“Please, call me Bob.”
I looked at Marta. She shrugged.
“Uh,” I said. “Okay. It’s very nice to meet you, Bob.”
Robert Longstreth smiled, and waved toward a glass-topped table set against the back wall of the room.
“Sit, please. Can I get you all smoothies?”
I shook my head. Marta shot him a look, then turned away.
“I’ll take one,” Micah said. “Can you do blueberries and bananas?”
Bob grinned.
“Absolutely. Shot of protein?”
Micah grinned back.
“Nah. I just ate a horse leg. I’m good on protein.”
Bob laughed, and stepped back behind the bar.
How to describe Robert Longstreth? Well, he was shortish, and oldish, and brownish, and mossy, and he spoke with a voice that was sharpish, and bossy.
No, wait. That’s the Lorax. This guy was definitely not the Lorax. The CEO of Bioteka was short, though, at least compared to Micah. I knew he was in his early fifties, but if I’d met him in the street, I wouldn’t have guessed he was much over thirty. He had a full head of dark brown hair, a voice that would have worked for the lead in a romance vid, and the easy grin of someone who knew that if he smiled at you, you pretty much had to smile back. He was barefoot when I met him, wearing a pair of baggy shorts and a shirt with a picture of a tap-dancing elephant on the front.
As we settled in around the table like a happy family getting ready for a feast at the Beef Bazaar, I was really having a tough time remembering that he was a super-villain.
“So,” he said. “This is nice. Marta never brings friends over. I was starting to think she was ashamed of me.”
He handed Micah his smoothie, and took the chair between Marta and me.
“I’m not ashamed of you,” Marta said. “It’s just hard to make a lot of friends when they’re constantly getting surveilled and interrogated and all.”
Bob laughed. Marta did not.
“Seriously,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve met these two gentlemen before, have I?”
“No,” Marta said. “Not in person. This is Jordan Barnes, Daddy.”
Bob’s grin widened, and he reached across the table to shake my hand.
“Mr. Barnes! It’s great to meet you. Your father’s a good man. I’ve tried to hire him away twice now, but those bastards at GeneCraft have him locked up like the Count of Monte Cristo. Can I take it from this that the two of you have been hitting it off?”
I smiled.
“Yeah, we’re thick as thieves now.”
“Very good,” Bob said. “That’s what I like to hear. I’m sure your father is pleased as well. He and I were both very hopeful that this would all work out.”
Micah reached across the table to offer Bob his hand.
“I’m Micah,” he said. “I’m Jordan’s boyfriend.”
Bob’s grin faded, and his hand, which had been reaching toward Micah’s, settled onto the table.
“Boyfriend?”
I nodded. Marta closed her eyes. Micah gulped his smoothie.
“Marta?” Bob asked. “Can I speak with you in private for a moment?”
“No, Daddy,” Marta said, without opening her eyes. “I didn’t bring them here so I could introduce you to my future husband.”
Bob stared at her.
“Security,” he said finally. “Send up two . . .” He glanced up at Micah. “Make that three officers, to the juice bar.”
The wallscreen behind the bar came to life.
The face on the screen was Devon Morgan’s.
“Sorry,” she said. “No can do. You all need to chat.”
The door to the hallway swung closed, and the bolt slid home with an audible click.
We sat in silence for what seemed like a long time then. Bob’s jaw hung slightly open, and his eyes kept jumping from Micah, to Marta, to me. Micah just looked confused. Marta’s eyes were open again, and she was wearing a beatific smile.
“So,” Bob said finally. “Is one of you going to explain to me what the shit just happened?”
Marta and Micah both turned to me.
“What?” I said. “I don’t know.”
“You were with her,” Micah said. “What was she up to?”
I shrugged.
“Dicking around with their VR tank. I have no idea how you get from that to taking over their house.”
Bob turned to Marta then.
“You let someone into my VR system?”
Her smile widened.
“‘Let’ is a very strong word.”
“Don’t blame Spooky,” Devon said, her voice coming from speakers in the ceiling and from the wallscreen simultaneously. “You’re the dolt who left his immersion tank unsecured. You didn’t even put a passcode on it, for God’s sake. And what’s with the tissue wall between the tank and your command systems? The rig at Hannah’s place was locked up like a bank vault, so I know Bioteka is capable of doing something right. Is this a nepotism thing? You hired an idiot nephew or something to handle your personal security?”
I looked over at Bob. His jaw muscles were bunching in an alarming way.
“I designed our personal security systems,” he said. “I didn’t trust it to anyone else.”
Devon laughed.
“Sweet. Should have gone with the idiot nephew, honestly. He couldn’t have done any worse.”
Bob jumped half out of his seat then, and planted both fists on the table.
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but if you don’t return full control of my house systems right now, I’ll . . .”
“You’ll what?” Micah said. “Kill Jordan?”
Now it was Bob’s turn to look confused.
“What?”
“That’s right,” Micah said. “We know all about your Jordan-killing plans, and we’re not going to stand for them. Right, Jordan?”
I looked over at Devon on the wallscreen. She shook her head. Bob dropped back into his seat. He opened his mouth to say something to Micah, then thought better of it and closed it again. He turned to Marta instead.
“Marta? Honey? Why are these people in my house?”
Marta sighed.
“Sorry, Daddy. These were the best accomplices I could round up on short notice. I probably could have done better if you let me have more friends.”
He looked back and forth between us, then back to Marta again.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s take this one step at a time. Why do you need accomplices?”
“I already told you,” Micah said. “We are like ninety percent fully opposed to your plans to murder Jordan. Ninety-five percent, even.”
“Quiet,” Bob said. “Grown-ups are talking now.”
“Micah’s an idiot,” Marta said, “but believe it or not, he’s mostly right. We know about Project Snitch, Daddy.”
Bob’s eyebrows came together at the bridge of his nose.
“Project what?”
Marta rolled her eyes.
“Give it up, Dad. I don’t have anything else to do around here, so I snoop. I’ve heard you and Marco talking about Project Snitch more than once.”
“Actually,” I said, “I think Hannah said that the real name for it was Project DragonCorn.”
Bob’s face went blank.
“Oh,” he said, after a long, silent pause. “Oh. Oh, honey. You mean Project Sneetch.”
I looked at Marta. Marta looked at me. Micah finished his smoothie, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and smiled.
“Uh,” Marta said. “What?”
Bob sighed.
“Sneetch, honey. Not Snitch. Sneetch.”
“Oh,” Marta said. “I thought you were just making fun of Marco’s accent when you said it that way.”
We all turned to stare at her.
“Anyway,” I said. “Confusion-wise, I’m not sure that’s . . .”
I slapped my palm to my forehead and let out a long, low groan.
“What?” Micah asked. “Are you having a stroke?”
“Sneetch,” I said. “Project Sneetch. Holy shit, dude. You think you’re Sylvester McMonkey McBean.”
“Right,” Bob said. He leaned back, and crossed his arms over his chest. “See, honey? Your gay boyfriend gets me.”
Micah and Marta had no idea what we were talking about, and unless your parents were aficionados of mid-twentieth-century classic children’s books, you probably don’t either. So, here’s a quick primer:
The Sneetches, by Theo Geisel, tells the story of a society made up of fat-assed, flightless, beach-dwelling birds. Think sandpipers, only slower and stupider and more prone to eating hot dogs. They’re also super, super racist. Some of them have stars on their bellies and some of them don’t, and the ones with stars act like total douches to the ones without.
So one day they’re all hanging around the beach being assholes to one another, when Sylvester McMonkey McBean, who’s sort of a chimp in a top hat, rolls up in a mobile tattoo parlor and offers to put stars onto all of the plain bellies. This torques the star bellies, because now they can’t tell who they’re supposed to be assholes to anymore. So, McBean offers to take their stars off for them. Then, he offers to take the stars back off the original plain bellies as well. After a few rounds of this, McBean rolls away with giant bags of sneetch cash hanging off his rig. How, exactly, these stupid birds came to possess so much lucre is left unexplored. The sneetches realize they’re all flat-ass broke now, and they can’t remember who they’re supposed to be assholes to anyway, so everyone lives happily ever after.
“So wait,” Micah said. “You’re telling me that when Jordan gets chlamydius maximus, all that’s gonna happen to him is that he’ll get a star on his belly?”
Bob sighed. Marta smacked the back of Micah’s head. Micah shot her a warning look. She smacked him again.
“First,” Bob said, “the retrovirus we developed for Project DragonCorn doesn’t literally put a star on your belly, you dunce. What good would that do? What it will do, if everything goes the way we’ve planned, is make it so there aren’t any UnAltered anymore. Once DragonCorn has run its course, we’ll all be Engineered. Everyone will be the same. There won’t be anything left to fight about.” He paused then, looked at Marta, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he said, “Second . . . it won’t be just Jordan who gets it, Micah. The star-on machine wasn’t just for the plain-bellied sneetches. It has to be universal, or we’ll just have a new way to decide who to hate. We built features into this virus that will make it far and away the most communicable disease vector that’s ever been. At the end of the day, it’s going to run through everyone.”
“Holy crap,” Micah said. “I don’t believe this.”
“I know,” Marta said. “It’s one thing giving Jordan super-herpes, but this is just crazy. What were you thinking, Daddy?”
“No,” Micah said, “not that. I mean, that’s stupid, but if you start with a stupid premise, you get a stupid result. What I can’t believe is that this idiot has been sitting here calling me an idiot.”
Bob’s face hardened into a scowl.
“Watch it, son.”
Micah grinned.
“Sorry, Bob. I call ’em like I see ’em, and you’re a dimwit.” He leaned forward, with his elbows on the table. It sagged under his weight. “You gonna beat me up now?”
Bob looked like he’d just taken a bite of something he’d really like to spit out, but after looking Micah up and down, he leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“Fine, big man. Here’s the premise I started with: six years ago, this world came awfully goddamn close to falling apart. You were eleven years old, and living up here in East Jesus, so you probably don’t know how far out over the precipice we were dangling before Daniel Andersen managed to reel us back in. He crammed that genie back into the bottle—just barely—but he didn’t kill it, and if we don’t change things up in the very near future, it absolutely will come screaming back out again. And when it does, there are better than even odds that we wind up turning this whole stupid planet into a charnel house. So tell me, my insightful young friend—where, exactly, has my reasoning led me astray?”
I looked over at Micah. He caught my eye and winked.
“Start with this, Bob. What do you suppose is the most likely way for a chimp to die?”
Bob dropped his head into his hands.
“Answer the question,” Devon said. “Nobody’s leaving this room until you’re all ready to hug it out.”
“Right,” Bob said, without looking up. “I’ll go with banana poisoning?”
“Huh,” Micah said. “That’s a good guess, but no. In fact, the most common way for a chimp to die is to be murdered by another chimp.”
“Micah?” I said.
“Shhh,” he said. “I got this. Here’s the point, Bob: there are no Engineered chimps.”
“Marta,” Bob said. “Please . . .”
“No,” Marta said. “I get it, Dad. He’s saying that if you make everyone Engineered, we’ll just find some other way to divide ourselves up into tribes and go at it. I mean, it’s not like everyone just lived in harmony until the first Engineered baby popped out, right?”
Micah nodded.
“Exactly. Catholics and Protestants. Jews and Muslims. Star Wars guys and Star Trek guys . . .”
Bob rolled his eyes.
“Anyway,” Micah said, “you get my point. As Jordan often tells me, people are stupid, and they’re really good at finding reasons to kill each other. So, while I get what you’re trying to accomplish, and while it would totally be worth causing Jordan’s junk to explode if it would really bring about a new age of peace and love for all, in this particular case, I think you’re just blowing up his dong for nothing—and that, sir, I cannot support.”
We all sat and stared at him.
“You know?” Bob said finally. “Somewhere in there, you may actually have a point.”
“Really?” I said. “Because I’m pretty sure that whole monologue was just an excuse for him to talk about my dong exploding.”
Bob nodded.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s true. You have to remember, though, that brilliance often comes from the subconscious. Hemingway thought The Old Man and the Sea was just a story about a guy who liked to fish.”
Micah turned to look at me.
“It wasn’t?”
“Hush,” Bob said. “You already impressed me. Don’t spoil it. I’ve been thinking about Project Sneetch for almost three years now, but I will admit that I never really considered it from that angle.”
“Wait,” I said. “You mean you never considered the possibility that the issues the UnAltered have with you folks—with us folks, if I’m being honest here—might have as much to do with the fact that we own all the money and all the stuff as it does with the fact that we have nicer hair than they do?”
“No,” he said. “I honestly did not. However, I’m going to have to disagree with Gigantor’s premise, at least partially. Yes, humans are tribal, and yes, we’ve always found reasons to fight. However, you’ll have to admit that visual cues are a big part of what triggers those kinds of instincts. When you see someone who doesn’t look like you, it rings alarms in your lizard brain, no matter how enlightened the rest of your cranium thinks it is. Add in the facts that Engineered often have visual cues that are a lot more obvious than skin tone, that they’re a small minority, and that they tend to be at the top of the economic and social ladder, and you’ve got the makings of a pogrom—which is basically what the Stupid War was, isn’t it? DragonCorn is going to fix all of that.”
Micah laughed.
“Really? Where does the part where jobs and cash get redistributed to the proles come in?”
Bob’s face settled back into a scowl.
“Fine. DragonCorn will fix most of that. Happy? At a minimum, it will take away the visual part, so you won’t be able to recognize the elite at a glance. It’s hard to have a good pogrom if you can’t figure out who it is that you want to kill.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s allow that there might actually be some benefit to making us all at least look like we belong to the same tribe. Call it a worthy goal—but you’re doing it through an engineered virus, Bob. That’s some scary shit, no matter how you cut it. Also, is it really gonna be an STD?”
Bob shrugged.
“That’s not the only way to spread it—but yeah, pretty much.”
“And how do you see that playing out? Even therapeutic GeneMod viruses wind up killing some of the people who get them. There’s no way this thing you’re cooking up doesn’t wind up with a significant body count. It’s going to look like a plague, Bob, and people really don’t like plagues. Even if you’re planning on accompanying this one with a PSA telling everyone to chill because it’s going to end all discrimination by making everybody beige, I’m guessing a whole lot of folks are going to lose their shit.”
“Yellow,” Bob said.
“What?”
“DragonCorn turns you yellow. Like corn. Get it?”
I shook my head.
“Whatever. My point is, this is not going to go over well. I think it’s just as likely that you’re about to start Stupid War II as you are to prevent it.”
Bob sighed.
“We’ve thought of that, Jordan, and we’ve taken steps to ameliorate some of the risks to our people and their families—particularly the children of our project team, who I recognize may have to deal with a bit of blowback until everything settles down. There may well be some unrest during the transition period, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?”
“Sure,” Micah said. “If by eggs you mean people, and by a few you mean a few million, yeah, I guess that’s true. Anyway, I don’t think Jordan was talking specifically about your people when he was saying there’ll be problems if you go through with this. No shit you’re gonna take care of your own. I’m sure you and Marta will be locked up in here safe as bugs in rugs until it’s all over. What about the rest of us, Bob? Are we just the fucking eggs?”
“I don’t mean to sound callous,” Bob said, “but there has never been a real advancement in the human condition that hasn’t been accompanied by some sacrifice, Micah. How many test pilots died in the early days of aviation, or the early days of spaceflight? If it hadn’t been for their sacrifices, we’d still need a week to get from here to LA.”
“Big difference,” Micah said. “Test pilots are volunteers.”
“That’s true,” Bob said. “On the other hand, what we’re doing now is a hell of a lot more important than shortening travel times. If there were an easier way to do what needs to be done, believe me, I’d do it. You say Marta and I will be safe in here, but the truth is, NatSec is probably going to figure out where DragonCorn came from eventually. When they do, I’ll be lucky if all that happens is that they throw me down the memory hole. I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights over the past two years, trying to think of some way to let this cup pass me by, but . . .” He turned to look at Marta again. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
We sat and stared at one another for ten or fifteen seconds then. Bob’s face had taken on a serious, thoughtful expression, which I’m guessing was his default setting. Micah just looked defeated.
“Well,” Bob said finally. “This honestly has been a really helpful conversation. You’ve helped me to clarify my thinking to a surprising extent. You can let us out now, hacker girl.”
I looked at Marta. She shrugged.
“Just to clarify,” Devon said from the wallscreen. “Are you willing to at least consider calling this thing off?”
“Well,” Bob said. “That’s a difficult question. As I said, you’ve really given me something to consider here. The thing is, though . . .”
“What?” Marta said. “What’s the thing?”
“Well,” Bob said, “you’re actually a little late to the party, honey. DragonCorn’s been in production for over a month now, and unfortunately one of our test engineers inadvertently contaminated herself a couple of weeks ago. She’d been keeping a lid on it, and we were hoping she’d continue to do so until we were ready for an orderly roll out, but as of two days ago that situation no longer holds. As a result, we’ve been forced to move up our timeline substantially. In fact, we’ve just gone into full emergency deployment.
“Just to show how sincere we are about this, I had our people provide the first doses to the team that developed the virus for us. And to make sure we get optimal distribution, I then put almost every one of them onto a plane or a shuttle somewhere. I’m afraid this is a bell that can’t be unrung, my friends. DragonCorn is happening. We’re just going to have to wait and see how it plays out. I know you won’t agree with me on this, but I’m optimistic. Micah here may be right that we’re not on the edge of utopia, and the next few weeks may be a little rough . . . but I think they’re also going to be the start of a happier world.”
The drive home from Marta’s was not a cheerful one. We rode back out to the main road in silence, with me eyeing the gas gauge and waiting for the engine to start sputtering the entire way. Bright spot? Turned out there actually was a charging station with a still-working gas pump about a mile from the end of Marta’s driveway. I filled up the tank. Micah bought a liter of iced tea and a twenty-seven-serving bag of corn chips. Devon sat alone in the back and sulked.
“So,” I said when we were all back in the car. “What now?”
I started the engine, and pulled slowly back out onto the access road.
“I dunno,” Micah said finally. “What do you think, Devon? What’s our next move?”
I glanced back. Devon was slumped sideways across the jump seat, head leaning against the window, eyes closed. She shrugged.
“Go home and wait for the apocalypse, I guess.”
So, that’s what we did.