Kill switch the sommerfe.., p.17
Kill, Switch: The Sommerfeld Experiment #4, page 17
“Shelby, I’ll need an assistant.”
“Like a secretary?”
“More than that. Someone I can absolutely trust.” He quickly did a rundown of what he needed.
“You want me to dress like a townie, fly to LoSan, interview realtors, pick one and then start looking at skypalaces?”
“That’s about it. Find yourself and Kevin a place, too.”
“I won’t say no to a skypalace,” Kevin said.
“Do I get a clothes budget?”
“Wearing cargo pants and a t-shirt to look at multi-million-credit mansions won’t make a good impression.”
“I should do it just to mess with them, but hey, I always wanted to shop in one of those expensive swanky stores.”
“Security is most important in choosing a house. Line of sight, no easy method of approaching the skypalace without security knowing.”
Shelby spun in a giddy circle. “I’m going to fake an accent. Be all haughty and act rich. Like I’m better than everyone else.”
“How the hell do you act rich?” Kevin asked.
She minced down the walkway and back, her right arm bent at the elbow, swinging out. “Aren’t I all pretentious.”
Kevin and Joshua laughed; Ginji turned a few circles.
“A bit ago you gave me shit for dressing like a townie.” Joshua leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.
“Yeah, that was before you told me I get to dress like a mega-rich, snooty townie.” Her eyes grew wide. “Oh, wait a second. If you’re Wyatt DeLuca, do I get to meet Piper? She is one of my heroes. As your assistant, can I visit her offices and see what’s on the drawing board?”
“She said she would let us beta test for her.”
“Man, this is totally worth leaving Macau for.”
Later, Brizeyda poked her head in and let them know it would be dinnertime soon. Joshua introduced her to the gang. Before dinner, Joshua showed his friends their rooms.
“Fancy for an abandoned mealpac factory.” Shelby dropped her suitcases in the middle of the room. She poked her head into the bathroom. “How long are we staying?”
“A few weeks, tops. Kevin will need facial reconstruction, and I need a few more surgeries, myself. But I’d like you to head into Seattle tomorrow, get what you need for Anina Tyler to be Wyatt DeLuca’s assistant, then start making some comms to find a realtor who’s known for discretion in LoSan. DeLuca board members and Wyatt’s uncle are getting restless. Wyatt’s been gone now for months, and I need to make an appearance.”
“Hey, when I’m in LoSan looking for your skypalace, can I stay in that hotel on the hills only accessible by skycar?”
“Done. Kevin, you’ll meet Nicolo tonight. He’s stocked a workshop for you to create the Vipers. The doctor, when she upgraded my face, gave me retinal implants to bypass the obvious use of goggles.”
“Implants, huh… this is going to be fun.”
Shelby decided to stay behind and unpack and take a nap, having been up late the night before figuring out the odds for a half-dozen Egames, while Joshua took Kevin to his new temporary lab.
On a stainless-steel workbench sat two new model Vipers. Military grade. Unavailable for civilian purchase. Joshua picked one up. It was light, but still had a good solid feel in his hand. The overhead lights gleamed dully on the matte black surface. Nicolo had done well.
Kevin walked around the workshop, stopping to look at the various equipment and mechs he’d need to upgrade the Vipers.
“Perfect. I can get started on these whenever you want me to.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, Z, let me check my busy schedule. Oh, I just realized I should call you Wyatt. My brain can’t wrap itself around all this.”
“You and me both, buddy.”
24 – Warrior Gene
Over dinner, Gabriella Ravello sat back and watched Joshua and his two friends laugh, joke, and poke fun at one another. She had never seen this side of the young man—goofy, funny, engaged. His friends brought out the best in him. Shelby teased him mercilessly like a bratty little sister. He exchanged nerdy gamer stories with Kevin until they were laughing and holding their sides.
After tonight, not only did lingering doubts dissolve, but Gabriella realized she was seeing the young man who might have been. Not a thug. Not a killer. Not even a scientific experiment, but a young man who, given the chance, could have been a good person.
Gabriella reined herself back on that one. A good person couldn’t face the dangers that lay ahead and do what probably needed to be done. She reminded herself that the part of him who gleefully looked forward to chasing down Graves and whoever the fixer was working for was not a good person.
He was the person they needed.
But becoming Wyatt DeLuca might give him the chance to become a better person. It looked like this plan would save him in more ways than one. At some point in his life, had it continued along its previous trajectory, there would have been a point of no return.
After dinner, Gabriella Ravello excused herself and went to her office to check on an encryption script she had running against notes found buried in Dr. Sommerfeld’s digital archive.
The program had finished, and she settled in for what she knew would be a long night. They were running out of time to put Joshua out as Wyatt, and she wanted to know as much as possible about who and what Joshua was.
Within the first few minutes of reading, she discovered the project that had birthed Joshua was called Erebos.
“Erebos,” she said aloud. “A Primordial deity, and the personification of darkness. One of first five beings in existence and born of chaos.”
It was terrifyingly fitting, Gabriella found, as she dove deeper into the files that Sommerfeld had kept hidden and uncovered the truth.
“Doc is calling me,” Joshua said to his friends. His sides hurt from laughing, and he wiped tears of merriment from his cheeks.
“I’m going to turn in, myself. It’s odd having my physical body back. It’s so limiting. I want to move it in ways that I know will sprain something.” Kevin stood and tried to do a flying ninja kick but stumbled and almost fell. “Ow. I think I sprained a groin muscle.”
“Sometimes I’m not sure how you two feed yourselves.” Shelby held out her arm to Kevin. “I’m jet lagged like crazy. I need to turn in, too.”
Kevin tottered out of the cafeteria holding on to Shelby’s arm, and she chattered away like she’d known him all her life.
Joshua joined the doctor in her office. Dark circles smudged under her eyes, and her usually neat clothing looked rumpled.
“I recognize the look of an all-nighter.”
The doctor rubbed her hands over her face. “It’s part and parcel when you’re a researcher. Come in and close the door. I need to show you something.” She gestured to a chair. “Please, this might take a while.”
He sat, unable to see from this angle what was on the holoscreens. “Everything okay?”
“I’m sorry to alarm you but…” She stared at the holoscreens and tapped a fingernail on the desktop.
“Doc?”
“Oh, yes… this is fascinating.”
“I can do a lot of things, but I don’t think mind reading is one of them. Yet.”
“How are you doing, Joshua?”
The question took him off guard. “That was your urgent question?”
“Uh… no.” She looked flustered for a moment. “You’ve been through a lot.”
Joshua gave a half-shrug. “I’m ok. Bounty hunters aren’t breathing down my neck. Food here is good.”
“And your friends?”
“They’re happy to be here. It… feels good having them here.”
“How about your simulated memories?”
“I’m fine, doc. I haven’t had a nightmare since my second session.” He tried to rein in his impatience. “What did you need?” He wanted to hit the workout room for an hour before he went to bed.
“I’ve been reading Dr. Sommerfeld’s notes. These… these were hidden. Have you ever heard of the word ‘Erebos?’”
“Maybe in high school. Greek god of something… darkness, I don’t remember.” Busy doing drugs and shaking down local businesses for protection money. Joshua’s memory was becoming increasingly better, but he had a feeling those days of his flash addiction would remain foggy.
“Ever heard of Cynosure Somatology Research?”
Joshua shook his head with a half shrug. “Should this mean something?”
“The Erebos project originated from a think tank named Cynosure Somatology Research.”
“The way you’re talking, it sounds like this should be something I know about.”
“The idea to create you wasn’t Sommerfeld’s; he was simply the tool to bring the idea called Erebos to fruition. I don’t know if CSR is part of DARPA or an NSMZ dark project.”
“I’ve always wondered if there was a purpose behind my creation, or if Sommerfeld simply made me because, fuck it, he could, and why not since he had the lab and the money. At least I wasn’t the result of some random fuckery.”
“Interesting way to describe yourself, but no, your creation was not random. E42 was your designation, the forty-second baby of the E-strain of organoid and DNA alterations. Areas most of note were changes to your Monoamine oxidase A gene, or MAOA, which has earned the nickname ‘warrior gene.’ It’s linked to aggression. The two main genes that were associated with the stress response COMT and BDNF have been… best way to describe it is your stress response has been turned down. Which explains your lack of stress-related health issues. Other enhancements had been made to a suite of your genes that involved memory.”
“I’ve always had a good memory. A bout with drugs in my late teen years seems to be immune to that, though.” He held up his hands defensively. “I was a troubled teen.”
“You don’t say.” Dr. Ravello smiled slightly. “Sommerfeld also made changes in a host of genes, ACVR2B, TRHR, FTO, and IRS1, all related to lean body mass and muscle strength, and bone density. Ever broken a bone?”
“A few ribs.”
“Starting with strains A through E, Sommerfeld meticulously documented hundreds of failures, the subjects perishing in his pursuit of the perfect combat-oriented human.”
Damn. That was sick. And this fucker was his father… no, he wouldn’t think of it that way. He didn’t have a father; he had a sperm donor who was a insane son of a bitch.
“Initially, he attempted planting organoids along with the DNA changes into infants. When that failed, he implanted them into embryos.” She looked from the holoscreens to Joshua. “The one that finally survived and thrived was you.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
“Reading through his notes finally unlocked who you are, Joshua. You can tell me to bury these, or I can continue.”
He nodded with a short jerk of his head. Part of him wanted to get up and walk out. He was what he was, and nothing could change that. Another part of him deeply wanted to understand why, who, and how.
“You were created as the prototype for highly specialized, small unit combat, like Navy SEALS, but with bio-enhancements giving you unique hyperawareness of surroundings: sight, sound, smell, taste. People who could be inserted into delicate situations with no obvious enhancement or internal neural hardware detectable with scans. All created organically.” She stopped reading and laced her hands on her desk. “Does any of this make sense?”
“I’ve always had boosted senses. When I was a kid, my mom taught me how to block it out by meditating. Sensory gating, she called it.”
“She was as good mother.”
Too bad I couldn’t see past my own selfishness to save her. “She was. Continue.”
“The next phase of Erebos was the insertion of bio-enhanced telepathy, allowing the soldiers to link and communicate telepathically.”
“Now how the hell were they going to accomplish that?”
“Quantum entanglement.”
“I know about Quantum Key Distribution networks; that’s what NSMZ uses for its networks. But I’ve never heard of using quantum entanglement in humans to communicate.”
“It’s decades away, and Sommerfeld never reached that phase before the lab was raided by Farrell.”
“Farrell never said how he was tangled up in all this.”
“Taking down Sommerfeld’s lab was his first major assignment. Unfortunately, who from CSR began Erebos, and who chose Sommerfeld, is not revealed.”
“Do you think this is why Sommerfeld was never executed or put into stasis for his crimes? Maybe CSR was protecting him.”
“Or someone very high up—someone in the United States government or military—had stayed Sommerfeld’s execution, and while he was incarcerated, they allowed him to continue to work on his notes, perfecting the idea behind Erebos until that time he could be released, free to continue his work.”
“But then I showed up as the missing link.”
She regarded him thoughtfully for a long moment. “And now the urgent and exorbitant bounty on you makes sense. CSR is probably pulling strings behind the money, and attempting to bring you back to NSMZ under the guise of the Maelstrom project, which I know is dead and buried.”
“You think they want to continue without Sommerfeld?”
“Most definitely. I don’t think they—whoever they are—will give up. They just need to find you and a suitable successor to Sommerfeld to continue. It is fortuitous that we moved quickly to change your identity. Even now, if they somehow located this facility, you are Wyatt DeLuca.”
“Except for Kevin. Shelby’s ID as Anina Tyler is intact, as far as I know.”
“I will talk to Kevin and prepare him for surgery and a new ID. But, as you can see, this puts a new urgency behind appearing to the public as Wyatt. CSR won’t give up; you are the culmination of years of work and billions of credits. More money will be added to your bounty the longer you are free, and the pressure to capture you will grow more urgent.”
“Wyatt and I spoke about it. Shelby, Kevin, and I fake our deaths. You have the lab here grow some tissue samples, plant it on a skycar. Fiery crash. Investigation. My DNA is identified. Declared dead. The bounty hunters stop looking. Whoever is behind CSR and Erebos gives up. But first, I make my grand appearance as Wyatt DeLuca, out in the open, press conference, where everyone can see me.” Joshua laid out a quick plan with Dr. Ravello, who nodded as he spoke. “See where I’m going with this? This way, Joshua doesn’t suddenly die, and Wyatt appears hale and healthy. I doubt anyone will put two and two together, but why chance it?” Joshua couldn’t help but think of Farrell. If anyone could add together two seemingly unrelated equations and come up with ‘Joshua equals Wyatt,’ it would be the NSMZ agent. “How quickly do you want to move on this?”
“Two weeks tops to first press conference, and in fifteen days I can create something convincing from the lab. I will need tissue samples from Ms. Tucker and Mr. Maitland.”
Joshua wanted to say he wasn’t ready, but even if she said a month, he would claim he wasn’t ready. It wasn’t being Wyatt DeLuca that worried him; it was the extreme scrutiny that would come with it.
He would be in the spotlight of the entire globe.
25 – Preparations
The next few weeks went by too quickly for Joshua.
Shelby was dispatched as an assistant to two mysterious wealthy businessmen who wished to anonymously purchase skypalaces. Once she realized she had a limitless budget, as well as one for clothes to look the part of a billionaire’s assistant, she was all-in and gave notice at her job.
Once Nicolo approved the skypalace, it was purchased, along with another nearby for Kevin.
Piper offered Shelby the use of her downtown LoSan penthouse, claiming she never used it much anyway.
The afternoon following Joshua’s conversation about Erebos with Dr. Ravello, Kevin went in for facial reconstruction; his surgery didn’t include his eyes, so while he healed, he started work on Joshua’s Vipers.
A week later, the Vipers were complete, and Joshua’s retinal implants were calibrated to work with the new mindlinked weapons. His cyber weapons from Nasr E-Weapons of Damascus arrived, and another surgery integrated them into muscle, nerves and tissue.
At breakfast, five days before Wyatt DeLuca’s first personal appearance, Joshua commed Kevin, Shelby, and Nicolo to join him at breakfast.
“Ye olde faked death trick, huh?” Kevin, said, and slouched in his chair. His new official name was Maxwell Reed. Joshua and Shelby had both teased him about it sounding like a bougie millionaire’s name, which, Kevin promptly claimed, was the point. Who would accuse Maxwell Reed of being a former criminal? “This’ll be my second faked death. Is there a limit to these? Like nine lives? I feel like there should be.”
To Joshua, Kevin sounded the same, but Maxwell Reed would definitely fool security checks, and hopefully Argus Panoptes.
After they finished breakfast, Kevin left to complete his morning exercises to strengthen his mending body, Nicolo to meet with a team who would start the process of staging the faked deaths.
Joshua moved to a seat close to Shelby.
“I’d be creeped out if I didn’t know you,” she said, leaning away from him.
“I need you to very quietly, with emphasis on the quietly, look into a think tank called Cynosure Somatology Research.”
“Blah blah research, what?”
Joshua repeated himself.
“That’s a mouthful. Sounds like a fun place to poke around, like one of those creepy labs you see in horror movies where the creature gets out and eats all the scientists. Rawr.”
Or melts, but Joshua kept it to himself.
“What exactly do you need?”
“Look for Project Erebos. Comms, lab notes, names associated with the project, whatever.”
“Are you going to tell me why I’m looking for this?”
“They, uh…” Joshua didn’t know why some of this made him uncomfortable. It was admitting that he wasn’t normal. “Erebos might be the people who, you know, asked Sommerfeld to make me.”
