| |
14:13 Monday 15 March 2077
Michelle looked out of the window at the deep blue sea, the waves appearing motionless thousands of feet beneath her. Zafar was reading a Harry Potter novel on his e-reader. His children were very fond of the novels and he’d downloaded a copy of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ for himself. He knew that it was a children’s book but that didn’t mean that adults shouldn’t enjoy the stories too. Douglas was watching Blade Runner for the umpteenth time, it being one of his all-time favourite films. Michelle had a paperback copy of Mark Haddon’s ‘The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time’ on her lap but she couldn’t concentrate on the story – she had far too much on her mind.
As the Sky Runner executive jet raced across the sky, it occurred to her that her father had made the same journey nearly eight years previously (although he had been unconscious for the whole journey). She, however, as a highly trusted member of One Life, was free to enjoy the flight awake. Nobody on the ground was aware of the presence of the aircraft, its VACS system removing all trace of its existence. It didn’t even have a radar presence.
The plane landing was so smooth that if Michelle hadn’t seen the ground rushing to meet the undercarriage, she would have sworn that they were still airborne. Two women, one brunette and one blonde, were waiting for the passengers on the tarmac. Douglas stepped off the plane and gave them both a hug.
“Michelle, these are my daughters, Anita and Andrea. They’ll take you to your room so you can freshen up and have something to eat before I show you around.”
Michelle thanked Douglas and was led away by the two women to her quarters. As she entered the room, and Anita gave her a guided tour of the room’s features, she couldn’t help but wonder what Maurice had made of everything.
Unlike her father, Michelle had the highest level of security clearance and was not confined to her quarters. She had free access to almost all parts of the complex, which looked like, and indeed was, a high end resort with all the features that one would associate with such a place. She knew that she was there on business but she wasn’t expected to see Douglas again until eight o’clock the following morning so she may as well take advantage of the facilities. She ordered a white bikini from the interactive menu on the main control panel and three minutes later Andrea arrived at the door with a pristine white bikini and a matching beach towel. Michelle thanked her and, once Andrea had left, peeled off her jeans and the rest of her clothes before slipping into the bikini. She picked up the towel and stepped outside where she saw a self-drive buggy awaiting. As she approached a disembodied voice spoke to her from the vehicle.
“Good afternoon Michelle. My name is Bob the Buggy and it’s my pleasure to take you to wherever you wish to go. What is your destination or activity, please? I can take you anywhere. I am connected to a private Automatrix system. I can take you anywhere. Where would you like to go?”
Michelle was used to using self-drive cabs back home but had never seen such a polite vehicle before.
“I want to go swimming. I need to go to a swimming pool.”
“Certainly Michelle. Which pool would you like? I can offer you the jungle pool. It’s completely safe and, as the name suggests, is a sparkling lagoon buried deep in the surrounding jungle. Or you can swim in the beach pool which is surrounded by tropical palm trees and the latest holographic technology gives the impression that you are actually at the beach. Unfortunately, security precautions mean that you can’t go to the island’s actual beaches – which I assure you are also really beautiful – but you would never guess that you were swimming in a pool if I hadn’t told you.”
The jungle pool sounded most intriguing. She’d been to the beach many times but had never swum in a jungle lagoon before.
“I’ll go to the jungle pool please.”
“A wise choice Michelle.”
Ten minutes later Bob the Buggy pulled up at the edge of what appeared to be a little piece of paradise. Bob hadn’t said anything during the journey but now that they had arrived at their destination he was programmed to give more instructions.
“Michelle. We have arrived. In the glove compartment, you will find a wristband. This wristband contains the latest Smart technology and will give you complete control of your environment. You can use it to screen the pool from prying eyes so that you can swim naked if you so wish. It’s your choice. I have marked the pool as occupied so you won’t be disturbed. There are also two environment settings, tranquility and adventure. In addition, there is an emergency button. If you find yourself in trouble for any reason, two rescue drones will be despatched immediately to aid you. You are in absolutely no danger. In addition, I shall remain here at the water’s edge ready to return you to your quarters at any time. I shall, of course, deactivate my cameras to allow you your privacy.”
With that last comment, Bob switched off his cameras and went into sleep mode. Michelle looked at the lagoon before her. It truly was an idyllic setting with vibrant colourful flora surrounding it. At one end of the lagoon was a beautiful waterfall, its crystal clear water cascading down a cliff face and bouncing off the rocks at its base. At the other end were half a dozen zebras and a giraffe quenching their thirst and frolicking in the water. If Michelle had thought about it, she may have considered it odd that creatures that prefer open woodland, scrub, and grassland would be living in dense jungle conditions, but she was too enchanted by her surroundings to bother analysing them. Even though she was wearing a bikini, she was glad that Bob had deactivated his cameras – she wanted to relax, not worry about peeping toms in a remote control room.
After ten minutes of lazing and playing around in the water, she looked at her wristband. Curiosity was starting to get the better of her and she wondered what would happen if she changed the environment setting to adventure. Bob had said that she was in no danger so surely it couldn’t do any harm to press it and see? She moved her finger to press the button and then quickly withdrew it. She was in the centre of the lagoon, about a hundred metres from shore, but she was a strong swimmer. Plus, if worse came to worse there was always the emergency button available.
She moved her finger towards the button again but this time she pressed it. She wasn’t sure what to expect but was disappointed that three minutes later nothing had happened. Suddenly she was aware of a shadow moving through the water in her direction. She thought that she had imagined it at first, thinking that her peripheral vision was deluding her. Then she heard the rippling of water as something broke the surface of the water. Now she could see a long armour-plated snout and a pair of beady eyes approaching her at a fast rate of knots. Instinct had already taken over her body and she started swimming to the shore as quickly as she could. The creature was gaining on her. She tried to find extra speed but the animal had accelerated and was closing the gap. Trying to outswim it was useless. She tried to remember what nature documentaries had said to do if under attack by a crocodile but her mind had gone blank. It was too late. She saw the lifeless eyes hone in on her and the fearsome jaws opened wide, eager to take a bite of her arm. The jaws went to clamp down on her arm and Michelle closed her eyes in preparation for the pain that was to come.
But there was no pain. The jaws of the crocodile passed straight through her limb just as one would expect of a hologram.
Bob flashed his lights and Michelle swam to where the buggy was waiting. If the vehicle could have laughed it would have done.
“Nobody can resist pressing that button.”
“Shut up Bob. Just take me back to my room, please.”
“Yes, Milady.”
An hour later, Anita and Andrea arrived at her room, ready to take her to see the project that Douglas had spoken about earlier that morning. She was taken along a jungle path until the three met up with Douglas and Zafar, waiting in front of a very large and lush tropical tree.
She suddenly noticed that there was a door in the trunk of the tree, which opened as she approached the two men. She couldn’t stop herself from commenting on the bizarre situation.
“This is all very Walt Disney, Douglas. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but it’s a bit enchanted forest, isn’t it?”
Douglas laughed as they entered an elevator.
“I know what you mean Michelle, but it’s actually designed to be sympathetic to the natural environment. There are lots of entrances like this and if they were just metallic elevator housings, well, that would look so ugly.”
The view that met Michelle’s eyes when the elevator doors swished open again was a stark contrast to the beauty that she had experienced above ground. The environment underground was disturbingly clinical. Everything was ordered, nothing was randomly placed. There was no attempt to decorate the walls of the main circular chamber, an area ringed by several large doors, save for several large monitor screens that did nothing for the aesthetic of the place. Dozens of white-coated officials dashed around the facility, tablets in hand, giving out instructions. Others appeared to be technicians and medical staff, putting those instructions into action.
The lighting was subdued in the immediate vicinity of the elevator but the intensity of the light gradually increased as the small group walked deeper into the research complex, allowing the visitors’ eyes to gently become accustomed to the new environment. Douglas led the way, followed by Zafar and Michelle, who was finding it difficult to take in all that she could see around her. Nobody was just chatting for chatting’s sake; there was a low hum of conversation but the content appeared to be all work related.
Douglas broke the silence of his small group.
“This is the hub and what I like to think of as the birth-place – you’ll see how apt that analogy is shortly – of the Recarn solution. Michelle, we are on the verge of making history. We are on the verge of solving the Recarn problem once and for all.”
Michelle was intrigued as Douglas led her towards a 2 metre diameter white painted circle in the middle of the chamber. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but none of the people milling around the area had encroached upon the circle; in fact, they seemed to avoid it like the plague.
“This is actually Illuminati technology. We stole it from them. No point in re-inventing the wheel when this is so effective. Now, spread your legs a little, please.”
A blue beam of light dropped from the ceiling and bathed Michelle in its glow.
“The light checks for weapons and any communicable diseases, whilst simultaneously performing a DNA security check, through drawing six miniscule samples from random points of your body. It’s perfectly harmless – you won’t even notice it happening.”
Once all three had been security-checked by the blue light, Douglas led Michelle through a door. The door had no markings that differentiated it from any other door in the place. Douglas looked at his antique Rotary wristwatch.
“I’ll leave you in Zafar’s capable hands, Michelle. It’s time for my morning juice. I think I’ll have acerole juice this morning. I do love the variety of fruit that the tropical climate encourages.”
Now, she was alone with Zafar. She felt more comfortable with him; she had known and worked with Zafar for years. Douglas was an entirely different kettle of fish. Although he had tried to put her at ease, she had still felt a little intimidated by him. It was an alien feeling for her.
She looked around the room and saw several people, both men and women, in the process of having their stem cells harvested. She looked at the face of one of the donors, a young woman in her early twenties, and winced as the needle entered the woman’s pelvic bone and began to suck out the bone marrow that contained the stem cells. The heavily sedated woman appeared nonchalant, the sensation being little more irritating than a mosquito bite, but to Michelle, it looked to be a very painful procedure.
“Is this what it looks like, Zafar?
“Yes, it is. We’re harvesting stem cells. But don’t worry. The cell donors are all volunteers. Nobody is forced to donate. Each and every one of them believes in the solution and is pleased to participate, knowing that they are doing so for the greater good.”
“But what are they harvesting the cells for?”
It was common practice to use stem cells for growing replacement parts for humans, for rich humans anyway. Cloning technology had come on in leaps and bounds since the mid nineteen-nineties when Dolly the sheep had become the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. The discomfort of the harvesting process was a small price to pay for having an on-demand supply of component parts that were 100% compatible with one’s body. And those who didn’t want to use a stem cell from their own body found it much easier to find suitable donors thanks to much improved screening processes. Organ rejection had become almost non-existent.
Michelle knew that there were still ethical hurdles to overcome regarding cloning a complete human. She knew it existed of course. She had first-hand experience of meeting human clones; firstly, there was Trudi 001, the prototype clone that she had taken from the Illuminati laboratories, and more recently there was Philippa, a clone that she had met in much more sinister circumstances, when she had temporarily replaced Michelle’s sister, Caitlin. But Michelle had overcome her initial anger when Philippa had shown her true colours and proved herself to be a good person, a good human being. Indeed, Philippa was now a trusted member of One Life, fighting the very people who had created her.
Caitlin, on the other hand, had taken much longer to come around to the fact that clones were people too. Indeed, she had almost killed her clone and only just stopped herself at the last minute. But now she had finally banished her prejudices and saw Philippa as another human being, not just a factory-produced facsimile of herself.
Michelle was almost certain that she knew the answer to her question but Zafar confirmed it.
“We’re producing human clones.”
“But why?”
“We don’t have time to go through the normal processes of clinical testing. We simply can’t afford to waste years by following normal clinical trial methodology. We don’t have the luxury of time to use computer modelling and then test the product on normal humans, in order to discover if the product is safe or not. The Recarn problem is here. It’s now. And if we don’t do something about it now, it will only get worse. The Illuminati have had centuries during which they have abused their Recarn mutation; that’s what it is, a mutation. They have their New World Order. They dominate us. They oppress us. They’re a cancer on the planet.”
It was quite a shock to Michelle to hear Zafar speaking so passionately and vehemently about Recarns. She knew that he was a very senior figure in the resistance movement, but he usually sounded so calm and controlled. Of course, she agreed with the idea of returning to the days when humanity thought it lived one life and one life only, even though she knew that it was impossible to not know about reincarnation. Thanks to the 2015 Revelation, the world knew that reincarnation was a truth. Mankind could never forget that. And, although she fought for One Life, her fight was really against the Illuminati.
“Michelle, we need to rid this planet of Recarns. There are two ways we can do this. We could kill them all, but will it solve the problem? Of course not, they simply reincarnate in another body, complete with past life memories. That’s an absolute waste of fucking time.”
Michelle had never heard Zafar swear before. Not once. This was a Zafar that she had never seen.
“Plus we’d be killing millions of innocent people, people who have done nothing wrong, just because they have a mutation. That would be wrong. The only way to get rid of Recarns is to NOT kill them but change the physiology of their brains. We know where the problem lies. Their brains have mutated, the part of the brain that deals with memories. Most of us don’t have this mutation. Our memories act like the RAM memory in a computer. It’s wiped clean when we’ve finished using it. We die. We reincarnate. Of course we do. But we start again with no memories, ready to learn and experience new things. Occasionally a small residual memory may slip through – think déjà-vu – but it’s nothing to worry about. So we need another solution. And that’s where the Product comes in.
“We need a way to switch off the gene that creates and maintains the mutation, but we need it now. That’s where the clones come in. Thanks to the advances in cloning that the Illuminati made we can create a never ending line of subjects for experimentation. And, remember, the donors are all volunteers.”
“And they’re all Recarns?”
“Some have to be. But some aren’t. We have to ensure that the Product only does what we want it to. 95% of people aren’t Recarns and we need to make sure that there are no adverse effects that will harm or even kill off the very people that we’re trying to help.”
What she was hearing didn’t sit too well with Michelle, but she said nothing. She believed that clones were people too. She had said as much to her sister, when Caitlin had voiced her prejudices against human clones, considering them to be no more than organic robots. It certainly didn’t seem right to be breeding clones for experimentation. Zafar kept talking about the Product. What was the Product?
“What exactly is the Product, Zafar?”
“The Product is a virus, a virus that will destroy that part of the brain that stores past memories. We have to be sure of many things. We have to be certain that it targets only the specific part of the brain that we want it to. We have to be certain that it doesn’t kill Recarns. We have to be certain that it doesn’t kill non Recarns either. We’re not mass murderers.”
“But clones need souls.”
“We get souls from terminally ill patients. They’re desperate to help us. They want to be rid of their pain and suffering and start a new life, both Recarns and non Recarns. There are Recarns who see their ‘gift’ as a curse. Imagine that you had suffered continual pain during your life or died a horrific death. Imagine being unable to forget. Imagine not being able to erase the memory of what happened to you in another life.”
Michelle knew that One Life had soul transference technology; they’d used it on Marcus when they had transferred his soul to one of the twins that Janice Hillary had been carrying in her womb. But it didn’t feel right. One Life was supposed to be the good guy, and here they were doing exactly the same thing that the Illuminati had done.
“I can see you’re struggling to come to grips with all this, Michelle. It’s a lot to take in. But it’s for the best.”
Michelle said little more, whilst Zafar showed her the rest of the operation. She saw the cloning process, from start to finish, she saw the research biologists creating various strains of the virus in their laboratories, she saw the viruses being applied to the adult clones and their responses to the exposure being monitored and recorded. It really was a lot to absorb. Zafar was talking about biological warfare. But biological warfare could never be right, could it? History was littered with examples, examples that had horrified later generations; the use of smallpox against Native Americans, the use of bubonic plague by the Japanese in World War Two, and the use of anthrax as a terrorist weapon to name but a few. Surely biological warfare was always wrong. It had to be. Didn’t it? But if Zafar was right, and nobody would be harmed, nobody would suffer pain, nobody would die because of it, was it necessarily wrong just because it could be labelled a biological weapon?
One thing that she hadn’t considered until she was faced with the visual evidence was that testing on children would be necessary. One Life scientists had perfected the manipulation of the growth hormones and could arrest or accelerate growth at will. Michelle witnessed experiments being performed on clones of all ages, from newly created babies to visually elderly men and women, who had the physical appearance of people who had lived for decades and experienced joy and sadness in their lives but were, in reality, only a matter of weeks old and had experienced neither of these things.
Seeing the baby and child clones being experimented upon had upset her. The clones were being treated like objects, like commodities or assets. They had no names – they were assigned product numbers – but they were people. Clones were people. And, as people, they surely deserved basic human rights.
Michelle was torn. She had been a member of One Life ever since her father had returned home and taken his family under the protective wing of the resistance organisation. She had a loyalty to One Life, and her sister and her father owed their lives to Douglas. One Life had been good to her family.
She wondered why she had been shown all this. Why her? She wished that she hadn’t seen it, that she didn’t know about the Product. She wished that she could forget what she had seen and been told.
But she couldn’t.
She suddenly found herself remembering something that her father had told her. They had been watching an old science fiction movie together, ‘The Wrath of Khan’, in which an alien crew member, Spock, had uttered what became the immortal lines “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Her father had turned to her and said, “Remember that. One day you may need to make a tough decision. This may help you make the right one.”
Now was the time to make that decision. Recarns made up only 5% of the world’s population. They were the few. Normal people made up the other 95%. They were the many. Obviously. Of course, not all Recarns were bad, most were good people, but those that were bad were the ones that controlled the planet’s governments and reigned over the world’s population with an iron fist. Nobody would be hurt, not even Recarns. They would simply have an undesirable mutation stripped away from them.
It had to be better than killing them, didn’t it? And that would be pretty pointless anyway. Experience had taught her that.