He stopped in front of the couple. “Excuse me, sir.”
The Lyle stared at him a moment, then smiled broadly and held out his hand. Lyle shook it.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked. Her attitude was clipped and cold, her voice strained and her eyes bloodshot. Lyle imagined she’d spent a lot of time recently worried and crying, which seemed appropriate. He kept his own voice as soft and nonconfrontational as possible.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Lyle, “but I’m a doctor, and I couldn’t help but notice this man’s condition. Please, may I ask you: did he have Down syndrome before he used ReBirth?”
“I really don’t want to talk about this,” said the woman.
“I didn’t,” said the man. He had a slight lisp. “It started five weeks ago. A bad dose.”
“A bad dose,” Lyle mused, looking at the other Lyle’s face: his own face, but with the classic characteristics of Down syndrome. Almond-shaped eyes, a slightly flat nose, smaller ears than normal. The eyes, interestingly, showed the typical Lyle heterochromia, a patch of light in a darker iris, but here it was multiplied into a dozen or more small spots. Lyle didn’t know what would cause something like that. He searched his memory for what little he knew about the causes of Down syndrome, but it was far from his area of expertise.
“We’re going to the Amnesty Center,” said the woman. “Do you think they can change him back?”
“Have you tried a dose of other lotion?” asked Lyle. “From a different source?”
“Of course,” said the woman, “we’ve tried everything, but it never goes away.”
Lyle frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. How many doses has he used?”
“Before or after the Down syndrome?”
Lyle froze for half a second. “He used other doses of ReBirth before the bad one?”
“I was an actor,” said the man.
The woman nodded. “He kept changing for different roles. The fourth dose turned out to be Lyle Fontanelle, so we tried a fifth, hoping it could reverse it, but this time it was a Lyle with Down syndrome. I didn’t think that was possible.” Her eyes were wide and pleading. “Please say you can help him.”
Lyle’s mind reeled: five doses of ReBirth in three months, and who knows how many since then. There wouldn’t even be time for one to finish before the next started in. Kerry had done something similar, but …
“Do you think it’s because we stacked Lyle on Lyle?” she asked.
“I don’t think that’s it,” said Lyle. He’d been overwritten with his own DNA at least once, and it hadn’t done anything. The wheels were turning, though, and he had his own theory about what had happened. It wasn’t going to make her feel any better. “I don’t think it was a bad dose, either.”
The woman grew tenser, her mouth pinched in worry. “What happened?”
Down syndrome is a chromosomal disorder, he thought. A human being is supposed to have forty-six chromosomes in twenty-three pairs, but a person with Down syndrome has an extra in pair twenty-one. Three chromosomes instead of two. If this man had six different genomes all warring for control of his body, sooner or later something was bound to go wrong. The signals got crossed, or confused; maybe the lotions even attacked each other. The plasmids in the lotion were designed to unroll and mimic DNA long enough to write portions of themselves onto the host DNA—if one bit of ReBirth got to another bit of ReBirth halfway through this process, rewriting not just the host’s genetic code but the competing rewriter itself.… He swallowed. There’s no telling what could happen if they started doing that.
“What happened?” she asked again.
Lyle looked at her, speechless. There were dozens of chromosomal disorders, and so many ways for the chromosomes to become disordered: inversions, insertions, translocations. The list went on and on. If ReBirth can do this, and if ReBirth is even half as aggressive as it seems to be, this could mean the end of …
… of human genetics.
“Please, sir,” the woman sobbed, “tell me what I can do for him!”
Lyle looked up sharply, shocked back into the real world. “Don’t take him to the Amnesty Center.”
“But they can help him—”
“They can’t help anyone,” said Lyle. “It’s a scam.” He pulled on his fake mustache, tearing it off in one long, painful tug. “I’m just like you, okay? And I’m trying to help you. Take your husband to the Amnesty Center and he will spend months or years in what is essentially an underfunded prison camp; in his condition he’ll probably die in there.” Lyle dug in his pocket for cash, some of the hundred thousand he’d stolen from Kerry, and handed her a wad of thousands. “You want my advice, go to the other side of this platform, take the first outbound train that comes along, and get as far away from civilization as you can. Rent a room on a fishing island or something; get away, stay hidden, and wait it out.”
The woman stared at the money.
“Wait what out?”
If this means what I think it means … Lyle shook his head. “The end of the world.”
47
Sunday, October 14
8:03 P.M.
Flushing, Queens
61 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Lyle returned to his grandmother’s place only to find himself already there, dressed in a pink floral nightgown and dead in his grandmother’s bed.
“Grandma?”
The dead Lyle’s hair still held the chemicals from the old woman’s last perm—faint wisps of curly, snow-white hair with over nearly half a centimeter of strong brown growth at the scalp. The room smelled of death and excrement. The intense nutrient needs of the transformation had apparently been too much for her ancient body to handle.
Lyle covered her with another sheet from the closet, and retreated to the living room to try to figure out his next move. He could place an anonymous call, but to who? The country’s infrastructure was falling apart; electricity was still turned on, and water and gas were still flowing through the pipes, but the society that used those staples was crumbling. There were millions of ReBirth cases in the country; a massive percentage of them, especially in New York, were Lyles, and the military was scouring the streets for every Lyle they could find. More Down syndrome cases had cropped up, and leukemia and other cancers, all generated spontaneously by the lotion. Almost no one dared to use the lotion, and yet more clones—almost all of them Lyles—were surfacing every day. Nobody knew where they were coming from.