Best Of You Page 2

thesis, published last year under my real name. It’s a blabbering work of fiction, written over a long weekend and not worth the handful of kilobytes it takes to store. I had to write it, though. It’s my safeguard.

  “Sorry,” I say. This isn’t an e-book signing. Get ahold of yourselves, humans. “I’m due to speak momentarily. Perhaps afterward.” I press forward toward the main hall, the crowd parting only at my insistence.

  “Excuse me, please.”

  The nasal tones of a military administrator slice through the chatter of the swarm.

  “Excuse me.”

  The voice is unmistakably my event coordinator, Sandy. She is at my side seconds later, her click-board extended to its maximum length and tucked under her arm. Her hair looks permanently fixed into place, so smooth and compressed that it reflects the light of the ceiling. The crisp lines on her dark blue pants suit tell the rest of her story. She is all business.

  “This way, Dr. Brooks.”

  She takes the lead and breaks through the side of the crowd to lead me parallel to the main hall entryways. Her samurai voice cuts away any further obstacles, and we slip unscathed through a single unmarked door. Behind it is a hallway designed for royalty, coated with deep red carpeting and wide enough for a full entourage of guards. It had been far less interesting to visualize from the schematics.

  “What’s the attendance like, Sally?”

  “Full to capacity,” she says, her pace unaffected. “Best of You, Inc. sent three from their corporate office to fill our last remaining seats.”

  It was to be expected. They think of me as their best marketing tool. Never mind that the procedure hadn’t been repeated successfully in the last eleven years. I am the living proof that their splicing has the potential to create genius children. Their walking, talking prototype. But not for long.

  I shift my backpack around to my stomach as we walk, silently reaching into it and activating the disrupter.

  “Please, wait in here, Dr. Brooks.” Sally turns and takes one last step backward to usher me into a waiting room. “Watch for my introduction on the screen. This room is directly below the central platform. When you’re ready, the lift in the corner will carry you up.”

  Sally pauses and looks back just before leaving me. She looks like she wants to say “good luck” or some other clichéd comfort, but she holds her tongue. Then, I’m alone. It seems like the first time in months that I’m not actively implementing a new plan. All the work has led to this morning, and now it feels good to just relax and wait for it to happen.

  After several minutes, the wall before me lights up with an image of the main hall. The perspective is good, high enough to avoid being obstructed by the shuffling scientists but low enough to see many of their expressions. Would they be just as happy if they knew they were here for the sole purpose of extracting their life’s work from the face of the Earth? Not a chance. The most primitive human instinct of self-preservation would be there to undermine any such notion of the greater good.

  “Please, be seated,” Sally says, her voice carrying across the hall. Two hundred individual conversations cease. Sally waits patiently while the last few attendees take their seats.

  It really is too bad about Sally. She’s been extremely useful in her role – I doubt I’ll find many others who can do their jobs with as much competence.

  Sally is standing just to the side of a small table with water on it. She seems so much like the water, steady and calm behind the thin microphone. The microphone is only vestigial, of course. The receptors stuck to her lapel will capture and distribute the audio. It’s just another relic, a trick to convince emotion-driven humans that they’re being reminded of a time when things were simpler, happier. It’s a ridiculous habit, and I see it everywhere. It’s fascinating to me how a species could survive thousands of years without ever fully learning to embrace an uncertain future.

  “It is truly my honor to introduce perhaps the most talented young man to have ever lived to one of the few audiences capable of understanding him. He was made famous as the miracle of the late Dr. Turnbull, the famous architect of Best of You Incorporated’s groundbreaking genetics program. But your presence here is a testament to the fame he has earned since then. His work has had a tremendous impact on your careers and on how the world understands the most fundamental building blocks of every living organism.”

  I move to the lift and step onto it. I carefully place my backpack beside my feet.

  “Please, join me in welcoming the illustrious Dr. Charles Brooks.”

  The lift rises up as the crowd rises to their feet. I am a rock star again, surrounded by obsessed fans hoping for a glimpse of the world through my eyes. They pretend they are celebrating me and my accomplishments, but they are really celebrating themselves and the honor of attending this event. They clap as loud as they can to cover their shameful lack of understanding, and they deliver the same kind of noise any group of primates gathered together around a fire could make. Even in a room full of the world’s most brilliant scientists, I am as alone as if I had never left the waiting room. With every thwack of their chimp hands, they confirm humanity’s dire need for medical attention.

  I hold my hand up in polite acknowledgement of their praise, and this silences them.

  “Thank you so very much.” The passion of the clapping is gone, and they take their seats. “And thank you, Sally…” I turn to regard her and to count the paces between us. She’s far enough away. “… for the warm introduction.”

  I turn back to face my fans.

  “Maybe too warm, even,” I say. I draw a vertical line on the perspiring cup of water beside me.

  My grin draws nervous laughter.

  “Sorry, bad joke. It’s just that I was excepting a juice box or something.”

  The laughter this time is genuine. I learned early on in my career that jokes about my age were always a smash hit. I’ve never met a scientific peer who didn’t secretly wish I was older so they’d be less embarrassed by their admiration for me.

  But the tension they are laughing through this time is about more than my age. I made sure the invitation to the event would be enough to lure them here. I had promised to reveal a method of genetic sequencing and reconstitution never before identified, one that would become the new gold standard for their work. I had hinted at it in my book, calling it the Theory of Predictable Imperfection. I wasn’t lying when I told them that not knowing this method would, essentially, make them obsolete in their fields.

  As the laughter begins to die, I take a drink of the water and use the motion to unlock and slip out of my disposable shoe sole coverings. My footprints from here forward would match those of a size five female SLPD detective. Future generations will always wonder who had the gall to stand where I once stood. I step back into my place behind the pretend microphone and use the toe of my shoe to touch my backpack. Data seeker away.

  The cacophony of malfunctioning electronics is too much of a distraction even for the focused minds of scientists. Alerts, notifications and warnings of all kinds soon undermine even the few words I had prepared as a delay tactic. It’s a simple program, really. It temporarily occupies each device while it records the addresses of any servers they’re connected to. Then, it erases all the data on those servers. The only thing I hadn’t accounted for was the resulting warning from the devices that the data was no longer there. I should have guessed, though. Geneticists live and breathe their data.

  There’s no reason to delay any longer. The panic is going to set in at the loss of their data, and there will be a run for the doors like they’re in a burning theater. I press in on the side of my jacket pocket.

  The enormous thud that comes from the tunnel below jerks their attention away from the devices. They are starting to realize something bigger than their electronics might be happening. Their control over their lives is thinner now, thinner than they had previously imagined. What had been a shallow, dithering panic has now become real fear.

&
nbsp; What they don’t realize is that the explosion had only been a test. And I was right to have them install the test charge, because it was closer to my position in the hall than I had planned. I think back over the distance to the maintenance lift and calculate the timing. I’m going to have to move much faster. Still, my probability of survival is high enough to proceed. I’ll just have to trigger the lift as soon as I start to run.

  “I’d hate to be in that subway car,” I say. I watch as the words wash the madness out of their temporal lobes and turn it into embarrassment. Yes, you are still alive. Yes, the hand you are holding belongs to the stranger beside you. And yes, they are still alive, too. The irony of their newfound zen is almost too hilarious for me to contain.

  Instead of laughing, though, I tap the main charge in my other pocket.

  Before I can even spin completely around, a splintered chair arm cracks into my leg and knocks me to the floor. I’m only left with three seconds of my four second window. It might still be enough, if I’m fast. Luckily, my leg isn’t broken, the first wave of debris has passed, and I can still run. Which I do. I fly forward, my feet churning to keep up with my torso. I pump furiously with one arm while the other grasps for the lift trigger inside my jacket pocket.

  When I reach the lift, the second wave of debris is already in flight. The