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He stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking around, although she knows his attention is on her. Finally he says, “The ADR says they’ll send those medical supplies you asked for in the next few days. ”
“Should I believe it?”
“Probably not. ”
She knows this is not the reason why he came over to her, but she doesn’t know how to coax things out of him anymore. She knows she has to do something before this distance between them gets ingrown.
“So what’s the problem of the week?” she asks.
He scratches his neck and looks off, so he doesn’t have to look her in the eye. “Sort of the same, and sort of you-don’t-want-to-know. ”
“But,” says Risa, “it’s big enough for you to tell me that you can’t tell me. ”
“Exactly. ”
Risa sighs. It’s already getting hot, and she’s not looking forward to pushing her way to the infirmary jet in the heat. She has no patience for Connor being enigmatic. She’s about to tell him to come back when he actually has something to say, but her attention is snagged by the grumble coming from the crowd around the TV, which has grown since she last looked. Both she and Connor are pulled closer by the gravity of the crowd.
The news report is an interview with a woman, rather severe-looking, and even more severe-talking. Coming in the middle, Risa can’t make heads or tails of what she’s talking about.
“Can you believe it?” someone says. “They’re calling this thing a new life form. ”
“Calling what a new life form?” Connor asks.
Hayden is there and turns to both of them. He looks almost queasy. “They’ve finally built the perfect beast. The first composite human being. ”
There are no pictures, but the woman is describing the process—how bits and pieces of almost a hundred different Unwinds were used to create it. Risa feels a shiver go as far down her spine as she can feel. Connor must have the same reaction, because he grasps her shoulder, and she reaches up to grasp his hand, not caring which hand it is.
“Why would they do such a thing?” she asks.
“Because they can,” Connor says bitterly.
Risa can feel the heaviness of the vibe around her, as if they’re all watching some awful global event unfolding before their eyes.
“We need to get the escape plan ready,” Connor says. Risa knows he’s talking more to himself than to her. “We can’t do a dry run, because the spy sats will pick it up, but everyone needs to know what to do. ”
Risa feels the same blast of communal intuition. Suddenly getting the hell out of the Graveyard sounds like a very good idea. Even without a safe destination.
“Composite human . . . ,” someone grumbles. “I wonder what it looks like. ”
“C’mon, haven’t you ever seen Mr. Potato Head?”
There’s a smattering of nervous laughter, but it doesn’t lighten the mood.
“Whatever it looks like,” Risa says, “I hope we never see it. ”
17 - Cam
With a finger he traces the lines of his face, down the side of his nose to his cheek. Left, then right. Out from the symmetrical starburst of flesh tones on his forehead, then beyond to the lines that spread beneath his hairline. He dips his finger into the graft-grade healing cream again and spreads it across the lines running down the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his chest, and every other place he can reach. He can feel the tingling as the engineered microorganisms in the cream do their job.
“Believe it or not, the stuff is actually related to yogurt,” the dermatologist told him. “Except, of course, that it eats scar tissue. ” It also costs five thousand dollars a jar, but, as Roberta has told him, money is no object when it comes to Cam.
He’s been assured that when treatment is done, he’ll have no scars at all, just hairline seams where every little bit of himself meets.
His cream-spreading ritual takes half an hour, twice a day, and he’s come to enjoy the Zen-like nature of it. He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between—and while he’s had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands he’ll never reach.
There’s a knock at his door. “Are you ready?” It’s Roberta.
“Reins in your fist,” he tells her.
A pause, and then, “Very funny. ‘Hold your horses. ’ ”
Cam laughs. He no longer needs to speak in metaphors—he’s created enough bridges in his mind to bring some normality to his speech—but he enjoys teasing Roberta and trying to stump her.
He dresses in a tailored shirt and tie. The tie’s muted colors, yet bold, fractal pattern, were specifically chosen to project a sense of aesthetic composition; a subliminal suggestion that an artistic whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. He fumbles with the tie. While his brain knows how to tie it, his virtuoso fingers obviously had never learned to do a Windsor knot. He must focus and overcome the frustrating lack of muscle memory.
Roberta knocks again, a little more insistently now. “It’s time. ”
He takes a moment to admire himself in the mirror. His hair is just about an inch long now. A virtual coat of many colors; streaks extending out from the focal point of multiple skin tones on his forehead. Blond runs down the middle, blending to amber on both the left and right. Shades of red and brown arc back from his temples, then give way to jet black above his ears, and tight, dark curls at his sideburns. “All the famous hairstylists will be trampling one another to get to you,” Roberta said.
Finally he opens the door before Roberta’s knocking becomes frantic. Her dress is a little more elegant than the slacks and blouse she usually wears, but still very understated. It’s all calculated to keep the focus on him. For a moment she seems annoyed at him, but now that she gets a good look at him, her irritation melts away.
“You look spectacular, Cam. ” She smoothes out his shirt and straightens his tie. “You look like the shining star you are!”
“Let’s hope I don’t give birth to complex elements. ”
She looks at him quizzically.
“Supernova,” he says. “If I’m a shining star, let’s hope I don’t blow up. ” He wasn’t even trying to stump her. “Sorry—it’s just the way I think. ”
She gently takes him by the arm. “Come, they’re waiting for you. ”
“How many?”
“We didn’t want you to be overwhelmed by your first press conference, so we limited it to thirty. ”
His heart beats heavily, and he must take a few deep breaths to slow it down. He doesn’t know why he should be so nervous. They have prepared him with three mock press conferences already, where questions were hurled at him in multiple languages. In each one of those he did just fine—and this time it will be only in English, so he has one less variable to worry about.
This one, however, is real. This time he’s about to be officially introduced to a world that is unprepared for him. The faces he saw at those fake press conferences were friendly ones pretending not to be, but today he will be facing actual strangers. Some will just be curious, others amazed, and some might be flat-out horrified. Roberta told him to expect this. What he’s worried about are the things that not even she can predict.
They walk down the hall to a spiral staircase that leads to the main living room—a staircase he had not been allowed to use for his first weeks, until his coordination improved. Now, however, he could dance his way down those stairs if he chose to. Roberta tells him to wait until she announces him. She goes down first, and Cam can hear the rumble of chattering reporters die down. The lights dim, and she begins her presentation.
“Since time immemorial, mankind has dreamed of creating life,” Roberta begins, her voice amplified and larger than life. Flashes of light reach the top of the stairs. Cam can’t see the ima
ges from her presentation, but he knows them. He’s seen it all before.
“But the great mystery of life itself has been elusive,” Roberta continues, “and every dream of creation has ended in humbling failure. There’s a good reason for that. We can’t create what we don’t understand, so until we understand what life is, how can we ever create it? No—instead it is the task of science to take what we already have and build on it. Not create life, but perfect it. So we put forth the question, how can we recombine both our intellectual and physical evolution into the finest version of ourselves, the best of all of us combined? As it turns out, the answer was simple once we knew the right question. ” She pauses to build the suspense. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Camus Comprix, the world’s first fully composite human being!”
At the sound of applause, Cam begins his descent down the spiral staircase, posture proud but gait casual. The audience is still in shadows as he descends, and all the lights are focused on him. He can feel the heat of the spotlights, and although he’s in a familiar place, it’s as if they’ve transformed the living room into a theater. He hesitates halfway down, takes a deep breath, and continues, making it seem that his pause was intentional—a photo-op tease, perhaps, because this is one press conference where no cameras are allowed. His presentation to the public is being carefully orchestrated.
The applause gives way to astonishment as the crowd gets a good look at him. There are gasps and whispered chatter as he descends to the microphone. Roberta steps aside, giving him the floor, and by the time she does, there is absolute silence in the room as they all stare at him, trying to process what they’re seeing: a young man who is, as Roberta put it, “the best of all of us. ” Or at least the best of various unwound teens.
In the charged silence, he leans toward the microphone and says, “Well, I have to say, you’re a very well put-together group. ”
Chuckles all around. He’s surprised by the amplified timbre of his own voice, a resonant baritone that sounds more confident than he actually is. The lights come up over the group of reporters, and with the ice broken, the first hands rise with questions.
“Pleased to meet you, Camus,” says a man in a suit that’s seen better days. “I understand you’re made up of almost a hundred different people—is that true?”
“Ninety-nine to be exact,” Cam says with a grin. “But there’s room for one more. ”
The group of reporters laughs again, less nervously than the first time. He calls on a woman with big hair.
“You’re clearly . . . um . . . a unique creation. ” Cam can feel her disapproval like a wave of heat. “How does it feel to know you were invented rather than born?”
“I was born, just not all at the same time,” he tells her. “And I wasn’t invented, I was reinvented. There’s a difference. ”
“Yes,” says someone else. “It must be quite a weight to know that you’re the first of your kind. . . . ”