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“We’ll deal with her,” Tommy snarls.
“Deal with her? Deal with her?” Dr. Chen is nearly weeping. And I can see the fear beginning to infect the others.
Sullivan from accounting has gone pale. “I’m the one who’s on the hook for moving funds around. I’m the one who has been moving money out of Level One budgets into the Adam Project.” He’s panting like a hunted animal. “I’m going to go to jail. I’m going to prison! What am I supposed to tell my wife?”
“I can’t handle prison!” Dr. Chen wails. “I’m an intellectual!”
“Shut up, all of you,” Tommy snaps. “You’re scared of one middle-aged woman?”
The consensus seems to be that yes, yes they are very scared of Terra Spiker.
“Hey!” I yell. “Hey! What is this, some puppet show you’re putting on for my benefit? Like Terra Spiker isn’t the one behind all of this?”
Tommy turns on me, his eyes blazing. “You know, you’re really not as smart as your parents, are you? Your parents? They were geniuses! Maybe when we put you in the tank we can raise your IQ a few points so you can keep up.”
In the tank? I’m not sure what that means, but I can guess. Even with my limited IQ. But that’s not the point. That’s not why I meet Tommy’s gaze and say, “Listen, Dr. Holyfield. You have to tell me.”
“Yeah, so you got into my computer, good for you, kid. But you didn’t learn much, did you?”
“We have to run!” Dr. Chen cries. “I have family in Guangdong Province!”
Tommy leans close, his expression cruel. “You stupid little nobody. Your parents were gods to me. Terra Spiker threatened to have them arrested. Terra Spiker forced them out of the company. You’d be worth billions, kid. Billions!”
“Why did she threaten them?” I ask, but I’ve already guessed.
“You think Adam was the first human we made? Before there can be perfection there has to be experimentation. The Plisskens made a baby boy. We named him Golem. He died. Because of a slight flaw in his genetic makeup.”
“His sphincter was on his forehead,” Dr. Anapura says.
“He didn’t suffer,” Dr. Gold reassures me. “He was basically stillborn.”
“No,” I whisper.
“It’s not so easy being God,” Tommy says, and a shadow passes over his face. A memory, perhaps. Or a regret. “You can’t always get it right. But the Plisskens had already developed the Logan Serum. The thing that allows you to recover so quickly when I do this—”
Tommy smashes his fist into my face.
His audience gasps.
“Little Evening had a heart deformity,” Tommy says. “Surgery would have been very dangerous. And the Plisskens had the cure, a side benefit of the research they were doing. Terra traded them her silence for the cure. But she tried to get them to quit. She ordered them to stop.”
“You’re telling me my parents were monsters?” I say. I won’t show any emotion.
I can’t, won’t, refuse to.
But it’s coming clear to me now. I don’t like the picture.
It could be Tommy’s lying just to mess with me. But no. The others are nodding along. They all know the story. Only I am in the dark.
I’m the fool.
“Everything you see down here, it’s all their work, theirs … and mine. Oh, I know how your little mind works, Solo the bagel boy. I know how conventional you are. Inadequate. Thank God your parents are dead or they’d die of shame!”
My parents were monsters.
Terra Spiker is … I don’t know quite what she is.
“Look! He’s going to cry,” Tommy mocks. “Dr. Anapura, Martinez, Sullivan: Get him into the tank. We’ll see if we can’t make him a bit more malleable.”
