The Last Peak (Book 2): The Darwin Collapse (33 page)

“Papa?” Iridia said.

“Yes?”

“What will happen to my friends?”

My friends.

Iridia had never referred to anyone with such concern discoloring her voice. He’d been careful to protect her from the weakness that attachment engendered.

“Like you, they will have the opportunity to refresh themselves and then we will discuss how next to proceed.”

“What about Theresa? She’s infected. Can you help her?”

“Why do you worry for her?”

Iridia dropped her gaze. “She’s my friend. I care about her.”

Anton grabbed her by the shoulders and squeezed hard enough to guarantee her undivided attention. He stared hard until she lifted her eyes.

“They are not family, moya dochka. Never trust anyone who isn’t family. You know this.”

Iridia shrugged. “I know. I know. But these people are nice. I’m alive because of them.”

“You are alive because you are a survivor, as I am. Remember your mother. She placed her trust in others and she died for it. Never forget that.”

“I understand.”

She understood, but she was not convinced. And that meant these people were dangerous. He would let nothing come between them.
 

Nothing.

Iridia looked at him twisting her mouth to the side.

“Speak,” he said.

“You didn’t answer me.”

She had the defiant spirit of her mother.
 

“Didn’t I?”

“No,” she said. “Can you help her?”

These people were very dangerous indeed. Anton did his best to keep the irritation from his voice as he responded. “While there is—”

“I knew it! I knew you could help!”

“Let me finish. While there is an antiviral treatment, it yet exists in vanishingly small quantities. What if you or I get sick? Should either of us die so that this girl we do not know may live?”

Iridia pulled away. “But I do know her. And she’s been very nice to me. Even when I didn’t deserve it.”

“For you, I will consider it.”

Iridia pursed her lips together. The usual curves flattened into tight lines. She rose and retreated into the bathroom and closed the door.

Anton rose and spoke through the barrier. “Wash away the clinging dirt. It is better this way.”

She didn’t respond.

Her new friends would need to be dealt with, and soon.

Anton exited the apartment and found Mr. Pike at his post by the door. “Stay here and let no one enter.”

“Yes, sir.”
 

Did he have a particular glint in his eye as he responded?

Anton marched down the hall and entered the elevator. He waved his keycard over the reader.

“Hello, Dr. Reshenko. Where do you wish to go?”

“The lab.”

“Descending to the basement laboratory. Please stay clear of the doors.”

Anton almost snarled at the perpetually genial voice and the overly courteous programming. Artificial intelligence so terrified humanity that they demanded any incarnation of it genuflect in every interaction so that mankind could remind itself of exactly who was in charge.

Even as AI took over more and more and left error-prone, weak-willed humans to do less and less. It was not unthinkable to believe that Anton had saved humanity from some impending robotic apocalypse in addition to the more obvious disasters his bold action had succeeded in preventing.

“Basement Laboratory.”

The elevator dinged and the doors slid open.

He stepped out and ignored the guard standing next to the security doors. He used his keycard to get through and headed straight for the detention cells. The Patient Wing, as they euphemistically named it.

It wasn’t Iridia’s friend he’d come to see. He couldn’t care less about the girl. No, it was the esteemed Senator Rawlings that piqued his interest. Anton had inoculated him with a variant of MT-1 that was designed to guarantee the patient changed into a delta. The original had a different goal and so a different, but related, formulation.

Another swipe of the card and he was in a corridor lined with locked doors. Each door featured a large, thick glass window which made for easy viewing within the cell. He strolled down the line and stopped at the proper cell.

There on the other side of the glass was the elderly senator. The results appeared promising.

Anton hadn’t seen him since yesterday evening. The senator had been fully engulfed in the fever at the time. The variant had proven to be a slower acting agent and he was anxious to get a definitive result either way. The critical juncture had to have passed. A continuing decline into a terminal hemorrhagic fever or a quick recovery even as the prefrontal cortex burned itself out.

The infection was too far gone for the cure to arrest its progression, assuming it even worked the same on this mutated form of MT-1. But that was also assuming Anton chose to give it to the senator in the first place, which he had no intention of doing.

Yes, the man had been instrumental in carrying out Anton’s destiny. And what? Did that create some kind of reciprocal obligation?
 

No. It didn’t. Every tool had a shelf life, a period of time after which it was discarded because it was no longer useful.

Senator Rawlings was one such tool.

The senator was to be commended for the fact that, even at the end of his utility, he was able to offer one last service to Anton, to mankind. The development of the MT-1 variant was critical to ensuring a stable work force moving into the future. The future of intellectual progress would undoubtedly require a servile work force to provide for its basic needs like food production and other manual labor.

And the man that could reliably provide such labor would be well-positioned in the new society. Anton would accept the responsibility with his usual humility and expectation.

He knew some would ignorantly call it slavery. But they would be wrong. Anton himself agreed that historical slavery was a mistake. To subjugate one intellect to the whims of an equal intellect was morally reprehensible. It was against nature.

But a delta was not of an equal intellect. A delta lacked the very thing that made us human: the higher functioning brain.
 

People owned apes and no reasonable person protested that it was slavery. The deltas, in general, were closer to apes than humans. There hadn’t been sufficient time to perform a longitudinal study to determine exactly how their cognitive functioning compared, but the observations he had made indicated a close pairing. Taking into account the natural variability of the virus’ efficacy, it was reasonable to conclude that some deltas were likely less capable than apes on the cognitive scale.

Anton stared into the brightly lit room. Curiosity at the senator’s fate had his fingertips trembling on the glass.

The senator lay curled up in a corner next to a bare metal bunk. His thin arms covered his face. A white medical gown streaked with dried feces and blood draped over his wrinkled, frail body. The wheelchair used to cart him downstairs sat next to the bunk.

Anton tapped the glass.

No response.

Anton frowned.

Had he expired? Perhaps the fever had taken him. The weak sometimes expired before the change could take place. The stress on the system could simply be too much. And the senator was nowhere near in his prime.

Anton banged on the glass and the body didn’t move. He removed his keycard and swiped it over the reader next to the door. A red light switched to green and the magnetic lock disengaged. He pushed the door open and quietly stepped inside.

The body flinched and Anton froze. Not because he was scared, but because he’d thought the senator had passed, which would’ve been a terrible indicator for the potential of the variant serum.

The old man peeked out from beneath a filthy sleeve.
 

Anton stepped closer while still being certain to remain out of reach.

The elderly man growled. An inhuman voice echoed in his throat.

Pride warmed Anton’s chest. The variant had worked! It would take many more tests to validate its efficacy, but this result was encouraging.

“Congratulations, Senator Rawlings. You’ve bolstered my confidence in the variant. While I commend you for your service, I must also inform you that your utility is now at an end.”

The delta didn’t respond. Not that Anton expected it to. Complex verbal language was no longer within the scope of its abilities.

“Try not to worry, you will perish soon enough.”

To Anton’s surprise, the words sounded almost regretful. With agitation, he examined the underlying emotion. Was it attachment? Was he breaking faith with the very rule he’d just reminded Iridia of?

No.

No, he wasn’t.
 

He regarded the old man with the same admiration a carpenter did a trusted hammer. And so, in like manner, there was some regret in discarding it when the time came to replace it.

Anton squatted down so he could look one last time into the senator’s clouded eyes.
 

The old man uncurled and lunged at Anton.
 

In fear, Anton lashed out and happened to catch his attacker on the chin. The delta’s head snapped to the side and it collapsed into a heap of withered flesh.

Anton stumbled back in shock and tripped on the wheelchair. He fell into the wall and cracked his head into the concrete. His heart pounded wildly in his chest.
 

The changed man looked up at Anton. Blood gushed down his chin from the ragged wound created by his teeth slicing through his lower lip. The length of the lip dangled by a remaining bridge of skin.

“You idiot!” Anton screamed as he kicked the cowering delta in the side.
 

While the kick felt good, the insult felt better. Much like the average person might use a more mundane expletive like asshole. Only ‘idiot’ was far more derogatory an insult.
 

He never understood why a person might opt for something so perfunctory as asshole. The asshole was simply an alternative combination of letters that meant the same thing as anus. And the anus was a useful, if underappreciated, part of the human body. Yes, there were possible allusions to filth and disease, but was there disgrace in effectively doing a dirty job?

No.

Because it was a job.

A function.

An idiot was infinitely worse. An idiot was a machine with apparently working parts but whose whole did not exceed the sum of its parts. In fact, it was quite the opposite. An idiot equaled less than the sum of its parts. And worse yet, it implied a willful squandering of the human potential.

And this delta who had once been Senator Charles Rawlings was truly an idiot. He had underestimated Anton from the start. His dreams had been small. His vision myopic.
 

And now his brain had devolved to a state that more accurately reflected his true character.

If Anton’s work created the conditions in which a certain measure of poetic justice could be carried out, he was not averse to its appreciation.

BETH
forced back the ocean of tears threatening to pour out of her eyes. Now, more than ever, she needed to keep it together. A broken, insane mind wasn’t going to be much help to Theresa. And her daughter needed her.

Needed her to do what?

She didn’t know how to save Theresa. She was a veterinarian, not a scientist at a pharmaceutical company. She had no idea how to create or manufacture an antiviral drug that might save Theresa’s life. And even if she did, even if all of that was true, none of it would matter because there wasn’t enough time.
 

Theresa needed immediate treatment.
 

The fever had already been building and the massive exertion of fleeing the deltas seemed to have accelerated her deterioration. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst of it was that Beth couldn’t be with her.

If indeed this was an illness that couldn’t be stopped, then Theresa deserved as much comfort as she could have. It tore Beth’s heart out to think it, but if her baby was going to pass, she wanted to hold her head and kiss her forehead as she went.

But she couldn’t be with her because she was locked up like a damn criminal by Iridia’s insane father.
 

Shitbag.

A knot in Beth’s throat choked the air from her lungs. She bit down on her tongue in the hopes that the pain might keep her mind from coming undone. The bright sting and salty taste drew just enough of her attention to keep her from completely melting down.

She paced across the office interior toward the locked door. The locked door with the trained-to-kill soldier guy outside. She needed to break the goddamn door down and go find her daughter. Anton had ordered her to be taken to the lab.

She pounded on the door, not expecting any more reaction than the nothing she’d encountered already.

No response.
 

She tried the handle and it was still locked.

Beth needed one thing right now. She needed Mason. Always, but now more than ever. She needed the man she’d grown to trust implicitly over the years. This was his area of expertise. Beth was a healer at heart. She could be hard when the occasion required it, but she had no training in the tactics of aggression.
 

A whirlwind of emotion threatened to sweep her away. A wild voice begged her to surrender to the agony, to the madness where reason limped to die. Losing her husband. Losing her daughter. The voice demanded she give in.
 

And so much of her wanted to.

But a tiny voice somewhere in the chaos told her to be strong. To fight for her family. To rise above and act.

She reached for the voice, clung to it, coddled it so that it wouldn’t be snuffed out by the riotous winds enveloping it.

Yes. She had to act.

But how?

Someone spoke.

Beth looked up and didn’t recognize the face for an instant. So deep was the battle for her sanity that the words were echoes without a source. Sounds she noticed in passing and couldn’t catch before they faded away.