AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nelson sighs, pulls out his tranq pistol, and fires a low-dose dart at Argent. The tranq dart hits him painfully in his Adam’s apple. He pinches the little flag and pulls the thing out of his neck, but not before it delivers its full dose.
“That’s coming out of your pay,” Nelson says, which is a joke because Argent receives no pay from Nelson. He had made it clear it’s an unpaid sort of internship. But that’s okay. Even getting tranq’d is okay. Because life is good for Argent Skinner.
As he dives down toward tranq sleep, he takes comfort in the absolute knowledge that Connor Lassiter will soon be going down too—but unlike Argent, Connor will never be getting up.
3 • Connor
In a dusty corner of a cluttered antique shop on a weedy side street of Akron, Ohio, Connor Lassiter waits for the world to change before his eyes.
“I know it’s here somewhere,” Sonia says as she digs through a pile of obsolete electronics. Connor wonders if the old woman was alive to witness the birth and the death of all that technology.
“Can I help?” Risa asks.
“I’m not an invalid!” Sonia responds.
It’s a dizzying prospect to think that they are about to lay eyes upon the object on which the entire future hinges. The future of unwinding. The future of the Juvenile Authority’s iron grip on kids like him. Then he looks over to Risa, who waits with the same electric anticipation. Our future, he thinks. It’s been hard to consider the concept of tomorrow, when life has been all about surviving today.
Grace Skinner, sitting beside Risa, wrings her hands with friction-burn intensity. “Is it bigger than a bread box?” Grace asks.
“You’ll see soon enough,” Sonia says.
Connor has no idea what a bread box is, yet just like anyone who’s ever played twenty questions, he knows its precise size. It’s all he can do to keep from wringing his own hands too, as he waits for the device to be revealed.
When Sonia began to tell the tale of her husband, Connor thought he might, at best, get some information—clues as to why Proactive Citizenry was so afraid of not just the man, but the world’s memory of him. Janson and Sonia Rheinschild, winners of the Nobel Prize for medicine, were erased from history. Connor thought Sonia might give him information. He never expected this!
“What if you invented a printer that could build living human organs?” Sonia said, after telling them of the disillusionment that ultimately took her husband’s life. “And what if you sold the patent to the nation’s largest medical manufacturer . . . and what if they took all of that work . . . and buried it? And took the plans and burned them? And took every printer and smashed it, and prevented anyone from ever knowing that the technology existed?”
Sonia trembled with such powerful fury as she spoke, she seemed much larger than her diminutive size—much more powerful than any of them.
“What if,” Sonia said, “they made the solution to unwinding disappear because too many people have too much invested in keeping things exactly . . . the way . . . they are?”
It was Grace—“low-cortical” Grace—who figured out where this was leading.
“And what if there’s still one organ printer left,” she said, “hiding in the corner of an antique shop?”
The idea seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Connor actually gasped, and Risa gripped his hand, as if she needed to hold on to him to stave off her own mental vertigo.
Finally Sonia pulls forth a cardboard box that is about exactly the size of what Connor imagines a bread box would be. He makes room on a little round cherrywood table, and she sets the box down gently.
“You can take it out,” Sonia says to him, a bit out of breath from her efforts.
Connor reaches in, gets his fingers around the dark object, then lifts it out of the box and sets it on the table.
“That’s it?” says Grace, clearly disappointed. “It’s just a printer.”
“Exactly,” says Sonia, with a smug sort of pride. “Earthshaking technology doesn’t arrive with bells and whistles. Those get added later.”
The organ printer is small but deceptively heavy, packed with electronics tweaked for its peculiar purpose. To the eye, it is gunmetal gray and, as Grace already noted, entirely unremarkable. It looks like an ordinary
printer that might have been manufactured before Connor was born, and the casing itself probably came from a standard printer.
“Like so many things in this world,” Sonia tells them, “what matters is what’s inside.”
“Make it work,” asks Grace, practically bouncing in her chair. “Make it print me out an eye, or something.”
“Can’t. The cartridge needs to be filled with pluripotent stem cells,” Sonia explains. “Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you much more. I’ll be damned if I know how the thing does what it does; my forte was neurobiology, not electronics. Janson built it.”
“We’ll have to reverse engineer it,” Risa says. “So it can be reproduced.”
