SIMS

FIVE: Thy Brother's Keeper Chapter 31

  FAR HILLS, NJ

  Ellis stared at the screen, fascinated, shouting, "They've done it! They'vedone it!"

  He didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. He didn't know what tomorrow would bring, or even what the rest of today would hold, but everything in his life was going to be different from now on. If nothing else, today promised a brighter future for the sims of the world.

  His phone rang. "Ellis," said a deep voice he immediately recognized.

  "Zero! Congratulations! I just saw the film of the birth. Tragic about poor Meerm, but uploading the film to Eckert was a brilliant move. Where are you?"

  "At the front gate. "

  That startled Ellis. And something about Zero's voice wasn't right. "I'll open it right away. Have you got the baby with you?"

  "No. But I have questions. Alot of questions. "

  Ellis's stomach plunged: He'd been dreading this moment, dreading it for decades. "Yes, I suppose you do. I'll open the gate. "

  He pressed a button on a wall unit that operated the gate mechanism, then went to a front window to watch a black van climb the long winding driveway to the house. The cook and the maid had the day off; he'd planned to visit Robbie and Julie later, but he might have to delay that.

  Ellis stepped outside as the van pulled to a stop before the front door. Zero alighted immediately and Ellis was surprised to see that he'd removed his mask, his simian features naked to the world. He walked past Ellis without a word, without a handshake, without even eye contact, and stepped into the foyer. A man and a woman emerged - Romy Cadman and Patrick Sullivan, looking perplexed. Ellis introduced himself and welcomed them. The last to debark were Kek and an aging sim, but they did not approach.

  "You two are welcome inside," he said.

  "No, sir," said the sim. "We stay. Good air. "

  "As you wish. "

  As Tome and the mandrilla wandered out onto the frosty lawn, Ellis stepped back inside and faced his guests.

  "Can I offer anyone some - "

  "You've seen the film," Zero said, his voice thick. "Meerm's baby is a girl, a very human-looking girl. Dr. Cannon told me she should look more like a sim and she told me why. She also gave me a possible explanation for why the baby looks so human. She didn't want to believe it and neither do I. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

  "Yes, I believe I do. "

  "Then tell me it's not true!"

  "I only wish I could. "

  Zero lunged toward him, teeth bared, hands clawing forward. Ellis braced himself for the impact.

  "Zero, no!" Romy cried.

  Her voice seemed to pull him back. He turned away and leaned a hand against the wall.

  "Monster!" The word came out half growl, half sob. "How could you?"

  "I didn't. At least not knowingly. "

  "Can someone tell me what this is all about?" Romy said.

  "Yes," Ellis replied. "I suppose it's time I told someone. Let's all sit down and I'll try to explain. "

  He led them to the two-story cherrywood library that housed the book collection that had once been a pride, but had long ago stopped meaning anything. Romy and Patrick took a couch. Zero dropped into a wingback leather chair and stared at the floor; the pale morning light through the tall windows washed out what little color was left in his face. Ellis remained standing. This was going to be too painful to tell sitting down. He needed to be up, moving about to release the tension coiled like an overwound spring in his chest.

  He wished Zero were alone, but Zero might wind up telling Romy and Patrick anyway, so it was better they all heard it firsthand.

  "I've lied to you, Zero. Lied to you from the day you were old enough to understand. You're not a mutant sim. You're the very first viable sim. We designated you 'Sim Zero. ' Your cells provided the source material that was modified and remodified into the creatures we now call sims. All sims are your descendants, Zero. You are the sim Adam. "

  Ellis heard Romy gasp, heard Patrick mutter, "Oh, man!" But he was watching Zero.

  Zero looked up, fixed him a moment with his yellow irises, then looked away again. "And who ismy Adam?"

  "That's a longer, more complicated story. ButI was lied to long before you were, Zero. To see the whole picture, we have to go back to the early days when my brother and I were plowing all our capital and everything we could borrow into germline engineering a commercially useful chimp-human hybrid. We weren't looking to create a labor force then. We had other uses in mind - antibodies and xenografts were high on our list. We could see success down the road but we needed more funding. To get it, we made a deal with the Devil.

  "Mercer approached the Pentagon with a plan to co-develop an aggressive warrior-type simian-human hybrid along with the more docile strain we wanted to market for commercial use. The World Trade Towers were still standing then, but everyone in the military accepted that sooner or later we'd be at war again in the Middle East. So the generals jumped at the plan. But they realized the outrage that would arise when the public learned that the army was creating gonzo animal warriors and training them to kill humans - what if they got loose? - so they cloaked their involvement under layers of security and bureaucracy.

  "A wing of Army Intelligence was created to develop and train these hybrids as warriors; it was given the innocuous name of Social Impact Studies Group. SIRG in turn created Manassas Ventures as a conduit for the funds funneled to our new company, SimGen. To make this look like a real venture capital deal, the head of SIRG, a colonel named Conrad Landon, demanded that Manassas get a piece of SimGen in return for the investment. We agreed, not knowing at the time that we'd be mortgaging our souls.

  "But even with all these millions in funding, the transgenic road to a sim-human hybrid was fraught with obstacles, and at times seemed impassable. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, embryo splitting, and germline modifications are routine procedures now, but not then. We found we were able to increase the intelligence of apes, mandrills, and baboons by only small degrees, which did not make the Pentagon happy. And we were also running into walls trying to 'upgrade' the chimp genome closer to human. We were swapping genes from our own cells into chimp germlines and making a hideous mess of it. With a string of failures and the Pentagon breathing down our necks, I was cracking under the pressure. "

  Ellis sighed, remembering and regretting his decision to take a sabbatical at that time. Merce had been enraged, screaming that he was jeopardizing both their futures, but Ellis had made up his mind. He'd recently wed Judy and already their marriage was in trouble because he was never home. So for his own sanity and the sake of his marriage, he'd left his brother to work alone while they flew to France and rented a little house in Provence. It had temporarily saved his marriage, but it ruined the rest of his life.

  "So I took a breather to rest and recoup. I intended to stay a month but that stretched into two, then three, then longer. I shouldn't have gone at all. I've done many foolish things in my life, but the most foolish was trusting my brother to work alone. "