Cody Breswick heard the beat of his heart on the ECG machine before he heard anything else. It made a sound like the old Pong video game his father had shown him at the San Francisco Exploratorium the last time they were there. Beep. Beep. Beep. A steady, almost monotonous sound that called him up from the black, murky waters where he had been floating aimlessly for longer than he could imagine.
The ring finger of his left hand twitched, then fell motionless again.
Air escaped from his lungs in a short, sharp burst.
He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry and what little saliva he could gather together wasn’t enough to coat the inside of his mouth much less the inside of his throat. It felt raw and burning when he tried to swallow.
He moaned.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
At the edge of the darkness, he could see the first bluish-purple glow of a sunrise. There was light out there somewhere beyond the darkness, beyond the black, formless landscape. He sensed it more than saw it, but it was there all right, gradually drawing in the surrounding darkness the way a Black Hole draws in the light. The black sky turned dark blue… turned light blue… turned white-orange… turned
…turned bright and illuminating, a burning, sparkling sun.
His eyelids fluttered open against the light, and he was startled by the intensity. He blinked back the glare several times, felt his eyes water, and raised his hand to shade his eyes against the brightness. Overhead, a small fluorescent lamp cast its gaze over his pillow and halfway down the bed.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The machine making that rhythmic sound stood against the wall, next to the bed. Across a screen near the top, a graph line moved from left to right, spiking synchronically to each new beep. Cody didn’t know exactly what it did or how it did it, but he thought the beeping had something to do with his heart. Small round bandages on his chest and wrists and ankles were connected to long wire leads that seemed somehow to join him to the machine.
He tried to move his legs. They felt as if they were cased in concrete. A dull throbbing pain went spiraling up his calves and through his thighs. His right arm, which lay in some sort of contoured half-cast, strapped across the biceps and forearm, spasmed then fell still again. There was a needle protruding from beneath several layers of medical tape across the inside of his elbow joint. The needle ran into a tube, the tube ran into a machine that sounded as if it were gnawing on something, and above the machine someone had hung two bags of clear liquid from a metal stand.
“Mom…”
He glanced to his right, beyond the machinery, and realized he was not alone in this room. There was a girl in the bed to his right. She looked as if she might be a year or two older than him, her hair blond-brown, her fingernails unpolished and long. She took in a shallow breath and her chest expanded briefly then fell back again. Cody wondered distantly if she were dying.
“Mom…”
It was scary here. Beyond the girl, there was another bed, another girl. And beyond her, another bed still. Each of the beds had its own overhead light, its own staff of machines. It brought to mind images of a hospital, though this seemed as if it were one step beyond the hope of a hospital, a place where they brought the hopeless to die.
“Mom…”
He called out another half-a-dozen times before the door finally opened and a woman he didn’t know walked through. She seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see her. And though later he would wonder about his mother and why she wasn’t there, initially he didn’t care that the woman wasn’t his mother. Initially, all that mattered was that someone had finally arrived.
Someone who wasn’t hooked up to a machine.
[110]
There had been no early flights out of O’Hare and Childs had ended up hanging out at the airport for nearly three hours before his eight o’clock flight was ready to board. The plane landed a little after ten, Pacific Daylight Time. It took him another thirty minutes to retrieve his luggage and make it to his car, which was parked in the overnight lot half-a-mile from the terminal.
By the time he made it home, he had begun to feel the effects of the trip. He dropped his suitcase in the entryway and headed for the wet bar in the living room, where he poured himself a Vodka Collins. There was a slight chill in the house, though he preferred it a little on the cool side and didn’t have the energy to bother with the thermostat, which was mounted on the wall at the other end of the hall.
Instead, he collapsed on the couch.
It had been a long haul. Not just the trip and the flight home, but everything that had happened over the past twenty years: the first administration of Genesis, the disappointment when it hadn’t appeared to have had any effect, the follow-up with the children just in case, then the mishap with the AA103. A long journey and Childs still wasn’t sure how far he had come.
D.C. had instructed him to dispose of the AA103 and all his research notes shortly after the comas had started to crop up. If the public ever found out, he had said, all hell would break loose. The entire government would be in danger. Of course, that had been before they discovered the other side effect: that the children had stopped aging. By then, D.C. had already supervised the burning of the notes and the disposal of all ten vials of the drug.
Childs had been devastated. He had naively allowed himself to believe that he had been part of something important, so important that the CIA and the DOD had wanted him on their team. That was the only way he had been able justify what he had done. It had been for the good of the country, for the good of mankind. The end truly would justify the means.
Not all the AA103 had gone down the drain. Childs had not been able to bring himself to dispose of all of it. Shortly after the first child had fallen ill, he had set aside a single vial, replacing it with distilled water. He was perhaps naive, but he wasn’t stupid. He realized that once word got out about what had happened things in Washington would heat up and eventually he would feel the pressure. So he had covered himself.
He took another swipe at his drink.
AA103.
How close could a man come to uncovering the key to aging and still not quite figure it out? All he had to do was take a look at any of the dozens of sleepers scattered around the country. In ten years, not a single child in the group had grown older. Not a single child. Not a day older. They had all beaten Old Man Time’s ticking clock, and they had done it because of him. And now the only thing that remained between him and history was understanding the connection to the AA103.
How close could a man come?
He gulped down the last of the Vodka Collins and nearly missed setting the glass on the coffee table. There was a quote he had picked up in college, though he couldn’t remember who had said it. It was this: I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
“Not so me,” Childs said, knowing that the fear of failure had been a harbinger perched upon his shoulder for as long as he could remember. It was always there, always whispering calamities in his ear, rarely letting him sleep the dreamless night, rest the wakeful morning. And it had only become worse since Audrey had died.
“Not so me.”
The phone rang.
It startled him, and Childs barked the shin of his right leg against the coffee table as he sat up. It hurt something awful as he limped into the kitchen and grabbed the receiver off its cradle. “Yeah?”
“You’re back?” Elizabeth said, surprised. Her last name was Tilley. She was in her late-fifties, and she had an extensive background in nursing, which was how Childs had first met her back in the days of the off-campus clinic near Berkeley. They had been together, professionally, ever since. If there was anyone in the world he trusted, it was Elizabeth. She was his adviser, his confidant, the only person who had truly shared his vision all these years.