“Hey, come here, check this,” Allyson called to them. While Jack went over the planned break-in with Kayla, Allyson had flipped on the TV. Something she was watching had her leaning forward on the futon, riveted.
Jack and Kayla joined her and they, too, were instantly fascinated. They were watching the CNN5 channel, which was all news, twenty-four hours a day.
Kayla was on the screen — but it was the fake Kayla from the billboards. She was as neatly turned out as ever in a bright pink sweater, matching short skirt, and high boots. Her bobbed hair shone and bounced as if she were in a shampoo commercial. Her silver lipstick and matching eye shadow were perfect.
Zekeal Morrelle stood beside her, appearing as handsome and confident as ever. Kayla wondered why he kept the eye patch. Surely Global-1 could have provided him with a new eye. He probably just likes the way it looks, she thought disdainfully.
She didn’t think about him for long, though. She was more interested in the smiling young woman beside him — her clone, or one of them, anyway. Although identical to her in so many ways, this girl seemed completely different, so conventional and so docile. She was working on the Tattoo Gen Public Murals Program, so she probably had the same artistic ability as Kayla, Kendra, and Kara. Kayla figured the palm-reader clone would have it, too.
Yet despite their sameness, the lives they’d led had made them so different. With a chill, Kayla also remembered the Gene Enhancement/Manipulation Program file. Had GlobalHelix also had a hand in making them different?
Zekeal and the clone were talking to a crowd, though their voices weren’t yet audible. The voice-over announcer spoke cheerily, “Tattoo Gen has sent two of its most high-profile and popular spokespeople on a cross-country book tour to promote their new book, The Bar Code Way to Happiness. In it, Zekeal Morrelle tells the fascinating story of his time as an undercover agent for Tattoo Gen. But what is perhaps most appealing here is the emergence of a love story between Zekeal and bar code resister Kayla Marie Reed. Kayla was fleeing police and headed to the Adirondack Mountains to join other resisters when Zekeal went in search of her and convinced her to come home and get the bar code tattoo.”
Kayla once again was struck with the eerie sensation that she was looking at what her own life could have been if it had taken an alternate path. It was true that Zekeal had come to the mountains to try to persuade her to return with him and get the bar code tattoo. But in real life, she had refused. She’d run and hid from him until he gave up trying to find her.
What she was seeing now was what would have happened if she had given in to him.
“I wonder if that girl even knows she’s a clone,” Jack said.
“She knows,” Kayla replied. “She talks about things that happened to me, not to her. Tattoo Gen has recruited her to play this part.”
The voice-over stopped and the camera closed in on Zekeal and the fake Kayla Marie Reed. Zekeal began promoting the book as a biography and as a guide to achieving a sense of belonging in society by being bar-coded.
The reporters in the audience began to ask questions. Zekeal answered them all smoothly until someone addressed one to the fake Kayla: “Kayla, do you feel you were wrong to give up your principles for love?”
“What’s she going to say to that?” Allyson asked. She clicked the RECORD button on the remote. “I’m saving this,” she said.
“I don’t … uh, that’s not what I did. I …” Fake Kayla rubbed her eye, which appeared to be irritated. Flustered, she looked to Zekeal for help.
“She didn’t give up her principles. I simply helped her clarify what —”
“Let her talk!” someone from the audience shouted.
Fake Kayla began rubbing the other eye with her knuckles.
“She’s crying,” Kayla said.
With red eyes, the Kayla clone turned to Zekeal. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said, a sob in her voice. “It’s a lie, and I won’t have anything more to do with it.”
Zekeal realized the microphones were picking up her words. “She’s overwrought. It’s been a tiring tour,” he tried to cover.
“No!” fake Kayla cried. “I want to tell the truth.”
Zekeal looked sharply at someone off camera and the screen instantly went blank. In a second, the broadcast was back in the news studio with the anchorwoman. David Young’s face appeared on the screen behind her.
“In other news, Decode leader David Young remains on suicide watch. He has refused to take the Propeace prescribed for him. He also continues to refuse to leave his jail cell until the last of the hundred protesters still being held in jail have been freed. Global-1 doctors feel that the incarceration is exacerbating Senator Young’s condition and urge him to leave.
“Ambrose Young, father of David Young, obtained a court order enabling him to have a webcam installed in his son’s cell. ‘I want to make sure those bastards at Global-1 don’t hurt my son when no one is looking. I or one of my lawyers will now be looking every second.’”
Allyson turned off the TV, and the three of them sat, stunned. Things were getting even more out of control.
They had to do something about it.
They activated their plan later that night.
It started with Allyson banging on the soda machine in the lobby of the bio/infometrics building where she did her research. “My bar code won’t scan on this stupid thing!” she complained loudly. She kicked the machine again.
“Hang on there,” the guard at the front desk warned sternly. “Calm down.”
“I won’t calm down. I just want some damn soda!” she said, dealing the machine another violent blow. “What good is a bar code tattoo if it doesn’t even work on a soda machine?”
“The machine was working before,” the guard said, coming over to inspect it. “Are you sure you have sufficient funds in your account?”
While Allyson distracted the guard, Kayla and Jack darted past the momentarily abandoned front desk. They took the emergency stairs to the third floor so that the guard wouldn’t notice any activity in the elevator. Once there, they ran to unlock the window that led onto a fire escape at the back of the building. A few minutes later, Allyson climbed in through that window, breathing heavily from the exertion. “I’m going to start exercising,” she vowed.
Once she had recovered, she unlocked the facility but didn’t dare turn on the light. Using a flashlight, she loaded the e-chip into the infometric computer that had been handling related files. She took the second chip, which she’d taped to the underside of a desk drawer, and fed it, too, into the computer. “Come on, Helen,” she urged it. “Show us what kind of super hacking beauty you really are. Launch a thousand ships for us.”
The computer ran through the first half of the program before it came to the subfiles. Then it began to whir, a sound that made Kayla uneasy. Was something going wrong?
“It’s trying alternate ways in,” Allyson explained, although she, too, seemed concerned. “It’ll keep trying until it finds the one that works.”
A silky, feminine robotic voice made Kayla jump and yelp in surprise. “Retinal recognition required,” the computer’s audio speaker reported. “Provide scan.”
Allyson cursed, throwing her arms out in frustration.
“These computers are sucking in info from everywhere, right?” Jack checked with Allyson.
“Right,” she confirmed.
“It must be indexing it somehow. How do I access its search engine?” Allyson directed him to a notebook-size unit on a nearby table. It took him close to a half hour, but finally, he stepped back from the computer and smiled. “I am so good!” he boasted. “Jack the hack, that’s me.”
“What did you do?” Allyson asked.
“I merely searched until I found the GlobalHelix file of employees with computer file clearance. Then I cross-referenced it with their personnel files and broke into them to get coded copies of their eye scans, which, interestingly, are recorded in bar code form. I sent this info over to our infometric friend, Helen of Troy. With any luck she should be getting it any second now.”
As if Helen of Troy was acting on his command, a printer buzzed to life, rapidly sending out page after page of material.
Even female computers can’t resist him, Kayla thought, smiling inwardly.
Allyson began collecting the papers, reading them with darting eye movements. A crease in her brow deepened as she went. “I don’t believe it,” she murmured, looking up from her stack of papers. “Take a look at this.”
HIGHLY CLASSIFIED
GlobalHelix Population Behavior Control by Nanotechnology
Purpose:
The purpose of the GlobalHelix Population Behavior Control by Nanotechnology program is threefold:
- To create an orderly global community free of illness and dissent.
- To rid the world of those individuals promoting illness and/or dissent and create the necessary serving class of the genetically inferior.
- To identify the mentally and physically strong so as to create a community of cloned persons healthy enough to be involved in the next phase for a planned posthuman future free of disease, aging, and even death, a future of genetically enhanced humans.
See ancillary material below to learn about preliminary trials.
The Program
- Propeace12 Release
Nanomachinery will be capable of a steady, timed release of this amplified version of Propeace. The maximized serotonin-reuptake pharmaceutical can keep patients in a tranquil state indefinitely with few side effects. The most common side effect is keratoconjunctivitis sicca. This application is recommended for patients with dissident or rebellious tendencies, as indicated in their bar codes, who have not actively engaged in antisocial behavior. It effectively precludes these activities from being initiated by the patient.
- Vagus Nerve Stimulator Release
Nanomachinery will be able to overstimulate the vagus nerve, which has wide connections throughout the brain, with timed electric pulses, thereby inducing a severely depressive state in the patient. At certain low levels this stimulation can offer relief of depression, but at higher levels of activation it creates anxiety and agitation. Patients in this state lack initiative and are rendered inactive. Reported side effects include a constricting pain in the back of the throat, hoarseness, and other odd inflections to the voice. A quiver in pronouncing the l sound has been particularly noted in patients speaking Romance- and Germanic-based languages. In some case studies the patient was rendered unable to speak at all.
This application is recommended to patients who are in direct and open rebellion against government directives. Failure to willingly comply with bar code tattoo legislation 16661 constitutes such an infraction of the law and warrants this penalty. Algorithm required for release — highest classification.
- Vagus Nerve Stimulator Intensified Release
Certain patients have been shown to be resistant to the course of treatment indicated above, persisting in their antisocial behavior. In this event, intensification is recommended, with an amplified and more frequent pulse. In 90 percent of cases, suicidal tendencies arise. Without adequate intervention, an attempt will be made. (See below for data on preliminary trial cases.)
- BC12 Virus Release
Nanomachinery is able to mimic known viruses. The bar code 12 virus (BC12) has been developed as a fail-safe in the event that the population behavior control methods described above incur unwanted notice. A change of algorithm is all that is required to switch from vagus nerve stimulation to virus release. Algorithm required — highest classification.
Conclusion
The bar code tattoo program has been highly effective. During the extraction of the mandatory blood sample, self-replicating nanotechnology was injected into the bloodstreams of persons receiving the bar code tattoo. These molecular-size computers can be activated by codes generated from the central GlobalHelix computer. Each of the strategies discussed above is activated by its own algorithm. By associating the genetic maps recorded in the bar code tattoo with specific algorithms targeted at corresponding individuals, each citizen can be controlled in accordance with his or her exhibited behaviors. A Global-1 caseworker will monitor the movements of approximately 100 patients each. Recommendations will be made on a biannual basis as to which algorithm will be activated in each case.
Ancillary Materials
- Program Activation Dates
Phase I: Trial period. Selected experimental subjects only. Begins September 1, 2024.
Phase II: Forcibly tattooed subjects only. Political and criminal prisoners. Begins October 15, 2025.
Phase III: General population behavior activation. Pending success of phases I and II. Projected start date: January 1, 2026.
For more information on early trial results, see files entitled:
- Genetic Enhancement/Manipulation Program: Donor Kathryn Marie Reed
- Production of Identical Sextuplet Humans During the First Cell Cycle of Nuclear DNA Transfer
- (Subfile) Offspring of Kathryn Marie Reed:
- As involved in Population Behavior Control Program (JR-1)
- As involved in Genetic Enhancement/Manipulation Program (KM-1-6)