The Bar Code Rebellion (13 page)

“How far is Los Angeles from here?” Kayla asked Allyson in the morning.

“Just twelve miles,” Allyson replied from the kitchen, where she was buttering toast for their breakfast. “Why?”

“My grandmother died in a psychiatric institution there. I thought I’d go search around and see what I can find out about her.”

“It’s a big city,” Allyson cautioned.

Jack picked up Allyson’s handheld computer. “Maybe I can save some legwork by running a few preliminary searches,” he said, stretching out on the futon and beginning to input information.

Kayla joined Allyson at the table. “I was hoping you and Jack could come to the facility with me today,” Allyson said. “Together we might be able to figure out a way to get the infometric computers to open those subfiles. We could search for the secret bar code algorithms, too.”

“Final level!” Jack burst out triumphantly, swinging around and off the futon. “I found your grandmother! What a hacker genius I am!”

“If you say so yourself,” Allyson teased.

“I do say it,” he said, unabashedly proud. His search had connected the name Kathryn Reed to a private psychiatric facility in Los Angeles. It had once been called St. Francis Clinic but was then taken over by Global-1 and renamed the GlobalHelix Mental Health Center.

By cracking their security code, he’d entered a subfile that gave him an index of former patients in which he found Kathryn Reed’s name. “It looks as though she was in and out of there a number of times between 2007 and 2015,” he reported, reading the information on the screen.

“What does it say about her mental illness?”

Jack looked up from the computer with a puzzled expression. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean?” Kayla asked.

“It says she was admitted to the center for treatment of schizophrenia, but everything in this file has to do with her DNA.” He continued to read rapidly, his eyes darting across the screen. “It says she donated genetic material for ‘cellular experimentation.’”

Allyson joined Jack on the futon and read the screen with him, her expression becoming increasingly troubled.

“Tell me,” Kayla pressed anxiously.

“I don’t think your grandmother really
was
schizophrenic,” Allyson said. “To me, it looks like that was just a cover story to conceal the real reason she was there.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Kayla, I don’t know how to say this,” Allyson said. “So I’ll just come out with it. It looks like you’re a clone of your grandmother. She was selling her genetic material to Global-1 for a cloning project.”

“Which means she’s not actually your grandmother,” Jack added gently. “Your great-grandmother would be your mother. Kathryn Marie Reed is your … twin, I suppose.”

Allyson nodded. “Twins — or triplets or quadruplets or quintuplets — are the closest thing in nature to clones.”

“But clones have no father?” Kayla asked, barely speaking through her shock.

“Genetically speaking, your great-grandfather provided the male component in your creation. Kathryn Reed’s father is also your biological father. They replicated Kathryn’s DNA however many times.”

“Six times,” Kayla said slowly, remembering the name of Kathryn Reed’s child as it was listed in her file.

KM-1-6.

Saying she needed a little time alone, Kayla left the apartment and began to walk. She had so much to think about.

A clone. She was an identical genetic copy of someone else — of Kathryn Marie Reed.

So much made sense now. Kara. Kendra. The palm reader. The smiling, bar-code-loving Kayla on the TV. Kayla herself. And the one Kendra had said was dead — KM-6.

This had so many meanings for her. Her parents were not her parents. It meant her father was her older brother, in a way. No — it made her
his
aunt, his mother’s sister. At least it meant they were related.

She laughed, darkly remembering how everyone had always commented that she resembled her father but was the exact image of her late grandmother. No kidding!

She did some calculating. Kathryn Reed would have been forty-nine years old in 2008, the year Kayla was born. A little old to give birth but not impossible, though maybe she hadn’t given birth. The embryos might have been implanted in different mothers.

Kayla had once had pictures of her mother sitting in a hospital bed holding her as a newborn. And she’d seen pictures of her mother when she was pregnant. So her mother, Ashley Reed, must have been carrying her own mother-in-law’s clone.

Why had they done it? Was it for money? Her father had worked for the FBI. What if it was part of some government experiment?

Kayla recalled something that made her stop walking, stunned by the realization. The night
before, the file Allyson had showed them had listed Kathryn Reed as a participant in the Genetic Enhancement/Manipulation Program.

Enhancement
and
manipulation
.

There were six clones, and GlobalHelix had done something to change their genes.

Kendra in all her ranting madness had talked about an increasing level of enhanced powers. When she had been in the G-1 Pediatric Rehabilitation Center she’d glimpsed her own GlobalHelix file. Is that what she’d learned — that each cloned embryo had been enhanced at an increasingly intensified level? Enhanced how?

They had to get the infometric computers to open the subfiles. They needed to know what other experiments GlobalHelix was doing with nanobiotechnology. And she needed to learn exactly what they had done to her genes.

She hurried back to Allyson’s apartment, eager to talk with her friends about what she’d been thinking. She had to impress upon them the urgency of opening those subfiles.

Running up the stairs, she found Jack and Allyson huddled over a pad at the kitchen table. Allyson was drawing a map or floor plan of some kind. “We’ve figured out a way to get into the research facility,” Jack told her. “I went by the facility and got a look at the work schedule. The night guard is still scheduled to work alone, so we’ve got to do it tonight.”

“Hey, come here, check this,” Allyson called to them. While Jack went over the planned break-in with Kayla, Allyson had flipped on the TV. Something she was watching had her leaning forward on the futon, riveted.

Jack and Kayla joined her and they, too, were instantly fascinated. They were watching the CNN5 channel, which was all news, twenty-four hours a day.

Kayla was on the screen — but it was the fake Kayla from the billboards. She was as neatly turned out as ever in a bright pink sweater, matching short skirt, and high boots. Her bobbed hair shone and bounced as if she were in a shampoo commercial. Her silver lipstick and matching eye shadow were perfect.

Zekeal Morrelle stood beside her, appearing as handsome and confident as ever. Kayla wondered why he kept the eye patch. Surely Global-1 could have provided him with a new eye.
He probably just likes the way it looks,
she thought disdainfully.

She didn’t think about him for long, though. She was more interested in the smiling young woman beside him — her clone, or one of them,
anyway. Although identical to her in so many ways, this girl seemed completely different, so conventional and so docile. She was working on the Tattoo Gen Public Murals Program, so she probably had the same artistic ability as Kayla, Kendra, and Kara. Kayla figured the palm-reader clone would have it, too.

Yet despite their sameness, the lives they’d led had made them so different. With a chill, Kayla also remembered the Gene Enhancement/Manipulation Program file. Had GlobalHelix also had a hand in making them different?

Zekeal and the clone were talking to a crowd, though their voices weren’t yet audible. The voice-over announcer spoke cheerily, “Tattoo Gen has sent two of its most high-profile and popular spokespeople on a cross-country book tour to promote their new book,
The Bar Code Way to Happiness
. In it, Zekeal Morrelle tells the fascinating story of his time as an undercover agent for Tattoo Gen. But what is perhaps most appealing here is the emergence of a love story between Zekeal and bar code resister Kayla Marie Reed. Kayla was fleeing police and headed to the Adirondack Mountains to join other resisters when Zekeal went in search of her and convinced her to come home and get the bar code tattoo.”

Kayla once again was struck with the eerie sensation that she was looking at what her own life could have been if it had taken an alternate path. It
was true that Zekeal had come to the mountains to try to persuade her to return with him and get the bar code tattoo. But in real life, she had refused. She’d run and hid from him until he gave up trying to find her.

What she was seeing now was what would have happened if she
had
given in to him.

“I wonder if that girl even knows she’s a clone,” Jack said.

“She knows,” Kayla replied. “She talks about things that happened to me, not to her. Tattoo Gen has recruited her to play this part.”

The voice-over stopped and the camera closed in on Zekeal and the fake Kayla Marie Reed. Zekeal began promoting the book as a biography and as a guide to achieving a sense of belonging in society by being bar-coded.

The reporters in the audience began to ask questions. Zekeal answered them all smoothly until someone addressed one to the fake Kayla: “Kayla, do you feel you were wrong to give up your principles for love?”

“What’s she going to say to that?” Allyson asked. She clicked the
RECORD
button on the remote. “I’m saving this,” she said.

“I don’t … uh, that’s not what I did. I …” Fake Kayla rubbed her eye, which appeared to be irritated. Flustered, she looked to Zekeal for help.

“She didn’t give up her principles. I simply helped her clarify what —”

“Let
her
talk!” someone from the audience shouted.

Fake Kayla began rubbing the other eye with her knuckles.

“She’s crying,” Kayla said.

With red eyes, the Kayla clone turned to Zekeal. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said, a sob in her voice. “It’s a lie, and I won’t have anything more to do with it.”

Zekeal realized the microphones were picking up her words. “She’s overwrought. It’s been a tiring tour,” he tried to cover.

“No!” fake Kayla cried. “I want to tell the truth.”

Zekeal looked sharply at someone off camera and the screen instantly went blank. In a second, the broadcast was back in the news studio with the anchorwoman. David Young’s face appeared on the screen behind her.

“In other news, Decode leader David Young remains on suicide watch. He has refused to take the Propeace prescribed for him. He also continues to refuse to leave his jail cell until the last of the hundred protesters still being held in jail have been freed. Global-1 doctors feel that the incarceration is exacerbating Senator Young’s condition and urge him to leave.

“Ambrose Young, father of David Young, obtained a court order enabling him to have a webcam installed in his son’s cell. ‘I want to make sure those bastards at Global-1 don’t hurt my son
when no one is looking. I or one of my lawyers will now be looking every second.’”

Allyson turned off the TV, and the three of them sat, stunned. Things were getting even more out of control.

They had to do something about it.

They activated their plan later that night.

It started with Allyson banging on the soda machine in the lobby of the bio/infometrics building where she did her research. “My bar code won’t scan on this stupid thing!” she complained loudly. She kicked the machine again.

“Hang on there,” the guard at the front desk warned sternly. “Calm down.”

“I won’t calm down. I just want some damn soda!” she said, dealing the machine another violent blow. “What good is a bar code tattoo if it doesn’t even work on a soda machine?”

“The machine was working before,” the guard said, coming over to inspect it. “Are you sure you have sufficient funds in your account?”

While Allyson distracted the guard, Kayla and Jack darted past the momentarily abandoned front desk. They took the emergency stairs to the third floor so that the guard wouldn’t notice any activity in the elevator. Once there, they ran to unlock the window that led onto a fire escape at the back of the building. A few minutes later, Allyson climbed in through that window, breathing heavily from
the exertion. “I’m going to start exercising,” she vowed.

Once she had recovered, she unlocked the facility but didn’t dare turn on the light. Using a flashlight, she loaded the e-chip into the infometric computer that had been handling related files. She took the second chip, which she’d taped to the underside of a desk drawer, and fed it, too, into the computer. “Come on, Helen,” she urged it. “Show us what kind of super hacking beauty you really are. Launch a thousand ships for us.”

The computer ran through the first half of the program before it came to the subfiles. Then it began to whir, a sound that made Kayla uneasy. Was something going wrong?

“It’s trying alternate ways in,” Allyson explained, although she, too, seemed concerned. “It’ll keep trying until it finds the one that works.”

A silky, feminine robotic voice made Kayla jump and yelp in surprise. “Retinal recognition required,” the computer’s audio speaker reported. “Provide scan.”

Allyson cursed, throwing her arms out in frustration.

“These computers are sucking in info from everywhere, right?” Jack checked with Allyson.

“Right,” she confirmed.

“It must be indexing it somehow. How do I access its search engine?” Allyson directed him to a notebook-size unit on a nearby table. It took him
close to a half hour, but finally, he stepped back from the computer and smiled. “I am so good!” he boasted. “Jack the hack, that’s me.”

“What did you do?” Allyson asked.

“I merely searched until I found the GlobalHelix file of employees with computer file clearance. Then I cross-referenced it with their personnel files and broke into them to get coded copies of their eye scans, which, interestingly, are recorded in bar code form. I sent this info over to our infometric friend, Helen of Troy. With any luck she should be getting it any second now.”

As if Helen of Troy was acting on his command, a printer buzzed to life, rapidly sending out page after page of material.

Even female computers can’t resist him,
Kayla thought, smiling inwardly.

Allyson began collecting the papers, reading them with darting eye movements. A crease in her brow deepened as she went. “I don’t believe it,” she murmured, looking up from her stack of papers. “Take a look at this.”