Virtual war, p.13
Virtual War, page 13
He leaned forward to let her get behind him and massage his shoulder. Unable to see her face, Corgan asked, “So! What are you planning to do for the six months it takes to get your machine here?”
Her strong fingers kneaded his muscles, but they stopped. Seven and nineteen hundredths seconds passed before she answered, “Well, I thought I’d … go with you to the Isles of Hiva. If you want me to. Do you?”
Forgetting his pain, Corgan squeezed his eyes shut. He said, “Yes.”
Fourteen
Corgan was bloody up to his elbows. His strong hands groped inside the warm body, grasping, tugging, as the cow bellowed her outrage and pain.
“I have to twist it,” he told Sharla. “I don’t want to hurt it—wait! Wait. I feel the head. It’s coming out now. Stand back.” In a rush of fluid the calf fell into his arms.
Corgan laughed out loud as he stood the calf on its wobbly legs and pulled off what was left of the placenta. “She’s alive. She’s beautiful!” Pointing to his own blood-soaked blue jeans and manure-caked boots, he said, “And I’m filthy. But who cares?”
After he rubbed the calf with a rough towel, its brown and white hair stood up in little whorls.
Sharla asked, “Do you need to let the lab team know right away that the calf has been born?”
“No hurry,” he told her. “They can do the blood test later. I’m going to leave her with her mother for a while.”
“Look at those big brown eyes,” Sharla murmured. “Even if she isn’t transgenic, even if she turns out to be just a plain ordinary cow, she’s darling.”
But it will be a lot better if she is transgenic, Corgan thought. With the arrival of each new calf, the genetics team kept hoping. So far they’d created just two calves that carried a special human gene resistant to the Ebola virus. Maybe this new baby would be the third.
A blood sample and a simple genetic test would confirm—or dash—the hopes of the team. If the calf was transgenic, it meant the team had succeeded in implanting the human gene into the fertilized ovum, and the cow would grow up to produce milk containing a human protein. Extracted from the milk, the protein from one cow could stop an Ebola outbreak in a whole domed city. Protein from two dozen transgenic cows would be able to cure an epidemic worldwide. And Ebola was just a starter. The genetics researchers—the people who shared a laboratory on the northern end of the island—had already recombined genes to counteract every major plague virus. If their work eventually succeeded, Earth could become habitable again. But so far, only two out of sixty-one newborn calves had turned out to be transgenic.
“As long as you don’t have to report the calf’s birth right away,” Sharla said, “let’s go down to the beach. You really ought to wash all that … stuff … off you.”
“What, you don’t like mud, and blood, and—” Corgan grinned at her, bent his knee, and pointed to the heel of his boot. “This nice ‘stuff’ on my boots? Maybe you don’t know the right word for it. Let me improve your vocabulary, Sharla. This ‘stuff,’ this cow by-product, is called—”
Her laughter rang out, that wonderful, rich, delicious laugh that Corgan loved. “Never mind. I know what it’s called. Just leave the boots here.”
Both of them ran barefoot from the top of the hill, where the barn stood, all the way to the beach. Corgan could easily have outraced Sharla because he was the faster runner, but he liked to stay behind her where he could watch her free, graceful movements.
Six months’ worth of bleaching from the tropical sun, six months of salt spray from the ocean, six months’ wear and tear from sand, and Shark’s cotton dress had become tattered. She insisted on wearing it that day even though she’d grown taller and the dress had shrunk and torn at the hem.
Corgan’s blue jeans had suffered almost as much. They were torn, faded, frayed, and stained from the work he’d been doing. Since he hadn’t been given a shirt to go with the jeans, he went bare-chested most of the time. His skin had turned far darker from the sun than Shark’s, because Corgan was brunette, something he’d never even thought about when he lived inside the Box where there was no real sun.
They raced into the surf and splashed each other until Corgan had completely cleaned himself of the cow’s birth matter and the spatters of manure on the legs of his jeans. Then they swam together, floating where the surf carried them.
He pulled her to her feet so he could always remember her the way she was now, as they stood there in the shallow water, the waves lapping their ankles. Sharla looked golden. Sun had streaked her hair countless different shades of gold, some of them exactly matching her skin.
Waves crashed around them, pushing them forward and then pulling them back when the water returned to its bed in the sea. This was the real roar of the real ocean they were hearing, so much more powerful than artificial noises filtered through electronic signals and aerogel.
Shark’s dress clung to her. When she shivered, Corgan took her hand and led her out of the surf.
“Look,” she said, pointing at the sand.
They knelt to examine a jellyfish washed up by the waves. It lay stranded on the sand, brown, shiny, and gelatinous, like an overturned bowl with a dark fringe around the edges.
“You can see inside it,” Corgan exclaimed, pointing to narrow coils of viscera, and to the thin, delicate strands of tissue that showed beneath the transparent surface membrane.
“Primitive and perfect,” Sharla announced. “We’ve evolved, and they’ve stayed the same.”
“Let’s figure out a way to move it so we can toss it back into the ocean. It’ll die here in the sun.”
“No, Corgan,” she said, pulling on his arm. “Don’t interfere with nature. The waves washed it up, so—”
His bark of laughter was incredulous. “You don’t want me to interfere with nature? And you’re going back to slice up DNA and engineer humans! While I stay here, birthing genetically altered calves that might save what’s left of humanity.”
Sinking down, she patted the sand for him to sit beside her. “We only have a little while before I have to leave. Let’s not waste it talking shop. No ideas deeper than … than the foam on the surf”
Corgan sprawled on the beach and looked out at the waves. He loved the way they rolled up and melted the sand from beneath his bare feet. Taking Shark’s hand, he pressed it into the damp surface. The imprint of her palm and fingers stayed just out of reach of the foam-flecked water. Then he imprinted his own hand, with the indentations of his fingers meshing into hers.
“I’ll miss you,” she said.
“Your things are already packed, and the Harrier Jet won’t take off for about an hour,” he told her. “You don’t have to leave just yet.” He remembered his own flight in the Harrier Jet when the panels of the domed city had opened to allow the aircraft to rise, straight up, out of the only place he’d ever known till that time. At six thousand meters’ altitude the aircraft had turned southwest. It was then that Corgan saw, for the first time, snow-covered mountain peaks, and actual trees, and lakes that reflected sunlight and made his breath catch with their beauty.
Sharla said, “You never even mention minutes anymore, Corgan, let alone fractions of seconds.”
“Why should I? I work with cattle now. All that matters to animals is seasons, not seconds.” Digging another imprint in the sand with his fingers, he said, “There’s something else different about me, too. Look.”
He held up his hands. They were rough and splintered, with the fingernails ragged and none too clean. “I remember,” he said, “at the celebration, when I hit Jobe—all I could think of was that I didn’t have to worry about my hands anymore. I could split my knuckles on his face, and no one would care.”
Sharla smiled. “Jobe cared! The poor guy—he never knew what he did wrong.”
After a while they stood up to walk back toward the Western Hemisphere Biotechnology Laboratory, keeping close, holding hands. The sun warmed them. He ached because he knew she was leaving him. She’d stayed with him nearly every minute for six months, cheering him when he delivered a calf, helping him learn to be comfortable with the genetic scientists in the laboratory. Sometimes he needed to get away, to go off by himself, but he was getting better at socializing, Sharla told him. Getting used to people.
“They like you,” she said. “They love telling you about their work because you listen and you learn so fast.”
“It’s interesting stuff,” he’d answered. “It’s like finally understanding how and why I got started in a test tube. Me and the calves—we’re mutations with a purpose.”
Since both Corgan and Sharla had been born in the laboratory on the same day, they’d celebrated their fifteenth birthdays together, running on the beach. They’d played a real game of Go-ball with real racquets and a real ball, using a line drawn in the sand for their net.
Now, on her last day on the Isles of Hiva, they approached the laboratory. The roof of the narrow, single-story building had been thatched with palm fronds in the same way the natives had thatched their huts so long ago, or so he’d been told.
“Have you heard any news about Brig?” Corgan asked.
“He’s in bad shape. He can’t walk at all now, but he keeps working on his programs for the Mutants. I’ll see him tomorrow.”
“Tell him I said …” What message could he send to Brig? Nothing seemed adequate.
“I’ll give him your love,” Sharla promised. “Do you want to wait here? I’ll just be a minute inside the building. I need to change into my LiteSuit and pick up my bag for the flight.”
“I’ll wait,” he told her. The Harrier Jet would leave in a few minutes from the concrete launch pad two hundred meters away. Corgan could hear the jet engines warming up. To find out if he could still do it, he tried to count the revolutions-per-second of the engines just by listening to them throb, but his ability to calculate time had fallen off. He was no longer split-second accurate.
When Sharla came out of the building, they walked toward the launch pad. “I almost hate to leave Hiva. It’s so beautiful here,” she murmured. “Everything is! I understand why Gauguin wanted to paint it all.”
“Who’s Gauguin?” he asked, raising his voice when they approached the aircraft.
“A French artist who came here two hundred years ago. These islands were called the Marquesas then. He painted the people and the ocean and these very same palm trees, or at least the ancestors of these trees.”
“Ancestors,” he mused. “Everything has them, one way or another. Trees, humans, cows—”
“That reminds me.” Speaking loudly now, she turned toward him. “Listen, Corgan, when you’re putting together your statistical data on the transgenic cattle, be careful.”
“Careful? Why?”
In one hand, Sharla carried the small bag that held her clothes; in the other hand, a pink hibiscus blossom to remind her of Hiva. She backed slowly across the concrete pad, still facing Corgan. When he attempted to follow her, the pilot waved him away and shook his head, meaning Corgan couldn’t come any closer.
“Don’t always believe statistics,” Sharla shouted. “Statistics can be tweaked to prove almost anything. Genetic stats, population stats, War-game stats!”
He frowned, trying to understand the words he had trouble hearing over the engine roar. “Wait a minute! What are you—Sharla?”
The engines revved to a higher pitch. Sharla climbed a small ladder to reach the open hatch of the cockpit, then turned and waved.
At the top of his voice Corgan cried out, “Sharla! The game stats! Did you—”
“NNTK, Corgan.”
“Sharla!” Not caring about his own safety, Corgan ran toward the Harrier Jet.
“’Bye, Corgan! Enjoy your Isles of Hiva that you love so much! I’ll be back some day.” She slid into the seat behind the pilot just before the hatch closed above her.
The aircraft rose vertically, lifting straight up into the perfect sky. Corgan ran after it until there was nothing left to see. Sharla was gone.
Alone, he stood on the empty beach.
Read the First Book in the Virtual War Chronologs
VIRTUAL WAR
Imagine a life of virtual reality—a childhood contained in a controlled environment, with no human contact or experiences outside of the world of computer-generated images.
Corgan has been genetically engineered by the Federation for quick reflexes, high intelligence, and physical superiority. Everything Corgan is, everything he has ever seen or done, was to prepare him for one moment: a bloodless, computer-controlled virtual war.
When Corgan meets his two fellow warriors, he begins to question the Federation. Now Corgan must decide where his loyalties lie, what he’s willing to fight for, and exactly what he wants in return. His decisions will affect not only these three virtual warriors, but all the people left on earth.
Available now from Simon Pulse Published by Simon & Schuster www.SimonSaysKids.com
LOOK FOR THE NEXT BOOKS IN THE VIRTUAL WAR CHRONOLOGS COMING SOON
Read the Second Book in the Virtual War Chronologs
THE CLONES
Corgan, hero of the Virtual War, has been living a blissful if placid life on the Isles of Hiva, his reward for winning the war with Sharla and Brig. But what he doesn’t know is that Brig died soon after the war, and yet is not truly gone. Sharla saved some of Brig’s DNA and has created clone-twins with it. Corgan’s world is disrupted when Sharla brings one of the clone-twins, Seabrig, to him to raise on the island while she keeps the other, Brigand, with her in the Domed City.
However, when circumstances force Sharla to bring Brigand to the island, they find that while the boys might look identical, their temperaments are not. And, as a result of the cloning process, both boys are growing at an astonishing rate. This leaves Corgan alone with an incredibly dangerous and unstable Brigand—who is looking to get rid of Corgan once and for all!
Available now from Simon Pulse Published by Simon & Schuster www.SimonSays.com
LOOK FOR THE NEXT BOOKS IN THE VIRTUAL WAR CHRONOLOGS COMING SOON
Gloria Skurzynski, Virtual War
