“Still no Igdrocil,” muttered Ira/Moore. He pounded the table in fury. “If they don’t have it, who does!”
“I can’t guarantee anyone on this island is still alive,” said Blauwitz. “That Toby lotion really did a number on their communal digestive system—it looks like this snowballed into flu, dehydration, and then a malaria outbreak before they even had time to get leukemia. I don’t know if I can overstate this: this island looks like the world ended.”
“For them it did,” said Miller.
“I’ll save who I can,” said Blauwitz, “but it’ll be all I can do just to clean it up before anybody else sees it. We can’t let anyone know what happened here. I’ll call you later.” He severed the connection.
General Clark stared at the room. “Congratulations, we’ve made a bad situation worse.”
“Did the lotion work faster than normal?” asked Miller. “What happened?”
“We were too concerned about the lotion’s direct effects and didn’t consider the side effects,” said Ira/Moore. “There wasn’t enough food and water on the island to keep up with the demands of a mass increase in metabolism.”
“That still sounds like we’re putting it lightly,” said Clark.
“Now we know what happens when ReBirth gets used on a large scale,” said Miller. “Our espionage gadget just became a weapon of mass destruction.”
“We need Lyle,” said General Clark. “Not a knockoff, the real thing. He’s the only one who knows how to make ReBirth.”
“If he’s even alive,” said Miller.
“He’s definitely alive,” said Ira/Moore. “But he doesn’t understand ReBirth or Igdrocil any better than the rest of them.”
“You’re sure of this?” asked Clark.
He never made it for us, thought Ira/Moore, but that might have all been a deception. Just biding his time until he could burn our building down. He sighed and threw up his hands. “No, I’m not sure. But how do we find him? He has the best disguise in the world. Current estimates suggest we have more than seven thousand Lyles on the East Coast alone, and more than twenty thousand total in the country. There’s at least three thousand in Arizona—we think Mexicans have been using the lotion to jump the border. And because we can’t tell them apart, if we start grabbing Lyles and interrogating them we’re literally never going to stop. We’d interrogate the same guy a dozen times.”
“We could … tag them?” said Clark.
“They’re not bears,” said Miller. “Besides, the ACLU’s starting to make waves over these Lyles, and anything we do to them will fall under even closer scrutiny than before.”
“Seriously, though,” said Ira/Moore, a slow grin spreading across his face. “Why not tag them?”
“I was joking,” said Clark.
“The Lyles are criminals, right?” asked Ira/Moore. He leaned forward, excited by his new idea. “By the definition we created, anyone who uses ReBirth without government sanction is a terrorist; that’s why I’m in this meeting, representing Homeland Security. The ACLU can go and screw itself once Homeland Security gets involved. We’ve never prosecuted more than a handful of ReBirth biological weapons cases, and then only for dealers, but we have the power to prosecute anyone. I say we don’t just talk to the Lyles, we round them up: every single one of them has broken the law, so why not arrest them?”
“Because you just told us there’s more than twenty thousand of them,” said Miller. “We don’t have anywhere to put that many people, certainly not in any of the prisons this administration keeps underfunding.”
“Then we form camps,” said Ira/Moore. “I know this sounds extreme, but we can do this—we have the legal power, and we have the legal precedent. Every single Lyle out there has been trafficking and using a biological weapon. It is, effectively, illegal to be Lyle Fontanelle. All we have to do is start punishing people in violation of that policy. And in the process, we question each one until we find the original.”
“I don’t like this,” said General Clark.
“Everything that happened on São Tomé could happen here,” said Ira/Moore. “As soon as Al Qaeda or North Korea or who knows who else gets hold of some ReBirth, suddenly we’re a nation of blind cancer patients dead of dehydration and plague, torn apart by dogs in the streets. Are you willing to do what it takes to stop that?”
The room was silent. Finally General Clark nodded. “Get the camps organized before you make an announcement—and be diplomatic when you do it. If we tell them it’s a prison camp we’ll start a civil war. Call it … amnesty. A chance for nonterrorist ReBirth users to come clean, and get help.”
“Get help?” asked Miller.
“Under ideal circumstances, yes,” said Clark. “As long as we’ve got them all in one place we may as well do something to help them regain their old identities. If possible. But finding the real Dr. Fontanelle is our number-one priority.” She sighed and shook her head, seeming to deflate in her chair. “This is going to be hell.”
46
Wednesday, October 3
8:15 A.M.
Port Chester, New York
72 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
One of the Lyles at the train station had Down syndrome.
Lyle couldn’t help but stare. He had seen his own face in subtle variations a thousand times now, maybe ten thousand times, and while none of them were perfect replicas they were incredibly, uncannily similar. Ten thousand identical twins, however different they might be in the details, were still more or less identical. To see an outlier so wildly different was almost as big of a shock, at this point, as the first Lyle clone had been so many months ago. The Down syndrome clone was standing with a woman, and it was all Lyle could do not to walk straight to him and pepper them both with questions.
Fascinated or not, though, Lyle was still intensely paranoid, and he scanned the train platform carefully for anyone who might be watching. The government was actively searching for Lyles now, rounding them up into “Amnesty Centers,” and Lyle had started disguising himself to stay free: dyed hair, a fake mustache, a hat and gloves, even a makeshift fat suit with extra bulk around his midsection. Anything to break up his profile and distinguish him from the thousands of other Lyles that seemed to be coming out of the woodwork. There were at least five Lyles on the platform now, probably headed into Manhattan to turn themselves in. What will happen to them? he wondered. Should I just go with them, and stop running? What will they do when they find out I’m the real Lyle? Kill me, or imprison me, or force me to make more ReBirth?
Maybe they won’t even care. That thought scared Lyle more than any of the others.
When Lyle had first gone into hiding, it was just to get away from Ibis, and from the police, and from everyone else who wanted to capture him. Then he’d stayed in hiding as some kind of self-styled Robin Hood, bringing ReBirth to the terminally ill, but that was more of an illusion that anything else; he’d helped, what, five people? Six? He had no resources, and all his efforts to find more had led to dead ends. Now he was hiding simply to hide. Because continuing on one path was easier than finding a new one.
But now …
Now, a Lyle with Down syndrome changed everything. For months he’d been trying to figure out how ReBirth did what it did, and here was the best lead he’d ever had: an anomaly. A corner case in which the process didn’t work the same way it had in every other. Figuring out why ReBirth didn’t work right with this man might help him to figure out what “working right” meant.
Lyle finished his study of the platform, then studied it again, just in case. There didn’t seem to be anybody waiting to jump out and grab him. He leaned away from his pillar and walked toward the couple. Down syndrome is a genetic disorder, he thought, growing more scientifically excited as he approached them. Maybe ReBirth reacts differently to that? But it’s cured all the congenital disorders they’ve tried it on before—why not this one?
