Xeno Sapiens (8 page)

“
I feel about as low as anyone could
ever feel, I think. It’s horrible. That woman, whoever she is, is
saying those horrible things about
me.”

There were still pages and pages of
clippings and editorial sidebars. Articles had appeared in both
Time and Newsweek. Scientific American had prepared an article
about her. The supermarket tabloids printed broadsides “exposing”
monstrous mutations she had allegedly created. Her phone rang
incessantly.

Reporters waited to pounce when she
left her apartment to go to school. They took pictures and shoved
microphones in her face. Changing her number to an unlisted one
mattered not a whit. Huge sums of money were offered
her.

In desperation she had packed up her
most basic necessities and fled from her apartment at two am and
moved in with her father. The reporters found her the next day and
lined up outside her father’s house. Ingrid refused to go out.
After two days of this treatment, Jack Milner appeared on his
doorstep bright and early one morning, wearing only his pajama
bottoms and slippers, looking very much like Jed Clampett after
downing a four way hit of acid. His trouser drawstring hung down at
his crotch. He carried an M1 carbine and told the reporters
assembled on his lawn that if they didn’t leave his daughter alone,
he would blow every damned one of them out of their shoes where
they stood. The reporters had never expected to find a war zone in
their own backyard and that had been the last of the trouble with
them.

Ingrid closed her scrapbook and
replaced it. She started to close the closet door, then stopped.
Impulsively she took her scrapbook down and left it on the small
night table next to her bed.

She left the TV on when she went to
bed, hoping the calming noise would soothe her whirling nerves.
Oddly enough, she slept soundly, awakening very late the next
morning. Yet when she awoke it was not slowly, but with a sudden
jolt. Her gaze was drawn as unerringly to the TV screen as a
compass needle swings toward magnetic north.

On the screen, one of the towers of the
World Trade Center was in flames.

Horrified commentators squawked in
shock as the first people leaped from the burning building to the
murderous pavement one hundred stories below. Even as she tried to
assimilate this initial horror into her waking reality, a second
commercial airliner veered into the screen, banking left, she
thought, with inexorable deliberateness, and exploded into the
second tower of the World Trade Center in an explosion she knew
must be immense but looked uncannily small on the television
screen. Even years after, she would sometimes think of how it
seemed it would be so easy to freeze the frame of the jetliner
veering toward the building and keep it all from happening, yet no
thing constructed by human hands ever deterred its inevitable
detonation upon its intended target. She hadn’t even stayed to
watch as the Twin Towers began to crumble to cinders before she
consulted a small business card in her shaking hands and called the
number on it.

“
Yes?” It was Merrifield. His voice
sounded thin and papery and she imagined him staring at the TV
screen in sickened amazement just as she had.

“
This is Ingrid, Mr. Merrifield. When
do we start?”

“
How soon can you be ready,” he asked
calmly.

“
Give me two weeks.”

She turned off the TV. In one grand,
evil gesture, a middle eastern madman named Osama Bin Laden had
turned the clock back a thousand years to the time of the Crusades,
managing to kill the most people on American soil in one day since
the battle of Antietam. And while he and others were fanatically
intent on returning to past glories, Ingrid made her decision to
step into the future. As Hubert had told her, it was useless to fly
in the face of Fate. She picked up the project Change folder she
had left on the coffee table, wanting to know just what the
terrible attacks of 9/11/01 had forced her into.

January 1, 2002

The biggest winter storm of the year
had blown into the North Carolina mountains, bending the trees into
twisted ice sculptures and piling up drifts six feet high. The wind
screamed through the valleys of the little town of Winfield like
the whistling of a skyrocket. Ingrid, who was used to the mild
climate of Florida and thought the southern states were supposed to
be warm during the winter, found temperatures hovering around zero
with wind chills to sixty below more than she had bargained
for.

She had arrived at the facility a week
earlier without a single winter garment to her name. Merrifield had
bundled Ingrid into one of his mammoth topcoats and driven her
fifteen miles from Winfield to Little Switzerland, a resort town
that had everything the winter tourist could want. Merrifield
supervised the procurement of an entire winter wardrobe for Ingrid.
He was obviously well known in Little Switzerland because the store
proprietor greeted him by name and produced an account book for
Merrifield’s signature when the shopping was done.

During the drive back, Ingrid had
peered through the blowing snow at the houses and shops in town.
Nearly all of them were modeled after Swiss chalets, thus obviously
accounting for the name. Signs of civilization ceased abruptly as
soon as they left Little Switzerland and made the journey back to
Winfield on the narrow, twisty road. The project facility (which
everyone referred to simply as the Alamo) was right in the middle
of a heavy resort area.

“
Why would you want a secret camp
right in the heart of a tourist area,” Ingrid asked.

“
The project site itself isn’t
secret,” Merrifield said. “The locals think we manufacture
drugs.”

“
Do you know a lot about the
area?”

“
I grew up here,” he said. “Not in the
mountains, but in a little one hydrant town called Candor, the
Peach Capital of the South. It used to be, at any rate. The most
excitement we had there was sitting in the car and watching the
stoplight change.”

“
Is it always so cold?” Ingrid had
burrowed into her new parka, even though Merrifield had the heater
going full blast. The back seat and trunk of the sedan bulged with
packages.

“
Not that unusual for the mountains.”
He slowed down to let the windshield wipers catch up with the
blowing snow.

“
I tell you,” he said. “When I found
out you didn’t have any winter clothes my blood fairly boiled. Here
I am with one of the most valuable commodities in the world running
the risk of catching the cold or flu.”

“
Thanks for your concern,” Ingrid said
ruefully. She didn’t quite know how to take being called a
commodity.

“
Now I didn’t mean it like that,”
Merrifield said. “My concern for you runs deeper than that, though
it’s wise,” he reflected thoughtfully, “to take precautions in all
things.”

Directly upon her arrival at the site, Ingrid had been
issued a plastic ID card complete with thumbprint and a photo of
herself wearing dark glasses; a secret electronic code for access
to her quarters, and an admonition of the sign at the front gate:
NO UNAUTHORIZED PHOTOGRAPHIC OR RECORDING DEVICES BEYOND THIS
POINT. ALL EMPLOYEES MUST CONSENT TO SEARCH. FAILURE TO CONSENT TO
SEARCH IS GROUNDS FOR IMMEDIATE TERMINATION. It really
was
cloak and dagger
stuff.

Merrifield had escorted Ingrid to her
quarters, leading her with a paternal arm.

“
Your last night to sleep,” he had
said. “Tomorrow we go through all the tiresome business of having
all the documents signed. After that,” he pronounced grandly, “to
work.”

Ingrid had expected a jail-cell sized
cubicle, an army cot screwed to the wall, a lavatory and stainless
steel toilet bolted to the floor. She found instead that her room
was reasonably appointed, more like a small apartment. The prints
on the walls were fairly bland, but the color scheme of maroon and
black more than made up for them.

She was overwhelmed by the variety of
food that threatened to spill out of the refrigerator when she
opened it. There were steaks, pork chops, and roasts in the
freezer, all kinds of fruits and vegetables in the crisper. Staple
items were on a dry goods shelf in the pantry, plus a chef’s dream
of spices. After spending four years of eating TV dinners and Ramen
noodles, she believed she must have died and gone to
heaven.

She took out the biggest steak she
could find and thawed it in the microwave while she made a salad.
When the steak was done, she gorged until she reminded herself of
the rat in Charlotte’s Web. She showered and congratulated herself
on how easily she had made the transition from college student to
VIP project director. She went to bed and was asleep in no
time.

She had rambled through the facility in
the small amount of time she had left after her workday and had
come to know the ins and outs of it quite well after only a week.
She had expected armed guards at every door and OD clad soldiers
around every corner. There were, in fact, only two rent a cops at
the facility. Whether by design or discretion, they rarely came
inside the building itself, staying mainly at the front
gate.

She was pleased that she had been
relieved of the burden of most of the paperwork and was known as a
working director, able to actually get her hands greasy in the
gears of the project instead of being a pencil pusher behind a
desk.

She met her team. Alan Caudill was a
bald, bespectacled cove of some fifty years, a surgeon out of UCLA.
He was in charge of the RNA, mRNA, and codon sequencing
laboratories, a huge amount of responsibility for a project of this
magnitude.

He had joined the army at age
thirty-one, induced into a covert project in which the biological
equivalent of the neutron bomb had been constructed. Anthrax
bacteria had been mutated into a form that took only hours to form
ulcerating nodules in the lungs. Ingrid didn’t know that part. She
had grown to like him. Had she known, she might have seen him as
one of the monsters she wished not to become.

Merrifield had a special place in his
heart for Caudill. However, even Merrifield was exasperated by one
of Caudill’s idiosyncrasies.

Caudill mumbled.

Ingrid had already been witness to
Merrifield’s chameleon act, but it was still a little unnerving to
see him turn after he had introduced Ingrid to Caudill.

“
Pleased to meet you,” Ingrid had
said.

“
Mphm molograi,”
Caudill had replied, shuffling
his feet and looking at the floor.

“
I beg your pardon,” Ingrid had said,
leaning forward to hear better.

“
Merrgrm growf.”

“
Dammit, Alan,” Merrifield had barked.
He shaped his hands into claws and showed every intention of
hooking them to the white lapels of Caudill’s lab coat and shaking
him.
“Spit
the mush out, man! Speak English! Speak English!”

Caudill had flinched a bit, then walked
away mumbling something with the tone of an apology.

Randy Bare was a youngish type who
fortunately didn’t live up to his name. Though he was only
twenty-five, he had already lost most of his hair. Ingrid knew male
pattern baldness was hereditary, but she was discovering that the
deprecation “egghead” was fitting.

Bare was the boss of the synthesizing
lab, a room full of machines that looked like kitchen appliances.
But the brews they cooked up here were beyond the most avid
culinary artist. The Helix Depolarization Chamber resembled a
washing machine, and the Protein/Peptide sequencer (sometimes
called the Gene Machine) looked like a set of bar taps that
dispensed their contents into a Lazy Susan. Planted in one corner
of the room was a vast video screen which interfaced directly with
the facility’s private mainframe. Also in the room was a laser
crystallography chamber which magnified the chromosomes and showed
them on a screen to facilitate working with them.

There were pieces in the facility
figuratively gathering dust that Ingrid would have killed to have
had at the university. There was not one, but six Cray computers,
any one of which her small university could never have afforded in
eight centuries. There were culture incubators from six cubic
inches to two thousand cubic feet. Ingrid was taken aback by the
scary reverence she felt when she looked at the huge incubator. It
came from knowing its ultimate use. The facility’s infirmary was
complemented with a fully equipped surgical theater with
state-of-the-art optics, graphics, and computer feeds.

And there was Clifton. The first time
Ingrid had seen him in any role other than pacifier was on her
second day at the Alamo. She had been jotting down notes, trying to
decide whether to use synthetic chromosomes to create the special
traits she sought, or to recombine existing genes with superior
traits onto chromosomes.

Rejection would be no problem at the
molecular level, providing that the terminal end of each protein
chain that formed a gene was bonded to its corresponding base:
Adenine to Thymine, Cytosine to Guanine, etc. Ingrid rarely thought
in terms much more complicated than the lay person. She left the
tedious business of templating, tertiary structure of
macromolecules, or non-superimposable mirror images to the organic
chemists.