Soul Tracker, page 4
“I don’t think you can, brother.”
“Your Dorothy, she helped you, didn’t she?”
The man started to answer but stopped.
“Didn’t she!”
“I don’t think you can.”
“Don’t tell me I can’t! I’m her father! I’m supposed to protect her! I’m supposed to be there for her! She’s sixteen years old.” His voice cracked. “Sixteen!”
He hesitated, noticing how quiet the coffee shop had grown. He glanced around, once again realizing he was the cause. He took a breath to steady himself. “Look, I’m, uh, I’m sorry. I—”
“No, I understand. Believe me.”
“What do you mean, you understand? Have you lost a kid?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Then don’t tell me you understand.”
“We’ve all—”
“No!” He was nearly shouting again. He brought it back down, practically hissing. “Until you can say the word dead and your child’s name in the same sentence, you understand nothing!”
The old man looked down, quietly taking the blow.
David had had enough. He closed the diary and rose from his stool. Struck with sudden light-headedness, he reached out to the counter and steadied himself. As he did he saw the preacher writing something on a napkin, then shoving it at him.
“What’s that?”
“When they found out ’bout me dying and all, some folks in the area interviewed me. It’s a program that looks into the type of stuff you’re talkin about. If anyone can help you, maybe they can.”
The dizziness cleared and David looked down at the napkin. On it, in uneven scrawl, were the words:
Life After Life.
Dr. Griffin watched as Norman E. Orbolitz stepped out of one of Life After Life’s three virtual reality chambers. He was a tall, emaciated man in his seventies with translucent skin almost as white as his closely cropped hair. He wore a blue, tight-fitting bodysuit that in some ways looked like the uniform of a speed skater. He removed his 3-D goggles to reveal a pair of dark sunglasses that he was required to wear from his most recent operation. He placed the goggles in a clear case recessed in the outside wall of the chamber and turned to greet a half-dozen children who raced up and clambered around him. As always, there was plenty of horseplay and laughter. Mr. Orbolitz required it. And for good reason. More than one study indicated that this type of socializing strengthened the immune system and actually increased life spans. And since living forever (or as close to it as possible) was a passion of Mr. Orbolitz, these children and their parents were paid healthy salaries to increase those odds.
Of course, no one knew for certain when he was in the VR chamber. Because of the great vulnerability whenever he was inside it, that information was held in the strictest confidence. Still, the kids had a pretty good idea whenever they were hustled down to the VR lab “just for fun.”
“Hey there, Dick.” He spotted Griffin standing on the elevated platform behind the control console. “Haven’t been waiting too long, have you?”
“No, sir.” Griffin stepped down to join him.
Mr. Orbolitz picked up a husky six-year-old and playfully slung him across his bony shoulders. He was surprisingly solid for a man so underweight. Of course the lack of weight was intentional, all part of his fourteen-hundred-calories-a-day diet. Studies of rats with similarly restricted diets indicated they lived thirty to forty percent longer. This translated to an extra thirty years for humans. And thirty extra years wasn’t a bad start for a man who used everything within his sizable influence to achieve such things. Everything and then some. It was the “then some” that Griffin suspected had summoned him into the great man’s presence this afternoon.
Lowering the boy to the floor and shooshing him away with the others, Mr. Orbolitz asked, “How long this time, Wendell?”
Griffin’s assistant answered from up at the console, “Almost fifty-eight minutes, sir.”
Orbolitz flashed him a grin and Griffin saw every tendon and cable in his neck. The man was pleased. The virtual reality that PNEUMA created from the data of all those dying brains had become very authentic. So authentic that, unless you built up resistance, exposure to only a few minutes of the information would fool your own system into thinking it was dying and cause it to actually start shutting down. Theory had it that it would take younger, more elastic brains longer, but for first-timer adults, six minutes was the maximum. Orbolitz, who had built up resistance from many sessions, could last nearly an hour.
“Did you see anything new, sir?” Griffin asked, as they turned from the VR chambers and headed into the hallway. Though it was indoors, the hallway’s floor was covered in a carpet of grass sod, along with ferns, flowers, bushes, even an occasional tree. Everything was real, including a handful of birds, some smaller wildlife, and a few of the more pleasant insects—butterflies, ladybugs, and a dragonfly or two. But since there were no windows in the vast complex, as sunlight contained ultraviolet rays which break down human cells and shorten life span, the vegetation had to be constantly replaced.
“I seen that river again,” Mr. Orbolitz said. “And the garden. Say, did I ever tell you that the ancient word for paradise means ‘walled garden’?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I tell you, ol’ buddy, it is one fascinatin’ place.”
Griffin smiled. The good-old-boy persona was one of his boss’s many eccentricities. Some thought it was a way to purposefully irritate the rich and influential, to rub their noses in his success. Others knew it was more calculated—to lull his competition into underestimating his abilities so he could strike and take them by surprise. Whatever the reason, as his empire grew and expanded, so did this persona.
“But them faces…” Mr. Orbolitz shook his head. “Way too many faces in the garden. Your boys may want to put some sort of filter on that. All them past reunions with all them dead friends and relatives can tucker a fellow out.”
Griffin nodded. It was one thing to piece together an afterlife from thirteen hundred people’s experiences, quite another to see each and every one of their past acquaintances come to greet them.
“I hear you had a little excitement over at the lab this morning.”
Griffin nodded. “A little.”
“Another one of them hell encounters?”
“Hard to tell. PNEUMA is still processing. I’m isolating it to chamber two’s system until we make sure it isn’t some crazy person’s hallucination.”
“Good idea.”
A pretty assistant, California beach blonde, midtwenties, approached. She carried a tray holding an eight-ounce glass of carrot juice with the appropriate electrolytes to balance his metabolism from the VR workout. Orbolitz gave her a wink and she returned a dazzling, picture-perfect smile as he took the glass.
“How the other projects comin’?” He gulped down the drink and replaced the glass with a nod to the girl. She continued the smile and drifted away. “What’s happening with them longevity studies?”
Griffin hesitated, unsure where to begin. How much detail did his boss want to hear, and in what area? Oxidation, free radicals, caramelization? Or did he wish for an update on the hormone replacement therapy or their genetic research? Uncertain, Griffin decided to focus on the latter, while being careful, as he always was, to insulate the man from any legally gray areas.
“We seem to be having quite a bit of success with telomerase right now.”
“Telomerase…the enzyme us old fogies stop producing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Remind me what it does again?” He chuckled, pointing to his head. “Old age, you know.”
Griffin laughed, uncertain whether the man was playing stupid or had actually forgotten. It was another aspect of the good-old-boy charm that kept his employees on their toes. “It protects the shortening of our chromosomes,” Griffin answered. “Which occurs every time our cells reproduce.”
“Which they do…”
“Most of the cells in our body die off and are replaced every few years.”
Mr. Orbolitz nodded.
“Without telomerase the chromosomes in those cells become shorter and shorter until the cell ceases to function.”
“Fifty or so reproductions, if I remember right, then we’re history.”
“That’s the Hayflick limit, yes, sir. But by injecting genetically altered telomerase into some cells we’re actually increasing those cells’ reproduction rate up to twenty more generations.”
Mr. Orbolitz shook his head in quiet wonder. “The Tree of Life.”
“Pardon me?”
“From the Bible. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they weren’t allowed to eat from the Tree of Life. And when they couldn’t eat its fruit, they up and died.”
“Ah.” Griffin chuckled good-naturedly. “A piece of fruit no doubt containing a cousin to the telomerase enzyme. I get it.”
Mr. Orbolitz grinned. “Imagine if such a fruit really existed—or just a piece of it so we could copy its DNA?”
“It would certainly put me out of work.”
Mr. Orbolitz laughed, slapping him on the back. “Maybe I oughta start up another division and get some archaeologists working on it, what do you think?”
Griffin chuckled. “Who knows, maybe you should.”
Still laughing, Mr. Orbolitz added, “Who knows, maybe I have.”
The merriment continued, though Griffin wondered if the old guy was crazy enough to actually try it. He’d pursued just about everything else they could think of. Not that Griffin blamed him. In fact it was one of the many things he admired in Orbolitz. If you’ve got all the money in the world and only one life, why not do everything you can to prolong that life? Forget the charitable organizations. Forget wasting wealth on the poor or other parasites who could never return it. Spend it on what really mattered. Survival of the fittest. Darwinian pragmatism at its finest.
Over the years, Griffin had read a half dozen biographies on the man. Nothing spawns public interest (and unauthorized biographies) like a reclusive megapower. There were various theories on his birth that he neither confirmed nor denied. The most popular had him the illegitimate offspring of a Catholic priest and a young nun. When the Mother Superior refused to buy immaculate conception and when the girl refused to put him up for adoption, baby Norman and Mommy were cloistered away in some rural, ultrarestrictive convent with little to feed his heart and mind but a growing hatred for the Church and its God. Pop legend said that as a child his loathing was so intense he used to pray to God to allow him to become the Antichrist. As far as anyone could tell, that prayer had never been answered. But it didn’t stop the man from trying to go toe-to-toe with God on the eternal life issue…while building a multibillion-dollar communication empire on the side.
The two approached an indoor waterfall and pool, complete with carp, water lilies, more ferns, and a tiny pygmy bunny that froze at their appearance. The pool narrowed to a small stream that meandered down the hallway.
“Dick,” the old man said, “I got a gift I want to give someone—a special favor for a buddy of mine.”
Griffin almost smiled. Despite the public’s perception of Mr. Orbolitz as a charitable man (a perception fueled by Orbolitz’s own media machine), in Griffin’s eleven years of employment, he had never seen Orbolitz give away something for nothing. Everything had a price. If he could spin it to look like philanthropy, so much the better. But when it came to Mr. Orbolitz, nothing was free; everything had a string.
“Seems Congressman Hagen is having some congenital heart problems. They say it’s pretty serious.”
“Really?” Griffin said. “I didn’t know.”
“You ain’t supposed to.” The pigmy bunny decided to make a run for it. Dashing in front of them, it raced for the nearest clump of ferns several yards downstream. Mr. Orbolitz continued. “’Course they got him on all the ORO lists, waiting for a new ticker, but you and I both know that’ll take months, maybe years.”
“Even for a congressman?”
“First come, first serve. We’re all equal in the eyes of the government.”
“So I hear.”
With a chuckle, he added, “Though some of us are a tad more equal than others.”
The bunny arrived at the ferns and did its best to hide.
“Anyhow, I’m expecting that your research projects, with all them volunteers…well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you discovered some private donor willing to help the congressman.”
Now, at last, Griffin understood the reason for their meeting. “They’ve certainly come forward in the past, haven’t they, sir?”
Mr. Orbolitz flashed him a grin, enjoying their little joke. After all, it was Griffin who had personally secured Orbolitz his most recent upgrade, not to mention the pair of healthy kidneys and pancreas he’d received some three-and-a-half years ago. He’d also lined up a future liver and heart donor, should the need ever arise. Organs do wear out. Especially for a diabetic. And should you ever need one and have the means to replace it, you’d be a fool not to plan ahead. And Norman E. Orbolitz was no fool.“
How close of a match do we want?”
Mr. Orbolitz came to a stop above the bunny. It remained perfectly still in the ferns, obviously hoping it was unseen. “Nothing as extravagant as mine,” he said. “There’s no need for him to entirely miss the joys of drug therapy.”
More chuckles. Both knew the physical and emotional discomfort that antirejection drugs bring. A discomfort that Griffin had made certain his boss would never have to endure.
“Still,” Mr. Orbolitz continued, “try to make the match as close as possible, given our tight time frame.”
“How tight?”
The old man stooped down to the bunny. “I’d like him back on his feet in a couple three months.”
“So we’re talking an immediate transplant.”
“The sooner the better.”
Griffin nodded, then frowned slightly.
Sensing his unease, Mr. Orbolitz looked up. “Something on your mind, son?”
“It’s just…well, isn’t Congressman Hagen a strong advocate of gay rights?”
Mr. Orbolitz turned back to the bunny. “So I hear.”
“And given your feelings toward homosexuals…”
“I’m not sure what you’re talkin’ about, Dick.”
“In the past, you’ve always expressed to me—that is to say, you’ve always felt they were…”
“Deviant throwbacks?” Mr. Orbolitz asked. “Useless mutations that serve no purpose on the evolutionary ladder ’cept to deplete resources from folks who actually propagate the species?”
Griffin chuckled. “Well, yes, something like that.”
Mr. Orbolitz slowly lowered his left hand in front of the bunny. “Actually, if you were to have deeper conversations with the good congressman, you’d find his sympathies and mine aren’t all that different.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, yeah.” He stealthily lowered his other hand behind the creature, unseen.
“But his policies,” Griffin persisted, “his public positions—”
“Rather necessary, I should say, given his district includes some of the largest gay populations in the country.” Having distracted the animal with his left hand, he quickly slipped his right hand in and caught it. Pleased with his success, he rose, holding the squirming creature.
Griffin continued, trying to understand. “So the fact that you share similar views on homosexuals is enough to merit the risk of—”
“Nah, not at all.” Then with a sly twinkle he added, “I may be a bigot, son, but I ain’t a stupid one.” He held the bunny before his face, looking it in the eyes, then returned it to the safety of cupped hands against his chest. “There’s another matter far more important to both of us.”
He resumed walking, holding the shivering creature, stroking it and calming it. “Come next legislative session, the good congressman will propose a bill to legalize embryo stem cell research. And he’ll use his sizable influence to pass it.”
Griffin’s heart quickened. Was such a thing possible? Imagine the doors that a bill like that could open for research. To finally have their hands untied and legally study the most vital of all human cells. Still, other politicians had tried and failed to legalize it in the past.
“What about the religious right?” Griffin asked. “That’s a political hot potato for anyone to handle.”
“You bet it is.” The stream drifted to the right, pushing them so close to the wall that Mr. Orbolitz’s shoulder nearly brushed it. “But, given the fact that he’ll soon be owing me his life, so to speak, well, I’m sure he’ll be able to put his whole heart into the program.” He chortled over his joke. “His whole new heart.”
Griffin smiled. This was the Mr. Orbolitz he knew—the one who never gave something for nothing. As always, what started off as a carrot would turn into a stick.
“I understand, sir.”
“Good. Now I want you to contact your division heads and—ah!”
Griffin gave a start as the man angrily yanked the bunny from his chest and slammed it hard against the wall.
“Stupid creature!”
“What happened?”
“It bit me!” He cursed as he brought the animal before them. It was injured from the blow, writhing and twitching in his hands. With another oath, he took the head in one hand, the body in the other and gave a quick, sharp twist. There was a sickening crunch of breaking vertebrae. The rabbit stopped moving. In disgust he threw it against the opposite wall. It hit with a dull thud and slid into the grass.
Griffin reached for Mr. Orbolitz’s hand. “Are you okay, sir?”
“Yeah, I think so.” They carefully studied each of his fingers. “No broken skin, at least. Stupid animal.” He produced a locket from around his neck and pressed its large, round button. “Better safe than sorry, though.”
Griffin nodded. “Absolutely.” Within seconds he knew that the medical team would materialize. They would examine the bite and decide if any cautionary steps would be needed. If they did their job well, Mr. Orbolitz would praise them and give a reward. He was always quick to praise and reward. Just as long as you pleased him.
