Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) (31 page)

“Hmm.”  Focus Rizzari’s stock rose in his estimation.  When Liutraven’s name came up, he expected his information would disturb Focus Rizzari’s worldview.  Likely not.

Dr. Zielinski took out a yellow legal pad, drew two large crosses and filled in the eight varieties of Transforms that Van Reijn recognized.  “In Dr. Van Reijn’s model, the most significant division among Transforms is gender.  He also recognizes axes of variation based on whether the Transform is a Major Transform, and another based on whether the Transform is a juice producer.”  The most shocking aspect of Van Reijn’s model was his insistence on the inclusion of male Major Transforms.  Leading Focuses never liked speculation about male Major Transforms.

“I think I see it, though several of the terms don’t ring a bell,” Focus Rizzari said, not visibly thrown by the inclusion of the male Major Transforms.  “What’s a Goldilocks?”

Dr. Zielinski smiled at his major contribution to Van Reijn’s work.  “Goldilocks is an MD term, not recognized by the MRC at all.  They think we’re crazy, but I’ve seen several.  A Goldilocks is someone who goes through Transform Sickness and comes out clean, with no visible effects.  They have juice, and they come out of their transformations with supplemental juice levels elevated by a point or two for men and depressed by a point or two for women.  After about a month, their supplemental juice levels zero out, unless a Focus tags them and gives them juice.  All they’re left with is fundamental juice, but they don’t have any of the normal low juice effects.”  He decided to leave the details for later.

Focus Rizzari’s stone face wavered, but only for an instant.  “Wild.  Why isn’t this in the literature?”

“At least four papers have been rejected on that subject, because there’s no theoretical model to support the existence of the Goldilocks Transforms.” An automatic rejection criteria for the medical journal referees.  “Clinically, the Goldilocks Transforms are treated as ordinary Transforms and are put into Focus households, although they don’t need Focus support after the first month.  Perhaps not even before then.  Many of us MDs suspect that there are dozens of these Goldilocks hanging around in normal society, undetected.”

Focus Rizzari studied the male section of the diagram.  “Chimeras I’ve read about.  The so-called Male Monster.  Are they actually confirmed?  Real?” she asked.  “I thought the evidence on them anecdotal.”

Dr. Zielinski nodded.  “They’re quite real, though we would like to keep their existence out of the press, for obvious reasons.  Like Arms, they consume juice.”  This brought Focus Rizzari’s eyebrows together momentarily, which puzzled him.  She didn’t agree with his straightforward statement.  Instead, she changed the subject, despite her obvious interest.  He smelled a rat.

“How human are these Chimeras?” she asked, now focused and intense.  “Can they talk?”

“They’re not human at all.  As with Monsters, they change into an animal-like form.  However, at least one maintained a limited speaking vocabulary, even in his animal-like form,” Dr. Zielinski said.  “The four Chimeras in the records are all quite intelligent, however, and all retained the ability to understand language.”  And, if his information was correct, only one of the four still lived, hunting Monsters in the northern Canadian Rockies.

“Okay, I’ll buy that.  What’s this about Male Focuses?  In quotes?  Don’t you mean Crows?” Focus Rizzari asked.  “
Dr. Van Reijn’s model has them under positive abundance, which doesn’t match my experience.”

“Crows?” he said, and shook his head.  “I’ve never heard that term.”  Interesting.  He hadn’t expected to actually learn anything from Focus Rizzari.  Perhaps this wouldn’t be a total waste of his time. 

“Some Focuses have met male Transforms who called themselves Crows,” Focus Rizzari continued, causing him to shiver.  Met.  She said ‘met’, not ‘heard of’.  Damn.  “Crows aren’t comfortable with people and like to stay in the shadows.  Met, though, might be too strong a word.  Talked to on the telephone might be more appropriate.”

“It could be a hoax.”  He
had heard rumors about male Focuses for years, but without the Crow name.  He suspected he even met a couple of them back during the Quarantine days.  They hadn’t called themselves either Crows or ‘male Focuses’.  Back then, he and several other doctors had classified them as Sports.  Victims of anomalous transformations.

“Perhaps,” Focus Rizzari said.  “These self-named Crows knew things, though.  They can sense Para-procorticotrophin,” juice, “like Focuses and Arms do, which implies they’re Major Transforms.  They have enough accuracy to be able to tell a Focus where she’s calling from, and enough range to do so from miles away.  The reason I’m surprised is that they considered themselves Para-procorticotrophin consumers.  No.  That’s what the Focuses deduced from the terms the Crows used.  What the Crows actually said appeared to be utter nonsense.  They have no understanding of what they are or how they work.”

“Would you mind if I passed your information along to Dr. Van Reijn?”

Focus Rizzari shook her head.  “No.  No problem.”  She paused.  “What does
Dr. Van Reijn say about Monsters?  How do they fit in?”

“He considers Monsters to be a failed state,”
Dr. Zielinski said.

“I disagree,” Focus Rizzari said.  “Unlike the male Transforms in juice withdrawal, who die, Monsters can live for an indefinite amount of time.  Not only do they not deteriorate, they improve as they get older.”

“You know this for certain?” he asked.  He knew they didn’t die, but he hadn’t realized they improved.

“Personal experience,” Focus Rizzari said.  Enigmatic.  “Have you encountered any information on any Monster juice capabilities?  Juice weaponry?  The ability to talk?”

“Not a word on any of those.”  Her questions were unexpected and intriguing.  “I take it you have?”

She paused, looked him in the eyes for the first time, and didn’t answer his question.  “I think we’re going to have to work together,
Dr. Zielinski.  What you’ve shown me today indicates that the rest of our medical and research establishment doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on with Transform Sickness.  Especially considering what I discovered during my dissertation research.”

“What was that, Focus…Lori?”

“Para-procorticotrophin is only a carrier.  The biochemically active substances are trace hormones within Para-procorticotrophin.  Several different varieties of trace hormones.”

Dr.
Zielinski took a deep breath, goose pimples rising on his arms.  “Your results don’t surprise me,” he said, and thought fast.  He didn’t know much to say on the subject, or what would be appropriate, such as his knowledge of Transform pheromones.  “That does lead into Dr. Van Reijn’s conclusion, though.  Dr. Van Reijn is convinced Transform Sickness isn’t a disease in the standard sense, despite the fact we’ve isolated the disease vector behind it.  Diseases cannot cause new organs to grow, or cause such a fine-tuned set of effects, in his mind.”

“Then what is Transform Sickness?”

“His hypothesis states Transform Sickness is a reactivation of some part of humanity that, for one reason or another, went dormant a long time ago.  His hypothesis requires a minimum of two mutated genes, one or both activated when Transform Sickness hits, with discrete physical transformation outcomes.  Any gradations we think we see are what he terms archetype flaws, variations away from the distinct transformation outcomes instead of variants along a continuum.  In his view, Arms aren’t failed Focuses, but many of the other Sports are.”

Focus Rizzari’s face went blank.  “I’ll have to think about that.  That fits with the work my people are doing.”

Cryptic.  She wasn’t going to elucidate either, he realized.  Or answer the other unanswered question.  He realized she played her cards as close to the chest as he did.  She didn’t trust him.

“I know you don’t trust me,” he said.  She raised eyebrows; she wasn’t used to being read by a normal, but turnabout was fair play.  “I can accept that.  I do ask that you check into my background and my history with our mutual friends, including your regional representative to the Focus Council.  You’ll find the information educational.”

“I see.”  Her head tilted to one side, momentarily, and within seconds, her bodyguards surrounded her.  Interesting signaling trick, not one he had seen before.  “Your FBI problems have arrived and I have no interest in talking to them today,” she said.  He wondered how she figured that out.  Perhaps she guessed.  “I’ll get back in contact with you shortly.”  She stood, without a goodbye and walked a few paces away.  She turned back to look at him.  “No, I’m not immune to a certain Focus problem you were too polite to mention,” she said, which proved she had read and understood several of
his
papers.  “If you ever come up with any ideas on how to get around that little problem, I would like to know.”  She and her entourage walked away, toward the back of the Park Plaza foyer.

He stood and turned.  What she had mentioned was a tendency for Focuses to have memory problems and, because of the memory problems, suffer a diminishment in IQ and perhaps overall intelligence.  He smiled for a moment, remembering the Hancock data, which showed Van Reijn’s predicted opposite effect in Arms.  Memory enhancement, with secondary IQ elevation, because of those large pulses of juice Arms got when they drained juice from a surplus Transform.  Smart Arms, or at least Arms who started at the top end of the intelligence scale, such as Hancock, could easily end up being a real big problem as time went on.  Something to watch for.

The memory problems didn’t seem to bother Focus Rizzari as much as it had bothered some of the Focuses he had met, such as Focus Casso.  Focus Rizzari clearly had been quite intelligent before her Focus transformation.  However, her lack of Focus charisma meant that on the Transform side of the equation, she was a Focus without a future.  The other Focuses, the big bitches with their overwhelming Focus charisma, would see to that.  He would check up on her, anyway, but he couldn’t see bothering to work with her.

He sighed.  Somehow, Focus Rizzari had been correct.  Two FBI agents waited for him as he walked out of the hotel.

Gilgamesh: October 25, 1966

Her name was Wilhelmina Minton.  According to the newspapers in the archives of the Chicago Daily News, Miss Minton had transformed seven months ago, in March.  She was a Focus, and a minor, barely seventeen.  Her parents had initially kept control of her, but her household of Transforms had sought and received a court ruling declaring Miss Minton an adult, a ward of the Transforms whose lives depended on the actions of the Focus.  They had filed suit against Mr. and Mrs. Minton to provide monetary support for them, after Mr. and Mrs. Minton had filed suit to reverse the court ruling against their daughter.  A month ago, they settled, mutually agreeing to drop both suits.

Gilgamesh had no fear of this Focus.  He and Midgard were able to creep right up to the apartment complex she and her household lived in and take dross.  It wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing. 

He had never felt so bad about anything in his life.

“I say we should rent one of those apartments,” Midgard said, once the two of them had gone back to their hidey-hole in a culvert in the Busse Woods Reservoir.  Midgard had hopped the same freight train as Gilgamesh, and they had ended up in Chicago.  For the moment, they decided to work together.  Gilgamesh had once found the thought of spending large amounts of time with the other Crow unnerving.  Now they stayed together for convenience, but he doubted it would last long.  “It would be safe for us.  Her Transforms don’t believe a single thing Minton tells them.”

Midgard’s observation wasn’t surprising, as Miss Minton was a prisoner in one of the apartments, under strict discipline.  If she didn’t move the juice correctly, her household punished her, led by several of the male spouses of the women Transforms.  Some of this ‘discipline’ had come out in the court case.  The newspapers reported that if she messed up the juice flow a little, she was grounded, and if she messed it up a lot, she lost television privileges. 

“Where are we going to get the money?” Gilgamesh asked, hugging his knees and resting his chin on his arms.  Depression crushed down his soul, amplifying the emotional loss he
had been experiencing since he left St. Louis and Tiamat behind.  “What they’re doing to Minton is criminal.  I can’t stand her pain, and I don’t want to live near her.”  If the newspaper reports had been correct a month ago, Miss Minton’s discipline had rapidly worsened.  She was currently confined to a bedroom with several other female Transforms, on short rations, and in the short time Gilgamesh and Midgard had been watching the Focus she had twice been beaten with a belt until she bled.

Midgard nodded, and picked at a splinter off the wooden crates they sat on.  They had collected the crates from behind the Sears, and piled them high enough to keep them from having to sit in the icy water that ran through the culvert.  “You want to leave Chicago?  I’ll have to admit that I’m still a little unnerved by the three Arm kills we found.  I’m sure they’re Zaltu’s.”

Zaltu wasn’t anywhere that Gilgamesh could find in Chicago.  Nor was Gilgamesh bothered by the idea of sharing a town as big as Chicago with the Arm, despite her violent nature.  “They’re Zaltu’s.  If she didn’t kill those Transforms, two of them would have turned into psycho killers and the other into a Monster.  Yes, she’s a killer, but she saves the lives of normals as well.”  Which was a hell of a lot more than Gilgamesh was able to do, which bothered him a lot.