the effects are irreversible.
I know you’re confused, but I’ve never lied to you. I’ve copied all the TAM materials, Sébastien and Dr. Corella’s findings, etc. and my plan is to expose or find someone who can put a stop to all this before it goes too far. I’d hoped there was another way, but since my body is changing and soon I will be considered a mature adult, time is running out.
I can’t stand by and do nothing.
I love you.
K
“He kept mumbling her name.”
Dr. Corella inspects Flynn’s dressing and doesn’t look up at the attending assistant. Flynn’s wound is healing quickly with the deep muscle accelerants.
“Mmm. Seems to be sleeping now.”
“Should we wake him, Doctor?”
“Heavens, no. Let the man rest.”
Dr. Corella pulls the curtains around Flynn’s bed aside and the assistant moves away down the hall. When Dr. Corella crosses the hall to his office, he pulls up Flynn’s diagnostics on a projection screen and picks up a mug of cold, black coffee. Sitting down at his desk, he takes a sharp sip of the cooled bitter brew and studies Flynn’s charts.
As men of science, for five years he and Sébastien have been so careful with everything. Naturally there’s been bumps along the way, ebbs and flows and the like, but nothing so unexpected as a pair of strangers dropping in from the blind or a young girl right under their noses attempting to bring the project down.
Good lord… despite global malevolent tendencies for greed, these days getting any new drug to market took decades, and with TAM’s invasive nature had they proposed an extended trial from the outset they would’ve been hung out to dry by their respective thumbs. By utilizing the ruse of the Commonage and circumventing the usual jurisdictional foot-dragging, they now have the proof that TAM actually works—and in one fifth of the time it would have otherwise taken. True, the delivery system and quality controls need tweaking, but they now understand how TAM is absorbed and metabolized and what the safe dosage ranges are. With TAM’s shocking lack of long-range toxic effects, Sébastien and Dr. Corella are nearly ready to offer their discoveries to the highest bidder. What the highest bidder does after they acquire the research is not really their concern, but the program surely contains loaded promise to change the world.
Rid humankind of its congenital and biological paradoxes, all of the predictable societal ills.
Bring peace, equanimity, and most importantly, social engineering at a price.
Dr. Corella knows if they both can keep it together for just a little while longer, a few more months at the outside, he and Sébastien will both be wildly, impossibly rich.
Of course for his partner the massive windfall from TAM will be surfeit fortunes on top of previous excesses, but for Dr. Corella the impending payday would change everything.
TAM is his life’s work.
Agreeing to get Flynn started on the adaptive modifications verifies he and Sébastien at least are still on the same page. Point of fact, Dr. Corella actually finds it stunning that neither of them had ever considered TAM’s use for Depressus cases before. While there may be some averseness given the commercial ratings on live mass suicide feed broadcasts, people’s tastes in entertainment are hardly inexorable and, heavens, doesn’t everybody love a good comeback story? Who’s to say the Second Free Zone confederacies wouldn’t be interested in a policy about-face? One thing is for certain though. Patient advocates who backed the mass euthanizing events will undoubtedly have to change their tune.
Dr. Corella takes another sip of cold coffee and rises. After retrieving a large pressure syringe from a nearby cabinet, he unlocks a drawer and selects a local anesthetic and then a TAM cartridge.
It’s time to wake Flynn.
After calling on Kumari’s parents, Sébastien returns to his quarters and examines the contents of Kumari’s needle drive. Quickly he ascertains that his previous hunch was correct. The archived contents confirm that she accessed and downloaded every last TAM file and sub-file on his systems and found out
everything.
Minutes later, the dispatched second group returns from the wrecked sub. As they enter, they report that they checked the sub’s onboard systems and industriously removed what they could. After the group hands over all the recovered electronics and Koko and Flynn’s bug-out packs, Sébastien advises them to keep word of what they’ve found strictly to themselves. Effectively compliant and obedient with TAM, the group respectively bow their heads in unison and then depart.
After their exit, Sébastien inspects the electronics and proceeds to transfer the sub’s records into his systems for more penetrating analysis. When he examines Koko and Flynn’s backpacks and finds what’s inside he isn’t surprised at all.
Keep up the face?
Well, in any case he now knows something about the two alleged survivors.
Taking the backpacks, Sébastien leaves his quarters and treads downstairs to the commissary. Just off the rear of the central kitchen, and used for miscellaneous waste disposal, are a pair of thermite furnaces. As he’s unacquainted with firearms of any kind, it takes Sébastien a few minutes to break down Koko and Flynn’s weapons, and when he’s finished he uses a slot to feed the deadly hardware into the furnaces’ forging heat. Checking the first-aid kits, he decides it would be sensible to destroy the laser scalpels and he slips these into the furnaces as well.
Taking the backpacks into the kitchen, Sébastien finds a tray and collects some food: a small loaf of bread, a plastic carafe of water, a bowl of mixed fruit, and a couple of milky-white wedges of hard cheese. Then he heads off to the Commonage’s supply stores and gathers some clothes and toiletries. Minutes later he climbs the stairs in Lodge Delta and approaches Eirik, Bonn, and Gammy with calm reserve. He tells the twins to go, and they head for the stairwell.
Gammy, on the other hand, is delighted to see Sébastien. Setting down the tray of food, clothes, and toiletries he’s brought, he praises his synthetic and gives Gammy’s throat a good scratch.
“Good girl, good girl. Let’s see if our visitor is awake, shall we?”
Sébastien types in a code to erase the door lock, and then, leaving the backpacks outside, he picks up the items he brought and opens the door.
“Hello?”
Koko is slowly stirring and tonging open her eyes with her fingers, but when she sees Gammy and Sébastien entering the room she sits up like she’s on fire.
“I’ll just leave these here,” Sébastien says as he sets the tray and other items down on the desk. “Fresh clothes and some toiletries. I took a guess at your size and they’re nothing fancy, but you should find them suitable to our climate. The clothes and boots you arrived in are still being laundered, I believe.”
Koko glares at him. Briefly Sébastien wonders if she’ll make a mad dash for it, but she remains still.
“I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” Sébastien says. “I admit, that’s partly my fault, but Dr. Corella suggested it might be better to extend a greater hospitality to you. Obviously you can understand our earlier precautions. So, all that said, how’re you feeling?”
Koko eyeballs Gammy and responds churlishly, “Through the ringer, but just so you and your huge pooch are clear, I’m not exactly in a trusting mood right now.”
Sébastien picks up a yellow pear from the fruit bowl on the tray and tosses it to her. Koko bobs right, and the pear bounces and rolls off the bed. Gammy looks at the fruit with big, dark eyes.
“Please, there’s nothing spiked in that pear. Squandering food is discouraged here.” Selecting a green apple from the bowl, Sébastien takes a large bite to demonstrate that nothing on the tray is tainted.