The boy raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Seriously? You all believe in this stuff?”
She nodded. “Many strange things happened even when this island was being built from an atoll in the sea. I am from Kavaratti, and I began working here to help my family, even though they didn’t want me to.”
“How come your family doesn’t want you here?”
“In India, we believe the evil eye is very real, and many people cursed Lemuria. Some deaths occurred during construction not long afterwards.”
“Oh yeah? How did they die?”
“There was a fire, started by protestors who came in by boat at night,” she said. “I was told their ghosts still haunt this place.”
Scott crossed his arms. “I don’t believe in ghosts. My dad told me there’s no such things.”
“That is your choice. Other strange events have happened. A few evenings ago I heard a strange sound coming from the jungle beyond the checkpoint.”
The boy’s doubts were replaced by curiosity. “What’s over at the other side of that checkpoint?”
“There is a very large private estate there,” Alisha said. “Off limits to everyone. I think they’re hiding a big secret in it.”
“Oh yeah? What kind of secret?”
The door beside them opened, and Taylor Erskine stood by the entryway. He eyed the young woman contemptuously. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning some rooms or something?”
“Yes, sir,” Alisha said meekly to the security chief before bowing out of the room.
Erskine gave the boy a crocodile smile. “Enjoying yourself, Scotty?”
The boy nodded. “Yeah, thanks.”
“I had a talk with your parents again, and I told them everything will be okay,” he said, fishing a few game tokens out of his pocket and handing them to Scott. “Here, you can play some more.”
The boy took the tokens and put them in his pocket. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Erskine said as he began to make his way out the door. “Stay out of trouble now, lest we have to look for you too.”
Scott stood silently as he watched the door close and he was alone in the game room once more. The staff seem to be scared of that guy, he thought. I don’t like him either.
30
THE HOTEL’S PENTHOUSE suite had four large bedrooms linked by an activity room, along with an attached kitchenette, but only one man was occupying them. Despite the bright, sunny afternoon outside, all the curtains had been drawn and the overhead lights turned off, leaving the suite’s interior in an air-conditioned sterile twilight, the only illumination coming from the laptop monitor showing the recorded videos of Project Proteus and its head scientist.
Kazimir Morgenstern held a glass of champagne in his left hand while watching the video. He had taken off his suit and now wore a custom-made polo shirt and loose slacks while skimming through most of the recorded files, only playing the most relevant parts in order to truly understand what his brother had done with all that money.
The videos contained Dr. Lauren Reeves’s personal log, and the first entry showed her wearing a perfectly pressed lab smock over a formal blouse. “Thanks to the generosity of the Morgenstern Group, I now have the funds and the technological means to apply my new discoveries and techniques in a controlled environment, without any outside interference. These recordings will provide a record of my personal views during the whole project.”
Kazimir took another sip of the sparkling beverage. Brilliant woman and not bad looking either. Pity she’s probably dead now.
“I hereby present Project Proteus,” Lauren’s recording said. “Why do I call it that? Well, Proteus is a Greek primordial sea god who symbolized change and mutability, and I thought it was a very fitting name for it. What I plan to do would change the very nature of genetic engineering and break through the limits of our capabilities. If I succeed, this will bring about a whole new scientific era, one in which human beings can live forever, in perfect, custom-designed bodies suitable for any environment.”
Kazimir fast forwarded the video when she began explaining the ethical aspects. He didn’t need to listen to any of that.
The new video entry showed a picture montage of the inner laboratory under construction with Lauren’s voice serving as narrator. “I’m well aware of the costs, but Emeric is with me all the way, and his support is invaluable to get to where we’re at. I’ve already done interviews with Fukiyama and Ostermann, and they have agreed to join my team. Dr. Ostermann took a bit more convincing, but the opportunity for fame and the money finally won him over. This is a dream team of the world’s top genetics researchers, and I can’t wait to get started.”
Kazimir thrust out his lower lip as he played another entry. What a disaster this is turning out to be. He had always known Lauren to be a genius in what she did, yet she was also too single minded, for she tended to overlook many obvious things like security redundancies and failsafe protocols in case something went wrong. She never married, and her own colleagues felt she had inadequate social skills.
“Editing of the human genome is a fairly straightforward process once you have everything mapped out,” Lauren said in the eighth video of the series. “The complications arise when you start adding in DNA strands from other species while turning off the genes you don’t want to keep and enhancing the ones you do, and the unexpected side effects all this entails.”
“In order to have a successful brain transplant, the new host body must be genetically compatible with the old one to prevent organ rejection, but due to the deformities of the original, and our lack of complete knowledge in fully mapping out the genome sequences of the various contributor species, this will be an ongoing process until we get it right. Trial and error, so to speak,” she said confidently.
The next few videos were too disgusting for him to look at, for they showed a hideously deformed child crying alone in a room, so he quickly skipped through them until the thirteenth video.
Lauren’s face showed signs of exhaustion, but it was also tinged with triumph as the recording showed her sitting in what looked to be the inside of a lab testing chamber. “Host body number three seems to be the most promising one, and I’ve prepped it for transplant surgery. The one major problem we seem to have is how it looks. Dr. Parsons says it’s a monster, and nobody disagrees with him, but this is the most stable frame we have engineered and grown so far. My major worry is that the brain must be placed into a host body right away, or else it could atrophy and die before we could save it. Time is our enemy now.”
Kazimir skipped through the next two videos until he got to number sixteen.
The video showed Lauren still dressed in surgical garb, her apron dripping with blood. She had taken off the procedure mask and still had the plastic cap on her head, yet the brightness in her eyes was evident. “Well, we’ve succeeded. Brainwaves are present though somewhat erratic, which means it’s alive. There’s still a whole lot of tests to run, but I’m confident we’ve saved it, and I’ve already told Emeric this. He’s on his way over and he’ll be bringing in a whole crate of lobsters and champagne for a victory dinner upstairs, so he says.”
Kazimir placed the now empty champagne glass on the coffee table before he skipped over to video twenty-one.
Lauren was dressed in a lab smock once again, but her once perfectly brushed hair seemed disheveled this time. “Some unexpected complications. The host body seems to be very sensitive to light, at the point where I think the lab illumination may be causing it physical pain, but I can’t be sure so we’ll just have to keep running tests on it. I’m not certain what the reason is, but Dr. Fukiyama thinks it’s due to the electroreceptors on the sides of its head.”