55

Herr Doktor Guthe had been up for hours. With the help of his team, he’d sequenced the synthetic strand and then had it biotically assembled by a nanosystem. Then he’d meticulously gone over the results to make sure it was right. It was rough, hardly the kind of job that he would be proud of, but it was accurate. If he could get it to replicate, he’d be able to make some extrapolations about the original strand, about the purpose of the mutation, and this might in turn tell him if the Marker was broken or if it was working intentionally.

His team had stuck with him around the clock until the moment when they’d injected the sequence within a proxy nucleus into four dozen embroyonic sheep cells, followed by chemical encouragement to get them to divide. After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Either it would work or it would not. For the first time in several hours, he looked around at his team, saw that they were haggard and frazzled by turns, some of them barely standing. So he sent them to bed.

Herr Doktor Guthe had intended to go to bed himself. Only he wasn’t tired. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been tired. He hadn’t slept for days.

And so he had stayed on, alone, in the laboratory. He waited, motionless, sitting on his stool. He felt as though he had entered a completely different state of mind, one that did not need sleep. He expected never to have to sleep again. This, he was sure, was due to the Marker.

Upon thinking the word, he pulled the necklace out of his shirt and clutched the icon in his fist. Would she come? If he thought hard enough, would she come?

And then she stepped out of the wall and toward him. At first she was no more than a blur, but as he squeezed the charm and concentrated, she began to change. The shadowy air around her was cut away and she became herself—tall, thin, a perfect face save for one small scar just above her left cheekbone.

I missed you, she said.

“I missed you, too,” he said.

She smiled, and a little blood dripped out of her mouth, but not too much. He tried to ignore it. Except for the blood, he loved the way she smiled.

What are you doing? she asked.

“An experiment,” he said. “I’m trying to understand the thing that brought you back to life.”

How flattering, she said. But I wish you wouldn’t.

“I wish I would have spoken to you then,” he said. “Back when you were alive. I watched you, you know. I followed you everywhere.”

I know, she said.

“And then you died and I thought I had missed my chance. But now you are here again.”

I’m just a projection of your mind, she said. You know that. You told me that yourself. You know that I’m a construct made from your memories.

“I know,” he said. “But you seem so real.”

She smiled again, wider this time, and blood began to slip down her cheek and to her chin. He had found her like that, twenty years before. He hadn’t even known her name. Then, as now, he was unsure of what had happened to her. Then, she was as good as dead when he found her. Now she kept dying but kept being brought back to life again.

You musn’t . . . , she started, and then she slowly faded and was gone. He sighed. He never got much further with the message the Marker sent, never heard as much of it as his colleagues had. He figured it was because his desire to see the girl was too strong, too intense.

He took a look in the cooker, was surprised to see that all forty cells in all forty receptacles had multiplied. That was unprecedented. Also unprecedented was the speed with which they multiplied—he had never seen anything like it. It had been only a few hours, and already the sample was visible to the naked eye.

He stayed for the next hour watching them until each of the receptacles was teeming with a pale pink substance like nothing so much as biological tissue. Should he take a closer look? Why not: there were plenty of samples. What would it hurt to look at just one?

He opened a receptacle, ran a mild electric charge through it. The pinkish substance withdrew, as if it felt it. Maybe it did.

He upturned the receptacle, poured it onto the table. The substance lay there, undulating slightly. Carefully, he cut it in half with a scalpel. He watched an empty furrow appear between the two halves, then watched the substance run back together again into a single sheet, leaving no visible line or scar. Marvelous, he thought.

He was still experimenting with it when his grandmother’s face appeared, hovering just over the counter. Startled, he jumped.

Sure, he loved his grandmother, but not nearly as much as he loved the girl. Or maybe it was just different: he had known the girl for only a moment, and so his love for her was pure and unadulterated. His feelings toward his grandmother were much more complex. After his parents died, she had taken him in. She had treated him all right, but she was old and grumpy, and sometimes she did things that he had a hard time understanding. And then one day, when he was a little older, she had simply disappeared. Even then he basically understood that something must have happened to her, something that she couldn’t help, that perhaps she had even been killed. But part of him had a hard time not resenting her for not coming back.

“What do you want?” he asked in German.

Is that any way to treat your grandmother? she said. She was speaking in a heavily accented English, even though he knew that if she had been real, she would be screeching in German.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve come, I imagine, because there was something the girl was unable to express. You know I love you.”

That’s more like it, she said, and held out to him a cellophone-wrapped sweet. She had always been doing that when she was alive. He tried to take it, but his hand met empty air.

It’s time, she said. You’ve learned too much. It’s time.

Time for what? He hadn’t felt whole since he lost his grandmother. And now she was here again, but not here at the same time. He could see her and hear her but not touch her or smell her. His whole life had been like that, a life of loss, first his parents gone and then his grandmother. In the end, all that was left was just his laboratory, the only thing he could count on. His laboratory had never let him down.

Are you listening to me? she asked, snapping her fingers. Do you understand what I’m saying? You must stop this research at once!

Stop his research? He felt a rage rising in him. She had never understood what he was trying to do, so why should it surprise him that she didn’t understand him now? “But I’m doing important work,” he said. “I’m making discoveries beyond human imagination.”

What you are doing is dangerous, she said. Trust me, child. I say this for your own good. The Marker will destroy you. You must stop before it is too late.

His eyes were stinging with tears. Stop his work? What else did he have? It’s not really her, he told himself. The Marker has just borrowed her image and voice. Why couldn’t it have stayed with being the girl? He had loved her but never really had her, so he couldn’t miss her in the same way that he missed his grandmother. And now it was trying to manipulate him, trying to use his grandmother to get him to stop.

“Please, go away,” he said, trying not to look at her. “It’s too much.”

Too much? she was saying. Her voice was a little shrill now, grating on his nerves. I need you to listen to me, Grote. This is very important.

He groaned. He couldn’t listen; he couldn’t bear it. He covered his ears, but somehow he could still hear her anyway. He shook his head back and forth and started to sing as loudly as he could. He could still hear her, could still tell she was saying words, but couldn’t hear what they were exactly. But she just stood there, still talking, refusing to go away.

He closed his eyes, her voice still humming on. What could he do? He was so tired, he just needed a rest. How could he drive her away?

Confusedly, he told himself she was a mental construct: his mental construct. If he simply stopped thinking, he could drive her away. All he’d have to do was knock himself out and he’d be all right.

There was a syringe in the drawer, a fresh needle. He had to uncover his ears to reach for it, and suddenly her words were spilling louder through his head. No, Grote! she yelled at him. Stop this foolishness right now! You haven’t understood at all. You’re going to do yourself harm.

He shuddered. He needed a sedative. There it was, already on the table.

Grote! she said. Can’t you see? This is what the Marker wants! You are not thinking straight. Stop and listen!

“Leave me alone,” he mumbled.

He affixed the needle and sucked the fluid up and in. It was thicker than he thought, hard to get into the needle. Still listening to his grandmother’s yammering, he tied his arm off and flicked the vein, then held the needle to it.

Grote, why are you doing this? she asked.

“I just need to sleep,” he said, and plunged the needle in. “Just a few hours’ sleep.”

It burned going in, and then his arm began to tingle. His grandmother gave him her awful, heartbroken stare.

You think that is a sedative? she said. She shook her head and drew back, a look of horror on her face. That is not what it is. You have hastened the Convergence. You must hurry to the Marker, she said. Surrounding the Marker is a dead space that will stop this thing in you from progressing. Go there and show the others what has happened to you and warn them. You must convince them to leave the Marker alone. You must try to stop the Convergence before it is too late. It is urgent that you convince them, Grote. Very, very urgent. And then slowly she faded away into nothingness.

He sat there for a moment, relieved, before realizing that she wasn’t saying it just to needle him; she was telling the truth. Oh, God, he thought, staring down at the empty receptacle, the empty syringe, realizing what he’d just injected. He looked at his arm, the strange swelling in the vein, the painful undulating movement that was not his own now deep within his arm.

He reached out and triggered the alarm, but then found he couldn’t sit still. Something was wrong. Something was already starting to change. His arm was tingling, had gone numb, and the undulating movement was larger now, had spread. He had to get out, had to see the Marker, had to talk to it. The Marker would save him, his grandmother had said.

He rushed out and down the passage, took the spiral down. The alarm was howling, people starting to appear, confused. He stumbled through two laboratories he had a passcard for, then through a transparent corridor with the move and shift of the water playing on its walls.

There, at the end, was the door to the Marker chamber, two guards standing in front of it.

“Let me in,” he said.

“Sorry, Professor Guthe,” said one of them. “There’s an alert. Can’t you hear it?”

The other said, in a strange voice, “What’s wrong with your arm?”

“I sounded the alert. That’s why I have to get in. The arm,” he babbled. “I need to talk to it about the arm.”

“Need to talk to what?” said the first guard suspiciously. Both guards had their weapons raised.

“The Marker, you idiot!” he said. “I need it to tell me what is going to happen to me!”

The two guards exchanged looks. One of them began talking into the com unit very quickly; the other now actively pointed the gun at him.

“Now, Professor,” he said. “Calm down. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t understand.”

There were other people in the hall now, people behind him, watching, puzzled.

“All I want is to see it,” he pleaded to them.

“What’s wrong with his arm?” someone behind him asked.

The arm was twisted now, his hand facing backward as if it had been cut off and flipped over, then reconnected. It was not just in his arm now, but in his shoulder and chest, too, everything changing.

He tried to speak, and it came out as a deep retching sound. The alarms were still going off. He took a step forward, and now the guard was shouting. He held his arm out in front of him and they shrank back, moving slowly out of the way. I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot! one was yelling, but he didn’t shoot. Guthe was at the door now, swiping his card. A bullet thudded into his leg, but it didn’t matter, he hardly felt it. And then the door opened and he fell in.

The chamber was empty except for him and the Marker. He moved toward it, his injured leg suddenly giving out underneath him. He pulled himself along on his knees until he could touch it.

Whatever was happening in his arm seemed to have stopped. It wasn’t getting better, but it wasn’t getting worse. The Marker was helping. The Marker was stopping it. He breathed a sigh of relief, then winced from the stabbing pain in his leg.

He would stay here, protected by the Marker. Once he figured out what had happened, he could put his team to work helping him to get better. If worse came to worst, he would have the arm amputated.

The alarm stopped and he found he could think better. He would have someone move his laboratory down here and would continue his work. He moved his leg, winced from the pain. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the door to one side opening. He turned, recognized one of the leaders, the man who ran the guards, the one with the brutal face. What was his name again? Ah, yes, Krax. He was just the one to help move his lab. And he had brought others with him, lots of men, healthy strapping lads. They could all help.

He was just opening his mouth to speak when Krax lifted a pistol and shot him through the forehead.

“That wasn’t necessary,” said Markoff from behind him.

“Funny,” said Krax. “You never really struck me as the squeamish type.”

“I’m not,” Markoff said. “But his condition was worth investigating while he was still alive.”

Krax shrugged.

Markoff gave him a cool look. “Give them the body to examine. And watch your step,” he said. “Don’t start assuming you’re not expendable. You’re more expendable now than you were ten minutes ago.” He turned on his heel and left.

Krax watched him go, feeling at once a little contemptuous and a little scared, and then started out the door himself.

“Take the body,” he said to the guards. “Carry it to one of the labs and leave it there.” He looked at the crowd of researchers. “Which of you have dissection experience?” he asked. Nearly all of them raised their hands. He singled out three of them at random. “Take a closer look at it and tell me what was happening to him.” And then he pushed through the already dispersing crowd and left.