Good idea. OPRR would get nothing out of Luca the snake.
“Excellent choice.”
Voss rose and straightened his suit coat. “Knew you’d like that. Matter of fact, Mr. Portero and me are gonna have us a little sit-down right now in my office. I’m gonna lay out the legalities we’re up against, and how we’re gonna slide around ’em.”
“What about my lab?” Ellis said. He’d come out of his crouch now, sitting up with a rigid spine. “I won’t allow them in my lab. And as for the sealed section—”
“Hey, ain’t no one from OPRR or anywhere else gonna be anyplace we don’t want ’em to be. Mr. Portero will see to that.”
Portero only nodded.
“Thank God,” Ellis said.
Voss and Portero headed for the door. “Talk to y’all later,” Voss said.
When they were gone, Mercer turned and found his brother on his feet, a small smile playing about his lips as he approached the desk.
“Hear them?” Ellis said.
“Hear what?”
“The trumpets. They’ve started to blow. And the first cracks are starting to show in the walls of your Jericho. Soon this will all come tumbling down. And then where will you be?”
“Nothing’s going to happen. You heard Abel—everything’s under control.”
“No, Merce. Everything’s spinningout of control. Can’t you feel it?”
“You’re breaking with reality, Ellis.” The worst of it was that he was echoing Mercer’s own inchoate fears. “You need to adjust your meds.”
Ellis had reached the far side of the desk where he continued that wide-eyed stare. “Knowing what you know, Merce, how do you sleep at night?”
Not this again.
“I sleep just fine. If you’ve got such a problem with the company, why don’t you simply turn your back and walk away?”
“If it weren’t for Robbie and Julie, I would—and go straight to the networks and blow the lid off.”
Spicules of ice crystallized in Mercer’s veins. Ellis was just unstable enough to do something like that. Probably thought he’d find some sort of redemption in self-immolation. But he couldn’t burn alone. He’d drag Mercer into his auto-da-fé. And his children as well. Thank god Ellis loved Robbie and Julie too much for that.
“You wouldn’t be blowing the lid off just SimGen, Ellis,” he said softly. “It’s not like we’re in this alone.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Ellis cried.
“Then you should know that the walls could have ears.”
Ellis blanched and leaned against the desk. “I hate this, hate this,hate this!”
“Well, any time you want to sell out, brother, you know my offer.”
“We’re both multi-billionaires. What would I want withmore money?”
“You could go off, buy yourself an island somewhere, declare yourself king, and—”
Ellis straightened again. “And leave the company under your sole command? Not yet. Not till I’ve finished what I started out to do.”
“Meaning what? Treading old ground we’ve covered too many times? You should be working on projects that will move the company forward instead of wasting your time on sims.”
“It’smy time and I’ll decide how I spend it. Once I’ve perfected a sim—mysim—and we start putting them out there, then I’ll sell out to you, Merce—in a heartbeat. But not a second before.”
“We’vegot sims, damn it!”
Ellis glared at him. “How do you live with yourself, Merce? How?”
Mercer sighed. “How? By being a realist. By knowing what is and what isn’t. By facing the hard cold fact that life is chemistry, nothing more, nothing less. When the chemicals are reacting, life goes on. When the reactions stop, so does life. That’s it, and that’s all it is. I am a collection of reacting chemicals; so are you; so are sims. To view existence as anything else is mysticism, romanticism, a myriad other isms, but it isn’t real. Only the chemistry is real. Everything else is self-delusion.”
He felt a pang as he considered his brother’s flushed face and blazing eyes. It hadn’t always been like this. He remembered their days in New Haven, inseparable, spending late hours in the labs, unafraid, pushing the limits, trying the impossible. Then the university had become too interested, looking for a piece of the action. Forget it: They’d dropped out, started their first venture to market no-shed house pets, and were on their way.
He could still visualize in perfect detail the day the Nakao team decoded the chimpanzee genome. He and Ellis immediately printed out a copy and unfolded it along a hallway; then they synched up a printout of the human genome next to it, and together they walked along, comparing, pointing out the uncanny parallels and match-ups.
Mercer remembered stopping and gazing at his brother, finding Ellis staring back at him across those printouts, realizing that Ellis was thinking what he was, seeing in his eyes the shared rapture of knowing what could be done, and that they could do it.
Heady times, those. The joy of discovery, the sense of the pulse of the world throbbing under their fingertips, the near omnipotent feeling that anything was possible.
And now, the hour-to-hour reality of managing one of the hottest new corporations in the world, of fighting day by day to catch up with the Microsofts and GEs of that world consumed him. He would not rest until SimGen was number one.
But that was his dream, not his brother’s. At some point along the road of years he and Ellis had parted ways.
Mercer knew the exact moment. He’d deceived Ellis. Just once. A crucial matter, true, but only that once. He’d hoped to carry the secret to his grave, but truth will out. Ellis had never forgiven him. Or himself.
If I could go back, he wondered, would I do it all over again?
Yes. In a New York minute. Because without that one deception, SimGen would be just another also-ran in the gen-mod field.
“The genie’s out of the bottle, Ellis. And now it’s grown too big to fit back in. I’ve accepted that. It’s about time you did too.”
“No!” He wheeled and headed for the door, yanked it open, and strode through. “Never!”
7
WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NY
OCTOBER 4
Pamela’s voice and her fist pounding on his back wrenched Patrick from slumber.
“Patrick!” she was shouting. “Something’s burning outside!”
“Huh?”
And then a crash—breaking glass—an object smashing through the window only a few feet away, and he was awake, sitting up, his heart jackhammering in his chest as he looked around his dark bedroom. His alarm clock read 1:04. Outside he could hear a car burning rubber as it pulled away.
“What happened?”
“Look!” Pamela said, her voice hushed with fear. “Out on the lawn!”
Flickering light through broken glass…Patrick swung his legs toward the floor.
“No!” Pamela cried. “You’ll cut your feet!”
Good thinking. He reached down, felt around till he found his loafers, then slipped them on. He hurried to the window, glass crunching under his soles, and looked out on his front yard.
His lawn was on fire.
“What the hell?”
He blinked. Well, not the whole lawn, but a circle of it along with some of the grass inside the circle blazed in the night. He was reaching for the phone to dial 911 when he heard the sirens. Apparently one of his neighbors had called the cops or fire department or both. So he reached for the lamp switch instead.
“Oh, shit, what’s happening?” Pamela cried. “What’s happening?”
He glanced at her. She crouched on the bed, blinking in the light like a fawn caught in the middle of the road. Pamela was his latest pseudo-live-in, meaning she owned her own place in New Bedford but had spent most of the last eight months at his place here in Katonah. Worked as a broker for Merrill Lynch; a few years younger than Patrick but her accumulated year-end bonuses put her far closer to early retirement. Dark hair, big blue eyes, and a dazzling bod that she was now shielding to the neck with the bed sheet.