Kingdom Page 2

  Campbell stumbled deeper into the laboratory. All around him machines continued to record data on their subjects, running experiments throughout the night. Morrison had not attempted to conceal anything from Campbell: Morrison had won; there was no longer any need for secrecy between the two men. Campbell threw up twice, hard, the smell of vomit mingling with the antiseptic already in the air. All the while, Morrison’s creatures continued to watch him.

  When Campbell stopped retching, he noticed something he had not seen when he first entered the room: a row of incubators in the far right corner.

  “No…” Campbell whispered.

  Inside the incubators were four tiny babies, each one’s accelerated skeletal system growth stretching the infant’s skin until bones began to grind up through the flesh. Germline manipulation, accelerated growth experimentation: Campbell instantly realized that Morrison had taken Exodus beyond even his darkest fears. And staring into the incubator below him, Campbell knew he was responsible. So he ran; into the hallway and back up the elevator, lurching through the main lobby and out the front door, the ruined sky above the arcology pressing down upon him.

  Chapter 2

  Tiber City: Glimmer District

  Aug. 26, 2015

  1:15 a.m.

  In a single, hard gesture, Dylan Fitzgerald leaned forward over the table and snorted a thick line of coke off its smooth black surface. The coke belonged to a guy with a greasy ponytail who was sitting across the table from Dylan, and who looked at least 15 years older than everyone else at the party that night. Dylan’s old college roommates, Chase Kale and Mikey Divert, were also at the table, which was one of several arranged into a casual formation around the edges of a massive infinity pool on the rooftop of an overpriced apartment some 60-odd stories above the clogged streets of Tiber City’s Glimmer district.

  Dressed in a Savile Row suit that had once belonged to his father, Dylan was attending his 24th birthday party. He was not sure, however, of the name of the host, let alone the names of half the guests, and no one, except for ponytail guy, had offered him a “happy birthday.” And ponytail guy had spent the last 30 minutes trying to recruit Dylan for an Internet reality show, which was not exactly the kind of birthday surprise he was hoping for.

  Still, Dylan was trying to pay attention to the ponytail guy’s spiel—he had promised Chase and Mikey he would listen, so he sat at the table, hoovering up the free blow and staring at the guy’s ponytail as it bobbed up and down like a thick rat’s tail. But guys like ponytail had been trying out their tired hustle on him for years and Dylan felt his attention wandering away from the table, over the side of the roof, and out across the city skyline.

  Corporate insignias and digitalized billboards stared back at him, offering a barrage of focus group-approved advertisements and imagery. Dylan shifted in his chair and adjusted the Ray-Bans he was wearing; he was growing restless, an anxiousness that was partially the result of doing too much of the less-than-stellar blow heaped in front of him like frankincense and myrrh for the midnight messiah and partially because, as Dylan’s glare strafed the skyline, there was no T. J. Eckleburg, no invitation to Disappear Here—nothing concrete upon which he could focus his discontent—only images exploding across the sides of skyscrapers before vanishing seconds later. Dylan struggled to concentrate on a single message, a single instruction, but found that impossible; the billboards and video monitors were changing too quickly, image replacing image replacing image. Immediate recall of specifics was impossible but later, when he was wandering the antiseptic aisles of a grocery store, some otherwise inaccessible alcove of his brain would awaken and drive him to purchase a new product he did not need, let alone even particularly like.

  A hand pressed against his shoulder, causing Dylan to startle. He looked around the table and saw Chase, Mikey, and the ponytail looking at him, waiting for him to say something. Snippets of conversations from the party continued to drift out of the loft apartment and onto the rooftop: Two guys were both trying to explain to a girl the benefits of Sony’s new 1620i resolution televisions, as though whoever provided the most coherent explanation of this important technological breakthrough would be inside her a few hours from now. For a moment Dylan was acutely aware that this was a possibility; that he was living in an age where the resolution of a man’s television set and his ability to covey the importance of such resolution constituted natural selection.

  “The naked eye can’t even detect the difference,” Dylan mumbled.

  “What?”

  Dylan looked around the table again and realized that wasn’t the answer his friends wanted. He leaned back over the lines of cocaine the ponytail guy had laid out for him, took another massive bump and felt the world shimmer, tighten, and finally focus. In the distance, beyond the billboards and the blurred sea of brake lights, the moon hugged the horizon, too tired to finish its ascent over the massive skyscrapers vying for infinity.

  “I meant, what did you say?”

  “Tell me you caught at least some of that,” Chase pleaded.

  “I caught…some,” Dylan said, the coke tickling the back of his throat. He swallowed hard.

  “Bottom line here,” the ponytail said, “is that it’s a win-win. And it’s going to be tasteful. In no way are we trying to exploit you or your family’s…legacy.”

  Dylan felt his body tense.

  “Family? What are we talking about here?”

  “The Network has a few new Web reality shows debuting next month. Nothing too radical—most follow the traditional format that viewers seem to really respond to; basically we stick you and several other citizen-celebs in an enormous house, supply virtually unlimited amounts of drugs and alcohol, and turn you loose. There will be an objective of sorts, vaguely defined and open-ended—run a boutique non-profit, help poor kids, that kind of thing. We would like you to try to accomplish this goal, whatever it might be, but if that’s not happening—and it’s OK if it’s not—all we ask is that if you choose to fuck up, fuck up spectacularly. And I’m not talking death here, although the download sales on that would be stratospheric.”

  “And this isn’t exploitive?” Chase asked, glancing back to Dylan, trying to gauge his friend’s reaction.

  “Anything but, my man, anything but,” ponytail insisted. “And it’s not tacky. There might even be an opportunity to move beyond the established reality-programming paradigm here. Push socially conscious issues; introduce morally responsible product placement. And that’s where we—you and the Network—could come together and really do something special.”

  To emphasize this point, ponytail brought his hands together at eye level, interlocking his fingers in a gesture that reminded Dylan of a game from childhood: here’s the church, here’s the steeple; open the door and see all the people.

  “Come together to…?” Dylan asked, barely paying attention, focusing instead on the planes taking off on the horizon and on the idea of travel, of transcontinental flights, and how airports feel at 1 in the morning.

  “Look man, I can see what you’re thinking,” he said. “But it’s not about the money. Everyone has money. We’re offering you genuine celebrity status. Sure, people already know who you are because of your father; you’ve got that fallen prince thing going on, which is why, to be frank, I’m even talking to you in the first place. But we’re offering you a chance to branch out and generate some celeb-currency on your own.”

  Ponytail offered the table a toothy, wired grin, but Dylan was already on his feet—it was time to go. The coke euphoria was fading fast and already he was feeling edgy and tense, his upper teeth hell-bent on grinding the lower set into dust. He began rifling through his pockets—iPhone, random pills, a pack of cigarettes. Pulling the Camels from his interior jacket pocket, Dylan mumbled goodbye to the table before lighting the cigarette on one of the tiki torches ringing the rooftop.

  He felt guilty about leaving his friends. Chase and Mikey meant well; best friends since college, the three shar
ed a bond that ran deep. Yet as more and more of their peers took steps in a definitive direction—marriage, law school, overdosing, Wall Street—a sense of unease had begun to descend on the trio’s stage of nightclubs and narcotics. Half-baked schemes for opening bars, real estate speculation, and HBO pilots had led to increased contact with hustlers and entertainment industry bottom feeders, most of whom resembled the dude with the ponytail. But he had given the ponytail guy a chance and it turned out to be bullshit like everything else. Plus the guy mentioned his father and now, everything was fucked.

  Chase and Mikey were calling for him to come back to the table, to discuss other options, other ways of making something happen. But there was no other way, no different way; it was always the same way: exploitation and degradation for cash and headlines. Dylan had experienced his fair share of all four and he was worn out, so he kept moving away from the table and around the perimeter of the unnaturally blue infinity pool. Two girls and a guy were in the pool, naked and sharing an enormous joint. The guy shouted out to Dylan, confusing him with some guy named Graham, encouraging him to get in the pool because apparently the water was fine, until one of the girls, a blonde with OK tits, giggled and whispered something in the guy’s ear. He shrugged at Dylan, laughing before throwing his head back and declaring that he was fucking high, man. But whatever—Dylan was still welcome to join.

  Dylan took a drag on his cigarette and considered the invitation for a moment before shaking his head. Tonight was supposed to be different, but as he pushed his way past the pool, beyond the rising stream and lights from the city reflecting off the surface of the water, everything felt the same. The girl with the decent tits giggled again, although this time the noise jumped an octave or three. Dylan winced but kept moving toward the sliding glass door that funneled revelers from the main party indoors to the pool to the balcony then back again.

  Inside the enormous apartment, Dylan scanned the party, his eyes stopping on a striking, raven-haired woman lingering along the edges of the giant main room. He took a double take, wondering if the coke was cut with a hallucinogen, with something harder, because if he wasn’t seeing things then standing across the room was the only woman he had ever loved: Meghan Morrison.

  Dylan began to move toward her, shoving through the doorway before plunging forward into a sea of exposed midriffs and alcohol-fueled bravado, wolfish white teeth complimented by artificial tans and expensive watches. The room seemed huge, endless, and the woman he hoped was Meghan kept slipping out of view as he tried to traverse the crowd between them. A few times he thought he heard someone call out his name, but he didn’t recognize the voice and simply nodded his head in return. The stereo was playing an ancient Velvet Underground tune and although Lou Reed was explaining that “there’re even some evil mothers who are gonna tell you that everything is just dirt,” no one was paying any attention.

  Then the crowd shifted and she was gone, swallowed up by a wave of flesh. The guy who owned the place—some Russian wearing a gold coke spoon necklace; Dylan could never remember his name, let alone why he was hosting Dylan’s party—came by talking a mile a minute, wishing Dylan a happy birthday and explaining in broken English how much he loved American bitches. Dylan started to ask him if he knew Meghan but before his Russian host could answer, the crowd heaved forward, knocking Dylan backward onto a minimalist leather couch. Then someone was screaming “fight” and the crowd heaved again, sending wall decorations and stacks of expensive electronic equipment crashing to the floor.

  Dylan didn’t see how the fight began, but that was irrelevant because he knew how it was going to end. Even before the guy with the shaved head smashed a tattooed forearm into the nose of the other guy—short, pudgy, vaguely Puerto Rican—the crowd, trained in the modern art of capturing violence, already had its phones raised and recording. Within the hour, the video would be forwarded around the globe, so some kid in Stockholm could see that kids in America bleed the same deep crimson. Whether the video caught the crunch that accompanied the pudgy Puerto Rican’s septum being driven up into his brain would, of course, depend on the device performing the recording. Judging from the number of Rolexes and Tiffanys attached to the tan arms holding up the phones, Dylan had a strong suspicion that the kid in Stockholm would get that crunch in surround sound.

  Later, when Dylan would think back to that night, it wasn’t the sound he would remember, but the look of utter disbelief stenciled across the pudgy kid’s face as he tumbled backward, an expression prompted by the realization that this moment was no longer a video game, that pressing the reset button was not an option. Seconds later the expression was gone, washed away by a tide of red as the plump Puerto Rican crashed through a glass dining room table.

  An incoming plane roared overhead, bathing the loft in alternating patterns of red and white light while muting the massacre unfolding in front of Dylan. The psycho with the shaved head was screaming something, his mouth opening then snapping shut then opening again, spittle landing in front of him, his eyes bloodshot crazed. And then he was on top of his fallen adversary, oblivious to the shards of broken glass boring into his own skin, his hands moving like pistons on overdrive, pummeling flesh until that flesh gave way to bone.

  As the beating intensified, bystanders jockeyed for position, each auteur trying to create the definitive narrative of the brawl, the footage that, regardless of its accuracy, would become the truth. Dylan considered this, watching the lawyers and brokers push each other aside as women pretended to look away. He was suddenly aware that he, too, was screaming, shouting, and another ringside reveler was shouting back, giving him a high-five even though Dylan couldn’t remember putting his hand up.

  And then he was moving, away from the brawl and back out to the rooftop, looking for Meghan, wondering if it even had been Meghan he saw and, if it had, why she had come to what was, in name anyway, Dylan’s birthday party. But whatever the answers, the girl who looked like her was gone and a familiar sense of dread was beginning to descend across his psyche. He needed another bump but the ponytail guy had vanished, leaving in his wake only the faint residue of white lines on a black table like the vapor trails of the jets roaring overhead. The pool was empty too; the two girls and the guy must have split. Maybe they left because of the violence, or maybe they had just moved to a better vantage point.

  Anything was possible and for a moment Dylan imagined he was falling forward into the pool; the water would be cold but cleansing and he could float down toward the light at the bottom, leading him away from demographics and downloads, mujahedeen and McDonald’s, from Blu-ray and the blur of airplanes coming and going, people across the world waiting for the lives they had been promised to begin.

  A hand clapped across Dylan’s shoulder and there was Mikey, his mouth moving but his words muffled by the jet.

  “What?”

  “Cops, man. Some bitch called the cops. That’s the last kind of drama you need tonight.”

  The Russian host appeared on Dylan’s periphery, apologizing and cursing Puerto Ricans and white trash and promising more bitches and more coke—“we party all night my man,” he insisted in his thick Eastern bloc accent. But the coke would be shitty and a sinister vibe, born of the violence, had settled across the party.

  “We have anywhere else to go?” Dylan asked Mikey.

  “The Graveyard kicked off about an hour ago. We know people there,” Mikey answered, swiping his finger across his phone’s touchscreen, scrolling through texts.

  “We can do Abyss; End of the World party and best coke in the city,” Chase chimed in, materializing at Dylan’s side.

  “Fuck that; Raul at No Exit gets top shit. Those psycho bikers run it in once a month—the Abominations or some shit like that.”

  “Red-eye to Vegas? I can call A.J. at Mirage, tell him we’re coming in.”

  “Just got off the phone with Jose at Oblivion; VIP room reserved till 8 a.m.”

  Leaning forward against the railing overlooking t
he city, Dylan lit another cigarette as the voices continued to swirl around him. The clubs and the coke and the women were almost indistinguishable at this point but he would go anyway. It was, after all, his birthday. It was also an entirely different kind of anniversary.

  Swallowing hard, trying to clear the coke dripping down the back of his throat, he exhaled, letting the smoke of the cigarette drift out into the blur of neon and skyscrapers and billboards and jets, and wondered if this was how his father felt when, on this exact night 10 years ago, he had stood alone in the presidential suite on the eighth floor of the Hotel Yorick, the world lain out before him, placed a single bullet in the chamber of a 9 mm Beretta, and blew his brains out over the balcony, raining them down along Chiba Street like confetti after a political convention.

  “Fuck it,” Dylan sighed, stubbing the cigarette out on the rail in front of him. “Call the limo.”

  Chapter 3

  The American Southwest

  The End of the 20th Century

  After fleeing the arcology, Campbell wandered south along the shantytowns bordering the Chihuahuan, drifting through the forgotten landscapes of post-geographic America. Rock, no water, and a single sandy highway: These were the lands that had given birth to Morrison Biotechnology.

  The landscape around Campbell was dying or already dead, soil and sky poisoned by the waste Morrison Biotech generated. Once there had been farmers in this land, men who coaxed life from the barren countryside. In the past decade, however, as the shadow of Morrison Biotechnology grew, these farmers had left, their crops failed. The traditions of farming passed down from father to son—practices that in past eras had withstood locust, drought, and depression—withered before this new enemy. So one by one, the caretakers of the Great American Southwest gathered up their families and departed, some pushing south into Mexico, others east toward Texas. And all the while, the arcology’s towers continued to grow, piercing the sky with their crooked clusters of satellite transmitters.