| When Clones Go Missing,
cont. The final termination order had been issued only 14 hours before it was executed. Dinner for the experimental twins had been beef stew that evening. The kitchen chief said it was a big favorite. A last savory meal, doctored with a sleep-inducing drug. The missing twins had somehow avoided its effects.. The weather had played an unforeseeable hand, producing a severe storm system in the area just before eight o’clock that evening. At 8:19 p.m. the dedicated power substation took a direct lightening strike, knocking out all the lights and systems. They got the emergency power unit running within minutes, but that produced only minimal power, leaving the compound barely lit, with visibility close to zero in the driving rain. The power company refused to send a crew to the substation before morning. But nobody worried about it because the replicants had all taken to their beds. Or so it was thought. The adjusters arrived in six large vans shortly after ten o’clock, an hour and a half behind schedule. Their commander, already in foul temper, became apoplectic when two empty dorm rooms were discovered, and screamed out orders for an all-out manhunt, indoors and out. The indoor search was accomplished quickly, but yielded nothing. The outdoor search was doomed from the beginning. Flashlights and walkie-talkies were useless in the zero-visibility. Chapter One — A Fine Kettle of Fish Riverside Drive, where it bends back along the curve of the Tennessee River near the old Walnut Street Bridge in downtown Chattanooga, is supported by a system of steel beams and ferroconcrete columns. The inside perimeter is tied to the top of a slope which rises from below in tiered concrete slabs to form a cavernous alcove high up under the road. The place affords refuge to homeless denizens of the night in the warmer months. But when four escaped replicants stumbled into it in the early hours of that first morning, they found it deserted. Lucky for them. They were wet, and cold despite the season. In the darkness, they silently changed into dry clothes carried in makeshift rucksacks fashioned from doubled plastic trash bags. They hadn’t been able to carry much. Besides their clothes, they had between them two small flashlights, two hairbrushes, a tube of Neosporin, a dozen large Bandaids, a half-used tube of lipstick, and half a dozen disposable razors. But they also had a state-of-the-art satlink- and Wi-Fi-capable handheld computer called an iChabod and an ordinary looking CDROM disk in a plastic case with nothing but a large X marked on the label. That and $560 in cash. The cash was a gift from Dr. Lopez. David had filched the iChabod and the disk from the briefcase of Nathan Grimes, the man who taught computer science and had written all the special computer programs used in Papa Eugene. David had stolen the disk on raw impulse, having no idea what, if anything, was on it. He hoped it wouldn’t result in any trouble for Grimes, who wasn’t a bad guy. They huddled together until the first grey light of dawn gave definition to the pillars and the river below. The storm was over, the storm which had nearly frozen them riding on the open flatcar, but had also covered their escape. Lucky, they all thought. “Time to move out,” David announced in an authoritative whisper. “Like we planned.” “Right,” said Nick. “Kelly goes with you, Sally with me. They’ll be on the lookout for twins.” “So, we split the money half and half?” Kelly asked. “No,” said David. “We’re only taking sixty dollars. You and Nick take the rest. I can get more.” “You sure about that?” Nick asked. David patted the iChabod and said, “Trust me.” A lone early jogger bounded down the steps that were part of the River Walk, quite a ways below them, lost in his own thoughts, no doubt. He hadn’t even glanced their way. “Okay, guys,” David said. “This is it. Remember. Whoever gets to Atlanta first puts a classified ad in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in the antiques-to-sell section, offering an “eight-legged round table.” * * * * *
Alexander
“Sasha” Krinn, ordered to head
up the manhunt (or clonehunt, as he called it), was faced with a whole
phalanx of problems. Thanks to the premature frenzy to destroy all evidence of the existence of Project Papa Eugene (after all, what had been going on was completely illegal), Sasha lacked vital pieces of information. He had no photographs of the fugitives, and no dental records. His team managed to lift fingerprints from the escapees’ rooms, but fingerprints were only useful in making identifications. They rarely helped locate anyone. He did not even know what the dupes were wearing. Uniforms had been suggested years earlier, but rejected in the interest of fostering a relaxed atmosphere. There had been no contingency plan for dealing with escaped clones. “Saint Mary’s bells, we don’t even know their names,” he groaned. Officially, they weren’t supposed to have names. In effect, they had no legal identity. Sasha knew only that incredibly high IQ and superior physical strength had been artificially bred into all four. Extraordinary means were employed in searching the area surrounding the campus grounds during the next 48 hours, ranging from dog tracking teams to sophisticated satellite imaging. No trace of the missing youngsters was found. Not a footprint in the mud. Not a thread caught on a bush. Nothing. “A fine kettle of fish this is,” Sasha muttered to nobody in particular. “Now we’ve got four potentially embarrassing superkids running loose somewhere and nothing to go on.” Most mystifying of all was the question of how the boys had disabled their PLBs, the extremely tight-fitting “Personal Locator Bracelets” which all replicants wore like a wrist watch. Made of superhard metal alloys and special high-impact glass, each PLB contained a miniature GPS transmitter that enabled authorities to monitor the whereabouts of the wearer at all times. Powered by a long-lasting battery, the PLB was virtually indestructible and could only be removed using high-tech cutting technology. Or by amputating or mutilating a hand. Two of these devices, the ones assigned to the girls, had eventually been picked up on the monitors that first night, miles from the facility, moving south on Route 27. A team of adjusters tracked the devices to the other side of Soddy Daisy and found them in the bed of a pickup loaded with a decommissioned golf cart. The girls had evidently managed to slip them over their hands because their abrasive inside surfaces were still slick with petroleum jelly. There should have been traces of blood and flesh too, but none could be detected. The two PLBs worn by the missing boys seemed to have stopped transmitting altogether. That just wasn’t supposed to happen. But Sasha and his team did have a few things going for them. Replicants had no money and, more importantly, no national ID cards. The high-tech ID cards could not be counterfeited, and, without them, it was impossible to use public interstate transportation anywhere in North America. Under the newly passed Partriot Act III, moreover, the system was going to be expanded. Within eighteen months the ID cards would be required for purchases of all vital goods and services, including food, gasoline, and medicine, and also to ride a city bus or taxi. But that was still in the future. Even so, even as things stood now, life was not going to be easy for the escaped replicants. Unless they found someone to give them refuge—not an easy proposition in today’s America, with a million government snitches in place spying and reporting on their fellow Americans, and the citizenry living in fear but also in the pretense that nothing was amiss, that all this loss of freedom was justified in the ongoing war on terror. That fear, Sasha knew, was a major psychological factor that enabled the system to survive. That and the fact that people are always reluctant to believe the worst. Lucky for him and his fellow adjusters. Chapter Two — Scary Talk Click here to see Table of Contents Click here to read the entire novel |