Kuvam smiled. “Of course.”
PART TWO
MAKEOVER
17
NEWSCASTER: We take you live this morning to the Regional Cancer Center in Trenton, New Jersey, for continuing coverage of what doctors are calling a medical miracle. Donna Pickett has spent the last seven years in a vicious battle with breast cancer, becoming something of a celebrity last month when she publicly rejected modern medicine in favor of naturopathic treatment. Still unable to leave her bed in the cancer center, she brought in an alternative doctor named Guru Kuvam and began some kind of treatment with him. Last night the story took a surprising—indeed, a shocking—turn, when Donna awoke from her latest bout of cancer symptoms not only healed, but seemingly decades younger. In many ways, the sixty-year-old woman is the spitting image of her twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Melissa.
DOCTOR: I don’t know what to say. After seven years of cancer and chemotherapy Donna was a shell—she was bald, she was frail, her skin was damaged. She looked like she’d been living on the streets, or in a desert. Now … well, I don’t know what to tell you. If she hadn’t been in our hospital, connected to our machines, I wouldn’t believe this is even her. I still don’t know if I do believe it, because it’s not just the cancer: I performed her mastectomy myself, four years ago, and yet … well, look at her. They grew back. It’s like Donna disappeared and Melissa’s long-lost twin showed up, except Melissa doesn’t have a twin. That’s really Donna. I … I don’t know what to say.
MELISSA: I’m just so happy to have my mother back—just so, so, happy. It’s like she’s been given a new life, a new start. I can’t thank the Yemaya Foundation enough for giving us this incredible chance.
NEWSCASTER: The Yemaya Foundation itself, and its mysterious Guru Kuvam, may be the most interesting facet of this bizarre story. Originally a medical charity based in a crumbling Manhattan neighborhood, the Yemaya Foundation has recently turned into something of a New Age religion.
KUVAM: What you see in Donna Pickett is not merely new health but new life—literally a new body to replace her old one. Through the love of her daughter, and through her own efforts at self-healing and mind-body communion, Donna has been born again, and through her example we, too, can achieve our highest standards of human perfection. [Kuvam holds up a small plastic bottle.] This is the secret—a special lotion that is nothing less than a secular reincarnation. Through this, we have the power to shed our forms and gain new strength—new life—in each step of our immortal cycle. We must take this as a sign, a message not from gods but from our own selves, our collective consciousness, that the next step is not just for Donna but for the entire human race. Set aside the things of the past, and set your eyes not on our limits but on our potential. Today is the first day of the new human race.
18
Monday, June 11
8:51 A.M.
NewYew headquarters, Manhattan
186 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
“Bastard,” said Cynthia, staring at the TV. “Pig-brained, half-witted, self-righteous little bastard.”
“He can’t be the one who stole it,” said Jeffrey. He looked around at the other executives. “Can he?”
“We need to kill him,” said Cynthia. “We need to rip his lying lips right off his tree-hugging face and shove them down his throat.”
“We’re not sunk yet,” said Kerry, absently stroking his biceps. He’d searched for weeks for a new body—something to replace Lyle’s unwanted DNA—and finally settled on an Italian underwear model. “I know it looks bad, but everything has a good marketing angle. We just have to find it.” Kerry’s new body was nearly seven feet tall, with a naturally fast metabolism and a genetic predisposition for lean, well-defined muscle. His wife had become a half-black, half-Korean bodybuilder with full lips and rich brown skin. Lyle still had no idea what they’d paid for the DNA, or how they’d convinced the models to sell in the first place. He had visions of them locked up in the company’s new headquarters on São Tomé, imprisoned with the rest of the security leaks.
That’s where I’ll go if I’m not careful, he thought. Or maybe Cynthia will gut me first and hang me from her office window.
“A good angle?” asked Cynthia. “We just lost the race to the market—we can’t get a patent, we can’t get exclusivity, we can’t get anything. Find a good angle in that.”
“We can still turn this our way,” Kerry insisted. “Even if this guy popularizes the lotion, we’re still in the best position to supply the lotion. He’s practically doing us a favor.”
He moves differently, thought Lyle, watching Kerry closely. It’s the same Kerry, thinking the same old thoughts in the same old way, but he moves like a completely different person—different muscles moving different bones, rotating against each other with a completely different set of joints. He’s … smoother than Kerry used to be. More flowing. Changing his body has changed the way he interfaces with the world.
How will that change his brain?
“We need to find him,” said Cynthia, “and figure out how he got our product, and then we need to make him regret it with every breath he takes.”
“We don’t even know it’s our product,” said Jeffrey. “It’s probably just a passing thing with this lady—the cancer went into remission or whatever, so she cleaned herself up and they call it a miracle.”
“Mastectomies don’t go into remission,” said Sunny. “This is definitely our product.”
“You need to stop moping about what went wrong and start looking for what went right,” said Kerry, flexing slightly. “We have our own hospital girl, for one thing: why can’t we just use that?”
“Because it’s come and gone,” said Sunny. “We cured her, sure, but nobody knows it was us because we were trying to be so careful. And now she’s been released from the hospital and it’s old news. Besides, all we did was heal a sick girl, and people do that all the time. This guy brought a cancer patient back from the brink of death, with a twenty-year-old body to boot.”
“We gave Susan a twenty-year-old body,” said Kerry.
“Nineteen,” said Lyle. “Those epithelials were older than we thought.”
“You’re looking at this wrong,” said Carl, his giant face filling the screen on the wall. He was in São Tomé, overseeing the establishment of the new headquarters, and was attending the meeting through a webcam. “This guru isn’t competition, he’s free advertising. Thanks to him every cancer patient in the world wants our product.”
“I told you to focus on health,” said Lyle.
“Lyle has a point,” said Kerry. “All of our applications are cosmetic, and this guy’s saving lives—we look kind of shallow in comparison.”
“I think you missed the point of my point,” said Lyle.
“It’s all in the presentation,” said Carl, “and we have a month to make them work. I want every presentation at the launch event to focus on the ‘whole body health’ aspects of the product, and I want all the press releases rewritten to reflect the same kind of touchy-feely crap.”
“It’s too late to change the products and the packaging,” said Cynthia.
“We don’t want to change those,” said Carl. “Those are going to the clinics, and those are just stores, and in stores people make decisions based on good old-fashioned self-interest—we tell them a product will make them beautiful and they buy it. All we’re changing are the press releases, to make sure we look just as altruistic as this hippie Kuvam.”
