Chimera Read online

  “What—exactly—are you studying here?” Chapel asked. “And why is the CIA funding it?”

  Taggart’s eyes went wide, and his smile lit up the room. “I’ve found the DNA sequence that codes for hibernation,” he said, grabbing a nearby cage and peering down at the sleeping hedgehog inside. “It’s so simple! For a long time we’ve understood the metabolic pathways involved in hibernatory behavior, but we’ve lacked the genetic understanding to know why some animals do it and some don’t. Just imagine what we could achieve if humans could hibernate. Can you grasp how useful that would be, to be able to program yourself to sleep that deeply, any time you wanted? The possibilities are enormous, from spaceflight to military applications—”

  Chapel shook his head. “I don’t think the CIA has manned missions to Mars planned for this.”

  “Well . . . no, probably not,” Taggart admitted. “They probably want to use it to torture people or something; that’s what they’re good at. But what if I could put you to sleep for four months, at the end of which you would have lost twenty-five percent of your body weight? We could end obesity and curb the diabetes epidemic!”

  “Or turn Guantanamo Bay into a warehouse full of people the government doesn’t like,” Julia said, “asleep for as long as we wanted.”

  “That’s a horrible thought,” Taggart admitted.

  “The CIA is famous for taking horrible thoughts and making them realities,” Chapel pointed out. “Like, say, the chimeras.”

  Taggart threw his hands in the air. “I knew it would come to this! That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To accuse me of doing bad things. Maybe you thought I would get all ashamed and start apologizing.”

  “It would be a start,” Julia said. “Dad, we found out what you did to all those mentally ill women. We found out about their—their mothers.”

  Every eye in the room turned to look at Ian.

  The chimera was sitting quietly in a chair at one end of the room. He’d allowed Chapel to tie him to it with lengths of computer cable. Chapel had no doubt that when Ian was ready he could break those bonds without much trouble. But tying Ian up made him feel marginally better.

  “Apologies and the like can wait,” Chapel insisted. “We actually came here to save you. From him.”

  “As you can see,” Taggart said, “that wasn’t necessary. Ian’s been quite pleasant company, actually. He just showed up here about three days ago, and since then he’s been helping me with some of the more mundane tasks. Cleaning the place, at first, but now I’ve taught him to titrate samples and prepare them in a centrifuge. He’s an amazingly quick learner and—”

  “Three days?” Chapel asked. “He’s been here three days?”

  “Yes. He showed up even before I got that phone call saying I was in danger.”

  Chapel’s eyes went wide. There was no way Ian could have gotten to Alaska that quickly on trains or even in a car. He must have flown directly to Fairbanks after escaping from Camp Putnam. The Voice must have helped with that. This whole time Chapel had been racing against the clock, trying desperately to get to Alaska before Ian could . . . and the chimera had been here the whole time.

  But then something else occurred to him. “When Angel called you to warn you someone was coming here to kill you, you didn’t even mention to her that someone—that a chimera—had already arrived?”

  “Ian and I had already come to our arrangement by then,” Taggart pointed out.

  “Arrangement?” Chapel asked.

  It was Ian who answered. “I had questions. I had a lot of questions. I needed to know why I’d been created, mostly. I needed to understand. So I made a deal with Dr. Taggart. I promised I would control myself, that I wouldn’t hurt anyone, if he would tell me what I wanted to know.”

  “You’re a chimera,” Chapel pointed out. “You can’t make a promise like that. Any kind of frustration, any small thwarting of your will can set you off. I’ve seen it—I’ve watched your brothers go from reasonable to homicidal in seconds. You can’t control it!”

  “Any kind of frustration,” Ian said, smiling. “Like, for instance, having a gun pointed at my face and being threatened with death right when I’m about to find out the answer to the most pressing question of my life? You mean a frustration like that?”

  Chapel had to admit that Ian had already proven him wrong. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said.

  “It’s a matter of will,” Ian told him.

  Chapel shook his head. “No. I’ve tried to reason with chimeras. I know where that gets you. You’re a time bomb, Ian.” He turned to face Taggart. “Doctor—back me up here. I don’t know why you created the chimeras, but I know they were a failure. You had to lock them up in Camp Putnam, seal them off from the world because they were too violent. Maybe you thought they could be something else, but their level of aggression was more than you could handle. They—”

  “I beg your pardon,” Taggart said, sneering. “There was no failure. The chimeras were—are—exactly what I meant them to be.”

  “You meant them to be so aggressive they killed each other off while the U.S. military could only stand back and watch?” Chapel demanded. “You meant for them to be violent psychopaths?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Taggart said. “But the answer is yes.”

  “Good God!” Chapel exclaimed. “What the hell did you think you were playing at? Why on earth did anyone authorize you to make these things?”

  Taggart took a step backward and leaned against a stack of cages full of sleeping bats. “As an insurance policy, of course.”

  DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:37

  “Insurance policy?” Chapel asked, deeply confused. “Against what?”

  “All this is top secret, Captain,” Taggart said. “Are you sure you’re cleared to hear this? I know my daughter isn’t.”

  “Dad,” Julia said, “he has a gun.”

  Apparently that was enough. Taggart shrugged and inhaled deeply before beginning his story. “It was 1979 when I was first brought in to consult on what became the chimera project. It had a code name back then—Project Darling Green—which thankfully was abandoned later, when we actually realized we could do it, we could solve the problem.”

  “What problem?” Chapel demanded.

  “Nuclear winter,” Taggart said. “You’re young. You might not remember what it was like back then, during the Cold War. We were locked in a stalemate with the Russians for so long. They hated us, wanted to conquer us. And we would do anything—anything—to stop them from taking over the world. After the Cuban Missile Crisis we understood that if either side started a war, it just wouldn’t stop. Nuclear missiles would launch. The world would be reduced to ashes. There were generals back then, smart men, really, who thought we could still win. That even after a nuclear exchange America could prevail. By the seventies, though, we scientists had figured out that was wrong—simply untrue. A thermonuclear exchange on a global level wouldn’t just turn cities to rubble and give a few people cancer. It would fill the sky with dust that would linger for years. It would change the planet’s climate and make human survival—not just American survival but the future of the human race—next to impossible. If the Russians launched against us, it would be the end of humanity.”

  “But the Russians knew that, too,” Chapel pointed out. “That’s why they never launched.”

  “It’s why they didn’t launch when they could still control their people,” Taggart said. “Even then, even in ’79, we could see the Politburo wouldn’t last forever. The Soviet Union was crumbling. The Pentagon was convinced, absolutely convinced, that if a coup or a popular uprising began in Moscow, then the Kremlin would start a war just as a last-ditch attempt to consolidate their power. At the time it was taken as gospel—a nuclear war was coming and could happen at any time.

  “The generals
came to me with an idea. A crazy idea, I thought, though it had potential—and they had money to make it happen, more grant money than I’d ever seen before for a project like this. What they wanted was . . . visionary. They wanted to create a new human race, a new phenotype based on good American DNA. A race of men and women who could survive even through a nuclear winter. People who were highly resistant to radioactive fallout, who were strong enough to live on polluted water and whatever food they could dig out of the ground. People with the immune systems of gorillas, people with the healing factors of lizards, people with the vision and the resistance to ultraviolet light of hunting birds. People to survive the apocalypse.”

  Chapel glanced at Ian. “You gave them chimeras.”

  “If you want to skip ahead, then, yes,” Taggart said. “The work was fascinating. It was incredible—Helen and I invented whole new fields of genetics and even basic biology. We had the money, the equipment, anything we wanted, anything we needed to do work that would have been unthinkable at the time. No one back then had even considered transgenics. The idea of splicing together disparate genomes to create a functional organism was pie in the sky, it was science fiction. Nobody understood homeotics at the time, work on atavisms was partial and hesitant at best, and we had barely begun to experiment with plasmids and gene therapy. But we knew it could work.”

  “ ‘We,’ ” Julia said, softly. “You and mom both signed off on this.”

  “Helen . . .” Taggart’s face grew wistful. “She was a genius. She and I together were . . . something more.” He shook his head. “We would stay up all night, hurling ideas back and forth, tearing holes in each other’s hypotheses, spinning out new trains of thought, building on each other’s brilliance. It was—it was the most satisfying relationship any two human beings could ever have. She understood what we were really doing. We weren’t just working for the Pentagon. We were working for the future. Both of us should have gotten Nobels out of that work. But it had to be kept secret, utterly secret.” He shook his head, but then he smiled as if he was reliving a happy memory. “DNA sequencers were so primitive back then, it was like coding genes by hand, like writing computer code on a legal pad.” He laughed. “We had to do all the basic research ourselves, compile our own library of sequences. There was no Human Genome Project to consult. I remember the night we finished writing down the final strings. When we had the recipe for what would become Ian and the others. It was well past midnight. We were tired, but we were also so full of As and Cs and Gs and Ts that we couldn’t sleep. We were talking in code, in genetic code, making jokes about our favorite proteins and dreaming of ribosomes hard at work. We went outside and looked up at the stars. We watched the moon set. It was like we had become something more than just human beings. Like we were little gods, at the dawn of a new creation.”

  “And then you created two hundred embryos, which you implanted in the wombs of mentally ill women without their consent,” Chapel pointed out.

  “Hmm. Yes. All right, we did,” Taggart admitted, waving his hands in front of him as if he’d like to argue the moral niceties but didn’t have time. “We ended up with two hundred perfect little organisms.”

  “Babies,” Chapel said.

  “Hardly. These weren’t like human infants. They could walk within weeks of being born—almost as fast as horses. They had teeth and they could eat solid food after a few months. No, these weren’t babies. They were the children of a new race. A new species, almost.”

  “You locked them up in a camp in the Catskills. You gave them basic medical care, a little education, and nothing else,” Chapel said. “You raised them like children, but then they started killing each other.” He looked over at Ian. The chimera’s face was totally passive, unreadable. “They tore each other to pieces. They were too aggressive. Too violent. So you sealed up the camp and abandoned them.”

  “Is that what you think we did?” Taggart asked, looking offended. “You think we made a mistake? That we were surprised and horrified that they were dangerous? Please. The world they were created for—the world under nuclear winter—was going to be a harsh and dangerous place. We made them aggressive so they could rule it. So they could own it. That was always part of the plan, Captain. They were always supposed to be that way.”

  Chapel’s blood went cold. He couldn’t believe it.

  “You wanted us to kill each other,” Ian said. It was the first time he’d spoken since Taggart began.

  “We wanted you to be fighters. And when you fought each other—well.” Taggart made an expansive gesture. “That was just Darwinian selection. The strongest survive. The most fit. We needed you fit.”

  “Not everyone agreed with you,” Chapel pointed out. “Dr. Bryant seems to have changed her mind about things. She left you and went on to spend the rest of her life trying to make amends for what she’d done.”

  “She lost her detachment, yes,” Taggart agreed. “She started thinking of the chimeras as humans. As children. Well, she was a woman. She was genetically coded for that kind of sentimentality.”

  Julia leaped up, her face red with anger. “Dad—” she began, but Chapel gestured for her to wait a moment.

  “Not just Dr. Bryant. The CIA didn’t like it, either. They decided at some point, maybe when Malcolm ran away, that the project was too dangerous. Especially since there was no more Soviet Union, and no real possibility of nuclear winter. They decided to shut you down. Kill everyone involved to keep it secret. They’ve spun a cover story, claiming the chimeras are infected with some kind of virus. They’re killing anyone who might possibly be infected, even though we’ve figured out there is no virus.”

  Taggart said nothing.

  He didn’t need to. His face went white. His hands stayed frozen in the air.

  “There is no virus,” Chapel repeated.

  “Dad,” Julia said. “Dad—answer him! Tell him there’s no virus!”

  Taggart slowly shook his head. “I can’t do that,” he said.

  DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:44

  “There is a virus,” Chapel breathed.

  He’d been so sure. He’d been certain it was a ruse. But they’d told him the truth all along. The chimeras were carrying a virus, a man-made pathogen, and they could infect anyone they came in contact with.

  Laughing Boy wasn’t using it as an excuse. He was cleaning up a very real mess.

  Ian leaned forward against the cables that bound him. He looked very interested. On the other side of the room, Julia let out a little whimper.

  “There had to be,” Taggart said, softly.

  “What do you mean?” Chapel demanded.

  “It’s . . . it’s how it’s done. There was no other way. We wrote the code, the one percent of the genome that had to change to create a chimera from human gametes. We assembled the code in a virus. A virus doesn’t reproduce on its own. It needs a host. It latches on to a cell and injects its DNA into the cell’s nucleus. The cell has no defense against this; it can’t tell one strand of DNA from another. So it replicates the viral DNA exactly. Over and over again. The virus we used to create the chimeras was designed to target egg and sperm cells only. It takes over the normal egg, say, and turns it into a chimera egg. When the egg is fertilized, it develops into something like Ian here, not a human embryo. Look, this is all very basic stuff, it’s the foundation for gene therapy and—”

  “Then skip to the part where the chimeras are still carrying the virus,” Chapel told him.

  “Well . . . they have to. To do what they’re designed for. The chimera DNA has to be copied exactly, or the much more robust, more proven human DNA will take over. The chimera virus has to spread so that any normal human who reproduces with a chimera will bear a chimera child.”

  “Wait—you wanted them to reproduce?”

  “Yes, of course,” Taggart said, blinking. “Oh. I see. You thought o
ur insurance policy was supposed to survive on its own. You thought our two hundred male specimens were supposed to be the entire batch, that they would survive when the rest of us died.” He seemed to find the idea amusing. “That wouldn’t do us much good, would it? They’re all male. They would only last one generation.”

  “Wait,” Julia said. It looked like she’d figured this out. “Just wait.”

  “In the event of a nuclear war, the chimeras would have been released into the survivor population,” Taggart explained. “They would have mated with female survivors—human female survivors—and produced chimera offspring, which would breed true. We couldn’t afford to have their children be human. So the virus remains in their systems. It looks for other hosts, hosts that can allow it to reproduce. It looks for human sperm and egg cells.”

  “And it spreads through any bodily fluid contact,” Chapel said.

  “Well, yes. It would be nice if it only passed on through sexual contact, that would be more elegant, but—”

  “Anyone who gets infected has chimera babies?” Julia demanded. “Anyone? And all their babies are chimeras like him?” She jabbed a finger toward Ian. “Dad—you fucked up. You really fucked up!”

  “Julia, sit down and watch your language,” Taggart commanded.

  “No. No, I will not,” she said, striding toward him.

  Chapel grabbed her arm. “Dr. Taggart. You and your wife, and Ellie Pechowski, all had constant contact with the chimeras at Camp Putnam. How is it you were able to avoid becoming infected? Is there a vaccine against the virus?”

  “Not exactly a vaccine,” Taggart said.

  “Then—what? A cure? A treatment?”