Zodiac Station

Fifty

He was alone; he hadn’t got Greta. That was the first thing I saw, though the relief lasted just as long as it took me to think what else he might have done with her.

It was the first time I’d seen him properly. He wore black combat trousers and a tight black T-shirt that clung to his biceps — though any clothes would have been tight-fitting on that huge frame. Clean shaven, the sort of short-back-and-sides haircut that practical mothers give their sons. Snow crystals gleamed in his hair.

‘Where is she?’ asked Pharaoh.

He brushed a few stray bits of snow off his shoulder. ‘Ice fall. I couldn’t get through.’

I thought of the cracks I’d squeezed myself through, the creaking ice crushing the breath out of my lungs. I thought of Greta down there in the dark as a million tons of ice began to come down. I wanted to scream.

Pharaoh frowned. ‘Did you find her body?’

He shook his head.

‘She might have got through before it collapsed. Go take a snowmobile round to the Helbreen and check if she came out.’

The man didn’t move. Just stared at me.

‘Of course,’ said Pharaoh. ‘You haven’t been introduced.’ He held out his arms. ‘Thomas, meet Thomas.’

I wasn’t really listening, too lost in thoughts of Greta, and wondering if I knocked him down the stairs whether I’d manage to break his neck. It took me a second to realise what Pharaoh meant.

‘He’s called …?’

‘We named him after you.’

‘It seemed appropriate,’ said Louise.

‘A second chance.’

‘We’re both still very fond of you.’

Now they had my attention. I stared at the man, this other Thomas, my mind filled with suspicion and wonder and doubt. I waited for him to come in, but he just stood in the doorway, like a child who’s forbidden from the living room.

‘What is he?’ The words came out so quietly I had to say them again. ‘What is he?’

‘You know what he is,’ said Pharaoh.

Our eyes locked. I’ve been on the receiving end of that stare many times, never beaten it, but this felt different. He wanted me to believe him — needed it, perhaps. He’d laboured underground all these years, building his masterpiece, and now he deserved some recognition.

‘You’re welcome to genotype him,’ Pharaoh offered. ‘I have the equipment right here. You’ll see things no one’s ever seen before.’

Virtual-reality theorists have a phrase that describes the revulsion humans feel when we see an almost perfect simulation of a person: the uncanny valley, the point at which the illusion becomes too close for comfort, but not quite real enough. This was similar. The creature — I refused to think of him as Thomas — was perfectly real, almost familiar. Yet some deep animal sense in me recognised he wasn’t real enough.

But it didn’t add up. ‘How old is he?’

‘Eight hundred and sixty-eight days. Two years, four months.’

Pharaoh laughed at the look on my face. ‘Quite the bouncing baby, isn’t he?’

‘Then how is he so …?’

‘Mature? An error.’ A tightening at the corner of his mouth; I remembered how much he hated mistakes. ‘One of the segments we snipped turned out to influence cell replication and development. He’s aging at approximately twelve times the normal rate. We’ll fix it next time.’

Something like fear crossed the creature’s face. It really was a child’s face: plump cheeks, skin unscuffed or worn. I couldn’t help thinking of Luke, when he was a toddler.

‘And the speech …’

‘We’ve spent the last two years educating him. Genes for general intelligence, “G”, are relatively easy to identify — that was the first area we improved. Married to his rapid development, it means he’s quite the conversationalist. He also plays a mean game of chess.’

Looking at him, I started to see why I’d believed, intuitively, Pharaoh’s impossible claims. Nothing obviously wrong: no bolt through the neck, or clumsy stitches up his cheeks. Not the sheer size, though if you’d met him on the street you’d certainly have stared. The arms, the legs, the nose and mouth were all correct. Even the eyes, the windows to the so-called soul. It was something greater, the way the whole package fitted together. Nature trains us in certain proportions: his were subtly different. I suppose Pharaoh would have said ‘better’.

He was still waiting, staring at me as if he wanted something. More than wanted. Coveted.

‘Go on,’ Pharaoh said to him. ‘Before she has a chance to get back to Zodiac.’

The creature — I couldn’t think of him any other way — turned to go. There was no way I could stop him, but I tried anyway. For Greta’s sake. All I got for my efforts was another bruise, and a scornful look from Pharaoh.

I sat down at the table, rubbing my arm. I tortured myself imagining Greta. Surviving the ice fall, dragging herself through the tunnels. Hauling herself up the rope towards that tiny circle of light. Coming out into the cold, thinking she’d made it. And then the monster’s hands around her throat.

But even that was optimistic. More likely, she was buried in the ice.

I had to talk or I’d go mad. ‘How did you do it?’ I asked.

Pharaoh was happy to answer. To show off. ‘The same way the Maryland group did it. Or, for that matter, what Roslin did with Dolly the sheep. We injected the synthesised genome into a human egg with its own genetic material removed, and then we implanted the egg in a host and brought it to term in vivo.’

In vivo. In life — in a human being. I looked at Louise.

‘You gave birth to this … creature?’

‘We prefer the term synthetic human,’ Pharaoh said.

I thought of the specimen jars, the fleshy masses floating in the fluid. I remembered a phrase from the literature: viable embryos. Pharaoh had made it sound so routine, just shake and bake. But science is messier than we pretend; we never get it right first time. It took almost three hundred tries to make Dolly the sheep.

I had no sympathy.

‘It’s a shame you didn’t give a damn about the son you already had. He still wakes up screaming in the night, by the way, because he thinks he doesn’t have a mother.’

It’s always a mistake to attack Louise. Hit her with a punch and the knife comes out. She put her hands flat on the table, shoulders tense, like a swimmer about to push into the deep end.

‘You only cared for Luke because it was the one thing where you could compete with me.’

We’d had this argument before. This time, I wasn’t going to play. Louise lapsed back into silence; I looked around the room. Once you got past the post-industrial concrete chic, you could see how primitive it was. There was a small kitchenette at the back, and a couple of doors that must be a bedroom and a bathroom. They’d obviously blown the budget on the lab space.

‘Who pays for this?’ I wondered.

‘I had some grant money left over. Beyond that, a few discreet and far-sighted philanthropists keep us topped up. Our overheads are fairly minimal — just supplies, and a couple of support staff off-site.’

‘Off-site?’

‘UPS doesn’t deliver here.’ An ironic smile, permitting me to laugh. ‘I pay the cook at Zodiac a small retainer to order in what we need, and leave it where we can fetch it.’

I rubbed my eyes. ‘Danny’s part of this?’

‘He thinks he’s supporting a global counter-terrorism conspiracy at the highest echelons. We also have a technician in Iceland. As you’ll understand, to accomplish what we’re doing takes vast computing resources. Computers need power, and power is in short supply up here. The number crunching is done on servers in Reykjavik — we appreciate their laws on data secrecy — and beamed to us here on Utgard. Your colleague Bob Eastman found our transceiver in Vitangelsk.’

‘Is Eastman working for you, too?’

‘Emphatically no.’ He steepled his fingers, contemplating a problem. ‘Eastman is a real danger to us, much more than the unfortunate Martin Hagger.’

‘But Hagger found you out.’

‘He came close.’

‘So you killed him.’ All the impotence and anger inside me suddenly found a point to fix on. ‘You talk about the sanctity of life—’

‘Life with a capital L.’

‘You talk about building a better human. There are some pretty obvious upgrades you can make yourself.’

‘I didn’t kill Martin Hagger, Thomas.’

‘He’d almost rumbled you.’

‘And I had found a way to, ah, discourage him. Who do you think told the Nature editors to re-examine Hagger’s sample? Who planted the idea in Francis Quam’s head — discreetly, of course — that if Hagger stayed it would jeopardise his precious funding? Everything was in hand.’

‘Evidently not.’

‘Unforeseen circumstances.’ Again the five fingers curled into a fist, like a flower closing its petals. ‘For some time, we’ve allowed Thomas — our Thomas — the liberty of the island. We felt it was important to his development; also, we wanted to observe him in the wild. Obtain real-world data. Thomas is relatively impervious to extremes of heat and cold; he lived in an abandoned building in Vitangelsk. One day — last Saturday, to be precise — he came across Martin Hagger on our back doorstep.’

‘He didn’t know what he was doing,’ Louise said. ‘He was frightened.’

She looked too tired for someone so young. Bags under her eyes, a grey tint to her skin. I don’t suppose she saw much sunlight, but it was more than that. It can’t have been easy for her, alone with Pharaoh so long. He’d always needed fuel for his tremendous energy, I remembered, and he drew it from other people. That was why so many of his students burned out.

‘Hagger provoked him. Thomas overreacted,’ said Pharaoh briskly. ‘Thomas’s emotional development has not kept pace with his physical and mental capacity.’

Again, I thought of Greta climbing towards the light.

‘You mean he’s got the body of a wrestler, Mensa-level intelligence and the moral compass of a two-year-old. There’s a word for that kind of person in real life. We’d call him a psychopath.’

‘There’s an interesting debate to be had on the co-morbidity of certain desirable and undesirable behaviours. What’s socially acceptable may not ensure the species’ survival. How that plays out in Thomas’s development is one of the major factors we’ll be looking at over the next few years.’

‘Did he sabotage the plane as well?’

‘He couldn’t bear to see you go.’ That smile again, like someone speaking a foreign language, not sure you understand him. ‘Thomas has developed a certain fascination with you. It was he, you see, who attacked you on the glacier when you went back there. He recognised you, then; he understood who you were. That’s why he let you go.’

The figure from my dreams. The arm raised, the face staring down at me. Recognition.

‘Why would Thomas care about me?’

‘When we made Thomas, we didn’t start with a blank sheet of paper. That would have taken too long. We took an existing human genome and edited the code. No point reinventing the wheel. Thomas is aware of that. He’s fascinated by the idea that he has a twin brother.’

The words hit me like a bullet. ‘You used my DNA? My DNA to create this …’

I caught Pharaoh smiling at me. I almost punched him — but I had to know.

‘Not yours. You and he share only fifty per cent of your varying DNA. Before improvements.’

Louise was trying to look at me without catching my eye. The way I used to watch her in the lab, sometimes. Pharaoh glanced at her.

‘You’d better do this.’

Louise put out a hand to steady herself. The mug rattled on the glass tabletop.

‘He’s talking about Luke.’