A Stand-In for Dying Page 5

  “You’ve got to take a break,” she insisted one day. “Let’s go away for a while. We desperately need some time together. The project will still be there when we get back.”

  Marcus grudgingly agreed to a vacation. His efforts were producing diminishing returns and he acknowledged that some time away might help him get a fresh perspective when he returned. It would be a mental reboot. They settled on a week in Hawaii and left the following weekend.

  The moment they entered the tube transport to Los Angeles, he began to relax. By the time they boarded the plane to Honolulu, all he could think about was the enchanting woman beside him, the way her eyes shone in the moonlight, and what it would feel like to make love to her on the beach. But his fantasies paused as they circled Honolulu and he saw the monotonous swaths of HibernaTurf blanketing the city and radiating into the countryside in all directions. He flashed momentarily back to the relentless march of HibernaTurf that marked the kiss of death for his parents’ farm and livestock. His right hand moved unconsciously to his chest, his index finger tracing an invisible outline. By the time they landed, he was back in the present and Corinne was all that mattered.

  They spent their first night on Waikiki Beach and flew to Maui the next day. As the plane approached the airport in Kahului, Marcus was again struck by the expanses of HibernaTurf covering the landscape even in what had once been a tropical paradise. But when they got closer, he studied the pattern on the ground and noticed it petering out at the edges in a single direction. He made a mental note to explore that area during their stay. He didn’t dare, however, give Corinne any inkling that he was thinking about work.

  Maui was like a glimpse into the past. Except for the invasion of HibernaTurf, the island looked much like it had around the turn of the century. Roads of asphalt were populated by antique vehicles that rode on wheels. Hovercars were absent. The roads were not adapted for them and the distances were short enough that they wouldn’t have provided much advantage anyway. Away from the towns, the roads narrowed and branched into tributaries of dirt.

  Marcus relished the sensation of tires bumping along an uneven road. What he’d loved most about riding his motorcycle in the days before Terra had altered the course of his life was the feeling of intimate connection with the earth that he’d enjoyed as a child on the family farm. He smiled as the electric jeep moved over the rugged terrain when they left the highway for the sparsely traveled roads in the boonies. They were headed for the place he’d seen from the air where the landscape changed. Even the dirt roads were surrounded by HibernaTurf for miles beyond the highway.

  Then suddenly what he’d come to see was upon them. Sprigs of foliage began to pop up among the grass, getting closer together and taller as they drove. At last, they were surrounded by a dense wood and there was no more turf to be seen. He stopped the car and got out, arms outstretched, turning around and around, almost dancing until he dropped to the ground and looked up at the patch of sky surrounded by exuberant thickets of towering bamboo. And he knew he had found his answer.

  Corinne watched the light go on in Marcus’s eyes as he lay among the bamboo looking into the sky. She was grateful for what she saw even if she didn’t understand what had just happened. She didn’t ask for an explanation and he offered none. But she trusted that he’d tell her about it when the time was right.

  The rest of their vacation was bliss. Marcus was more present in the moment than he’d been at any time since their relationship began. His passion for her was alive. His body seemed to channel the rhythm and power of the surf when he made love to her on the beach. When they were done, she sat at the water’s edge and watched as his body became one with the waves, skimming on the crests until they broke, then surging to her feet in a cascade of foam. And as he stood before her, the glowing image on his chest that was now so familiar to her faded in time with the receding waters behind him.

  Back home, Marcus was eager to get back to work. By the end of the first month, he’d replaced the HibernaTurf in half the greenhouse with trays of seedlings and cuttings of dozens of varieties of bamboo. As they matured, he pulverized roots and sequenced their chromosomes until he’d identified the combination of genes responsible for their remarkable rate of growth. The final step would be to splice this genetic blend into the DNA of HibernaTurf.

  Marcus treated only two of the hundreds of trays of HibernaTurf in the greenhouse. The very next morning he was greeted with a lush growth in those trays that spilled over the sides of the table. By the following morning, a ring of growing turf surrounded the original trays, and by the end of a week, the greenhouse was so filled with growth that he had to squeeze between the tables of lush vegetation in order to pass from one end of the greenhouse to the other.

  When he analyzed the content of his hybrid grass, it was rich in nutrients and passed every test of safety for consumption. It was virtually identical to the naturally occurring grasses that predated HibernaTurf, except for the presence of the bamboo genes. Since these came from a natural source, the scientific community was quick to conclude that Marcus’s grass presented no health risk either to livestock or people.

  Once introduced into the wild, Takana Grass, as it came to be known, rapidly proliferated, spreading even more swiftly than had HibernaTurf when it was first introduced. By the end of a year, there was hardly a blade of HibernaTurf left in the Western Hemisphere. Within two years, it was completely eradicated throughout the world.

  Takana Grass proved as nutritious and benign as the studies had predicted. Livestock flourished in revived pastures and herds regained strength. Dairy products gradually began to reappear in the food supply. The nutritional value of the milk from these freely grazing animals proved exceptional. And within the first five years, livestock had recovered sufficiently around the world to resume slaughtering for the production of meat that was lean and rich in protein. The only people who were disturbed by these developments were the animal rights activists, who had been happy to see the livestock industry die, and the stakeholders of the in vitro meat industry.

  Marcus’s discovery also brought an unanticipated bonus. The scientific community soon realized that his technique could spur the growth of all kinds of vegetation. Deforested areas were planted with genetically modified trees that grew many times faster than their native variants. New growth forests sprung up everywhere and the tropical rain forests approached strength not seen for nearly a century.

  Between the spread of Takana Grass and the resurgence of forested land, huge amounts of carbon dioxide were sequestered and the tide began to turn on global warming. Reforestation also helped restore natural cycles of evaporation and rain. Excessive rainfall over the next several years was welcomed by the populace as fresh water supplies were replenished.

  Other scientists working with the genetic potion from Marcus’s bamboo used it to revive kelp populations in areas of the seas where it had died out because of global warming and pollution. The resulting extraction of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere pulled the world further back from the tipping point. An additional benefit was the proliferation of sea urchins that fed on kelp. Harvested sea urchins provided another needed boost to the human food supply, one that even the animal rights proponents could appreciate.

  Takana Grass brought Marcus fame and fortune. His status as a hero exceeded any that Ray Mettler had enjoyed even at the height of popularity of HibernaTurf. Marcus’s work not only improved the quality of life on the planet, but may have been responsible for preventing an ultimate environmental catastrophe. He got to see what it felt like to be as famous as Mozart, Lennon, or Kennedy, but unlike him, they were mercifully ignorant of how short their lives would be cut.

  Marcus didn’t need the money. He was already wealthy enough from the money he got in exchange for his life as part of the contract that Terra had convinced him to sign. But he’d hidden that wealth from Corinne. What his new fortune provided him was cover for his terrible secret. He would now be able to share his wealth
openly with her. And if they were to spend the rest of his life together, it would work best if she were also to undergo the Ambrosia Conversion.

  Chapter 8

  THE MOVE to the penthouse was Lena’s first step toward reclaiming her life. Now that she tasted freedom, she wanted more. What she wanted most of all was to work again, which would mean spending extended times away from home and out from under Ray’s watchful eye. She had no idea how she would present it to him, but quietly let her professional contacts know that she might be receptive to an assignment if something worthwhile came up.

  A couple of months later, she was asked to interview a man newly thrust into the public spotlight. Marcus Takana was the biologist who figured out how to rid the world of HibernaTurf. He lived on the east coast just outside of the capital. Doing this story would take her away from home for nearly two weeks, but it was a juicy story that she desperately wanted to cover.

  Lena’s imagination was also captured by the poetic arc that connected her portrait of Ray on the heels of his invention of HibernaTurf with the man who would later undo his creation once it had turned into a monster. Of course, Ray would not likely see it the same way. Her coverage of this story would more likely strike him as traitorous. She couldn’t think of a way to avoid infuriating him with the truth. So she decided to lie. Once the piece was published, she’d deal with the fallout.

  “I’m planning a trip,” Lena told him over dinner.

  “A trip? what kind of trip?”

  “It’s work, Ray...an assignment.”

  “But you don’t need to work. We have everything we need.” Lena saw his head jerk ever so slightly to the left.

  “I miss it, Ray...the writing, the research. It was once a big part of who I was. It was how we met.”

  Ray put down his fork and placed both hands on the edge of the table. Lena held her breath while he digested her words. It was indeed how they met, but Lena knew that the level of intimacy involved in her work threatened him. After all, the same dynamics that brought them together could very well happen with someone else. She’d given up her freelancing to stay at home when she could no longer deal with his anxiety about her being away.

  “So this assignment,” he said, “who is it?”

  “It’s about a couple,” she replied, choosing her words carefully to minimize his defensiveness, “a young couple that reminds me a lot of us when we first met.” She was dancing around the edges of truth.

  “And what’s so special about this couple?”

  “He...they have made an important discovery, a scientific finding. I’ve been asked to explore how it’s changed their lives.” She drew in a long breath, waited for what felt like an eternity, and let it go when he didn’t ask her what the discovery was about.

  “Where do they live?” he asked next.

  “The east coast...DC,” she answered. I’d be gone between ten days and two weeks. “Please, Ray, this is really important to me.”

  “All right. Go. Go.” He swept his hands outward toward her as if shooing away a child. It was clear he wasn’t happy, but she gladly took his response as permission. He was so often irritated with her, anyway. How much worse could it get? And now she’d at least have a break from the interminable tension between them.

  The following Monday, Lena took the tube transport cross country. She was at her destination in less than an hour and was met at the station by a driver who took her to the Takana home. She was greeted warmly at the door by a tall, elegant woman. Lena was taken aback by her graciousness, given her intrusion into their privacy. Most of the people she wrote about tended to be guarded around her, at least for the first day or two. Corinne seemed entirely guileless.

  When Corinne introduced her to Marcus, Lena was struck by his combination of commanding physical stature and down to earth demeanor. He was almost apologetic about his celebrity status and treated her with appropriate respect for both her work and her age. He welcomed her into their home and assured her that their lives were an open book. Lena had no inkling what secrets he kept from the world and especially from his wife.

  Their home was so very different from the one she and Ray had shared for the past fifteen years. It was airy and inviting with high ceilings and lots of windows, many of which were open when she got there. The furniture was soft and covered with fabrics that were pleasing to the touch. Wonderful aromas emanated from the kitchen toward the rear of the house. And most unusual of all was a room lined entirely with bookshelves brimming with books. Lena hadn’t seen so many books in one place since she was a teenager.

  An even more striking difference was the obvious ease and affection between Marcus and Corinne. Even at the height of their courtship, Ray’s watchfulness had seldom let up and his misery swelled from within him to fill the space between them. Lena could hardly remember why she’d fallen in love with him. She’d clung to the remnants of that love as long as she could until they became too frayed to grasp. She now fought back jealousy of something she could never have, at least not within her marriage to Ray.

  Lena had come to write a story about Marcus, but found that story inseparable from the remarkable woman who shared his life. She wound up spending hours observing Corinne perform her magic with the pupils who streamed to her home to learn how to feel.

  This was her first personal encounter with SPUDs. They were among the bogeymen that populated Ray’s dark and paranoid world. He saw them as both sinister and inferior and was vehemently against them acquiring the status of truly sentient beings. He’d even contributed to The Tribe of 23, a human supremacy movement named for the number of chromosome pairs in the human genome.

  In early 2023, just before the United States government began to wind down its military program and was still training robotic infantry for combat, an incident occurred that underscored the complex relationship that was evolving between people and SPUDs. A combat ready trainee wandered off a military base in the Nevada desert and wound up at the edge of a main highway on the outskirts of Reno. It set up a sniper’s nest and began picking off cars leading into the city.

  The sharpshooting SPUD stayed on the move, eluding authorities for nearly two days. By the time it was destroyed by a drone-fired missile, it had killed 73 people and wounded nearly 200 more. It was the worst disaster in the history of surrogate combat. There was too little left of the renegade robot after the missile strike to determine what went wrong with its programming.

  While cooler heads chalked up the rampage to faulty programming resulting in mistaking the civilian environment for a theatre of war, others attributed more deliberate malevolence to the offender, making the incident a rallying cry against the threat of SPUDs turning against their human creators. One woman whose whole family had perished in a hail of gunfire later founded the Tribe of 23 to protect the world from being taken over by increasingly sentient AI’s. Other survivors joined the cause and their numbers were swelled by thousands of people whose jobs had been eliminated because of growing numbers of SPUDs in the workforce.

  The Tribe of 23 was still a grassroots organization when Ray joined it in 2027. Only later as our silicon-based brethren became increasingly sentient did it take a more sinister turn to evolve into a vitriolic hate group that even he could no longer in good conscience support.

  Lena now got to witness the impressive capacity of SPUDs to learn how to be human. She only wished that Corinne could have a chance to work her spell on Ray.

  It would have been awkward, perhaps impossible, for Lena to conduct her interviews of Marcus and Corinne had they known that she was Ray Mettler’s wife. She was working under her maiden name Holbrook and few people in her journalistic world were aware of her other identity. But even without knowing who she was, Marcus showed remarkable deference to his predecessor’s brilliance and empathy with his fate. He considered the unfortunate outcome of HibernaTurf a cruel turn of luck, one that could just as well have befallen anyone, even him. He viewed their roles as more complementary than antagonistic
, with his own findings building on Ray’s to bring about a more benevolent outcome. He had no doubt that Ray would have welcomed this turn of events.

  Lena was a master of her craft. Within the first couple of days, she had unlocked details of Marcus’s childhood that he’d never shared with anyone, not even Corinne, who listened as his story unfolded as if she were learning about a character in one of her novels.

  *****

  The Takana family migrated to the Willamette Valley in western Oregon, just months before Marcus was born, to settle on some of the plentiful farmland that had been abandoned because of the combination of dwindling water supplies and the rise of vat grown foods. While much of the nation’s population now ate meat grown in vitro because of its abundance and affordability, the Takanas were part of a reviving movement that believed that naturally grown foods were more healthful and desirable than their genetically manipulated counterparts. Most European, African and Asian countries had held the line against synthetic and genetically modified foods, still depending on agriculture for subsistence.