Episode 5
We stood in a wide hallway. The walls were an almost blinding white. The molding that trimmed each door, the baseboards, and the wainscoting that decorated the walls all appeared to be hand-crafted. Lavish oil paintings in gilded frames hung on the walls. Fresh flowers graced side tables. And the red carpeting was so deep I almost sank into it. Each door was painted black and had a copper number mounted to it. We stood before door number nine.
I turned to Amanda. She looked exhausted, like she was ready to pass out at any moment.
“Are you okay?”
She braced herself against the wall. “I will be,” she managed to get out before wincing and doubling over.
I didn’t know what to do, how to help, so I stood there useless as tits on a bull.
After a few minutes, she pushed herself from the wall and stood on her own.
“You alright?”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “I think so.”
I looked up and down the hallway. “Where are we?”
She rang the bell for door number nine. “We’re in New York right now. Manhattan.”
An older black woman pulled the door open. She smiled a toothy grin. “Welcome back,” she said, stepping aside to allow us entry.
I estimated the woman was in her late sixties or early seventies. She had medium length straight hair, and she wore a navy business suit with a pencil skirt.
“Hi Grace,” Amanda said as she stumbled inside. “I really need to sit down.”
The woman, Grace, helped her. I stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind me.
The apartment was huge. In every inch of available space were trinkets, knickknacks, and souvenirs acquired over a lifetime. It was a little gaudy for my taste, but it looked lived in and comfortable.
In the main room, two sofas faced each other, with a low table between them and an armchair at the head of the table. Grace helped Amanda onto a sofa like an exhausted rag doll.
Once Amanda was situated, Grace started to stand, but Amanda held on to her hand. Grace turned back to her.
“Leslie’s dead.”
“Oh, my! How did it happen?”
“She was ambushed trying to get Roy off base,” Amanda said.
Grace was quiet for a long minute while she processed the loss.
“But Roy survived.” Amanda gestured to me, still standing near the door.
Grace seemed to notice me for the first time.
“Grace, this is Roy Michaelson,” Amanda said. “Roy, Grace Benson.”
“Nice to meet you,” I greeted, holding out my hand.
“Roy Michaelson?” Grace ignored the proffered hand and looked me up and down. “Does he know?”
“He knows what he is,” she said. “And what I am.”
“And the others?”
I was getting sick of people talking about me like I wasn’t there. It reminded me too much of Carolyn and Penny ignoring me on the way up to the mind upload surgery.
“He knows about them,” Amanda answered.
Grace nodded her approval. “Roy, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” She offered her hand, which I only looked at. “Please forgive my manners. It’s not every day I get such a unique visitor.”
“Yeah. Right,” Amanda said, rolling her eyes.
Grace paid her no mind. “I’ve been dreaming about you for a long time.”
I was confused. “Dreaming?”
“Grace dreams about the future,” Amanda explained. “But she’s not altered,” she added. “Never even been injected."
Grace again ignored her. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”
I seated myself on the sofa across from Amanda. She sat in the armchair at the head of the low table.
“So how do you two know each other?” I asked, looking from Amanda to Grace and back again.
“Grace is like a grandmother to me,” Amanda said. “She took me in when things got rough and taught me how to use my ability. I owe her everything.”
Grace smiled at the praise but said nothing.
“Where’s Derek?” Amanda said.
“The doorman just called. He’s on his way up.”
“Who’s Derek?”
“Derek’s altered too,” she explained. “He can give off electricity, like an electric eel. Anyway, he’s been looking for Dockard and his people.”
A few minutes later, Derek arrived.
Grace greeted him at the door. Amanda gave him a big hug, like a younger sister hugging an older brother she hadn’t seen in a while. I stood, waiting to be introduced.
“Derek,” Amanda finally said. “This is Roy Michaelson. Roy, Derek Jackson.”
“Good to meet you, Roy,” he said with an easy smile.
Derek looked to be about forty years old. Despite the expensive business suit hiding his tall and lanky frame, I got the feeling that Derek was a survivor.
We tried to shake hands, but I got a shock when I touched him and instinctively pulled away.
“I’m sorry,” Derek immediately apologized. “I should have warned you. I tend to give people shocks.”
“That’s all right,” I said. I assumed, being made for battle, that a simple shock wouldn’t do any damage to my electronic components.
When the greetings and introductions were over, we sat again. Derek sat on the edge of Amanda’s sofa.
“So?” Amanda said.
“Dockard’s willing to talk,” he said with the same easy smile.
“Really?” she said. “What’s the catch?”
Derek shook his head. “As far as I can tell, there is none.”
Both Amanda and Grace looked skeptical.
“Who’d you talk to?”
“Sam. He’s always been straight with me.”
“Yeah, Sam’s a straight shooter.”
“Where does he want to meet?” Grace asked.
“He gave me an address,” Derek said pulling a business card from inside his suit jacket and setting it face down on the table. The address was written on the back of the card.
Amanda looked at the address. “New Jersey?”
Derek nodded. “Sam said Dockard would be waiting for you.”
“Who’s he got with him?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Sam’s the only one I’ve had contact with.”
“Do we know where the rest of his followers are?” Amanda asked.
Derek smiled. “That I do know.”
He pulled some papers from inside his suit jacket and spread them out on the low table between the sofas. As he arranged the papers, Amanda and I sat forward in our seats.
I had a million questions but decided not to interrupt. I figured if I needed to know who someone was, like Sam, Amanda would fill me in.
On the table were satellite images, maps with markings and cryptic notes in the margins, and surveillance photos.
Amanda studied the maps and images intently.
“What are we looking at?” she finally asked.
“An abandoned warehouse just outside a small town in Indiana called Celestine. Population: 250,” Derek said.
“And you think this is where his followers are?”
He nodded. “These pictures,” he said, indicating the surveillance photos, “were taken this morning.”
The photos were slightly out of focus and grainy, like they had been taken from a distance and put through at least one filter to bring out the images.F The photos showed three people standing outside an old, dilapidated warehouse.
“There’s Becky Walker,” Amanda said, pointing at the image.
From the grainy photos, Becky looked to be in her early forties with blond hair cut just above her shoulders.
“And…is that Marilyn Clark?”
Marilyn was in her late twenties or early thirties with dark hair pulled into a ponytail.
Derek nodded. “I think so.”
“Her father’s not going to be happy,” she said.
“No he’s not,” Grace said.
“Who’s the third person?”
Derek shook his head. “No clue.”
Again, I figured if Becky Walker and Marilyn Clark were important enough, eventually I’d find out who they were.
“Alright,” Amanda said, standing. She snatched up the business card with the address written on it and looked at me. “We’d better get going before Dockard changes his mind.”
Grace cleared her throat. “Did you get a chance to ask Roy about the nanobots?”
“Shit. I was so busy answering his questions, I forgot to ask.”
“What about the nanobots?”
“Do you know if the injections the original Mr. Michaelson received contained nanobots specifically designed to treat his cancer? Or did they contain a more generic, more generalized version of the nanobot?” Grace said.
“They weren’t designed specifically for me. They were designed to seek out and destroy cancer cells in general,” I said. “The program had nanobot variations for several different ailments, everything from mending broken bones to reconnecting nerve tissue to destroying cancer cells.”
“So there were no generalized nanobots?”
“No,” I said. “Not that I know of.”
“That’s a problem.”
“Why are you so interested in the nanobots?”
“Because we all have generalized nanobots in our blood stream," Amanda said.
“So?”
“It means that L.E.T. had outside help in developing the generalized nanobots.”
“What kind of outside help?” I asked.
“Me,” Amanda said.
“You?”
“Yeah. I can do more than just jump from one place to another. I can also jump through time.”
“What!?”
She nodded. “The only problem is, after 20 years, jumping hurts like hell.”
“That explains why you were in pain earlier.”
She nodded. “And time travel is about a thousand times worse. It’s like every cell in my body is being ripped apart and then put back together. The nanobots used to be able to keep up with the damage. But not anymore.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If you go back and give L.E.T. the generalized bots, won’t that cause some kind of paradox or something?”
She shook her head. “If you take specialized nanobots made in the sterile, controlled environment of a lab and put them into something as complex as a human body, they are going to adapt and evolve into something pretty close to what the FDA approved.”
“The problem is time,” Grace said. “We estimate this evolution would take at least a year.”
“And the original Roy’s recovery took place just a few months after the mind upload surgery.”
“Which is why you have to go back,” I concluded.
She nodded. “Not something I’m looking forward to.”
“We’ll deal with that later,” Grace said. “You two better get going.”
“You want me to go with you?” Derek asked.
Amanda shook her head. “I think we’ll be okay.”
Derek shrugged. “Just watch yourself.”
“Always,” she said with a grin and hugged him. She headed for the door.
“We’re not jumping?”
She shook her head. “An address does me no good. Unless I’ve actually been someplace, I can’t jump to it.” She picked up a set of keys from a table near the door. “So we’re driving.”
“Well, in that case,” I said as she was about to open the door, “does anyone have a phone or a tablet I can use during the drive?”
“Sure,” Amanda said. “But why?”
“I’d just like to catch up on current events,” I said. “Apparently a lot has happened in the past 27 years.”
Amanda turned around and walked toward a closed door at the other end of the living room. She emerged a few minutes later carrying a small tablet. She closed the door behind her and handed me the tablet.
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Roy,” Grace said.
“Nice to meet you, Grace,” I said. “You too, Derek.” I followed Amanda out the door.
We rode the elevator down to the building’s underground parking lot.
Amanda stopped at a town car. “This is it.”
“How long do you think it’ll take to get there?” I asked as I climbed into the passenger seat.
She checked the address again. “In midday traffic on a Friday? At least an hour. Probably more like two.”
As soon as we were on the road I began my research.
Thanks to my computer brain, I found that I could consume and retain entire websites at a glance. The first thing I did was look into the original Roy’s and Carolyn’s lives after the upload surgery. It was a strange feeling looking into a past I didn’t remember. But everything I saw, from the various articles to their personal emails and instant messages to pictures, indicated they were happy and in love until the day they died.
I skipped over the night they died. I didn’t need to know the details. Not yet anyway.
Next I pulled up anything pertaining to the nanobot treatments. I devoured articles about the original Roy’s miraculous recovery from stage-four liver cancer, the treatment’s fast-tracking by the FDA, and the thousands of stories of both recovery and death after the treatments.
Finally, I looked into those altered by the treatments. Most of what I found on the altered, as they had come to be known, was either anecdotal, stories and hearsay on various websites, or news articles portraying them as evil, people to be feared. I found several videos of altered showing off their abilities and several more of the arrests of suspected altered.
In my limited research, I found that Paul Dockard and what had happened in Tucson five years earlier was the best documented. Reading the news stories of the event, watching various news footage, and videos of the Senate hearing that then Senator Davis had held, no wonder the altered were portrayed as evil, people to be feared.
I looked up from the tablet when Amanda pulled the car over.
“What the hell?”