The Blood Artists
- Автор: Хоган Чак
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-688-15622-0
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Blood Artists». Краткое содержание книги:
“To keep you still. I operated.”
“In a lab?” Stephen struggled to raise his head off the pillow. He was becoming agitated. “What have you done to me?” he said.
Maryk located the bottle of morphine over the bed. He followed the feed line down to the dose administrator and doubled the rate of morphine drip. “I saved your life,” Maryk said.
“What have you done to me?” he said again.
Maryk watched Stephen’s breathing deepen and his eyes narrow to slits. Stephen was struggling valiantly to remain awake.
“What have you...”
Maryk remained looking over him until Stephen fell murmuring to sleep.
Maryk felt the first dragging symptoms of the impending cascade as he made his way toward Building Two. His exposure to Stephen had weakened him but he had one more task to perform that night. The Library and Reports Section was empty. He entered a dedicated user station and logged onto the bureau’s Genetech II mainframe.
The Genetech was a “living machine” molecular-based computer that used DNA goop rather than an electronic chip as its processor. A beaker full of properly managed DNA could crunch more arithmetic than the combined circuitry of every conventional computer on the planet. Human DNA was nature’s microchip and its capabilities had been harnessed to power the machine that powered the BDC.
What the Genetech did was coordinate genetic algorithms: lines of code that acted like living organisms in competition to evolve to beneficial solutions. The codes mated and mutated to form novel combinations in a Darwinian reserve of ones and zeroes. Less optimal remedies fell extinct as only the fittest survived.
The minivan-sized Genetech brain ran bureau life functions at the highest efficiency in everything from coordinating employee schedules to monitoring experiment conditions. It managed the U.S. Genetic Database and international LifeLink epidemic alert networks. It oversaw security in the pathogen vault freezer of Building Thirteen. Each bureau tablet worked as a low-power satellite borrowing off the assets of the high-capacity digital network the Genetech managed.
Maryk called up the code name files. No one had accessed the reports recently except Stephen Pearse. Yet somehow someone had learned of the existence of the only three Plainville survivors. Everything Maryk had now was riding on Milkmaid.
Maryk initiated a preloaded program “worm” designed to wipe the entire network clean of all records and reports relating to Lancet, Blossom, and Milkmaid. The code name project was terminated. Within twenty-three seconds all records of the project’s existence irrevocably ceased to exist.
The Telling
Melanie rolled over and over and finally she broke out of her fitful sleep. She sat up straight in an unfamiliar bed in a small, unfamiliar room. She was alone. She recognized her work apron and black cardigan sweater, but not the wooden chair and desk they were draped over, nor anything else. She threw back the sheets but was otherwise still dressed.
Panic set in. She rushed out of the bed at once, then fell into the wall and grabbed it to keep from collapsing. Her head. She winced against the blinding throb. She was always reeling, always walking into things, always coming to; she was never already there. She tasted acid in her mouth, and the abduction in the alley came back to her at once.
Margarine sunlight poured through the room’s only window. It was not the cool December sun of Boston. With one hand shading her eyes, she pulled herself toward its warmth and squinted out the window. She was three or four stories up from grass that was postcard green. She saw immense white stone buildings with lush trees all around, and young people strolling the grounds, satchels tossed over their shoulders. Students, of course. They haunted her. For one roseate moment she imagined she was back at Brown, getting ready to go to breakfast with friends, and nothing had happened yet to her family or her body.
She turned from the window. It was a college dormitory room: the empty bookshelves attached to the tawny-colored wood desk, the thumb-sized strips of missing paint scoring the plaster walls where posters once hung. There were two doors, one open and leading to a closet. She rushed to the other door. The knob turned freely under her hand.
The man from the trolley stood quickly out of a small chair across the hallway. Melanie kept a tight grip on the doorknob, blood beating against her head, while he stood awkwardly still. She didn’t think she could make it past him. Even if she did, she had no idea where to go.
“Where am l?” she said.
“Atlanta,” the man said.
She looked up and down the hall. It smelled of socks and hair spray. She said, “No, I’m not,”
He wore an identification tag on his shirt, with his picture and the name PASCO. “There’s a shower down this way,” he pointed. “I’m to take you for a meeting in” — he had a tablet gadget in his hand, and tapped a key — “twenty-five minutes.”
Melanie closed the door on him. She walked back to the foot of the unfamiliar bed and sat down. Sealed moving cartons were stacked near the empty desk, and she was certain, her intuition commingled with despair, that the clothes hanging inside the closet were from her own.
Her right arm felt stiff. She pushed back her shirtsleeve and discovered a small brown bandage taped over the pocket of her elbow. She touched it lightly, then peeled back one adhesive end, pulling up the pad. There was a fresh needle mark over the largest visible vein.
She did not shower, but did emerge from the room at the appropriate time and followed the man named Pasco outside across a university campus to one of the larger white stone buildings. He walked her squeaking down a waxed floor past closed classroom doors and into a deep, steeply set, empty lecture hall. They descended the blue-carpeted aisle past rounded rows of blue-cushioned seats facing a lectern and a viewing screen on the front wall. A breakfast tray was set before the center seat of the first row, and he showed her to it.
“You were out for ten hours,” he said. “We thought you might be hungry.”
“Wait.” He had started to leave. “What am I doing here?”
His apologetic wince kept the rest of her questions at bay.
“He’ll be out in just a minute,” he said.
He walked back up the aisle, and the click of the door closing resounded throughout the hall. She had no taste for the food, but reached for a tall glass of orange juice and drained it. Only after its coolness had coated her raw throat did she think that the drink might have been drugged. She was setting the empty glass back on the tray when the door beneath the wall screen opened and the white-haired man walked through.
The sight of his hair and black shoes made her feel immediately sick again. He crossed to the lectern in front of her and laid a tablet on top of it and a black doctor’s bag underneath. The gloved hands. The pearl-white hair. The white shirt buttoned under the thick neck, the dull black pants. He had walked straight out of one of her paintings.
He was regarding her too, not curiously but clinically, in the manner of an archaeologist coming upon an unusual rock. There was something about the man’s face, the squareness of his block jaw, the pride of his nose, the perfect smoothness of his flesh, that seemed to her truer than true. He did not seem real. He seemed wrong somehow, inactual. She looked at his condomized hands, the latex skin stretched tight over thick fingers. She looked at his stark gray eyes, like cold cement tunnels into which his real pupils had withdrawn.
Her stomach turned over and sent up a belch of orange juice that nearly choked her.
“You remember me,” he said, a stem voice giving her heart a good quick squeeze. It was not a question or a revelation but a statement, a point of understanding between them. “We remember each other.”