Transient - Complete Book One (Episodes 1 - 4) (Transient Serial) Page 22

  “That’s huge,”Benny said.

  “What if the media ignores it?”Halldor asked.

  “They might, but I doubt it.”

  “They’re heavily influenced by OBK,”Danielle pointed out.

  Benny nodded.“Or by the governments influenced by OBK.”

  “That’s why we needed a spark. A human element. It’s why I hoarded the documents and didn’t release them until now.”

  “We’re the human element,”Rae said, getting it.“The Tetrad.”

  “Without a face, this story goes nowhere. But now they have your face, Rae. And yours, Danielle. And Benny’s and Halldor’s too. And even mine now. The elusive hacker turns out to be the son of the governor. That makes it a political story, too. What is my father going to do about his missing son? To be honest, he probably doesn’t care. Except he needs to play the role - the concerned parent. The father who will stop at nothing to get his prodigal son back.”

  “Then they’ll have to release us surely?”Danielle said.

  Drew looked sombre.“Or bury us.”

  The confinement passed slowly. There were new games, new past-times, and a steady diet of books to read. The Tetrad was kept in the dark about the outside world, and no doubt the world knew little of them.

  Rae felt forgotten, abandoned. If someone were coming to rescue them, it would have happened in the immediate days after their confinement. What bothered her most was the lack of privacy. At home she had spent so much time in her own room that she had taken her privacy for granted. Here, though everyone got along most of the time, she was never alone except for the half hour or so a day that she had the bathroom to herself.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Drew went through dark periods of gloom where he drew inside himself, brooding and planning, but without the online connections that gave him access to the outside world, he was powerless. He didn’t like being powerless, and it sometimes made him difficult to be around.

  Danielle flirted with both Halldor and Benny, sometimes playing one off against the other, but the boys soon grew tired of her teasing, innuendo, and constant cries for attention, and formed a friendship of their own, rejecting her neediness for their own camaraderie.

  This left Danielle to seek out Drew, who needed no one and Rae, who was sympathetic to a point, but saw weakness in the girl’s nightly crying spells. Rae was the most empathic of the group, but even her capacity for understanding and tolerance had its limits.

  For the most part, she confined herself to reading. The novels they were given were mostly classics, historical fiction or fantasies. Nothing contemporary. She guessed this was part of OBK’s attempt to keep them isolated from the real world. Rae finished the books faster than they were replaced, so often read the same book three or four times, whether she had really enjoyed it or not. Some stories, like Moby Dick, grew on her with re-reading. She hated it the first time, and loved it the third. She had always liked Shakespeare, and had the chance now to discover some of the plays she hadn’t been taught in school. Her initial love of A Midsummer Night’s Evedidn’t survive the second reading, but the tragedies took on a deeper meaning to her, and she grew to appreciate some of the problem plays, like Pericles. And she never tired of The Tempest.

  But mostly, she craved escape.

  They had little indication of life on the outside world. The window offered few clues as to what was going on other than the passage of days, which they kept careful track of.

  They were frequently called away for tests. Always one at a time, never in groups. OBK had a lab where they were run through a battery of exams. Some were basic medical check-ups, but many were more elaborate. There were brain scans and physical stress tests and psychological tests. The longer they were there, the more intense the tests became, as if the OBK doctors were increasingly desperate for answers to questions that were never spoken aloud.

  One Saturday evening, a few weeks after their capture, Rae stared out the barred window, looking outside. She could see people in the streets, as small as ants. The inmates were in their bunks, avoiding the site of the city and the sounds of reverie outside.

  “They won’t let us go,”Rae said, having come to this realisation a long time ago.“They can’t.”

  Danielle was lying on her upper bunk bed, staring up at the white ceiling.“But they can’t keep us here forever.”

  “They don’t intend to. They could realistically keep us until our DOD. After that, we’re supposed to be dead.”

  “And if we aren’t dead?”

  “They’ll make sure we are.”

  They had discussed this possibility many times before, but it seemed more urgent now than ever. Because OBK had gone to such incredible lengths to silence the Tetrad, the group had come to believe that all their doubts about the cryptograph must be true. On some level, the test was flawed. And OBK knew it. They were hiding the kids because they were hiding the truth.

  “You really think they’d kill us?”Halldor asked.

  “To preserve the system, of course they would.”Rae said.“There’s too much money in the system. Too much power. They can’t risk a bunch of kids ruining the new world order. We have to die on our expiration dates as predicted. If we don’t die of natural causes, we’ll die of an‘accident,’or whatever it takes to preserve the system.”

  “We have to stay alive then,”Drew said,“to prove them wrong.”

  “Yes,”Rae said.“Stay alive, get outside and show the world that the test is false. That it is all a lie. That it’s always been a lie.”

  Danielle said,“Maybe it’s true.”

  “It’s not,”Drew said.

  “Think about it. Everyone dies when OBK says. It’s not like they’re killing everyone. They’re just predicting.”

  “We’ve been over this.”Rae said tiredly.

  “I know, but what if OBK isn’t as bad as we think. What if we’re just being paranoid?”

  Halldor looked Danielle square in the face, inches away.“Wake up, we’re imprisoned. We’re not being paranoid. They’ve kept us here against our will.”

  “Maybe because we’re really crazy, you know?”Danielle insisted.“They haven’t tortured us, have they? They haven’t done anything bad but keep us away from the world. And maybe that’s a good thing. The world hates us, Halldor, everyone hates us. My friends my family hates me. If they loved me, where are they? Why aren’t they coming for us? Where are the cops? The teachers? The media? They’ve forgotten about us, because they don’t care. The only people who care for us are Simon and Keith.”

  “Who?”Drew asked, baffled.

  “The ones who feed us. The ones who take care of us.”

  Rae found it amusing that Drew didn’t even know their names. He refused to talk to the orderlies. Didn’t see them as real people but as automatons, cogs in the machine.

  Danielle had gone to the opposite extreme. In her neediness, she was projecting her emotions onto the jailers, seeing them as her projectors. There was a name for that. Stockholm Syndrome. And Danielle was becoming a classic case.

  “We need to get out,”Rae said, more determined now than ever.

  “They won’t let us escape,”Benny said.

  “We have to try.”

  Drew looked thoughtful.“I’ve got an idea.”

  Chapter 24

  Drew’s plan for escape seemed unlikely to succeed, but they all agreed it was worth a shot.

  “We need something to cut with,”he said.

  Sharp objects were not allowed inside the holding room. Even the eating utensils were plastic.

  Halldor began by removing one edge of the metal frame from the bathroom mirror, and bent it into a cutting tool. It wasn’t terribly sharp.

  “Sharp enough to cut linoleum,”he said to Drew, who nodded.

  In the bathroom, Halldor and Drew worked on the floor for hours, until they could peel the linoleum from the wood flooring underneath.

  “That was the easy part,”Drew declared.

&n
bsp; He replaced the linoleum overnight, in case there was an inspection.

  The next day they worked on the wood planks, cutting around the edges of the nails until they could pry the boards loose. When they had three boards loose, they removed them and looked down into the hole created in the floor.

  “We can escape through here.”

  “How?”Benny asked.

  “Follow the plumbing. We’ll have to cut a path through, and find a way down and out, probably through the basement. It could take a few days.”

  Benny was dubious.“Or weeks.”

  “We have to try,”Rae said.“What other choice is there?”

  The next morning, the guards came in unexpectedly. Drew was working in the bathroom with the door closed.

  “Your presence is requested in the meeting room,”one of the guards told them.

  The toilet flushed, and Drew stepped out of the bathroom. He had become proficient at replacing the floorboards and covering them with the linoleum.“What’s up?”

  “They want us in the meeting room,”Rae told him.

  Something’s changed.

  “Who are we meeting?”

  “Dr. Oberkampf and Dr. Lakeb.”

  “Why do they want to meet with us?”Drew asked.“After all this time, why now?”

  “You’ll have to ask the doctors that.”

  The second guard continued,“If you play your cards right, we might let you out of here.”

  Rae and the others were escorted down the long hall to an elevator, and up to the top floor to what they guessed was some kind of executive meeting room. They were ushered into chairs facing a large flat screen television.

  Two tall men in suits and ties entered the room. One man was white, the other Asian. They looked like lawyers.

  The white guy said,“We have some papers for you to sign.”

  They presented copies of the papers to each of the kids, along with an OBK pen.

  “What is this?”Danielle asked.

  “A non-disclosure form.”

  “We’re not signing anything.”Drew declared.

  “Then you won’t be seeing the doctors.”

  Rae read through the agreement. It was three pages, in language that seemed fairly straightforward. By signing the Tetrad agreed not to reveal what they learned in the meeting.

  “Pretty standard NDA,”Benny said shrugging, and signed.

  Rae and Drew exchanged a look. He was probably wondering the same thing she was. Why make us sign an NDA if they’re going to harm us?

  But each member of the group signed. If they wanted to meet with Dr. Oberkampf and Dr. Lakeb, they’d have to abide by the rules.

  The lawyers left with the signed agreements, and a smartly-dressed woman entered with bottled water for each of them. Then she left, and the lights were dimmed.

  Rae whispered to Drew“I thought we were meeting O and L.”

  But instead of a personal meeting, Dr. Oberkampf and Dr. Lakeb appeared on the television screen. They wore white lab coats. The two men were in their sixties, with graying hair and weathered skin. In their youth they looked quite different. Oberkampf had been a dark-haired, bearded hippie, and Lakeb a straight-laced, tie-wearing blond. However, as they worked together and aged together they had gradually, over the course of many years, grown to look more and more alike, until many people now said they looked like brothers.

  Their expressions were kind if solemn, as they addressed the camera directly.

  “We are here with you tonight to respond to repeated questions we have received online and in the media,”Oberkampf said.“Many millions of you have called and written and spoken to us directly. You have raised some interesting and valid questions. There seems to be a wave of skepticism sweeping through some parts of our culture, and this is not entirely unexpected.”

  This is a recording, Rae realised. They don’t even know we’re here.

  She wondered who else had seen this presentation.

  “As scientists,”Lakeb continued,“we understand and appreciate the impulse toward skepticism.”

  “Skepticism plays a crucial role in the scientific method,”Oberkampf continued.“As scientists, we ourselves take all scientific claims with a measure of skepticism. We test, and we measure, and we test and measure again. We verify our results. We consult with our peers and colleagues, and even with our rivals. Much of this work is done in secret because invention on a large scale takes great resources.”

  Lakeb said,“These resources are attracted by intellectual property, by patents and trademarks and copyrights. As the scientists who developed the cryptograph over the course of many years and decades, we necessarily had to keep our research close to the vest, and apply for patents and trademarks that would allow us to raise money and stay in business.

  OBK was nothing more than a start-up company in the early nineties. Many times we came to the very brink of bankruptcy, but the promise of our research allowed us to find new investors. To protect those investors and those investments, we patented our work and kept the details of our science a trade secret.”

  “However,”Oberkampf continued,“once the cryptograph was finally perfected, we gave it to the world, and the world has thanked us. Part of that gratitude is expressed in monetary terms, and our company has indeed grown as a measure of our success. But as scientists we are most gratified by the public response and by how we’ve changed and greatly improved human lives all around the world. Today, it is fair to say that not a single human life is unaffected by our work. And it is that impact, and the good we have done for all humankind, that makes our many decades of sacrifice worthwhile.”

  Dr. Lakeb adopted a somber tone as he continued,“There is one thing we have not told you about the cryptograph. It concerns telomeres, the foundational science behind our discoveries. The truth is telomeres are not an exact science. Yes they can predict the date of your death, as we all know. These predictions have always been true. However telomeres can also change over time, based on levels of stress, exposure to violence, aggressive behavior, and diet. Does this mean, then, that your lifespan and predicted expiration date is somehow wrong?”

  “No,”his colleague replied, with great conviction.“It does not.”

  They’re dancing around the truth, Rae thought. They’re admitting the test is flawed, without admitting straight out that it’s flawed. They’re covering their asses, in case the truth ever gets out.

  “What this really means,”Dr Lakeb went on,“is that we have an opportunity.”

  “A truly amazing opportunity,”Dr. Oberkampf agreed.

  His colleague continued,“By manipulating the telomeres, we may be able to open a new window on life.”

  A new window…

  “Just as we were able to predict with one hundred percent accuracy, the lifespan of every person on the planet,”Dr Oberkampf intoned,“so we are now embarking on the next great adventure in medical science. The next breakthrough.”

  Rae waited, rapt with expectation.

  “Life extension.”

  Extension?

  “The research is still in its infancy but the future is bright. With the knowledge of your expiration date, and the study of your telomeres, we can offer you a second chance.”

  A second chance…This was what it was all about, Rae realised now. This is why the cryptograph had been invented in the first place, and testing rolled out to the world. Automatically her gaze moved to the water bottle.

  What is Evian spelt backwards…

  “Your time is short, but the possibilities are great.”

  “We can do amazing things…”

  “If we do them together.”

  The presentation ended and the screen went dead. The lights came back up, and the television turned off.

  The group was alone in the room.

  Benny was the first to speak,“So what was that all about?”

  “They’re saying we don’t have to die!”Danielle exclaimed, her voice full of hope.

&nbs
p; “But we already knew that,”said Halldor.“Didn’t we?”

  “Yes,”said Drew“The test is flawed. The expiration dates are not fool proof. This is the message we’ve been trying to get out.”

  “The message is getting out,”Benny said.“Or they wouldn’t be trying to cover their asses.”

  Something else occurred to Rae.“I get it now.”

  “Get what?”Drew asked.

  “This must have been part of the plan all along.”

  All eyes were on her now.

  Rae continued,“This is the product: not cryptograph but life extension. That was always the goal. But how do you convince someone they’ll have a chance to live longer?”

  “By convincing them they’re going to die,”Drew said, shaking his head.

  Rae could see in his eyes that he understood too.

  “Think about it. It’s basic marketing. You create a problem; then sell the solution. The problem is you are going to die. The solution is we can help you live.”

  Halldor shook his head.“But everyone knows they’re going to die. We’ve always known that. It’s part of being human.”

  “Yes, but OBK convinced us that it could predict whenwe were going to die, and the world changed because of it. Now, it’s going to sell us the cure. The cryptograph is flawed, but that’s by design. It was never meant to be absolute.”

  “I don’t understand,”Danielle frowned.

  “According to OBK we are all going to die on February 13, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But the test is flawed. The result is flawed. We could still be alive on February 14. If we’re still alive on February 14, it can mean only one of two things. A, that the algorithm was flawed. Or B, that we were cured by OBK. Either way, OBK wins.”

  “That’s what all those medical tests were for,”Benny said.