“We will give them our gifts, as well,” said Chirt, and the People picked up their spears and their broad leaf platters of meat, both mouse and insect. They crept out of the bushes, out of the tall grass, and onto the sand—dozens now, nearly a hundred. The full group of the People. The Gods were touching each other, in what Ket was almost convinced was a kiss, and they didn’t see the People until they were only a few short hops away.
The Gods screamed and moved back. They babbled, and their voices were loud, but Ket couldn’t understand them.
“They can’t speak,” said Tsit. “They can’t be smarter than us if they can’t even speak.”
“Maybe their language is greater,” said Ket, “like their objects are greater.” But he had his doubts. As confusing as the words were, the feeling seemed clear; he could hear it in their voices, and see it in their eyes.
They were afraid.
“A God should not be afraid,” said Chirt.
The larger God was clutching a giant spear, but a strange one; instead of tapering to a sharp point it flattened into a broad, flat leaf. Ket wondered what type of creature the Gods must hunt to need a spear so powerful. Tsit hopped closer, his eyes narrowed and suspicious, his spear held at the ready. The darker God—the female, he thought—hid behind the lighter one, and the male brought its spear down on Tsit with a great rush of wind. Wet sand flew. Ket had never seen such strength.
The God raised the spear. Tsit was a bloody mess in the crater it had made.
“These are not Gods,” said Ket, shocked at the attack. “They are not great.” He looked back at the People behind him, saw the fear in their eyes. The rage. “Animals have died before, and insects, but never the People. They have not brought us gifts, but death.” He turned back to the Gods. “They are afraid. They have great things, but they are not great. We would be better Gods than these!” He looked at the People and roared in righteous anger. “We will take their gifts! We will eat their meat! And we will become new Gods!”
The creatures screamed, and the People charged.
Acknowledgments
I started writing this book in early 2010, when I was working on a different book and got bored with it and decided to watch TV instead. The 6th Day was on, and it came to a scene where Schwarzenegger’s character comes home and sees himself through the window of his house, talking to his wife and playing with his kids, and he is suddenly and irrevocably faced with the reality that he is not unique. That the fundamental individuality of each human being, one of the foundational tenets of our entire way of life, is no longer true. He is not the only him, and he never will be again. The movie is okay, but that scene hit me like I’ve rarely been hit before. I dropped my other project then and there, and started working on Extreme Makeover: Apocalypse Edition.
The first person I should thank, then, is Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with Cormac and Marianne Wibberley. I’ve never met any of you, but you inspired me when I needed it. The next person I should thank is not so much a person as the entire health and beauty industry, in which I worked for eight long years between college and full-time authorhood. I knew that I wanted to write about cloning, see, but I also knew that I wanted to write something new about cloning, and that meant combining it with a branch of science no one had ever really combined it with before. And what branch of science did I have eight long years of experience writing about? Health and beauty, baby. I came up with the idea of a hand lotion that overwrites your DNA right then and there, sitting on the couch during a commercial break, and I never looked back. Thanks, vast array of heartless beauty companies. I couldn’t have done this without you.
Once I had the core concept, the help just poured in from every side. I told my writing group about it and they practically exploded with amazing ideas. Brandon and Emily Sanderson, Karen and Peter Ahlstrom, Ben and Danielle Olsen, Alan Layton, Ethan Skarstedt, Kaylynn Zobell: you’re the best. I told Howard Tayler about it and he extemporized a microbiological backstory on the spot; I told my wife, Dawn Wells, and she gave me an amazing list of horrific ways in which the technology could go wildly and amazingly wrong. At this point I knew I needed to do some actual research, so I talked to one of the health and beauty industry lawyers I used to work with, Allen Davis, and picked his brain about each and every one of those doomsday scenarios: if X thing existed, and Y thing happened, what would be the repercussions? How would the company react? How would the company defend itself? Everything I got wrong in this novel is 100 percent my fault, but everything I got right has its origins in one of these and many other conversations with people who are smarter than I am. Thanks to all of you.
At some point in every creative project, life inevitably intervenes. Extreme Makeover was bigger and weirder and more ambitious than anything I’d ever written before, and as such, it kept getting back-burnered while I worked on other projects that could actually pay the bills. I wrote the Partials Sequence, and a new John Cleaver novel, and started the Mirador series, and moved to Germany, and had two more kids, and did a thousand other things that ate up all of my time, but whenever I had a free minute or two I’d come back to Extreme Makeover and write another chapter or scene or paragraph. When I finally finished the book, it was wonderful and glorious and messy and unfocused and enormous, but my amazing editor, Whitney Ross, performed the single most amazing feat of long-form editing I have ever personally witnessed, and together we chopped that book by more than 35 percent—that’s almost 70,000 words cut, which is more words than my first novel had all by itself. Whitney and the rest of the Tor team did an amazing job, and deserve all the thanks I can give them: Amy Stapp, Alexis Saarela, Patty Garcia, Irene Gallo, and a ton of other people behind the scenes. I must also thank, as always, my incredible agent, Sara Crowe, for being incredible. She’s the best business partner I could ever ask for.
Thank you to JD Luckesen and Mike Woolf for bringing me fried chicken.
Last but not least: one of the themes I tried to focus on in this book was the idea that nobody is unique, and that doppelgängers appear everywhere, and that certain ideas and actions and names, and even people, will repeat themselves endlessly throughout our lives. Where common author wisdom tells you to make your character names unique and identifiable, I made them confusingly similar on purpose; when I needed an actor for my main character to try to impersonate, I chose Dan Wells because how awesome is that? And thus it is only fitting that, six years after I created the blond twenty-something intern in the book, I would end up hiring a blond twenty-something assistant in real life. I promise it’s not her. Thank you, Kenna Blaylock, for helping to get this book off the ground. I’m sorry you got shot to death by future chimpanzees on the roof of the UN building.
And thank you to you for reading. This is my Gotterdammerung, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we all enjoyed bringing it to you.
TOR BOOKS BY DAN WELLS
About the Author
DAN WELLS grew up in Utah, spent a few years in Mexico, and now lives in Germany with his wife and children. He is the author of the critically acclaimed John Wayne Cleaver series, The Hollow City, and the popular Partials Sequence of young adult books.
Visit him at: www.thedanwells.com. Or sign up for email updates here.
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