“I want a last name,” I say as we reach the outside.
“Kind of busy,” Evening says, and we race to board a bus. We find seats. People gawk at me. I’m getting used to it.
“I don’t like this,” I say. It’s true. I feel bad. I feel strange.
Aislin sits across the aisle from us. “I’ve always liked the last name Allbright.”
“Adam Allbright?”
“My name’s Aislin, by the way.”
“Yes, I’m aware of your name.”
She holds out her hand, very formal. She smiles. She has a nice smile. Different from Evening’s. But nice. Someone has recently struck her. She has a bruise on her face, and I can see the individual fingermarks.
I shake her hand and try out the name again. “Hi, I’m Adam Allbright. Adam Allbright, nice to meet you.”
Evening is looking back and forth from me to Aislin. I ask her if it’s appropriate for me to call myself Allbright.
“Call yourself whatever you like.”
“Adam Allbright,” I say. “That’s me.”
– 40 –
Aislin is not drooling.
It takes me a while before I notice.
Granted, her boyfriend is in the hospital fighting for his life. But I’ve known Aislin for a long time. Aislin memorizes the face and form of every single attractive male who comes within sight.
Aislin doesn’t look at guys and drop them into a simple binary system of “cute”/“not cute.” She does detail. Amazing detail. If she can’t actually see detail, she extrapolates from what she can see. Show her a guy’s neck, she can draw his chest. Show her a bicep, she can tell you what his thighs are like. Show her a thigh and you really don’t want to know just how much she can extrapolate.
It’s her own weird genius.
Aislin is not even looking at Adam. Maybe it’s overload. Maybe it’s just too much for her to process. But she almost seems shy. Aislin. Shy.
I guess I’m relieved. I don’t want to have to tell her to back off. Adam is mine.
According to the app on my phone, we can get off this bus and catch another bus heading back across the Golden Gate to Tiburon. It will take a while, though. Should I take a taxi?
Am I in a hurry? To get the money for Aislin, I’ll have to confront my mother. Which means I’ll end up telling her everything. Can I do that?
“What the hell have I gotten myself into?” I ask no one.
Adam says, “I don’t know.”
No, I decide. I’m not in a hurry.
I have to find my anger again. My mother used me as a biological experiment.
Yeah, and thanks to her I still have two functioning legs. Thanks to her I’ll run again.
Thanks to her a lot of people dying in harsh hellholes aren’t dying anymore. Or yes, they’re dying, but we all die. They aren’t dying today, right now, of some vile disease because my mother created Spiker Biopharm.
Instantly, all those terrifying photos come back to me. Way too high a price to pay for my leg. But was it too high a price to pay for saving countless lives? Are the two things even connected?
Couldn’t my mother have done one without the other?
We get off the Muni and onto the bus for Marin County. I don’t want to think anymore.
Aislin sits alone. Adam sits with me. He barely brushes against me, but that touch—two square inches of shoulder, six square inches of thigh—is charged with electricity.
“Are you sad?” he asks.
“Am I sad?” I’m going to blow him off with some facile, jokey, ironic answer. But his is not a face you joke with.
And his eyes. They’re Solo’s eyes—they’re the same incredible blue, anyway. But there’s something different about Adam’s eyes. They’re earnest. Utterly sincere.
“I guess I’m nervous. Or something,” I say. “All my life my mother was this perfect, slightly overwhelming person. Well, you’ve met her.”
“I don’t know many people,” he says. “I don’t really know how to judge her.”
“Then take my word for it,” I say.
“Your word as my soul mate?”
So he does have a sense of humor. The sense of humor I programmed into him. Not mean. Sweet, ironic. Just the way I made him.
“Anyway, my mother,” I continue, “was so high up, not even a pedestal really conveys it. It was like she lived on a cloud and I was just a regular person far down below her.”
“And you also had a father?”
“I was a lot closer to my dad. He was the mid-point between me, little Evening Spiker, and the almighty Terra-Mother. We worked that way. Me to my dad to my mother. Then he died and all of that … Some families, maybe it would have made us closer. With us, no. My mother was still way, way up there.”
“Up in the clouds.”
“Figuratively. You get that, right?”
“Yes. I know that people don’t live in the clouds.”
Maybe that’s a joke. I don’t know. I turn to look at him.
We are toward the back of the bus. The seats are tall. No one can really see us. Aislin’s dozing.
“What the hell am I going to do with you?” I ask Adam.
“Do you have to do something with me? It’s my decision what I do with myself. Right?” He genuinely isn’t sure.
I avoid answering directly. “I don’t even know what I’m doing with myself. What if they actually arrest my mother? What, I live with my grandmother?”
“Do you have to live with her?”
“I don’t know if I’m exactly ready for my own house,” I say.
“Freedom,” he says, and he gives the word surprising urgency.
“Responsibility,” I counter.
“Do they go together?”
“So I’ve heard,” I admit.
His beautiful eyes—eyes that I try not to remember as floating loose and unattached—look into my eyes. Eyes that he has never seen loose and unattached. Fortunately.
I have the advantage on him. I can remember everything about him. He can only seem to look into my soul. I can pretty much actually look into his.
“Does this mean you are responsible for me?” Adam asks.
“Do you want me to be?”
He frowns. There’s an instant of panic in his eyes. It surprises me. How has he moved so quickly from childlike naïveté to existential panic?
“I don’t know what I am,” he says.
“You’re Adam Allbright,” I say, and I try to flash a smile.
“I find you beautiful, but…” He stops himself.
“I like the part about ‘beautiful’ more than whatever was going to come after ‘but,’” I say lightly. Because what else am I going to do when the most beautiful boy in the world is seated beside me and several inches of him are pressed against me and I swear the taste of his breath is sweet in my mouth?
Joke.
“Do you want me to say you’re beautiful?” he asks. He seems concerned.
“Who doesn’t like flattery?” I ask.
“But it’s not flattery. It’s what I feel. I feel that you are the most beautiful—”
And that’s when the bus lurches as it heads onto the Golden Gate Bridge and oh I’m even closer now and he doesn’t pull away and I start to but I don’t. It’s not possible to pull away.
I kiss him.
He does not kiss me.
His lips are the lips I gave him.
I slip my hand beneath his arm and around his body, the body I made for him, the hard muscles I programmed him for.
Adam pulls back, gasping for air. His eyes are clouded. “I don’t know what to do.”
Of course, I know exactly what he should do. Biology, folks. Evolution. We’re all just animals, right? Right?
Right?
I touch his chin. It’s perfect. Chiseled, with a slight cleft. Sculpted-by-Michelangelo perfect.
Just the way I ordered it.
“Kissing’s easy,” I say, and I’m suddenly glad Aislin is asleep s
o she can’t hear me. “Whatever you do, it’ll be perfect.”
We kiss.
It’s just the way I ordered it.
When we come up for air, I turn to see if Aislin’s still asleep.
My face burns when I realize she’s wide awake and watching us.
I wait for the applause or the sarcastic, leering remark. But all she does is nod. Her smile is almost wistful.
Adam turns. He blushes, too. I must have programmed him with that gentle self-consciousness. “Hello, Aislin,” he says.
“Hello,” she says back.
“Lovely weather we are having,” Adam says, and before you can say “what the hell is going on here?” they are having an awkward, first-date kind of chat.
I suddenly feel like a fifth wheel, so I retreat to a seat near the front. When Adam starts to follow me, I tell him to stay and talk with Aislin.
I don’t know why. It just seems right.
There was something about that kiss. It was like a beautifully executed guitar riff, played without any feeling.
It was … not perfect.
– 41 –
SOLO
“Terra!” Tommy says.
“You think…” Dr. Chen says with a gasp. “You think she knows?”
“Who else would decant Adam?” Tommy rages.
“But why would she do such a thing?” Dr. Gold asks. “She doesn’t even know he exists.”
“Clearly she knows he exists, Doctor,” Martinez says with a slight sneer on the word “doctor.” “How else could she decant him?”
Dr. Anapura sees the anger in Tommy’s face—mostly beneath the tattoo that says “Pixies”—and says defensively, “I checked! She hasn’t been down here since the Plisskens died! And there are no cameras except the one we used to show the supposed simulation!”
“Wait a minute,” I say. No one pays attention.
“Oh my God, she knows,” Dr. Chen cries. He’s dancing from foot to foot like a child scared of visiting the dentist.
“We’ll deal with her,” Tommy snarls.
“Deal with her? Deal with her?” Dr. Chen is nearly weeping. And I can see the fear beginning to infect the others.
Sullivan from accounting has gone pale. “I’m the one who’s on the hook for moving funds around. I’m the one who has been moving money out of Level One budgets into the Adam Project.” He’s panting like a hunted animal. “I’m going to go to jail. I’m going to prison! What am I supposed to tell my wife?”
“I can’t handle prison!” Dr. Chen wails. “I’m an intellectual!”
“Shut up, all of you,” Tommy snaps. “You’re scared of one middle-aged woman?”
The consensus seems to be that yes, yes they are very scared of Terra Spiker.
“Hey!” I yell. “Hey! What is this, some puppet show you’re putting on for my benefit? Like Terra Spiker isn’t the one behind all of this?”
Tommy turns on me, his eyes blazing. “You know, you’re really not as smart as your parents, are you? Your parents? They were geniuses! Maybe when we put you in the tank we can raise your IQ a few points so you can keep up.”
In the tank? I’m not sure what that means, but I can guess. Even with my limited IQ. But that’s not the point. That’s not why I meet Tommy’s gaze and say, “Listen, Dr. Holyfield. You have to tell me.”
“Yeah, so you got into my computer, good for you, kid. But you didn’t learn much, did you?”
“We have to run!” Dr. Chen cries. “I have family in Guangdong Province!”
Tommy leans close, his expression cruel. “You stupid little nobody. Your parents were gods to me. Terra Spiker threatened to have them arrested. Terra Spiker forced them out of the company. You’d be worth billions, kid. Billions!”
“Why did she threaten them?” I ask, but I’ve already guessed.
“You think Adam was the first human we made? Before there can be perfection there has to be experimentation. The Plisskens made a baby boy. We named him Golem. He died. Because of a slight flaw in his genetic makeup.”
“His sphincter was on his forehead,” Dr. Anapura says.
“He didn’t suffer,” Dr. Gold reassures me. “He was basically stillborn.”
“No,” I whisper.
“It’s not so easy being God,” Tommy says, and a shadow passes over his face. A memory, perhaps. Or a regret. “You can’t always get it right. But the Plisskens had already developed the Logan Serum. The thing that allows you to recover so quickly when I do this—”
Tommy smashes his fist into my face.
His audience gasps.
“Little Evening had a heart deformity,” Tommy says. “Surgery would have been very dangerous. And the Plisskens had the cure, a side benefit of the research they were doing. Terra traded them her silence for the cure. But she tried to get them to quit. She ordered them to stop.”
“You’re telling me my parents were monsters?” I say. I won’t show any emotion.
I can’t, won’t, refuse to.
But it’s coming clear to me now. I don’t like the picture.
It could be Tommy’s lying just to mess with me. But no. The others are nodding along. They all know the story. Only I am in the dark.
I’m the fool.
“Everything you see down here, it’s all their work, theirs … and mine. Oh, I know how your little mind works, Solo the bagel boy. I know how conventional you are. Inadequate. Thank God your parents are dead or they’d die of shame!”
My parents were monsters.
Terra Spiker is … I don’t know quite what she is.
“Look! He’s going to cry,” Tommy mocks. “Dr. Anapura, Martinez, Sullivan: Get him into the tank. We’ll see if we can’t make him a bit more malleable.”
“What about Spiker?” Dr. Gold asks.
“We’re going to deal with her right now,” Tommy says.
I struggle. But I’m tied up. And worse yet, I’m beaten.
I’ve never been beaten. Even when I box and get my ass kicked, I never lay down, I never admit defeat. But now I feel like I’ve been gutted. Like I’ve been turned inside out.
I struggle. But at some level I almost think I deserve to be shoved into the tank. I’ve been an idiot. I’ve screwed up everything.
I’m the son of monsters, and I almost destroyed Terra Spiker who … even now, even as they drag me away, I can’t quite wrap my head around it … Terra Spiker, who wasn’t the worst person in the world.
– 42 –
The rest of the trip is, shall we say, awkward.
I, the creator, sit by myself while my creation talks shyly with Aislin, and Aislin talks shyly with him.
I, the smart one, am feeling pretty stupid.
I’m thinking about my mother—soon to be in a federal prison. I’m thinking about the vengeful guy who dictated that fate. I’m thinking that Adam is superior to Solo in every possible way.
And I’m wishing Solo was with me.
The bus lets us out a mile from the Spiker campus. We trudge along together for a while down the steep, curving two-lane road, dodging aside to avoid being run over by the occasional BMW.
Aislin and Adam walk together. It just seems natural for me to get out in front a little.
A Porsche comes tearing around a blind corner and nearly hits Adam.
I see the driver’s face. His mouth is a big O. His eyes are wide.
The brakes screech. The car stops a couple hundred yards away. The backup lights glow and the car swerves back toward us.
It stops. The window rolls down. There’s a bland, vaguely familiar, middle-aged man behind the wheel. Complete mismatch between the driver and the car.
“It’s him!” the man cries.
He’s looking at Adam.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Sullivan. From accounting. I—” He’s confused, clutching the wheel like Wile E. Coyote holding on to his latest rocket sled. “You better look out,” he says at last. “They’re crazy. They’re really crazy.”
/> “Who’s crazy?”
“All of them.” He spits the words out. “All those scientists. They’re all nuts!”
“What’s happening?” I demand. I put my hands on the door, trying to convince him not to bolt. But he rears back, scared.
“I have no part in this!” he cries. “I just moved the money around. I’m not putting people in vats or, or, whatever they’re planning to do.”
He puts the car into gear and, with a final terrified look, goes tearing off down the road.
“We need to hurry,” I say. “You two go as fast as you can. I’ll run the rest of the way.”
“I can run,” Adam says. Of course he can run. He has amazing legs, incredible stamina, maximized lungs, all the things I gave him.
“Yeah, but Aislin doesn’t so much run as trip and stagger,” I point out.
Aislin makes a face that says Yep, true.
“Adam, take care of Aislin.” I head off.
It’s the first time I’ve run since the accident. I wasn’t sure I’d ever do it again. My muscles are out of practice, but to my surprise, my breathing is smooth and easy. I wish I were in shorts, not jeans, but it still feels good. More than good.
I reach Paradise Drive and leave the cross streets and houses behind me. There’s a bend in the road, with trees on one side and open hillside on the other.
Right, left, right, left. I’m in high gear now. The familiar rhythm lulls me.
Up ahead on my right is the shattered stump of a big pine tree. The small hairs on the back of my neck rise.
The stump is weathered and gray, mangled. The damage happened long ago.
Six years ago, in fact.
I know this place. I forced myself to come here once, when I was about thirteen. I touched the sharp edges of the wood. It was still clinging to life, but I knew it was dying.
Once was enough.
Now, on foot, it’s unavoidable. My throat closes up and my easy breathing is a memory.
This is the place where my father died. This tree is the one his car hit when he went off the road. That drop is the slope his car plunged down.
I want to keep running, but my legs aren’t having it. I slow to a walk. I stop altogether.
I bend over, hugging myself, and I sob.