The Zen Gene (6 page)

“Holy shit Ty it’s beautiful,” she said and there were tears in her eyes.

He smiled and agreed, “Holy shit,” he said.

She was transfixed by the enormous scale and eerie majesty of the sight. It was purely breathtaking. The ruined building gave a graphic vision of dystopia. From the outside the building looked like the holographs she saw of the decaying industrial cities in the northeast United States but inside it was transformed into an enchanted castle of golden rays of light. She stood gazing in wonder until she noticed that Tyler was still holding her hand.

It spurred her to act and she stepped in front of him and pulled him forward into a rich mote-speckled beam of light and the sensation was wonderful. The sun bathed their upturned faces and she drew him closer with her arms wrapped around his waist and held him as they shared this sweet intimacy, swathed as they were in the warm embrace of angled light.

It did not last long as he soon began to squirm but that was okay she was amazed and happy he tolerated her touch for as long as he had. She could feel his discomfort build until it became too much for him and his eyes lost their dreamy glaze and took on the ‘trapped animal’ look he got when he was agitated. He stepped away from her and said,

“You promised. Don’t tell Andrea or mom, okay?”

She laughed when he said this; it was odd how after all these years he still called her mom “mom.”

He never called Andi “mom” and it was not until she was older that her own mom explained to her how much this hurt Andi. She knew instinctively he never did it to hurt Andi it was the way he learned things. He simply thought that her mom’s name was “mom” because that is what she called her.

“Okay, I promise. What’s the big secret anyway? Have you got a grow-op or something?” she said. She was kidding but she looked at his eyes wondering what the big deal was and why he was adamant about her not telling. She could easily understand him not wanting her to tell Andi but he must be extremely worried if he did not want her to tell her mom.

“What’s a grow-op?” he said.

The blank look on his face told her he was not kidding, he did not know what a grow-op was and it reminded her that, for a sixteen year-old boy, he was clueless.

“Never mind it doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Come with me and don’t make dust,” he said.

After he had released himself from her embrace he surprised her by taking her hand again to lead her along a cleared pathway through the factory to a door marked Bio Lab Eight.

He told her he was getting ready to leave for home when he heard her screaming. She watched him retrieve the key from where he stashed it and then plug in a cord lying on the floor. She laughed when he insisted she put shoe covers over her sneakers before he opened the door.

“Don’t touch stuff, okay?” he said. She nodded her assent and felt a puff of air touch her face as he opened the door to his big secret.

“Holy shit! Tyler, what the heck are you up to?” she said.

Jonas

Sept 22, 11:15 AM

Naden Naval Base

Esquimalt, British Columbia

Mann stared out the window for a full minute before speaking, “Colonel I agree you have a problem on your hands but why pick me? I am a researcher I don’t do field work and, more to the point, I have not worked on any aspect of aggression for years. There must be a hundred different avenues of investigation you could try before looking for a genetic factor. Do you have a specific reason to suspect there is a genetic factor?”

He was feeling guilty about the way he acted earlier, it must be a scary prospect losing that many soldiers to an unknown agent.

“Yes, but don’t ask me to explain it to you,” Western said.

“Is there someone working on this I can speak with? Maybe that will speed things along?”

“Yes, there is and he is an old friend of yours, Jonas McLean.”

He turned and looked directly at Western’s face for the first time since losing the staring contest. He managed to avoid a rematch up to this point but now he had no choice but to look because, if he heard him correctly, things had taken a decidedly weird turn.

“Colonel the Jonas McLean I know is dead, he died five years ago. He suffered from schizophrenia and my understanding is he killed himself. I read his obituary in the Toronto Star,” he said.

He watched the man’s face and tried to determine if this was some elaborate distasteful joke. Western gave nothing away but his mouth showed a trace of a smirk which held a hint of disgust; he could not tell if it was for the phony suicide or Jonas.

“Mr. McLean is not as dead as the papers reported. He is here working for us on classified human factors research. He knew it would blow his cover but when this problem came up he suggested we contact you.”

“You’re telling me Jonas McLean is alive?”

“That’s correct.”

He considered this for a moment and found himself shaking his head in confusion. Nothing Western said so far made any sense so why should the news of a fake suicide be any different?

“Okay Colonel, I never saw his body, if you say he’s alive I can’t argue the point. I don’t need to know what the fake suicide was about but none of this alters the fact that Jonas McLean, my one-time graduate student, suffers from severe paranoid schizophrenia and I can assure you he was not faking that.”

Western smiled, “We came to realize early on that there would be challenges working with him but in his own unique way he is quite brilliant. And in this particular situation he was our only option because we knew you would not freely cooperate with us, given your history. We were aware that he worked closely with you on aggression mapping; he recalled a fair bit of the detail but…,” he said.

“But he never understood the data in depth and that is why I’m here,” he finished for him.

“Yes, that is correct,” he said.

He looked at Western and laughed, it was a belly laugh with tears and all and it took him some seconds to recover himself.

“Colonel,” he said, “you have absolutely nothing to worry about. You have assembled an elite team of scientists consisting of the schizophrenically unstable and the pathologically unwilling. I wish you good luck you are going to need it.”

He laughed even harder when he saw the sour look on Western’s face.

Western cleared his throat and tried a new tack. ”We have the affected soldiers in isolation and we are also keeping them away from each other,” he said.

“Are you afraid of infection or conspiracy?” he asked and this time it was the Colonel’s turn to smile.

“It crossed our minds there might be some kind of conspiracy but we scratched that idea. These men are full-time career military personnel and they are as mystified as anyone by what has happened. We’ve determined that whatever the agent is causing this problem it is almost certainly spread through human contact.”

“Colonel, virology and epidemiology are not my field of expertise but as far as I know there is no known viral or bacterial agent, man-made or otherwise, which can cause the effects you’ve described. My advice to you is to look for another factor. Have they been exposed to radiation? Maybe it’s a thyroid issue. Was this a deep-sea diving mission? Maybe they were not adequately decompressed,” he suggested.

He was thinking out loud and tossing out random ideas and possibilities until he looked over and saw a thin smile on Western’s face and realized he’d been deftly hooked. As a research scientist asking questions and suggesting possible solutions to problems was his natural state of being. Western had expertly laid the trail of crumbs which led him into this trap. He was a little embarrassed at how easily he was worked but, he had to admit, he was intrigued by their problem.

If a man-made agent or a weaponized virus interfered with these soldiers on a genetic level and he could discover what it was it could certainly be important for the safety of soldiers. If it was not man-made but a naturally occurring mutation it could turn out to be a unique scientific discovery. Either way it was a fascinating problem.

He looked at the parked warships and came to a decision then laughed mirthlessly at the power of his ego to allow him to be dragged into something which had the potential to be either career ending or Nobel producing.

“What tests have been done on them?”

“I can’t tell you.”

For his part Western was maintaining a magnificent poker face and as infuriating as the man was he had to admire his nerve. “How am I supposed to do anything useful for you if you won’t tell me what’s been done so far?” he said.

There was that smile again.

“Are you agreeing to help us Doctor Mann?”

He looked at Western and frowned, confused.

“You have it set up that I have to help you if I want to keep my grant money. What else do you want?” he said. He was irritated by the man’s smug game-playing face.

“I need you to sign these documents here, here, and here,” Western said pushing a sheaf of papers in front of him and indicating several places where he wanted him to sign.

“What is this?”

“A confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement and part 4 of the official secrets act of 1971,” he said.

“I suppose I must sign this if I want to get back to my real life.” He picked up the pen and made a few chicken scratches where indicated.

Western picked it up and examined the scrawl. “Dr. D.F. Duck.” He laughed mirthlessly and jammed the papers into his briefcase. “It doesn’t matter what you sign Doctor Mann if you fuck with us we will bury you so deep God will need a flashlight to find you.”

“I am a scientist Colonel and I can assure you there is no God; people like you are sufficient proof of that.”

***

Jonas McLean was younger than him by five years but when he walked into Bio Containment Lab 1, in a building safely sequestered out of harm’s way at the extreme south end of the massive Naden Naval Reserve, his first thought was he looked ten years older.

He had never been large but now, bent and stoop shouldered, he seemed almost tiny. He looked life-beaten with a grim and deeply weathered face the product of living rough for years. His voice matched his face, he sounded as weathered as he looked.

“It’s been a long time, Lee,” McLean said and held out his hand. He was surprised by the strength in his grip, “You look good for a dead guy, Jonas,” he said and laughed at his own joke. Jonas did not smile.

“I was in a mental hospital for a few years and then I lived on the street,” he said. “My father was ashamed of me when I got sick. After I was released I left Ontario living rough on the coast; it was not until years later that I heard he placed the obituary.” The blue of McLean’s eyes deepened when he said this and hen felt bad about his joke until he realized that was exactly what McLean had intended.

“Where did you learn to work that emotional capital Jonas in the nut house or bullshitting the dumpster cops?” he said. Jonas shrugged and smiled winningly and said “It worked well on the young nurses, at least for a while, the street cops not so much.”

“Are you medication compliant?” he said.

He asked the question not unkindly he simply needed to know who he was talking to. He had some practical experience with the illness. His uncle Dave on his dad’s side was schizophrenic and even as a little kid he knew when Uncle Dave was off his meds the difference in his personality was like night and day. The medication helped to smooth him out but he was never free of the illness until one cold day in January when his uncle rose early, ate a hearty breakfast with his mom, then went down to the basement and put his father’s shotgun in his mouth.

“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” Jonas said.

He saw McLean glance at Western when he spoke and he realized their working relationship was probably an uneasy one. Western did not strike him as being tolerant of difference. The Colonel went to the door and opened it.

”I’ll leave you to get reacquainted. There will be a team meeting after lunch in my office I’ll see you there Dr. Mann. Jonas, I want you to come to my office for a few minutes before you leave for the day,” he said.

After the Colonel was gone he said, “What kind of bullshit did you feed them to get them to drag me out here?”

“I had nothing to do with it. They informed me you were coming. Believe me I had nothing to do with it. I suppose they think you’ve cracked the aggression placement problem. I told them they were out to lunch and you would sooner set yourself on fire than work for them but no one listens to me,” McLean said.

“Are all military types’ like Western or is he an outlier? This is an interesting problem but he seems way more freaked out than I would expect.” Mann said.

“Yes military types are an intense bunch but I suspect he is a little more desperate than most,” said McLean as he strolled over to the lab window and gazed out at the same dry docked ships but from a different direction. “Not that I blame him, it must be a daunting prospect to have an army unable to fight, anyway I’m happy to see you again Lee I never had a chance to thank you for having me committed. You saved my life. I know I was out of my mind at U of T and you helped me more than my own family. I would not be alive today if it weren’t for you. Thank you.”

He joined him at the window and gazed at the navy ships and remembered the good times they had in the lab together before Jonas became ill. He could not imagine what horrible demeaning things he endured since he last saw him. It must have been devastating to go from bright young graduate student with a promising career ahead of him to living on the street as an untreated schizophrenic and the occasional unwilling guest of the judicial/mental health system.

When they worked together at U of T he never thought of McLean as being particularly unstable until one morning when he came to work and he found him wandering the corridors confused, half dressed, and mostly insensible. At first he thought he was on an epic drunk but he soon figured out he was in a dissociative state. He managed to get him into the university van and drive him to the Emergency room at Toronto General Hospital. When he spoke with McLean’s admitting Doctor in the Emergency room the Doctor said he thought it was probably schizophrenia which, he told him, often strikes people in their early twenties.

He recalled that McLean was particularly good at statistics and everyone knew proficiency in statistics was a precursor to schizophrenia. “You would have helped me Jonas, if it were me in trouble. In fact you helped me a lot and for that and more I believe we are even,” he said.

Jonas had been solid for him when his girlfriend dumped him for someone else and his world tumbled out of control. He had been planning to ask her to marry him but one day, without warning, she broke up with him and left town. It hit him hard and Jonas was a rock the whole time. He wanted to steer the conversation away from those uncomfortable and hurtful memories and he changed the subject and got down to business.

“Tell me what happens to these soldiers when they try to… perform their work?” he said.

He tried not to think about the fact that killing people was their occupation. McLean rolled another chair up to a computer station and motioned for him to sit.

“What we know is mostly self-reported. The affected soldiers, with minor variations, describe the problem as beginning with a nasty headache. It is unclear if it would be considered a migraine because none of them suffered migraines prior to this event. They reported that the headache intensifies as they prepare to do whatever Government sanctioned act of violence they are about to undertake, presumably kill someone. The pain increases as preparations progress until it tips them over and they reach a point where they mentally and physically shut down.

The effect was discovered at an inopportune time during a sniper mission. Of the four soldiers involved three of them suffered debilitating reactions to identical situations. The scenario I was given was they were deployed in an unnamed foreign country preparing to assassinate someone in order to maintain our freedom and democracy when this group incapacitation occurred.

The leader of the mission is Master Sergeant Mike Peters and he described the pain he experienced in his head as bad then worse, quickly becoming unrecoverable. When it struck him he thought the self-destruct charge in his rifle scope had detonated,” he said.