RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) (36 page)

He was having some difficulty in getting results until he used the pentagon pass that John gave him.  Once inside their system he started looking for reports on nutrition.  He came across a study that someone had conducted in relation to the health of CIA field agents.  A few doctors working under orders of secrecy for the government back in the late 1990’s had come up with a dietary supplement that had astounding results in the rehabilitation of agents that were injured and laid up for long periods of time. 

It was common for people to develop muscle atrophy which made them nearly crippled from lying in bed for weeks on end while recuperating.  The government wanted their valuable assets to be available again in a shorter time frame so they developed this supplement. 

As it turns out, this was the same pink goop now being served to the newly restored.  It helped them get stronger faster so they could go home sooner.  This saved the government health care system billions of dollars per year by shortening their hospital stay after the procedure was complete. 

If consumed on a regular basis it created muscle mass and strength unmatchable by any amount of a workout regiment or the outdated steroid supplements.  Simply put, it made ordinary men and women four times stronger than usual, three times faster than normal and did it with only mild side effects like occasional skin rash and mild insomnia. 

He decided to attempt making a batch of it up, but it would require ordering some supplements and herbs from online sellers of naturalist products, and some quite serious chemicals.  He sent a grocery list of sorts to John for ordering with a note that said: please deliver by courier.  John knew this meant a trip to the bank.

It was a hot summer day and Bobby was having a great time.  He and Matt knew that summer was slipping away, it was late July now and summer vacation was nearly spent. It was time to start maximizing the fun days before the return to school.  Soon it would be back to the old books. 

He had gone to the courts to get in on some pickup games and met a new friend, a boy that was new to the area and looking to fit in.  He and Matt decided that the boy seemed down because the other boys were either picking at him or ignoring him.  They decided saying hello would be the right thing to do. 

His name was Toby Lansing and he really was a very nice guy.  He and his parents had just moved there from Michigan.  Toby’s Father found work there in Indy so the family moved there for a better opportunity.  They learned Toby was their age and would be attending school with them in the fall. 

They shot around some ball with him for a few minutes and he was pretty good, and he was also interested in the same things they were.  They invited him to come over after practice and hang out with them.  Matt messaged his Mother and she said it would be all right to bring his new friend home for a little while after practice.  Toby just needed to ask his parents if it was okay. 

They all sat there and talked about sports and the girls they liked while they waited for Toby’s parents to answer.  A moment later they got the green light and they were off in a flash to the retro-cade, the new teen hangout in town that had brought back the old style pin ball machines and retro video games.  They had the old whack-a-mole, pac-man, space invaders, and even skeeball, all the games that were popular when Grandpa Kerrington was a kid. 

Alan had talked Dodge and Linsey into going to check it out one Saturday afternoon.  Alan had a blast, it was like a flash from the past for him but Dodge and Linsey just didn’t get it, their
generation just didn’t warm up to it at all.  It had been revived by an entrepreneur recently that lived to be 99 years old when he decided to be restored.  When he got into his new body, he felt renewed and full of energy like a youth again.  It inspired him to start retro-cade and so he obtained rights to the old games and began having them made again.

The mechanical bells, levers and lights of the pinball machines were a new real world experience for youth that had grown up in a totally computerized era, and the retro video games while still electronic were all two dimensional and so basic that it became intoxicating for the modern youth.  The new retro-cades were now all over the United States in malls everywhere.  The boys settled in there for an evening of fun and junk food from the concession counter.

Back at the Kerrington house Dodge and Linsey were going through tutorials on the PC connected to the new security system.  It was feature rich, and so well thought out, that it was certainly the best system available.  The house was wired with 36 cameras placed carefully to not invade privacy but still provide excellent coverage of all windows and doors.  No one could get in or out of the house without being detected.  Any intruder would have set off several sensors just trying to get in.  Once inside they would be quarantined quickly by high voltage laser curtains that would shoot across each door frame.  Going through these curtains would render even the toughest of men unconscious, badly burned, and all of their electronics completely toasted.  It was so advanced that it could easily detect children or pets allowing only them to pass unharmed. 

Authorities would be alerted and the perp would be easily taken into custody when they arrived.  It was high tech enough to have facial recognition, retina scan and full hand scan touch-less entry as a backup.  The house would unlock the door for you before you even got all the way to the door.  It had already scanned your retina and face by the time you got to it and it also welcomed you by name. 

They could talk to it and give it commands to turn things on and off like lights, music, TVs just about anything.  They wanted to learn this system well and get full control of it.  In the event of an attack it might be the only thing that would save their lives. 

Meanwhile John Calhoun was spiraling ever deeper into the rabbit hole that was Cyrus Slade’s complete medical history.  He
had finally found the detailed files of everything that had been done to this poor man, that is, if you could call him a man.  The cloning gone wrong had left several parts of his body grossly deformed.  He had been through countless surgeries to fix various problems.  Several of his organs had been replaced with bionic organs because cloning him only yielded another copy with all the same infirmities.  The real horror of it all, was that he had been in excruciating pain with every operation.  His pain receptors were not normal but this was not discovered until his sixth year after he was cloned.  He had been put under for numerous operations and they thought he was feeling nothing but his mind was actually fully awake and aware of every cut, every pull and  every stitch going in when they sewed him back up. 

He could be re-cloned, but it would simply render the same mess that they had started with.  The process had not been perfected, as he and Ron were the first clones.  Ron was the second one, and they corrected many things that they had learned from Cyrus’s process that went wrong.  They were keeping Cyrus alive in order to learn from their mistakes, he was like a human guinea pig.  This fueled his hatred for Ron and his parents even more. 

He knew that eventually they would destroy him when they were done with him.  He didn’t let it happen, he escaped, he outsmarted them by drugging their drinks and overpowering the guards.  After his disappearance the government shut the project down and dispersed the staff.  The Doctor and his wife tried to give Ron as normal of a life as possible and were instrumental in getting him a job at ESS. 

Cyrus turned to a life of crime and was moving up the ranks fast when he rescued Glitch from a brush with death.

He and Glitch devised ways to rob people without ever  leaving their lab.  Soon the cash mounted as they stole huge sums of money from the wealthy.  Often, the victims didn’t even know they had been robbed.  In some cases the victims were simply too embarrassed of being taken by a scam, to alert authorities of it, so it remained unreported. 

Cyrus quickly became the dominant of the two, as he continually murdered his underlings to instill fear in those left living and still under his control.  Glitch took the back seat as the
computer expert, a master of hacking and program development, his expertise was near to that of John’s. 

John was beginning to understand what was driving this mad man and why he was by far the most likely suspect behind the deaths and this whole crazy situation.  It simply had to be
him, there could be no other explanation.  They had to get inside the systems of that compound and destroy the computers.  They had to stop Cyrus and Glitch from obtaining the information that only he and Dodge possessed, If the hackers gained total access they could easily control every human being on earth that had a LifeTech chip in their head, there would be no stopping them. 

John put together a video presentation of everything he discovered in his research.  It was rather lengthy at about one hour of total run time, but it was as short as he could make it and cover everything needed to bring the team up to speed on what was going on.  He sent a copy of it out to everyone on their secured channel to their skyphones with instructions for everyone to view it at 7:00 p.m. 

One by one, he received “okay” messages back from each of their team members, Black Ops, and Linsey and Dodge.  Their total member count was now up to 41 people, quite the little army. 

There were a lot of things to do.  The Black Ops team had spent two weeks now working on angles of attack on the compound.  They obtained satellite views of the building and a complete set of digital blue prints of the foundry.  They had no idea what change’s Cyrus had made on the inside but they figured it must be extensive and their attack would be challenging unless they could get some
intel on the inside. 

John had been busy obtaining weapons and communication equipment that the Black Ops team included on their wish list.  The
Captain of the team reused John’s word “unobtainium” when describing some of the items but John located the equipment anyway.  The Captain was impressed that John could acquire weapons that he could never get with any amount of paperwork or favors when he was an active government Black Ops commander. Information was certainly king in this high tech age. 

Dodge and Linsey were gradually filling Bobby and
Sarah in on what was going on.  They strategically left out the part about Cyrus being a cold-blooded killer and crazed madman, they didn’t want to scare them to death, just make them aware of a potential danger. 

They told them to watch for any unusual behavior from people that might be around the house, like security system people working at a house next door or an exterminator that might be working in the neighbor’s yard.  They told them if they saw anything like that to let them know right away.  They also told them to be especially wary of getting into cars with people that they
didn’t know well after school.  Someone saying that their parents had called and there was an emergency and they needed to come with them right away.  They made them understand that this was most likely a trap and to not go with anyone other than family.  They were quite concerned that Cyrus would make a move soon and they feared he might abduct a family member to use as a bargaining chip. 

At Alan
’s house, things were a bit different.  He went old school, obtaining some old military equipment from several friends.  All the doors and windows were now wired with charges, he warned Dodge and Linsey and the kids not to enter his house under any circumstances without him by their side.  His friends all knew something was going on, but they just thought he had become paranoid due to Dodge’s high profile position at ESS.  It had been all over the news, and they just figured, he was protecting his property the best way he knew how.  He didn’t know enough about electronics to do that high tech stuff but he was an expert with old style military booby traps.  Old sawed off shot guns, very thin filament wires, a few hand grenades and two modified cattle prods all carefully concealed throughout the house in strategic locations. 

If anybody came in uninvited and managed to get out alive, they would no doubt be missing a few pieces.  They would be easily tracked later by John through the hospital data bases as they would be seeking Restoration after leaving Alan’s little fun house, not to mention leaving behind some rather large DNA samples. 

Alan felt his plan to be very solid, he spent his days cleaning guns making his own ammo and getting generally prepared.  He was working out and eating healthily in preparation for a war, it was the only way he knew.  He realized that wars nowadays were fought more with technology than brawn but he had to go through his own process just in case, he had to be ready in case it did get physical.  He wanted to have the upper hand if it came down to one on one combat. 

Dodge asked his Dad to keep his visits to their house down to once a week or less.  He didn’t want the watchers to believe Alan was involved in any way.  This way they would not see him as a threat or an asset of any kind and would hopefully leave him alone.

Across town at the compound Cyrus Slade stood before his main console in his office.  In his hand he held yet another of his no frill’s status reports.  It read  . . . ,

Kerrington Residence;

Condition: Normal

Behavior: Very guarded, heightened awareness of surroundings

Activity:  Normal family activities, dinner out, sports participation.        shopping  

Surveillance: Outdoor line of sight only, Audio: none, Video: none           (state of the art security preventing penetration in both autos and            home)

Note: being very cautious, keeping tight tabs on children

Cyrus crumpled the paper in his fist and leaned back letting out a maniacal laugh.  He felt the greatest satisfaction welling up inside his seemingly soulless interior.  Cyrus had a secret, a dark secret, one that he kept to himself completely, not even Glitch knew of this evil plan that was nearly ready to be hatched.  He threw the wad of paper down, that’s it! He growled, as he mashed the report into the floor with a twisting, grinding motion, under the heel of his steel toed boot.
         “Dodge Kerrington, you think you’re so clever!  You think you’re above everyone with your fancy security system! Your perfect life!  Your perfect family!  We’ll see how smart you are when I’m cutting off your fingers one by one!  We’ll see what kind of man you are then!  I’ll crush you!”  In his moment of anger he punched the monitor putting his fist all the way through it.  He struggled for a moment to remove his hand before marching off to the lab, he had plenty of work to do. 

Several hours passed, it was now the wee hours of the morning. Down in the labs Cyrus pressed the intercom button for the quarters of his best geneticist, Alice Covings.  He found her several years earlier, after a two-month search, working at a
laboratory in California on gene splicing experiments.  He viewed her resume and decided it was she that possessed the exact skills he required. 

She had a husband and children but it was of no consequence to Cyrus he simply
didn’t care.  He ordered Glitch to hack into Alice’s Lifecorder one evening while she and her husband were away from their home.  Glitch made a copy of her life file before corrupting the data.  That very night while Glitch was tampering with her Lifecorder two hooded men were beating her husband Mark violently in an alley just outside a movie theater.  They staged a mugging gone wrong scenario.  They murdered her and left her husband badly beaten.  He managed to crawl back out of the alley and was found by a Passerby.  The EMTs got her lifeless body to the hospital only to find that her life file that was stored at a local backup service was corrupted and useless. 

The police raced to their home and kicked in their front door at the bequest of the injured husband who was still in the ER.  He told them to get her Lifecorder from the bedside table.  The police in confusion simply brought both hers and her husband’s to be sure.  They attempted to load the file up into a clone at about 65 minutes from the time of her death but it didn’t work.  

The doctors assumed the “after sixty minutes rule” as the cause for the clones insane behavior but it was actually the result of Glitch’s handy work.   The clone had to be euthanized immediately as a result.  Losing her had ruined this man’s life and broken his heart.  Their children, Sally and Phillip, were growing up without their Mother, and now their Father had no zest for life.  Little did he know that his wife was still alive and had become a captive and servant to Slade.  Cyrus had implanted the small explosive device in her brain just as he had done to all of his subservient, with the exception of Glitch. 

Alice answered the intercom call.     

“Yes this is Alice?”
         “Slade here, I need you to come to the lab immediately.” 

Alice thought for a moment, did she dare mention that it was 3:30 in the morning?  She decided that it wouldn’t be wise.     

“Yes Sir, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
         “Very good.” 

Cyrus’s voice crackled eerily back through the old speaker.  Why he insisted on using this old crappy intercom system was beyond anyone’s best guess, but no one had the guts to ask him. 

Alice arrived at lab no. 2 twenty minutes later as promised.  In the middle of the lab, leaning over a table, stood Cyrus.  His twisted figure to this day made her quiver with fear, she just never got used to his snarled face and angry demeanor.   There was just something about this man that made everyone uneasy, you just never got used to his presence.