Monday, June 11
8:51 A.M.
NewYew headquarters, Manhattan
186 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
“Bastard,” said Cynthia, staring at the TV. “Pig-brained, half-witted, self-righteous little bastard.”
“He can’t be the one who stole it,” said Jeffrey. He looked around at the other executives. “Can he?”
“We need to kill him,” said Cynthia. “We need to rip his lying lips right off his tree-hugging face and shove them down his throat.”
“We’re not sunk yet,” said Kerry, absently stroking his biceps. He’d searched for weeks for a new body—something to replace Lyle’s unwanted DNA—and finally settled on an Italian underwear model. “I know it looks bad, but everything has a good marketing angle. We just have to find it.” Kerry’s new body was nearly seven feet tall, with a naturally fast metabolism and a genetic predisposition for lean, well-defined muscle. His wife had become a half-black, half-Korean bodybuilder with full lips and rich brown skin. Lyle still had no idea what they’d paid for the DNA, or how they’d convinced the models to sell in the first place. He had visions of them locked up in the company’s new headquarters on São Tomé, imprisoned with the rest of the security leaks.
That’s where I’ll go if I’m not careful, he thought. Or maybe Cynthia will gut me first and hang me from her office window.
“A good angle?” asked Cynthia. “We just lost the race to the market—we can’t get a patent, we can’t get exclusivity, we can’t get anything. Find a good angle in that.”
“We can still turn this our way,” Kerry insisted. “Even if this guy popularizes the lotion, we’re still in the best position to supply the lotion. He’s practically doing us a favor.”
He moves differently, thought Lyle, watching Kerry closely. It’s the same Kerry, thinking the same old thoughts in the same old way, but he moves like a completely different person—different muscles moving different bones, rotating against each other with a completely different set of joints. He’s … smoother than Kerry used to be. More flowing. Changing his body has changed the way he interfaces with the world.
How will that change his brain?
“We need to find him,” said Cynthia, “and figure out how he got our product, and then we need to make him regret it with every breath he takes.”
“We don’t even know it’s our product,” said Jeffrey. “It’s probably just a passing thing with this lady—the cancer went into remission or whatever, so she cleaned herself up and they call it a miracle.”
“Mastectomies don’t go into remission,” said Sunny. “This is definitely our product.”
“You need to stop moping about what went wrong and start looking for what went right,” said Kerry, flexing slightly. “We have our own hospital girl, for one thing: why can’t we just use that?”
“Because it’s come and gone,” said Sunny. “We cured her, sure, but nobody knows it was us because we were trying to be so careful. And now she’s been released from the hospital and it’s old news. Besides, all we did was heal a sick girl, and people do that all the time. This guy brought a cancer patient back from the brink of death, with a twenty-year-old body to boot.”
“We gave Susan a twenty-year-old body,” said Kerry.
“Nineteen,” said Lyle. “Those epithelials were older than we thought.”
“You’re looking at this wrong,” said Carl, his giant face filling the screen on the wall. He was in São Tomé, overseeing the establishment of the new headquarters, and was attending the meeting through a webcam. “This guru isn’t competition, he’s free advertising. Thanks to him every cancer patient in the world wants our product.”
“I told you to focus on health,” said Lyle.
“Lyle has a point,” said Kerry. “All of our applications are cosmetic, and this guy’s saving lives—we look kind of shallow in comparison.”
“I think you missed the point of my point,” said Lyle.
“It’s all in the presentation,” said Carl, “and we have a month to make them work. I want every presentation at the launch event to focus on the ‘whole body health’ aspects of the product, and I want all the press releases rewritten to reflect the same kind of touchy-feely crap.”
“It’s too late to change the products and the packaging,” said Cynthia.
“We don’t want to change those,” said Carl. “Those are going to the clinics, and those are just stores, and in stores people make decisions based on good old-fashioned self-interest—we tell them a product will make them beautiful and they buy it. All we’re changing are the press releases, to make sure we look just as altruistic as this hippie Kuvam.”
“We have to start running the commercials now,” said Kerry. “We made them vague for legal reasons, and now that might work in our favor—people might see them and think the cancer cure was connected to us, which we will never confirm, of course, but if they think it that’s a point in our favor.”
“That’s only jumping the gun by two weeks,” said Sunny. “I say we do it.”
“Is that too far before the launch?” asked Cynthia. “We need this launch to be huge.”
“We have a whole month to think of something huge,” said Sunny. “I think we need something as big as this cancer lady—bigger, if we can do it—so we can announce it a day or two before and tell people there’s more news coming at the NewYew mystery event.”
“We have four weeks until then,” said Cynthia, nodding. “That gives us just enough time for the lotion to have full effect. Any ideas?”
“Another disease would be good,” said Kerry, “people are eating that up with this cancer lady.”
“And she has to be hot,” said Jeffrey.
“Attractiveness will definitely help,” said Sunny, “and the age thing is another good one. This Guru Kuvam hit all three major selling points with his cancer girl; he really knew what he was doing.”
“Maybe we should stop trying to change the direction of the cancer lady stunt,” said Cynthia, “and simply change the scale.”
Lyle raised an eyebrow. “What, like we take an even older woman, with a worse disease, and make her even younger and healthier?”
“Think bigger,” said Kerry. “Guru Kuvam healed one woman. Why don’t we heal the whole cancer center?”
“We’ll never get permission from everybody,” said Sunny, “plus we’d need willing DNA donors, and then the patients would have to agree to that, too. We don’t have time to arrange even half of that.”
“I’ve got it,” said Jeffrey, scrolling through something on his phone. “We’d lose the hot chick angle, though I guess the mom’s kind of hot, but check this out: there were two twins born last month, two little girls, and one’s completely healthy and the other’s on life support: she was born with one kidney, one lung, no liver, and only half a heart. Family’s going to pull the plug tomorrow.”
“Unless we get to them first,” said Kerry eagerly. “We turn the sick girl into a clone of the healthy one, we put their little faces up on the screen, and we tug on every heartstring in the country. Saving an old lady in Jersey is one thing, but saving a cute little baby is something everyone can get behind.”
“The family might say no,” said Sunny.
“We’ll take over their hospital expenses,” said Cynthia.
“More importantly,” said Lyle, glancing sidelong at Cynthia, “we’d be saving their daughter’s life. That’s kind of a big deal to us normal humans.”
“How could they say no?” asked Sunny. “The babies are identical twins, so they’re already clones of each other; we’d just be fixing a … manufacturing error.”
“Just don’t present it to them that way,” said Kerry. “Maybe we’d better let me do the talking.”
“Whatever you do, do it now,” said Carl. “We don’t have much time to prepare for this, and apparently we have new competitors popping up almost every day.” He picked up his phone. “While you work on that, I’m going to call Marcus and figure out who leaked our product to Kuvam.” Carl narrowed his eyes. “And when I find him, I’m going to let Cynthia kill him with a pair of pliers.”