Year Zero (26 page)

“Stem cells,” he stated. He wanted to sound knowing, or at least not completely benighted. Intellectual pride? he wondered to himself. What pride? Was he trying to impress this woman? He scoffed at himself.

“Stem cells are too primitive for what we’re doing,” she said. “Too generic. They’ll grow into anything you want, and we tried them in the beginning. But what we needed were clones who might be carrying immune responses to the virus. That meant selecting a more developed cell from the samples. Lymphocytes. T-cells. B-cells, C-cells. The whole family. Memory cells.”

“I could have used a few more of those back in grade school,” joked Nathan Lee. He’d forgotten. This was the No Humor zone.

“Wrong kind of memory,” she said. “T-cells memorize immune responses and store them away for a rainy day. Take chicken pox. Over the centuries, our ancestors were exposed to it, and with time they co-evolved with the parasite. A killer gradually became a benign gradeschool disease. Now whenever you’re exposed to chicken pox, your memory cells remember its protein configuration and tell your body to manufacture the exact antivirus to destroy it. The memory cells are like ancient libraries. They hold the secrets of thousands of microbes our ancestors survived.”

Their next stop, or pause, was at the PCR room. Polymerase chain reaction was a method of dividing the double strands of DNA and synthetically creating two helixes from one. The two became four, the four became eight, ad infinitum. Twelve machines the size of pinball machines were quietly at work. Everything was automatic.

He was struck by the blending of the ordinary and high tech. Among the PCR machines and computer screens and electron microscope “towers” lay common household utensils: a teflon spatula, pyrex pans, a baker’s measuring cup, a corkscrew. Yellowed
Dilbert
and
Far Side
cartoons were favored wall decor. Pictures of children mingled with out-of-date copies of
Nature
and
Outside.

Miranda led him into a lab and she showed him an unraveled strand of DNA floating in a beaker. “One of your guys,” she said.

“This is from the relics?”

She nodded, staring at the strands. “You wouldn’t believe how empty the human genome is,” she said. “It’s humbling. At the genetic level, we’re practically worms and flies.”

Nathan Lee tried to guess what any of this had to do with him.

“It’s all a matter of executive intelligence,” she said. “The Blind Watchmaker, tinkering at random.”

“God?” he said.

“Chance,” she hastily answered.

She showed him how to twirl the strand around a glass straw like a piece of spaghetti. “Now what happens?” he asked.

“For this little fellow? We’ll stain him with marker dyes and search for mutations and disease genes.”

“Corfu?”

“The memory of it,” she reiterated.

“And then?”

“If he shows promise, bring him through.”

“Through what?”

“This way,” she said.

They gloved and masked before entering a large, hot room murky with humidity and low-lit with blue night lights.

“My brood,” she softly said. “Yours, too.” Her cheekbones were slick and blue.

Then he noticed the big sacs floating in spherical tanks. Each contained a human form, large and heavy. They were growing people in here.

“From the relics?” he said. His mind whirled. They went into the next chamber. Divers floated in a big glass tank. One of the tanks descended into the water. The divers scissored open the sac with the casual precision of butchers.

A human being slid through the incision, his hair and beard gliding in the water like long, black Medusa snakes. His finger and toenails were like pale bony globes. Nathan Lee saw the man open his eyes. He blinked. He opened his arms wide, and his body was feeble. The muscles lacked tone. He had a eunuch’s soft tummy and thin neck. Then the divers were hauling him out of view.

“He’s from an earlier batch. In all we’ve birthed over fifteen hundred of them, usually multiples of the most promising ones. Your three won’t be ready for another thirteen weeks.”

Nathan Lee was stupefied. The great mystery of the place folded into itself. Absurdly, he had tears in his eyes.

“Is it so terrible?” she asked. He didn’t wipe away his tears.

“I don’t know,” he said. He heard watery coughing overhead as the clone took his first breath. Thirteen weeks ago, those lungs had been a tidbit of bone or leather in a vial, locked away for hundreds or thousands of years. Now a living man lay up there!

Out of sight, the clone began yelling and laughing with joy.

Nathan Lee looked up.

“They do that sometimes,” Miranda said. “They seem to remember dying. For them this is the afterlife. Some come out from the tank like him. Others aren’t so pleased.”

Nathan Lee tried to sort his questions. There was so much to ask. Her science tugged at him. It felt like a great temptation.

“What happens now? To him.”

“Testing is another division.” She was emphatic. “Other labs. South Sector.”

The clone’s hilarity echoed. He was babbling away. The language was distinctly not English, and Nathan Lee couldn’t make out any of the actual words. But on the edge of his linguistic ear he started to recognize a faint, guttural rhythm. “Is that…?” He listened harder.

She was watching him.

He remembered the dusty, sunstruck ruins of Aleppo, and a village in the hills above, a tribe of ancient refugees. “Is he speaking Aramaic?”

“You tell me.”

“I know a few words.” He started for the stairway.

She caught his arm. “We don’t to speak to them.”

“But why?”

“It could endanger our research.”

“I don’t understand.” He felt dizzy.
A man from two thousand years ago! A time traveler!

“It has never been important to what we do. It’s safer to treat their speech as nonsense. Mindless babbling.”

“But it’s not nonsense,” said Nathan Lee. “He’s thanking God.”

“I’ve gotten some of them back from South Sector,” she said. “Twenty-three of them so far. Uninfected specimens. Noncarriers. It was difficult. But they’re here, in the floors below. We keep them isolated.”

“What are you doing with them?” he said.

“Keeping them safe.”

“Safe from what?”

She turned her eyes away. “We’re looking for immunity,” she said. “So far we’ve found some who survived an earlier form of the virus. They’re partially immune to this modern outbreak. They can still get infected. But the symptoms don’t manifest in them so quickly. We’ve done computer simulations. They might live another three years before the pathogen kills them.”

“And you have twenty-three of them here?” said Nathan Lee. He couldn’t get over the technology.

“Yes.”

“What about the other fifteen hundred?”

Her green eyes peered at him from between her cap and mask. She didn’t answer him. “We have a Neandertal,” she said. “Totally immune.”

“You cloned a Neandertal!”

“That wasn’t for medical research. It was before Corfu. Anyway, she’s proved the species barrier. Subspecies, to be exact.”

“What does that mean?”

“For some reason, the girl’s naturally resistant. It could be the chemical barriers in her skin or respiratory tract or something in her GI tract. We don’t know. Her resistanace doesn’t transfer to us, though. We know that much. She’s a dead end.”

Neandertals! Clones from two thousand years ago! This place was a marvel.

“What am I supposed to be doing?” he said.

“It’s time to take the next step,” she said. “I want you to take a step backward. A step away.”

“Away from what?”

“You’re an anthropologist. They’re a tribe, of sorts.”

“You want me to study them?” That sounded simple enough. He was an archaeologist, not an ethnographer. But why spoil a free meal? Simplicity ruled. Los Alamos was supposed to be a stop on the map. Once he got Ochs to sing, he meant to vanish, no ties, no debts, no regrets.

“No contact,” Miranda answered. “There are cameras in their cells. Just watch and listen. Eavesdrop on their thoughts.”

The clone shouted out. It sounded like
“Rebekah”.
He was calling for a woman, his wife, perhaps, or daughter. Calling to her from the other side of death. Did he think she would join him?

The cry shook Nathan Lee. The voice closed away. They took the man from the room, off to some lab. In the quiet that followed, a swimming pool net dipped from above, scooping out parts of the fetal sac.

“You want me to make human beings out of your animals,” he said.

“You don’t approve of what we’re doing?” she said.

“Does that change anything?”

She was looking at him. “No one’s sure how much they actually remember,” she said. Probably not all that much. Their previous life has never been our purpose here. But they cry. They shout out. Maybe you can give them a little solace.”

“Solace,” he said.

“We created them.”

“Do they know that?”

“That’s beside the point. It doesn’t matter if they have no idea who we are. You can’t just disown your own children.” She was solemn, as if he were somehow part of her redemption.

T
HE
B
EGINNING OF
A
UGUST

N
athan Lee entered their world of monsters.

For a week, he did not go down into the so-called Orphanage, their warren of cells in sub-basement Five. Instead he took up residence in the Necro Archives, the human tissues room. It had lapsed into a sloppy grab bag of specimens. He set about organizing the samples, in part to organize his thoughts, but mostly to acquaint himself with the bones in preparation for their living flesh. There were teeth, dried muscle, withered organs in jars, baggies and vials, skulls, fingernails, and long bones numbered with magic marker or red fingernail polish. One of the twenty-three men had been made from silver, so to speak, from a Herod-headed coin speckled with blood flakes.

At last, after six days, Nathan Lee felt ready. He took the elevator down to the Orphanage. Captain Enote led him through the long, silent hallway, and it looked like a death row for robots, all shiny and metal. There were twenty quarantine cells on the right, and twenty on the left. The complex had been built by a contractor whose specialty was super-prisons. Nathan Lee paused by an empty cell, and went in, wanting the feel one more time.

“Familiar?” the Captain asked him from the doorway.

“They never did anything like this to you in Kathmandu,” Nathan Lee said.

There was no life in here, not even an insect. Everything was metal or indestructible plastic. Each cell held a bed, a toilet, and a sink. There was a shower nozzle in the high ceiling, a drain in the floor, and surveillance cameras mounted behind bubbles. Micron screens filtered the air that vented in and out of their rooms. They lived in a sterile state.

Moving on, he peeked through some of the Plexiglas slots at eyelevel, and the prisoners were mostly dozing. They had paper blankets, and no clothes. Once a day the shower nozzle sprayed them with soap and disinfectant. “They can’t see out,” said the Captain. “But they know we’re here. Did Miranda mention, no contact. Observation only.”

Ten times. “Got it,” said Nathan Lee.

On their way to the monitor room, the Captain pointed at door number One at the very end. “You don’t bother with that one,” he said. “Ever.”

The monitor room lit dark and cool. Two guards sat in chairs that could slide back and forth on roller wheels along the banks of screens. Nathan Lee did a quick count. There were eighty screens, two for each cell. Only the screens of the occupied cells were glowing. The Captain went to the pair of screens for Cell One, and turned them off. He introduced Nathan Lee to the guards.

“Mr. Swift wants to get to know the boys,” he said. “He’s cleared to come in here and watch the screens. He can listen on the headphones. You can talk to him. Share the files.” The Captain pointed at the screens for Cell One. “She stays out of it. Clear?”

“Yes sir,” they said.

One of the guards got a chair for Nathan Lee, and made room at the end of the long counter for his yellow notepad. “You want some bean?” he asked, and poured the coffee in a chipped mug.

As he was leaving, the Captain said, “how long did you spend in that Asia jail?”

It was deliberate. The two guards’ ears pricked up. Now they knew a convict was sharing the booth with them, which was fair enough. “Seventeen months,” said Nathan Lee.

“Don’t go try to bust anybody out,” said the Captain.

“No contact,” recited Nathan Lee.

“Let’s see where you get here,” said the Captain, and he left.

Nathan Lee strolled along the bank of monitors, orienting himself. He matched them up to his notes, man by man. On paper, each was a tooth, skull, or bit of wood. On the screen, they were not much more, just bits of humanity worn out by their short lives. Many bore livid surgical scars, which surprised him. What kinds of things had been done to them in South Sector? They acted less like prisoners than patients in a cancer ward. If they moved, it was only slowly. You felt their pain.

“Oh yeah,” said one of the guards. “South Sector’s hell on them.”

“What about him?” Nathan Lee asked. The clone was more scar than skin. He was missing part of an ear. His face looked like a badly sewn baseball.

“The fugitive,” answered the second guard. “He got loose last winter. He hit the razor wire, tangled in it, and just kept fighting. He tore himself free and made it halfway to the Rio Grande. The trackers said it was like following a paint bucket with a hole in it. He just about bled out and froze to death, they say. Finally found him in some cave dwellings down one of the canyons. After that he got rated high risk. None of the researchers wanted to work him no more. So Miranda added him to the collection.”

“How long have they been here?”

“Miranda salvaged the first of them five months ago.”

Each clone had an identification number tattooed on the back of their neck and at the base of their spine. The tradition of naming lab animals, whether they were slugs or chimpanzees, was as old as research. The guards had their own nicknames for the clones: Cueball for a bald fellow; Rutabaga and Cabbage for two catatonic men; Stiff for a clone with priapism; Yessir for the clone with a nervous tic; Johnny Angel for the blue-eyed handsome one.

“Do they talk?”

“Hoot, howl, mumble, scream. One used to sing. He quit.”

“Can I see their files?”

“Help yourself.” A guard pointed at the file cabinets.

Instead of biographies, each had lab reports, much of it classified and blacked out. That was inauspicious. Miranda was right, labs within the Lab treated one another as enemies. On the brink of destruction, the scientists were at cross purposes with their own survival, hiding their work. And yet their experiments and secrets were written on the flesh of their subjects. Some of the clones had survived four or five labs before being delivered back into their maker’s care. Not one had his own real name. Not one displayed a life before this life.

Nathan Lee laid their files in front of their respective screens. Those were now, what was then? He wanted to start from scratch, to erase their numbers, to reach back through the artifact two thousand years.

It was slow, frustrating work. He spent hours waiting for a movement or word on any screen. Their daily cycles were synched around food and the daily soaking. They wanted to dream away their captivity. Nathan Lee understood their torpor. He had done the same until his prison revealed itself as a palace. Restoring the past, he had restored himself.

The guards were interested in his work only because they were bored. When they weren’t too busy playing guitar with a rubber band or making paper clip chains, they might record events while Nathan Lee was gone. An event could be anything: a mumble, a scream…and then, on the third day, a name.

“There,” said Nathan Lee, replaying the tape. He jacked the volume up. “Do you hear it now?” He didn’t speak the name. He wanted to draw the guards into his discovery. He was going to need their help with the observing. But to them, the clones were a bare step up from vegetation. He had to convert them somehow. His father had taught him there was no other way to climb a big mountain. They had to find the spirit themselves.

“Isaiah?” One of the guards frowned.

“Did he really say Isaiah?” whispered his partner. His name badge read Joe. “Like in the Book?”

“Yes,” said Nathan Lee.

They were speechless. The bones could speak. The numbers had names. As Joe pointed out in disbelief, holy names.

“I’ll be back in five minutes,” Nathan Lee told them. “Keep listening for more.”

He raced up to the Necro Archives and rummaged through the drawers, and raced down again. Back in the monitor booth, he laid a heel bone in front of them, and it still had the nail driven through its side. “Isaiah,” he said.

It was a small thing. In a stainless steel cell two thousand years from his home, a nameless man had reminded himself of his own name. But now the guards understood. The Year Zero had just opened its door for anyone who dared to enter.