Kingdom (15 page)

And then the automatic door was sliding shut, another computerized voice, this time vaguely feminine, cautioning Dylan to move all arms and legs away from the door because it was about to close. There was a sign on the wall of the subway car informing him that, in the event of an above-ground emergency, riders could opt to receive special alerts via their mobile devices, thereby ensuring that, even as the city dissolved in a mushroom cloud, nothing would inhibit the flow of information. Dylan imagined the subway continuing in a post-apocalyptic loop, the riders long dead, mobile devices still buzzing with alerts informing the corpses that the world had ended. He felt an urge to run out of the car, sprint through the city until he was back in his bed, but before he could move the car was gliding away from the platform and into the dark tunnel ahead, steel screeching as the train picked up speed, and Dylan was thinking about the fact that the earth was once ruled by giant reptiles—about dinosaurs, about extinction, about his father.

The Journal of Senator Robert Fitzgerald
Excerpt # 2

To Dylan,

Things have begun to unravel. For as long as I can remember, even before you were born, I have felt a disconnection, a sense of separateness from not only my fellow man, but from the very world itself. What about your mother, you might ask? The answer is as simple as it is terrifying: I married her because when she and I were together, that fundamental separation seemed furthest and I imagined that, with enough time, she would be the way through which I would dissolve these boundaries. I was wrong. Elizabeth has been everything I could have hoped for in a woman, in a wife. But the things I feel, the deep alienation from my fellow man, are not mere loneliness or alienation: I sense—I know—they are something far more systemic; the products of a fundamental flaw deep within me.

By the time you were born, I already knew Elizabeth couldn’t save me. I didn’t want kids; I knew I wouldn’t be a very good father. Guess I was right. But the night we took you home from the hospital—that may have been the closest I ever came to escaping my demons. Holding you against my chest, I spent most of that first night walking around the house, whispering to you, telling you only the good things about the land into which you were born. The world was still and quiet and I felt that if only I could somehow freeze that moment in time things could be OK.

But I had to be in New York for a fundraiser the next afternoon and I remember sitting on the plane, watching the world fall away, wondering if it would be better for you if I never came back.

Love,
Your Father

Tiber City
Aug. 28, 2015
3:05 p.m.

T
he helicopter moved over the city like a terrible angel, its rotor blades slicing through the thick smog pressing down on Tiber City. Earlier that morning, there had been a moment when the chaos of the city paused and, as a light breeze blew in from the Leth River, the natural world seemed to exhale, lending the entire landscape an unusual sense of calm. Yet by the time Michael Morrison’s private chopper began its descent to the roof of IDD Energy stadium, the city was once again riddled with anxiety and expectation and as the sun—looking like a planet on fire—ascended higher in the sky, the breeze vanished, sending the temperature soaring.

As the city whipped past the window in a blur of steel and glass and concrete, Morrison scrolled through the messages on his phone, barely paying attention as one line of text merged into the next. Campbell’s refusal to rejoin Exodus, while not entirely unexpected, was infuriating and as the chopper swung around the stadium, Morrison seethed. Were it not for a single gene—the Omega gene—he would have wiped Campbell off the face of the earth a long time ago. Instead, because the Exodus team could not divine
the function of this single gene, Campbell was not only still alive and toiling in some refugee camp, he was now openly defying Morrison.

One gene, Morrison thought. It was incredible. There had been no problem identifying this gene and Morrison and his team were even able to reproduce this rogue molecular puzzle piece that, ostensibly, served no biological function. But when the Omega gene was dismissed as vestigial, a mere piece of evolutionary trash, and therefore excluded from the original Exodus prototypes, the results had been the things of nightmares: As the only explanation for these continued biological horrors remained the Omega gene, Morrison demanded the gene be included in all future prototypes. At first the transfer seemed to hold, and the mutations that plagued the early Exodus prototypes didn’t surface. And so the first complete product rolled off the Exodus assembly line and into American political life.

The chopper set down on the roof of the stadium, bouncing once before settling on the giant “H” marking the center of the concrete landing pad. Morrison snapped back to the present, sliding the helicopter’s door open, pushing past the two men holding semiautomatic rifles, ignoring their pleas to allow for a perimeter sweep as he strode out across the rooftop, barking orders into the tiny microphone attached to his collar, his voice carrying over the roar of the rotors. Seconds later, fireworks exploded overhead, confirming the information that had just been relayed to Morrison: Jack Heffernan was ready to take the stage.

The people gathered throughout the stadium were chanting Heffernan’s name, and those seated on the field rushed toward the stage, a massive, faceless beast. Back and forth the beast swayed, agitated by the unusual heat, and this beast would surge forward before falling backward, only to surge forward again moments later. There were too many people in the stadium and the smell of sweat and body odor and fried food permeated everything and there was a tension building, a tension that Morrison and his public relations wizards had spent years cultivating, a tension that would continue throughout Heffernan’s stump speech before the inevitable climax that would leave the collective beast delirious.

But the restlessness ripping through the crowd was just foreplay and a minute or two later, a beautiful young blonde woman, wearing a sharp but
conservative black suit adorned with an American flag pin on one lapel and the red-and-black Progress Party ribbon on the other, stepped out onto the stage and, waving to the crowd, walked to the microphone.

“Hi Tiber City! How are you today?” she asked.

The crowd roared its approval, again surging toward the stage, sending bodies tumbling over the barricade as security scrambled to prevent anyone from getting too close to the woman who, still smiling, had raised her right hand over her heart.

And then she was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, her eyes locked on the only U.S. flag in the stadium, which was attached to the roof and, as part of the ownership group’s attempts to squeeze every possible cent out of the stadium, was sponsored by First Bank—the pole was an alternating white and deep blue, First Bank’s corporate color scheme; changing the color of the stars hadn’t polled very well.

But the color of the pole didn’t even matter because each of the five dozen video monitors in the stadium were displaying the image of a waving U.S. flag, while the words to the pledge scrolled underneath and then the woman was waving goodbye and the opening chords of The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” began blaring through the stadium. Seconds later two fighter jets blasted over the stadium—they weren’t actual fighter jets, just regular planes that Morrison had customized to look the part—and then the stage was opening and Jack Heffernan was rising on a platform, waving to the frenzied crowd, pumping his fist and giving the thumbs-up signal, even pantomiming a little air guitar as he stepped onto the stage.

LED flashes burst out from every corner of the stadium—digital cameras and cell phones and smart phones thrust toward the stage—and Heffernan was looking out over the crowd, his hand pressed over his brow as he surveyed the stadium, pointing at random people in the crowd and flashing his golden smile, an image enhanced in real time in a control booth under the stage before being projected to every end of the stadium by two massive video monitors hung on either side of the stage, which were broadcasting the rally in cleaned-up high definition, offering a hyper-realistic version of events that, for the assembled mass, was the genuine narrative: The unprocessed life unfolding on stage was secondary. Finally, the crowd settled down and Heffernan, holding the wireless microphone in one hand and standing at the front of the stage, launched into his stump speech.

For a delirious 30 minutes, Jack Heffernan prowled the stage constructed in the middle of the field, his sleeves rolled to the elbows as he spoke to the crowd, smashing the disconnect of modern life in the way no man had done since Robert Fitzgerald back in 2000. The video monitors cut back and forth from shots of Heffernan on stage to images of the faithful gathered in the crowd—men with tears glistening in their eyes; women with their arms stretched out toward the stage; everyone shouting and pressing smart phones toward the stage like relics to be blessed. It wasn’t just the masterful stagecraft that had whipped the crowd into such a frenzy; nor was it the words or the pledges and promises; it was something else, something devised in the desert, in the vats of Exodus, a genetic code optimized to appeal to the largest number of people, based on criteria that had been run through thousands of focus groups; even Jack Heffernan’s voice had been reworked over and over again, until the Exodus team was able to find the perfect combination of cadence and pitch and timbre to create and sustain the illusion that the individuals in the crowd were no longer alone because Jack Heffernan understood them; that Jack Heffernan would save them.

And then something went wrong.

The light in Heffernan’s eyes began to flicker, and the brilliant blue began to gray.

His voice grew hoarse; his limbs were shaking. He was opening his mouth, trying to deliver the lines that had left so many audiences spellbound but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, garbled nonsense tumbled from his lips, guttural and frenzied, and a woman in the audience declared Heffernan to be speaking in tongues and people were shouting and pushing.

A sudden shift by the crowd knocked over a lighting rig in the corner of the field and screams were now mixing in with the cheers. Heffernan’s microphone had been cut but his lips were still moving as he stared past the crowd, out to some point on the horizon or beyond; maybe toward the heavens or maybe just in the direction of Michael Morrison’s luxury box and even though he was still smiling his eyes spoke of fear and helplessness and confusion and by now the audience began to grow restless, confused by the sudden change.

Heffernan had been their connection to a world in which they felt alienated and powerless; at the rally, bombarded by the multimedia product that was Jack Heffernan, this separateness—that nominal entry fee for the human experience—dissolved into an Edenic daydream. Heffernan’s bizarre meltdown
had torn that feeling away from them, and, in its place, a dangerous tension began fermenting among the tens of thousands gathered in the stadium.

Watching the rally from his private box at the top of the stadium, Morrison could feel his anger building. This was the moment he had hoped would never come to pass. Despite the setbacks of the past few months, Morrison still believed Heffernan would hold up, that Morrison and his team had stabilized the creature’s genetic code to the point where Heffernan could still win the presidency and last four, hell, maybe even eight, years in the Oval Office. Long enough, anyway, to make Morrison the most powerful man in the world. And Heffernan, he was only the beginning. Eventually, Morrison would use the breakthroughs made possible by Exodus to bring genetic modification to the masses; a wildly popular President Jack Heffernan would serve as the ultimate product placement.