“NewYew was nothing if not thorough,” said Ira Moore, clicking to the next slide. It showed a woman of almost exactly the same build, but African instead of Caucasian. “This is Sally.”
“The color is not the issue,” said General Clark. “The Lagbajas are trained soldiers, and turning them into Sallies or Jessicas isn’t going to change that. The ReBirth models are fit and healthy, genetically predisposed to a level of physical prowess that their army regimen is only going to enhance. My daughter was a cheerleader; I’m pretty sure these girls can still shoot a gun.”
General Blauwitz raised his eyebrow. “Have you ever seen a ninety-pound girl fire an assault rifle?”
“You’re right,” said Ira/Moore. “We need something debilitating—something that brings them down so powerfully that by the time they realize what’s happening they won’t be able to do anything about it.” He looked around the room and saw them nodding, waiting expectantly. If he’d proposed this final plan first they would never have accepted it, but now, intrigued by the possibilities of genetic warfare, they were ready. Now that Ira/Moore had planted the idea, they wanted to see what ReBirth could really do.
He clicked the trackpad. “Allow me to introduce Toby, the soldier of the future. Toby is six years old, congenitally blind, and suffers from late-stage leukemia. Because it is a disease of the chromosomes, this leukemia would be transmitted through the ReBirth and forcibly propagated onto every target in the invasion zone—and because his body is so small, the early stages of transformation would require a significant loss of mass, exacerbating the flulike symptoms that have become associated with ReBirth. Our simulations predict that a dose in their water supply would incapacitate the general population in approximately ten days. We walk in, take the island, and then turn them back into whomever they want once the population is subdued. It’s the easiest invasion in history.”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” said Blauwitz eagerly.
“You can’t be serious,” said Miller. “Biological weapons are prohibited for a reason—they’re unethical, they’re inhumane, and this one in particular is both degrading and offensive on top of that, to about twenty different minority groups. We’d be the mustache-twirling pariahs of the entire world community.”
“Biological weapons aren’t reversible,” said Ira/Moore. “ReBirth is. A week or so of lying on the ground, blind and too weak to move, and then they’re back to normal, in whatever body they choose.”
“Some of them would die,” Miller insisted.
“It’s a war,” said Ira/Moore. “Some of them will die no matter how we choose to invade. This way it’ll be relatively few of them, and they won’t die violently, and everyone who doesn’t die can be a hundred percent better four weeks later with no lasting effects.”
“You don’t call rewriting your DNA a lasting effect?”
“They’ve already rewritten their own DNA by becoming Lagbaja,” said Blauwitz. “Hell, we could turn them back into Lagbaja if they really want to; by then it won’t matter.”
“How are we going to know which ones to prosecute?” asked Clark. “By the time we start making arrests nobody in that complex will even have an identity anymore. Are we just going to pick up the best-dressed Tobies and hope they’re the executives?”
“Arrests are a secondary concern,” said Ira/Moore. “We want ReBirth, and the means to make more of it.”
“I like the plan in theory,” said General Clark, “but without any blank lotion it’s impossible to carry out.”
“There’s plenty of blank lotion on the black market,” said Ira/Moore. “Surely there’s enough room in our budget for that? It’s cheaper than sending soldiers.”
“But then why invade at all?” asked Miller. “If we can get blank lotion on the black market we can ignore this whole offensive debacle completely.”
“We’re invading because having ReBirth is only half of our goal,” said General Clark. “The other half is making sure nobody else has it. Everything Senator Moore has suggested we do to São Tomé is something that an enemy nation could do to us, and that makes ReBirth the most powerful weapon since the atomic bomb. Even more powerful, because it can be used to destroy a people while leaving their infrastructure intact. Imagine a Russia, or a China, or an Iran, with the ability to turn the entire American population into Toby the cancer patient. We’re planning to save the people of São Tomé afterward, but no invading power would give us the same courtesy. Two weeks and we’re too sick to move, four weeks and we’re dead, and every last bit of land, technology, money, and natural resources we’ve ever had are just lying on the ground for a conquering force to march in and take. They could live in our houses and drive our cars. If you question the need for the American government to be the sole owner of this technology you are a brainless jackass unfit for your job.” The general’s voice was like ice, and her eyes seemed to scorch the room like lasers. She stared for a few more moments, then turned to Blauwitz. “Put this into motion. I want Toby’s DNA in every human cell on that island within four days, and I want us in undisputed possession of São Tomé one week later. This meeting is adjourned.”
42
Saturday, September 15
7:30 P.M.
Yemaya Foundation, Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan
90 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Lyle squeezed into the back of the room, shoulder to shoulder with several dozen copies of himself, and realized that he’d never been more uncomfortable in his life. The room was filled with Lyles, his own face and hair and size and weight repeated on nearly two hundred people, differentiated only by their clothes. Their features, of course, were subtly different—ReBirth didn’t make exact duplicates, just identical twins based on the same DNA—but that only added to the creepy vibe that hung over the room, making Lyle sick to his stomach. When everyone looked so similar, tiny variations became prominent, and as Lyle scanned the room he saw some with a slightly sharper nose, or a narrower mouth, and he couldn’t help but study the way that their different clothes and haircuts changed the overall look of his face. He studied each face in turn, over and over, until it became too much. Looking at Guru Kuvam was a welcome respite from the sickening sameness.
“You are not criminals,” Kuvam was saying. “You have a criminal’s blood, and a criminal’s bones, but so does every child of a wayward father, and we do not blame a child for his father’s actions.”
Great, thought Lyle, another speech about how we’re all innocent because we’re not the real Lyle. Fat lot of good that does me.
Kuvam held meetings almost every night now, whenever he wasn’t on TV, or out preaching in hospitals and prisons the new path he called the Light of Life. Lyle had been talking to every pseudo-Lyle he could find, trying to figure out who had sold them their faulty lotion, trying to trace it all back to the source, and more and more they mentioned these meetings, a kind of self-help group for Lyles with Kuvam as their therapist.
“What the world does not realize,” said Kuvam, “is that we are all connected—all living things are tied together in an unbreakable web of power, and not just living things but rocks and trees. Nature, and the vast reaches of space beyond. What are human beings but chemicals? Water and salt and carbon, iron in our blood, energy from the sun filtered through the chlorophyll of plants and into our bodies as food. And this energy is not the only part of us that comes from the stars—every mineral in our cells comes from the depths of the earth, and the earth was formed by particles of matter thrown out by distant stars and supernovas uncountable millennia ago. We are ancient beings, composed of the very stuff of the stars, the shining children of the universe.”
The guru paced the small stage as he spoke—a nervous habit Lyle hadn’t seen in him during their first meeting, and he wondered who this man had been before he had rewritten himself with Kuvam’s face and body.
“And if everyone is connected in a web of light and stars and blood and life,” the guru continued, “then we are all the same. I am the same as you, and you are the same as me, and we’re both the same as the richest man in the world and the poorest child in the gutter. We are different faces on the same all-encompassing being, different manifestations of the core, primal force of light and life. And if we’re all the same, what does it matter if you’re you or me or Lyle or anybody else?” There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd, and Lyle was surprised to realize that not everyone in the room was ignoring Kuvam’s New Age nonsense. “You’ve always been you, and you’ll always be you,” Kuvam continued, “but you’ve always been Lyle, too. It doesn’t matter what you look like, because that doesn’t change who you are, because you still are, and always will be, us.” Another murmur of approval. “You are no less than you were before, you’re greater. You’ve gained knowledge, which is light, which is life. And if everything is light and life, then you have gained everything.”
The crowd was excited now, calling out affirmations of the guru’s words, and Lyle realized that this wasn’t a self-help group, it was a religion. He frowned, wondering how so many people could fall for the same ridiculous story, wondering if maybe the nature of Lyle conversion—of unwitting nobodies duped into buying the wrong thing—self-selected for a group of gullible people with malleable minds.
But the more he looked at the roomful of doppelgängers—the more he saw his own face lit up with two different shades of desperate hope—the more he realized that they weren’t dupes, and they weren’t nobodies. They were people whose lives had been ripped away, whose face and identity and entire sense of self had been destroyed. They were nodding and smiling and shouting approvals because Guru Kuvam was the first person, and maybe the only person, to tell them they were okay, that they weren’t freaks and criminals. The world hated Lyles, but here they were kings.
“I have a special guest today,” said Kuvam, and Lyle was immediately embarrassed by the thrill of hope that shot through his chest: Is it me? But he gestured to a man offstage who stepped in front of the crowd with a friendly smile. “This is Tracy Erickson,” said Kuvam, “a representative from the ACLU.”
There was a smattering of applause, and Tracy began to speak with a firm, impassioned voice. “Thank you, Guru, for this opportunity. My name is Tracy, like he said, and I’m an assistant legal council for the American Civil Liberties Union. You know us, we’re the weirdos always suing somebody or other for oppressing cannibals or neo-Nazis or something like that.” There were a few laughs, but most of the crowd seemed confused at the sudden change in tone, and Lyle assumed that many of them, like him, didn’t know where this was going. “We handle thousands of cases a year,” said Tracy, “protecting civil rights for everyone in the country, but naturally it’s only the controversial cases that make the news. And we take the controversial cases because somebody has to. Because everybody, no matter who they are, no matter what they’ve done, deserves to be treated like a human being. You’ve probably experienced this yourself in the last few weeks, haven’t you? You got some bad ReBirth, turned into Lyle, and now all of a sudden you lose your job, you lose your health insurance, maybe you lose your family or your bank account or your car. Everywhere you used to go, everything you used to do, you can’t, because you have the wrong man’s face, and you can’t go anywhere to complain about it because the substance that gave you this face is a biological weapon and you could be branded a terrorist just for possessing it. Many Lyles have, in fact, been arrested, but frankly there’s too many of you now for the cops to bother with. Thousands of Lyles around the country, maybe tens of thousands, and hundreds more every day.”
The mood in the room turned angry, not at Tracy but at the realities he was bringing back to the front of their minds. Kuvam had made them feel better for a moment, but at the end of the meeting they would still have to go back into a world that hated them. Many of them, like Lyle, might not even have homes to go to.
“That’s where we come in,” said Tracy. “You can’t fight for yourselves, and no one will fight for you, but we will. The ACLU has opened a case to fight for Lyle rights—not just a case, but a campaign. Today we began raising funds, and first thing Monday morning we’ll hit Washington with lobbyists and interest groups, with private meetings with some of our oldest friends in the government, and with public meetings all over the country to raise awareness and sympathy for your cause. Within the next few weeks we’ll roll out a series of nationwide advertisements, including TV and web, to call attention to the injustices happening to Lyles every day.” He grinned, and Lyle could tell he’d arrived at the crux of his speech. “And this is the best part. Cases like this tend to have a lot of negative inertia, just by nature. People don’t really ‘see’ civil rights violations until they’ve been personally hurt, and the criminal angle is another hurdle on top of that. But you have one thing going for you that will make this case completely unlike any other—volume. There are so many of you, and the number is growing every day; it’s going to be on everyone’s mind, on everyone’s lips, and it’s going to gain us a lot of traction. Tens of thousands of people being discriminated against because of their DNA. You realize what you are? You’re a racial minority. People deny you jobs and loans and even service in stores and restaurants, not because of what you do but because of what you look like. That is blatant racism, and that’s something that will get the world on your side.
“Starting Monday, we propose legislation to have Lyle Fontanelle recognized as an official minority group, with all the rights that come with it.”
43
