Wednesday, October 3
8:15 A.M.
Port Chester, New York
72 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
One of the Lyles at the train station had Down syndrome.
Lyle couldn’t help but stare. He had seen his own face in subtle variations a thousand times now, maybe ten thousand times, and while none of them were perfect replicas they were incredibly, uncannily similar. Ten thousand identical twins, however different they might be in the details, were still more or less identical. To see an outlier so wildly different was almost as big of a shock, at this point, as the first Lyle clone had been so many months ago. The Down syndrome clone was standing with a woman, and it was all Lyle could do not to walk straight to him and pepper them both with questions.
Fascinated or not, though, Lyle was still intensely paranoid, and he scanned the train platform carefully for anyone who might be watching. The government was actively searching for Lyles now, rounding them up into “Amnesty Centers,” and Lyle had started disguising himself to stay free: dyed hair, a fake mustache, a hat and gloves, even a makeshift fat suit with extra bulk around his midsection. Anything to break up his profile and distinguish him from the thousands of other Lyles that seemed to be coming out of the woodwork. There were at least five Lyles on the platform now, probably headed into Manhattan to turn themselves in. What will happen to them? he wondered. Should I just go with them, and stop running? What will they do when they find out I’m the real Lyle? Kill me, or imprison me, or force me to make more ReBirth?
Maybe they won’t even care. That thought scared Lyle more than any of the others.
When Lyle had first gone into hiding, it was just to get away from Ibis, and from the police, and from everyone else who wanted to capture him. Then he’d stayed in hiding as some kind of self-styled Robin Hood, bringing ReBirth to the terminally ill, but that was more of an illusion that anything else; he’d helped, what, five people? Six? He had no resources, and all his efforts to find more had led to dead ends. Now he was hiding simply to hide. Because continuing on one path was easier than finding a new one.
But now …
Now, a Lyle with Down syndrome changed everything. For months he’d been trying to figure out how ReBirth did what it did, and here was the best lead he’d ever had: an anomaly. A corner case in which the process didn’t work the same way it had in every other. Figuring out why ReBirth didn’t work right with this man might help him to figure out what “working right” meant.
Lyle finished his study of the platform, then studied it again, just in case. There didn’t seem to be anybody waiting to jump out and grab him. He leaned away from his pillar and walked toward the couple. Down syndrome is a genetic disorder, he thought, growing more scientifically excited as he approached them. Maybe ReBirth reacts differently to that? But it’s cured all the congenital disorders they’ve tried it on before—why not this one?
He stopped in front of the couple. “Excuse me, sir.”
The Lyle stared at him a moment, then smiled broadly and held out his hand. Lyle shook it.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked. Her attitude was clipped and cold, her voice strained and her eyes bloodshot. Lyle imagined she’d spent a lot of time recently worried and crying, which seemed appropriate. He kept his own voice as soft and nonconfrontational as possible.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Lyle, “but I’m a doctor, and I couldn’t help but notice this man’s condition. Please, may I ask you: did he have Down syndrome before he used ReBirth?”
“I really don’t want to talk about this,” said the woman.
“I didn’t,” said the man. He had a slight lisp. “It started five weeks ago. A bad dose.”
“A bad dose,” Lyle mused, looking at the other Lyle’s face: his own face, but with the classic characteristics of Down syndrome. Almond-shaped eyes, a slightly flat nose, smaller ears than normal. The eyes, interestingly, showed the typical Lyle heterochromia, a patch of light in a darker iris, but here it was multiplied into a dozen or more small spots. Lyle didn’t know what would cause something like that. He searched his memory for what little he knew about the causes of Down syndrome, but it was far from his area of expertise.
“We’re going to the Amnesty Center,” said the woman. “Do you think they can change him back?”
“Have you tried a dose of other lotion?” asked Lyle. “From a different source?”
“Of course,” said the woman, “we’ve tried everything, but it never goes away.”
Lyle frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. How many doses has he used?”
“Before or after the Down syndrome?”
Lyle froze for half a second. “He used other doses of ReBirth before the bad one?”
“I was an actor,” said the man.
The woman nodded. “He kept changing for different roles. The fourth dose turned out to be Lyle Fontanelle, so we tried a fifth, hoping it could reverse it, but this time it was a Lyle with Down syndrome. I didn’t think that was possible.” Her eyes were wide and pleading. “Please say you can help him.”
Lyle’s mind reeled: five doses of ReBirth in three months, and who knows how many since then. There wouldn’t even be time for one to finish before the next started in. Kerry had done something similar, but …
“Do you think it’s because we stacked Lyle on Lyle?” she asked.
“I don’t think that’s it,” said Lyle. He’d been overwritten with his own DNA at least once, and it hadn’t done anything. The wheels were turning, though, and he had his own theory about what had happened. It wasn’t going to make her feel any better. “I don’t think it was a bad dose, either.”
The woman grew tenser, her mouth pinched in worry. “What happened?”
Down syndrome is a chromosomal disorder, he thought. A human being is supposed to have forty-six chromosomes in twenty-three pairs, but a person with Down syndrome has an extra in pair twenty-one. Three chromosomes instead of two. If this man had six different genomes all warring for control of his body, sooner or later something was bound to go wrong. The signals got crossed, or confused; maybe the lotions even attacked each other. The plasmids in the lotion were designed to unroll and mimic DNA long enough to write portions of themselves onto the host DNA—if one bit of ReBirth got to another bit of ReBirth halfway through this process, rewriting not just the host’s genetic code but the competing rewriter itself.… He swallowed. There’s no telling what could happen if they started doing that.
“What happened?” she asked again.
Lyle looked at her, speechless. There were dozens of chromosomal disorders, and so many ways for the chromosomes to become disordered: inversions, insertions, translocations. The list went on and on. If ReBirth can do this, and if ReBirth is even half as aggressive as it seems to be, this could mean the end of …
… of human genetics.
“Please, sir,” the woman sobbed, “tell me what I can do for him!”
Lyle looked up sharply, shocked back into the real world. “Don’t take him to the Amnesty Center.”
“But they can help him—”
“They can’t help anyone,” said Lyle. “It’s a scam.” He pulled on his fake mustache, tearing it off in one long, painful tug. “I’m just like you, okay? And I’m trying to help you. Take your husband to the Amnesty Center and he will spend months or years in what is essentially an underfunded prison camp; in his condition he’ll probably die in there.” Lyle dug in his pocket for cash, some of the hundred thousand he’d stolen from Kerry, and handed her a wad of thousands. “You want my advice, go to the other side of this platform, take the first outbound train that comes along, and get as far away from civilization as you can. Rent a room on a fishing island or something; get away, stay hidden, and wait it out.”
The woman stared at the money.
“Wait what out?”
If this means what I think it means … Lyle shook his head. “The end of the world.”