Lowery grinned. “And by then we’ll be long gone. I like it.”
“It’s win-win,” Luca said. “If I’m right, we’ll have the sim. If I’m wrong, no more wasting time watching Cannon.”
But I’mnot wrong, he told himself. That sim’s in there. I can smell her.
18
SUFFOLK COUNTY, NY
“Even though it’s only Christmas Eve, we’ll call this our Christmas dinner,” Zero said as he opened the lids of the pizza boxes on his dining room table. “Because who knows where we’ll be tomorrow? No turkey for our sim Christmas, I’m afraid. Just two large pies—a plain and a sausage.” He glanced at his two guests. “Do either of you know what Christmas means, by the way?”
Kek didn’t even look up; he’d been lured away from one of the computers where he’d been engrossed inMortal Kombat XX , and now he grabbed a slice of the sausage pie and started wolfing it down.
But Tome smiled and said, “Lights and trees and presents.”
“Yes, that’s a big part of it. A time of peace on earth and good will toward men, I’m told. But what about sims? Does that include good will toward sims?”
Zero had made the mistake of allowing himself a glass of holiday cheer: one Scotch and water. Terrible tasting stuff, didn’t know how Ellis Sinclair had drunk so much of it all those years, but he’d forced it down—the season to be jolly and all that. Now he wished he hadn’t. Not used to alcohol, and though he wasn’t feeling much in the way of physical effects, it seemed to have untethered his thoughts, leaving them to wander. Now they were wandering into terra incognita.
“Tome not know, Mist Zero.”
Not know what? Oh, yes…about good will toward sims.
“Of course you don’t, Tome. Christmas has become a secular holiday for the most part, but it’s still a religious occasion for those who celebrate the arrival of their god to save mankind. But what of us sims? Are we included in that salvation? Or are we damned?” He toasted with a piece of plain pie. “Joy to the world.”
But he felt no trace of joy, felt instead as if he were standing on the brink of a precipice, gazing into the unknown. The world as he’d always known it was about to change. Radically. And with it his relationship to that world and all the people he knew in it. Nothing would ever be the same.
He tried to imagine what it would be like to come out of hiding, to wander about with his face exposed to the world, to be aperson . He could not.
He surprised himself by starting to sing: “We three sims of chimpanzee blood, wondering how we’ll ride out the flood…” He noticed Tome and Kek staring at him. “Come on, sing! You know the words!”
But then he couldn’t go on, not with his throat constricting around a sob.
What have I done? My race, my brother sims—what will happen to them when Meerm’s baby is shoved in the face of the world? By saving them will I doom them to extinction?
19
SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ
DECEMBER 25
“We leave at oh-three-hundred,” Luca told Lowery. The two of them had the SimGen security offices virtually to themselves. He checked his watch. “That gives you ten minutes to get the other four assembled by the cars and ready to go.”
“Got it,” Lowery said and trotted off.
Luca turned back to the printouts on his desk. This genetics stuff was so complicated. He’d done search after search before tracking down intergenomic and intragenomic competition, and then more searching before finding articles he could understand. Weren’t many of those, but he’d managed to glean some idea of what it all meant. He still didn’t see what was so frightening about it.
Intergenomic competition…a theory that arose back in the nineties about the maternal and paternal halves of the fetal genome competing for dominance during development. Luca understood it best when he translated it into combat terms. In a male embryo, the Y chromosome from the father directs the struggle against the maternal half of the genome. But in a female, with no Y to marshal the forces of the paternal genome, the maternal X has an easier time against the paternal X; it can then push more characteristics from its own underlying genome toward the front, thus showing more of its maternal DNA to the world.
Intragenomic competition was a newer and more controversial theory. Whileinter genomic competition applied to all species,intra genomic competition applied only to recombinant transgenic species of higher mammals, and it was a double war. While the usual intergenomic competition was being waged, there was also a civil war going on within the recombinant genome. As Luca understood it, the recombinant half would try to express the genes from its original underlying genome at the expense of the foreign genes that had been spliced into it.
Yeah? So what?
If all this held true, a human father meant the pregnant sim’s baby would look more like a human if it was a boy and more like a chimp if it was a girl.
Again: So what?
I must be missing something, Luca thought, because the only scary thing here is how boring this is.
He checked his watch again. Time to go. An 0300 departure would get them to Mineola in plenty of time to gear up for the raid.
And they had plenty of gear. Like the others, Luca was wearing a black cotton BDU; but before they went in they’d add body armor and Kevlar helmets with visors; each would carry tactical forearm 15,000 candlepower flashlights and an HK submachine gun equipped with double 30-round translucent magazines.
He hoped to use that weapon. He wanted that sim, yes, but wanted Cadman and Sullivan there too. Especially Romy Cadman. He wanted one last look at that pretty face before he put a bullet into it.
20
MINEOLA, NY
The racket—footsteps in the upstairs hallway, a fist pounding on a door, Betsy’s voice shouting—startled Romy awake. She found herself up and moving without knowing how or why.
“Wake up! Patrick! Romy! It’s time! We’ve got to go!”
Go? Where? She pulled open her door and caught Betsy as she hurried by. “What’s wrong?”
“Meerm’s in hard labor. We can’t hold off any longer. Got to get her to the hospital right now!”
Romy saw Patrick stick his head out of his room and called to him. “Did you hear?”
He nodded blearily. “What time is it?”
“Three-twenty!” Betsy cried, moving away. “Get dressed. We’ve got to move!”
Romy jumped into her clothes and was down the stairs in seconds, Patrick right behind her. They dashed to Betsy’s bedroom where they found a very confused and frightened Meerm lying on a cot and wrapped in blankets.
“Patrick, you carry her,” Betsy said as she yanked the spread and blankets off her own bed. “We’ll fix up the car.”
Romy followed her to the garage where they flattened the rear seats in the Volvo and spread out the bedclothes. Patrick appeared a moment later carrying the moaning Meerm. They nestled her in the rear section.
“Patrick, you drive,” Betsy said. “Do you know the way to the hospital?”
“No.”
“I’ll direct you, then. Romy, you stay here in the back with me.”
And then they were on their way, Betsy and Romy kneeling on either side of Meerm in the back as Patrick pulled out of the driveway. Romy opened her PCA and left a beeper message for Zero: “It’s happening. We’re on our way to the hospital.”
As she hung up she heard Betsy on her own PCA.
“…know it’s Christmas, Joanna, but this is more than just an emergency section, it’s an historical event…I wish I could say more than that, but I can’t. Have I ever lied to you? Well then, believe me, Joanna, youwant to be part of this. Okay, good. I’ll see you there.”
As Betsy hung up and punched in another speed-dial code, she glanced at Romy and smiled. “My surgical team. A dedicated bunch, but itis Christmas Day. My nurse anesthetist is Hindu, so she’ll be no problem; but both my scrub nurses have small children.” She shrugged. “One’s coming. I hope I can persuade the other. If not…do you faint at the sight of blood, Romy?”