The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (17 page)

Now a research bot neared Antosha and bowed. “Status report,” Antosha said.

“Aha, on schedule,” the bot said. “All preparations in the hall are complete.”

“Outstanding.”

The bot escorted them to a group of scientists who telepathically operated workstations. Above them, the holograms rendered an image of Portal 13, a cement slab outside surrounded by weeping willows, birds, and other wildlife. Two rabbits rested on the platform, crunching leaves. They scattered when the cement slab vibrated and opened.

“What’s happening?” Shrader said.

“You want to know why the commonwealth adores you.”

A transparent transport capsule emerged and delivered a Gemini to the surface. The protohuman blinked and protected its eyes from sunrise. Shrader passed his hand through the holographic image above the closest workstation. “What is this … wizardry?”

“We call it a Gemini,” Antosha said, though he could tell the doctor didn’t listen.

“This cannot be …”

The Gemini took one step off the cement slab and doubled over. Its head rocked up and down. Its body shivered, then convulsed. Blood oozed from its mouth, eyes, and ears, then crystallized.

It collapsed. Bobcats gathered near the corpse. The scientists under the dome expelled a collective gasp. Some cried.

Nothing that happens here today leaves the team,
Antosha sent.

“That man … you killed him …”

A helicopter swooped down to the Gemini. The animals scattered, and the research bots retrieved it. The helicopter took off, creating a breeze that ruffled the willow trees and wild grass.

“I don’t understand …” Shrader said.

Antosha pulled him away from the research scientists to a dais that held several workstations and a levitating, legless gurney. “Let me simplify it for you,” he said. “You’ve awakened to a world that’s hostile to protohumans and their descendant, transhuman man.” Antosha pinched the outer layer of Shrader’s biomat. “Without this,” and he nodded to the biomat, “the Earth’s atmosphere would penetrate your skin, your eyes, your blood, your nerves, and your brain and destroy you.”

Shrader flexed his hand, covered with the biomat, then swiped it through one of the holographic willow trees above a workstation. They broke apart and reformed. “Who was that man?”

“
It
was no man. We took your DNA and together with Neanderthal genetic materials we reverse engineered a protohuman clone, a synbio creation we call a Gemini, similar enough to conduct clinical trials to understand the effectiveness of our … Reassortment treatments—”

“Clinical trials? Clones? You killed that man!”

“No.
It
wasn’t a man
,
not in the way you’re suggesting. It was a Gemini.”

“This is barbaric. No, it’s worse, it’s—”

“But you know all about barbaric studies, don’t you, Kole?”

Antosha expanded his consciousness and wrapped it around the doctor. He triggered Shrader’s limbic system. Luella and Livelle Laboratory flashed across their vision, Antelope Canyon, the synbio silos, the mineral and medicine production, the physical and mental enhancements. The war. Ending the war. The transhuman trials. The torture of Eastern Hegemony prisoners of war …

“The work Luella and I performed was meant to end the war—”

“Well done, your work is what forced us beneath the ground, is why we test treatments with our less evolved ancestors, why you were frozen near absolute zero for three hundred sixty-eight years—”

“You don’t know what we faced then! The
war
, the famine and fear of extinction on a planet sucked dry of its reliable resources—”

“And your lovely Luella, dead, buried, gone from this world.”

Shrader met his eyes. His voice turned hostile. “Why’d you bring me here?”

The research bots returned with the dead Gemini and dropped its body upon the gurney next to Antosha. Some scientists cried out. Antosha told them to get back to work.
Not a word of this to anyone in the commonwealth,
he sent.
I find out any of you leaked information about today’s clinical trial and I’ll see to it you’re the next volunteer for the next Jubilee.
He delivered his message with the same telepathic tone he might use to invite a guest over to his apartment unit for dinner, but the scientists quickly turned back to their workstations and data streams.

“Oh my …” Shrader was saying. The Gemini looked like him, covered with bruises, its face and chest splayed with tributaries of crystallized blood.

“Dr. Shrader, you’re the man who was stored in stasis,” Antosha said, “the man the entire commonwealth believes could be immune to Reassortment, the man who can restore humanity’s place in the biosphere.”

“That’s preposterous. If the Reassortment Strain escaped our quarantine procedures in Hengill and mutated,” he turned to his Gemini, “and caused … this … there’d be no cure.” He turned to Antosha. “I’d be no more immune than you. That’s why we had self-destruct mechanisms. That’s why we strategically positioned hydrogen bombs throughout the lab—”

“The Myst and the bombs didn’t work though, did they?”

“Take me back to your commonwealth.”

“You remember, don’t you?” Antosha said. Shrader trembled. Antosha searched his mind. “Yes, I see it now. The strain escaped from Hengill after an attack by the Eastern Hegemony infiltrator that you orchestrated with—”

“I didn’t know what to do, the Autocrat sent a team to Livelle, or that’s what I thought, and we needed more time, more funding, and they offered it and I didn’t know what they would do—”

“With the access codes to break the z-wall to the Locust program, truly did you not realize they were Eastern Hegemony agents? Am I supposed to believe you?” Antosha searched deeper. “Seems you didn’t know, or did you ignore the signs willfully?”

“The Reassortment Strain was designed to enhance the human genome, not destroy it—”

“Not at first, but that’s what the project evolved into, didn’t it? You were going to use it against the Eastern Hegemony.”

“No! Luella and I were going to end the war! That I shared the access codes with my colleagues didn’t cause this.” Shrader waved his hand over the dead Gemini.

“You know I can tell you’re lying, don’t you?” Antosha raised his head. His breath fogged the bottom of his helmet, then cleared. “And you’ve been lying to us from the start.” Antosha closed his eyes. He merged his consciousness completely into Shrader’s. “But no longer …”

Sweat streamed down Shrader’s face. He blinked rapidly. He tried to resist Antosha’s presence in his mind. “What’re you doing to me?”

Antosha opened his eyes. “Forcing you to remember, willing the truth out of you.” Antosha paused. He reviewed Shrader’s research. “Just as I suspected.” Antosha squinted and his upper lip quivered. “You were missing a vital piece to the genomic puzzle that you couldn’t imagine would soon be discovered.” Antosha smiled, thinking about the Lorum orb. “With the strain designed for transhumans, you didn’t have to adjust it all that much to kill transhumans throughout the Eastern Hegemony, including those underground in synbio labs.”

Shrader’s eyes turned glassy. “You don’t understand.” He held back sobs. “Those bastards killed much of my family.” He narrowed his eyes, breathing hard. “If you’d experienced the quantum weaponry they used to kill our people, you’d have thought I was being merciful.” Shrader blinked his eyes clear and clenched his teeth. “We found something better.”

Antosha saw it. “Inventive,” he said, “devious …” The strain acted as if it operated like a mirrored organism, but it was so much more. Like a quantum computer, the strain contained a vast parallelism that would enable it to solve in minutes certain problems that would take classical computers a billion years. It was as simple as single-celled synisms in some ways and more complex than the Marstone artificial intelligence in others.

“It encrypts parts of its genome on the quantum level.” Shrader smiled greedily. “You’ll never find a cure for it. When you think you’ve solved it, it’ll reassort further and faster than you can adjust—”

A Reassortment research scientist collapsed and screamed, writhing on the ground.

Shrader’s eyes bulged. He moved as if to run, but Antosha grabbed his arm with one hand and with the other hand-signaled the bots.
We must evacuate,
he sent to his research team. He pulled Shrader into their helicopter. They latched into their seats.

Antosha telepathically connected to the chopper’s navigation system and ordered it to bring them back to Area 55. The choppers around them took off, one after another, and soon so did Antosha’s.

On the way back, Shrader turned to Antosha. “What exactly is it you want, Mr. Zereoue?” Antosha faced him. “My blood? My life?” Shrader shook his head. “If Luella’s dead you may as well kill me—”

Antosha pushed himself into Shrader’s mind …

… And the scene shifted to the Cryo Room in the Ventureño Facility, in 327 AR, where 335 scientists hung in stasis containment, Drs. Kole and Luella Shrader among them. Supreme Scientist Broden Barão commanded his team, including Damy, Nero, Verena, Antosha, Haleya, and Heywood, among others, to initiate the Regenesis procedure. The order was for a single scientist, hidden behind the vacuum, his arms sprawled across the stasis tank, his upper body nude, dark pants over his legs.

Brody lifted his arms, accessing the ZPF in typical grandstanding Barão fashion. Research bots circled their workstations. Antosha warned of an error, something he had first detected after an apparent assassination attempt; a Janzer had thwarted the attack, but in so doing caused damage to the tanks, or so Antosha believed. Brody ignored Antosha. He continued the awakening, and robotic arms melted through the ice and vacuum. Too few regenerative synisms released upon the scientist when he fell to the ground.

The procedure went out of control.

More tanks activated.

But one didn’t.

One malfunction saved Dr. Kole Shrader’s life.

Now Shrader knelt near his Luella at the base of her stasis tank, her eyes open and empty, water and gelatin pressed against her lips. “This wasn’t what Oriana told me in Livelle Cemetery, this wasn’t how it happened, they didn’t kill her, not this way. The activations weren’t timed properly, the scientists weren’t healed properly—”

“Oriana Barão has a vivid imagination,” Antosha said.

“She has been my friend since I awakened in this hellish place—”

“She’s as cunning as she is stunning, but you mustn’t allow her to sway you from the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That your beloved Luella was murdered because a supreme scientist didn’t want Beimenians to know … none of you are immune.”

“Why would Oriana lie?”

“Could it be,” Antosha said, “that she protects … someone important to her?”

Antosha rotated Brody’s image and displayed his name tag.

“Her father …” Shrader turned to Antosha. “Where is he now?”

“He’s a traitor to this commonwealth, much like his daughter, and he is serving out the rest of his days in the Earth’s depths. He won’t survive for long—”

“—and neither will she.”

Farino City

Farino, Underground North

2,500 meters deep

From when Connor had first awakened in the prison, confused, choking in the dark, the endless time passed much the same. Janzers rode in on rocketcycles, fed the dead to the eels, fed scraps to the living, cleared human waste from the island corners—feed, drink, shit, piss, sleep, wake, die, feed, shit, piss, sleep, wake, die.

He’d grown tired of waiting for the rescue, tired of watching his fellow Polemon die around him, tired of being the plankton when he should be the blacktip shark that Aera and Father trained him to be. He’d focused his waking hours pondering the ZPF and his suppressed connection to it.

They’d not replaced his Converse Collar since his arrival. He shielded his meditations the best he could from Marstone, penetrating the quantum signals the collar emitted into the ZPF, and his neurochip and brain. The collar neutralized his mind-body-cosmos interface the way a damp blanket might smother a fire. But what if part of the blanket could burn? What if Connor could find a crack through which he might feel the ZPF?

This became his focus, indeed, his obsession.

He could not share his plan with his comrades, lest Marstone pick up his speech, or their thoughts. He’d have to act alone, at least at first. Once he felt that connection restored, he’d be unstoppable, he assured himself, for neither Antosha nor Lady Isabelle were close enough to Farino to launch a counterstrike against him.

More time passed. Without the Granville sky illusion it was impossible for Connor to know how long. Finally, he awakened one day (or night?) and felt a sliver of his former connection to the cosmos. It wasn’t as strong as it would’ve been without the collar, to be sure, but it might just be enough. A Janzer need only come close enough for Connor to enact his plan. Then he’d lead his people out of Farino, warn his father about Antosha, and help them win the war.

He waited for the most opportune moment to launch his strike. Chow time. Thousands and thousands of Janzers weaved around the millions of islands on their rocketcycles with trays of food. A pair moved quickly, quickly, closer to him. Aera and Nero and Pirro and others sat up, leaning against ridged rock, looking weaker, dirtier, thinner, all hope drained from their expressions.

I must act now, or we’re all going to die,
Connor thought. A Janzer pair arrived at his island, separating, rotating to either side of him. One held his pulse rifle aimed at Connor while the other held a tray of food. More Janzer pairs sped around the islands near him in similar formations. Connor pushed his consciousness through the crack in the collar’s field, spreading it open as if he were parting water in Blackeye Cavern’s lake.

He felt the collar battle with his mind, enclosing and adjusting to his onslaught, until Connor sent a burst of energy through the ZPF. He forced his way through. He’d use the same tactic with Antosha’s field, if given another chance.