The Body Scout: A Novel Page 25

  The van doors opened, flooded us with light. We stumbled out into the fluorescent green meadows.

  Dolores and the driver signed to each other, their fingers and arms moving in a complex dance. I watched them, uncomprehending, rubbing my immobile prosthetic arm. I only caught a word or two.

  “Two hours. Same spot. If you’re not here, then I go,” the man said to me.

  We were a couple hundred yards from the stadium, close enough we could hear the smog vacuums buzzing around the building. Manhattan skystabbers shot up on each side of the park like the dark metal bars of a gigantic cage, but everything right around us was lush and alive.

  The gardens were filled with blue and orange flowers. Giant birds encircled the stadium, chirping as their fifty-foot streamer tails twirled in the wind. A few rested on the mechanical golden mouth sign, smiling and shining at the top. Large holograms of the starting lineup strode across the top of the stadium then disappeared off the edge. Lex Dash went by, then Sam Tzu and Henry “Hologram” Graham. Then, of course, Zunz. A gigantic, smiling hologram, swinging the bat as it floated by. During a game seven, teams pulled out all the stops.

  Dolores, however, was focused on business. She double-checked her pockets for her equipment, then scanned the area with her enhanced goggles for signs of danger. I checked my own pockets, fingering my gun and the blinders and knockout shots I’d brought in case things got rough.

  “Time to call in the troops?” she said.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Lila appeared on my screen, bobbing a bit with excitement. She was in the Diseased Eden bunker, hundreds of feet underground. I could see the aquariums of fluorescent, deadly fish behind her.

  “About time. We’re all in place.”

  “Tell your friends they can kick-start their Diseased Eden,” I said. “But remember you stay in the subway with Gerald. We have to assume Monsanto is still looking for you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You guys get to have all the fun.”

  “You’re our eyes and ears, Lila,” Dolores said. “That’s just as important.”

  “Whatever. Go save him.” She waved at us, clicked off the feed.

  Dolores adjusted her goggles, scanned the area again. Employees were running around, setting up vendors and seats for the fans who couldn’t fit inside the stadium. Security guards drank coffee, leaning against their hoverbikes. “Nothing seems out of order. Do you feel nervous?”

  “I’m always nervous before a job. That’s why I smoke. Thanks for reminding me.” I fumbled around my pocket with my left hand. Fished the eraser pack out. Held it stupidly in my one hand.

  “Here.”

  Dolores pulled out a cigarette, lit it, took a puff, and then placed it in my lips.

  “You feeling okay?” I asked.

  “I love it. It’s my favorite feeling. I’m tingling all over. It’s like game day, back in the Cyber League. I feel like I’m in the dugout ready to trot out to the field.”

  “Oh,” I said between numbing puffs of smoke.

  We waited.

  I paced around for a couple minutes, my mind racing with every possible failure and theoretical success. Then Dolores called me over. “It’s happening.”

  We watched the footage on her screen. Zunz Resurrected in Sin! and Monsanto Monsters Defile Children read some of the signs. The protestors poured into the plaza. Different sects of Edenists from all over the city. A few No Grows too, and even some Transhuman Socialists. They’d been told about Lila, and the various chapters had agreed that game seven of the World Series was the perfect televised time to stage a revolt.

  The Edenists hated the Future League teams on principle. The biopharms were reaping the profits of a world filled with copyrighted chemicals and genetic patents. That was a reason to protest. But a biopharm planning to cut open an Edenist to steal her cells was enough to start a religious war.

  On the screen, we watched security guards form a line in front of the stadium. A human wall armed with stun guns and gas launchers. They’d walled off the south entrance and courtyard from the rest of the stadium. But there weren’t enough of them. The Edenists kept flooding into the square. The guards yelled for backup.

  While the bulk of Edenists kept the guards occupied, the Diseased Eden sneaked through dressed up as fans. Four men pushed large shopping carts filled with swollen plastic bags. They moved them into the center of the plaza, shoved them toward the guards. The carts rolled across the orange bricks. Came to a stop a few dozen feet in front of the guards.

  The men ran away. The guards stayed still until they saw the other Edenists scramble backward, pulling out filter masks.

  One of the guards fired at the carts a few times. The bags stayed immobile in the empty middle of the square. Then they erupted. A flurry of yellow moths flew around the guards’ heads while a mass of blue spiders crawled across the bricks like a spreading coolant spill. A cloud of crimson gnats floated around the plaza. Centipedes, moles, snakes. Zootech creatures of all shapes and sizes spilled across the square.

  Someone tossed a canister at the foot of one guard. A cloud of pink gas floated toward his nose, and he fell to the ground, vomiting inside his mask. Other guards collapsed from the bites, helmets clunking on the pavement. Then the chaos started. The guards opened fire. Sparks of light in the bright day. Shock pellets flying across the plaza. Edenists fell to the ground by the dozens, twitching on the floor.

  Dolores and I watched this on our screen, the scrambling humans as small as ants.

  “They’re not using anything lethal, right?” I said, shuddering a little at the screams.

  “That’s what they promised. I think I trust them? But look, if things get ugly, you get out,” Dolores said.

  “Bullshit. What are you talking about?”

  “Pyramid authorized my mission. If I get captured, Pyramid will trade for me. I’ll make it out. You might not. You don’t have the Yankees protecting you anymore.”

  “Well, this time they’ll have to rip off more than one arm to kill me,” I said, laughing.

  When I looked at Dolores, there seemed to be a lake of sadness beneath her goggles. She gave me half a smile.

  Dolores and I made our way to the building. It didn’t look like anything at all at first. A small white shack in a field with other white shacks in front of the towering green sewage treatment dome. But there was something different about this one. Air filters stuck out of the ground to the side of the building, and the grass in front of the door was crisped from landing engines. According to Dolores’s blueprints, the basement was a laboratory large enough to conduct a dozen experiments. A network of enormous concrete worms sleeping in the dirt.

  A drone shaped like a cartoon parrot floated by squawking “Let’s go, Mets!”

  I said a little prayer to no particular god, then made my eye duplicate the scan I’d made from Coppelius’s corpse. My vision blurred. I held my breath and put my face to the security node. Coppelius had been working with Monsanto on this project. I figured he’d have as much access as anyone. I was right. The electrified wires turned silent as the gate opened for us.

  “If all goes well what are you and Zunz going to do?” Dolores said when we got to the door.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Zunz won’t be able to play baseball. Not after all this. And you’ll be blackballed from scouting.”

  “Zunz has money,” I said, flustered. My focus had been on finding Zunz, not figuring out what to do after. “Plus, we’ll blow the lid off the whole crime. Whatever it is. Bring the whole system down. The government. Monsanto. Everything.”

  The way Dolores was looking at me, I felt small and pitied. “Systems don’t simply come down. New players take them over.”

  “Even if it doesn’t topple over, we’ll kick out a few of the bricks.”

  Dolores pulled out her gun and shrugged. “Listen, I’ve got contacts in the Mextexan Free State. Say the word. I can get you set up there. Hell, maybe I’d join you
after this is all over. I’m getting old for this scouting life. We’ll sip tequila and fire guns at the tumbleweeds until the sun goes down.”

  I could picture it too. Dolores and me with a little house with a couple hammocks and a swimming pool out back. Living outside of the smog of the city. Kicking scorpions away with our boots and sipping beer under the hot sun while Lila begged us to make breakfast. It was a lovely, dumb dream.

  As the park descended into panic, I pulled out my gun. Grabbed the door. “I can’t really talk about this now.”

  And then we forced our way inside.

  44

  THE DEAD FRIENDS

  Zunz’s body was draped across a steel examination table, stomach opened for all to see. His arms hung off the table, long slits cut down them. The stench of his rotting insides filled the room. The head was falling off the table, facing us. His eyes were closed. Zunz was still smiling, but his teeth were tiny. Smaller than eraser nubs. Baby teeth in a giant’s mouth.

  I kept walking into the room, moving purely by inertia.

  “Oh, Jesus. Kobo,” Dolores said.

  I gagged. Bile in my throat.

  Around Zunz’s corpse were vials and machines of different colors. Buttons glowed. Screens projected figures and charts. The corpse was being studied, monitored.

  My foot slid in a puddle of yellow sludge. I tried to grab onto a cart of surgical tools for balance, but I reached out with the nonexistent arm. I fell to one knee on the floor.

  “Kobo.” Dolores moved over to me, helped me back up.

  Zunz’s stomach was completely cut away, the edges held open by what looked like a giant metal mouth biting him from the underside. Where his stomach should have been was a greenish brown pool of swamp water. I couldn’t see any organs or bones. It was as if he’d melted from the inside.

  I groaned, a deep sound traveling up from the well of my heart.

  I was too late. Again.

  Then I heard noises from the next room. Muffled grunts, and the sound of someone struggling against restraints.

  There was someone else here. Someone alive who could pay for this.

  I put the gun in my left hand up to my lips. Dolores maneuvered to the right side of the door with her own gun ready.

  I kicked open the door, swung the gun around. Stopped my finger right before pressing the trigger.

  In the next room, another Zunz was strapped to the wall. Naked. His jaw trapped in a plastic vise. His eyes looked around wildly. His skin was pink and wet. When he saw me, his limbs flailed.

  This Zunz reached out for me. His fingertips were a few inches from my hand. He made guttural, inhuman sounds. I couldn’t decipher any words.

  The Zunz on the wall wasn’t the only one in the room. Next to him was another Zunz, but half his size. A dwarf Zunz. This Zunz, too, was strapped on a wall mount, but his eyes were dead. Black beads. No iris at all. His neck was cracked, head resting on the shoulder.

  Beside that was an even smaller Zunz floating in orange liquid like a toy dropped in a jar of honey.

  I spun. The room was filled with Zunzes in different stages of life, or death. Each one had his brown eyes and broad forehead, at least the ones with heads. The only thing they were missing was his baseball glove birthmark. Some were only limbless torsos jammed into buzzing machines. Others were little more than lumps of skin, groaning softly, no bones to hold them up.

  “Are any—” Dolores paused. “Are any of these him? The real him?”

  Along one wall, hands and feet unattached to anything were suspended in bluish fluid. Another had a row of large conical flasks filled with unattached eyes, ears, and tongues.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  The door across from us slid open with a mechanical slurp.

  A yelp.

  The woman in the doorway threw up her hands, dropping a platter that held a miniature head with a tiny Zunz face. The head rolled across the floor. Hit my shoe, lips landing on the leather.

  “Do not fucking shoot me. I don’t even want to be here,” Julia Arocha said. She pointed at the security collar around her neck. “Hey, it’s you. Kobo. I tried to help you, remember? Can you put down your gun?”

  “Who else is here?” I asked.

  “No one. Not right now,” she said, shaking her head. She was wearing a flipped-up surgical visor and a stabilizing surgery glove with metal bands over the bones. “No one conscious at least. Setek is at a meeting with the Mouth. The delta model is recuperating downstairs.” She tugged on her security collar again. “I want to point out again I’m under contract and forced to work here. I don’t want to die for this shitty job.”

  “Delta model?”

  “The one who will play today. He’s being readied right now. We’re being extra careful this time.”

  I felt dizzy looking at the monstrosities around me. Different parts of my brother laid out on tables or stuffed in vials. An aquarium beside my head was filled with hearts, Zunz’s heart, stitched together and pumping slowly.

  Dolores didn’t seem as disturbed as I was. She still had her gun in her hands, but she was looking at a wall of fingers, reaching out and touching them with her own. She adjusted something on her goggles. A click. Seemed to be recording. I thought I heard her whisper “remarkable” under her breath.

  Dolores looked back at us. “So this is the woman who told you the Mets poisoned Zunz? This is Julia Arocha?”

  “I was supposed to finish her contract for the Yanks the night Zunz died.”

  Dolores put her gun back in the holster. She studied Arocha. “Yes. Pyramid was scouting you too. I was impressed with your work, but I thought you needed another year of university development.”

  Arocha looked at Dolores, then at me. “Um, thanks?”

  “Can we hold off on the pleasantries,” I said. “What the hell is going on here? Why are you dissecting my brother?”

  Arocha was wearing a lab coat in Mets colors. She bent down slowly, showing me her movements, to pick up the small Zunz head. She placed it gently on the counter. His face rolled over, teeth clinking on the metal. She righted my friend’s head. His smile was tiny.

  “We aren’t dissecting him. We’re growing him. Or his clones. Spares, as Setek calls them.”

  “How did you do it?” Dolores said, wonder in her voice. “How did you avoid another astroclone disaster?”

  “Setek didn’t. Not exactly.”

  I pointed at one of the cloned Zunzes on the wall. “Not exactly? What’s that, then?”

  “Setek realized that trying to clone a person’s mind was pointless. Even if you could execute the synaptic mapping, they’d become someone else. A new person. Not to mention an illegal one. But he realized you could just make a body and pilot that meat from afar. Look.” Arocha reached over to the table where there was a row of helmets and hats. She picked up one and tilted it so we could see inside. It was lined with a yellow membrane that covered a mixture of wires and veins. A white tube, like a spine, ran down the middle and split near the brim into a pair of glowing nodes. “This device lets you control a body from afar. Well, a body that has a neural mesh implanted at the right developmental stage.”

  Dolores was still walking around, recording everything in the room. Taking close-up photos with her enhanced goggles now and then. She reached over to take the helmet from Arocha.

  “It’s delicate. And proprietary,” Arocha said.

  Dolores stopped. Sighed. Lifted her gun.

  “I mean. Go right ahead.”

  I was fixated on something else. On the back counter, there was a set of six holopads, each illuminating a tube filled with pinkish fluid. The holograms were two feet tall. Inside were six people at different stages. They stretched from an almost reptilian fetus, curled and covered with wires, to what looked like a teenage boy. The first said forty days to full gestation and the last said ten days to full gestation. The teenage-boy body was turning, slowly. When the face came back around to me, I saw it was Zunz. Exac
tly as he’d looked in high school. Well, minus the wires and tubes connected to his limbs and orifices.

  When I walked back to Dolores and Arocha, they were discussing details like old colleagues. They swapped stats, processes, and specs.

  “We’d heard rumors Monsanto was working on this. We had no idea you were this far along. Are you bioprinting on a wetwire scaffolding?”

  “Yes, for the fetuses. We’ve edited the cycle checkpoints to enable rapid growth. Controlled cancer, basically. They’re in a nutrient and hormone slurry for forty-five days. The clones have a neural suppressor implanted at body-age of twenty months.”

  Dolores was nodding. “So they don’t fully develop a consciousness. Are they like newborns? Is that how Monsanto plans to get around the Rank Act ban on cloning sentient beings?”

  I couldn’t believe how they were talking. Like they were discussing interior decorating instead of standing in a room of mutilated body parts. But then the pieces started clicking together for me. I walked over to them.

  “I’ve done this,” I said, taking the modified baseball helmet. It looked like a normal Mets helmet from the outside to fool the cameras. I touched the yellow membrane inside. It was warm, and slightly slick. “It’s Monsanto’s new Astral system. I used one before.”

  “Not exactly.” Arocha took the helmet back, displayed the insides for me again. “The Astral you used would have been a prototype. Not very powerful. It was a baby step. This is a giant leap. The helmet just relays the signal. The neural mesh is organic and fully integrated into the cognitively suppressed brains.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means there’s no lag. No resistance. Seamless control.”

  I remembered how it was at the Janus Club, moving in the hot, slick bodies. It was thrilling in its novelty, but the controls were partial at best. Like playing an old video game with a broken controller. They’d do what you wanted them to do, yet only partially and haltingly. It wasn’t that way with these fake Zunzes. They were playing ball at a professional level against the elites of the sport. Maybe he wasn’t quite at 100 percent, but it was pretty darn close.