With my arm resting against the one-way glass and my gaze plunged into the interrogation room, I can’t help but shiver. I know that the doctor has no way of seeing me, that he’s only looking at his own reflection, but there’s something in his gaze that makes me uneasy. As if he knows I’m there, knows when I move, knows when I take a breath.
It’s been two hours since the arresting officers brought him here. Eugene Galton… doctor of genetics, expert in cloning. Eighty-eight yesterday, off the radar since his retirement a decade ago. Millions of dollars rich and rentier thanks to dozens of patents still feeding him with royalties. Despite his age, he stands tall in his chair. If one of his sons hadn’t denounced him, no doubt no one would have discovered the dehumanizing factory he had set up.
I stand back as the door on my side opens. Anderson, the captain, flanked by Malt, the investigating officer, appears.
“Well?” I asked.
“Nothing,” replies Malt. An old man of ninety. There’s nothing we can do against him.”
“You’re not going to let him go, are you?”
“We have no choice,” says Anderson. “The bail has already been paid.”
I can see the anger in his eyes. He, too, visited the factory before it was cleared of its occupants. He, too, was present at the first interrogation, and led part of it. The three of us know that this man is a monster with no empathy for the lives he has created. He’s not insane, but his rationality is so extreme, it’s terrifying.
***
“Please help us!”
A child’s voice, crying, sniffling. I leap to my feet and turn on the loudspeaker. Malt rushes up beside me, alerted in turn by my hand signal.
“Please help us.”
The voice has become a whisper, sometimes covered by the crackling of the telephone.
“I’m Lieutenant O’Leary. Can you identify yourself?”
“He keeps us in a large warehouse near a river. I can see a big black tower with Greek symbols through the window when it’s dark.”
The tone replaces the child’s voice.
***
“Do we inform the media?” asks Malt.
The captain looks at the doctor. He, too, is absorbed by this human-like creature. Galton has this effect, as do all his descendants. He draws the eye. We focus on him. He encompasses your thoughts and suddenly takes possession of you. You want to talk to him or shout at him, help him or hit him, but he doesn’t leave you indifferent. Skin so thin you can see the network of veins, hair so blond and fragile it looks white at any age, and eyes as black as two 9-gauge bullets ready to be fired. The hands, resting on the table, are bones covered with a layer of skin to give the appearance of life. There are no wrinkles, no scabs on Galton’s face, as if the energy he had devoted to conceiving his children kept him ageless. Perhaps, in parallel with the work we’ve uncovered, had he found a molecule to limit the effects of aging? That would be logical, and complementary to the objective he described to us.
“Inform them of what?” replies Anderson. “That we’ve found a scientist who’s been conducting forbidden experiments to gain eternal life? No. It’ll hit the papers soon enough, and if we can avoid getting splashed with this crap, we will. We’ll leave it to the D.A. Get this guy off my back, O’Leary.”
***
Based on the child’s descriptions, we soon find the tower. With the indication of the river and the warehouse, the search perimeter is immediately narrowed down, but the number of areas and square meters to be explored remains such that the captain mobilizes every man in the city to unearth the building. It still takes us over twenty-four hours, during which I don’t take any rest, I don’t eat anything, I just search and search. The kid’s voice haunts me constantly, and his words, full of innuendo. “He’s holding us back…” There are several of them, in the hands of a madman, a pedophile, and who knows if every minute doesn’t see a little life snuffed out. You need warrants or authorizations for each address, but I don’t need them, and too bad for the consequences—they’re laughable compared to what’s in the balance.
When I arrive in front of the warehouse, it doesn’t look like an abandoned one. It’s in operation. There’s a light on, steam escaping from a pipe on the roof, cameras pointing in all directions. I have a bad feeling, and I immediately call for backup. My partner is a hundred meters away, circling another building. I’m not going to wait for him. At the front door, I flash my badge at a camera, then knock. The metal amplifies the sound and spreads it around like a death knell. No one answers.
“Police!”
I know my gesture is futile, since I’ve just presented my badge, but I feel the need to make this place resonate with my presence. What if the children were behind and could hear me?
***
“So now I’m free?”
Even his voice makes me uncomfortable. It’s too dry, too penetrating. It shoots my ears off and hangs on to them. This thing is an insect, a phasma made man. I feel it could devour me if it weren’t still shackled at the feet.
“Don’t say anything,” he continues. “I don’t need you to talk. You’ve got nothing on me, apart from a vague story that social services will pick up on. I’ve done nothing illegal under current legislation. I could be criticized for my living environment, but all these children are well fed and educated. At my place of work, of course, but it’s as good a place as any.”
“What about all those we couldn’t find?”
My voice betrays me. It trembles. I shouldn’t have spoken, I didn’t want to speak, but the thought that this man will get away with it, either spared by his age or caught by the Grim Reaper before he can rot in prison…
“As you say, Agent O’Leary, you’ve found nothing. As far as I’m concerned, all these children born under my directives are alive.”
“These children, right? You don’t even have the decency to say they’re yours?”
“They’re not mine,” says Galton, blasé. “They’re me. If you haven’t understood that, then you haven’t understood my first statement.”
***
The door opens, but I don’t move forward. I stand still. Blocked. Petrified. The boy’s eyes are so fixed I think he’s blind. He’s not even a meter tall. I’m no expert on kids, so I can’t give him an age, but surely under three?
“You are too late. We took matters into our own hands. I hope we won’t have to worry about that.”
The voice is the second shock, but one that wakes me up and spurs me into action. Too mature, with intonations and articulation that don’t belong in a mouth with milk teeth. I take my hand off my revolver and take a step. The child disappears from the threshold, and I discover the interior of the warehouse. A gigantic, aseptic complex, with prefabs spread out in multi-story cube blocks in areas demarcated by white paint on the floor.
There are children everywhere. Lots of boys, all from the same mold. A few girls, with the same features. All have white skin, black eyes and stringy hair. They’re dressed in hospital gowns, identified by a number on the gown and a tattoo on the arm.
“What is this place?” I blurt out.
“Where we were born,” replies the kid behind my back.
I walk towards the first block. The surprise of this discovery makes me forget for a moment what could have motivated their call to the police or the danger they were in. On the first floor of the first prefab, through the window, I can see cribs with other children hovering beside them, bigger and older than those I’ve seen so far, but only just.
“It’s the latest generation,” says the boy.
Behind me, other young people have gathered. The same closed faces, the same scrutinizing eyes. I have the impression of an army of masks converging on me. I swallow hard and turn back to the glass.
“They have a genetic similarity factor of between 97% and 99.9%. He was very close to his goal.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, kiddo.”
“And I don’t understand why you dare call me kiddo.”
***
“Just tell me one thing, Agent O’Leary. Which one turned me in? I know it’s a sixth to ninth-generation one, but that still leaves about fifty suspects. Could you give me something to help me refine my idea? I don’t have any power over these kids anyway, but I wanted to know which one stood out.”
I know exactly what he’s talking about with his generations thing, and it disgusts me to hear him sound so calm and clinical when he uses those words. I mustn’t lose sight of what a psychopath he is. He’s killed hundreds, I’m convinced, even if we’ll never be able to prove it. He’s manipulated just as many.
“I see you don’t want to talk to me. Perhaps you don’t know which child has managed to contact you. But, you see, you need to know for yourself because he still has a role to play in my life. I can’t rely on the one who attacked me first, because these children think like I do. So the most intelligent manipulated the others to exonerate himself, but took part in the assault to show that he wasn’t a coward. Maybe not the ninth generation. After all, they’re still too young to influence their elders.”
The door opens behind me.
“That’s enough. O’Leary, get out,” orders the captain.
***
“It’s quite simple,” continues Eugene Galton. “A man and a woman having a child pass on fifty percent of their genetic heritage each. To be rigorous, a woman also transmits the DNA of her mitochondria, but let’s simplify it for you. All human beings on this planet also share a certain percentage of genes that are unaltered from between generations because they are indispensable to the viability of living beings. Do you follow me so far?”
Captain Anderson nods in agreement. I doubt he’d be interested in a course in genetics, but I know he’s on the lookout in the old man’s speech for the slightest element that might aggravate his case.
“A father and his child, male or female, share around eighty percent of perfectly identical genes, down to the smallest point of mutation. It is likely that the father is genetically closer to his child than a brother is to his sister. As a theoretical exercise, let’s now assume that this same father has a new child conceived through a daughter’s genetic material. The new generation born of this union will be even closer genetically than the old one. The genes of the very first mother are diluted because the new mother is genetically closer to her father. To make an analogy, it’s like those people who say they have half their blood from such-and-such a region. If they reproduce with someone from the said region, it’s said by misuse of language that their children have three quarters of blood from that region, while one parent has only half. Now that you’ve got that down, imagine a succession of enhancements between the same original gene donor and successive generations of descendants. You will mathematically converge on a tangent whose limit corresponds to a perfect genetic copy of the original donor.”
“Are you telling me that by having a child with your daughter, then your daughter’s daughter, then her own daughter, and so on, you hope to have a boy who is your… what? Perfect clone?”
“The term clone is a misnomer. Human cloning is forbidden in this territory, so don’t expect to accuse me of that. We’re talking about genetic copying, I repeat. Think of it as the selection of hereditary traits as practiced in breeding.”
I sense Anderson is making a huge effort to contain himself and remain professional when he asks his next question. “So, you had children with your daughters?”
“I can see what you expect as a declaration, but you can’t be more wrong. I’m talking about cells and genes, not minors and ovaries. Can you imagine how long it would take to conduct such an experiment using natural reproduction? Spin your brain, Captain, do I look like a pedophile?”
“I wouldn’t tell you what you look like, Doctor, but you don’t seem to realize your situation. You seem very proud of your pseudoscience, but you have nevertheless warehoused—that’s the right term—several dozen of your children in appalling conditions, some of whom were exploited to keep your experiments going. Undeclared births, by surrogate mothers no longer traceable today, with transfers to tax havens in the background—”
“I was just about to check whether my mind transfer had gone smoothly when those kids tied me up. These results must not disappear, do you hear me? The children must not be separated from each other. They must continue what I’ve started if you don’t give me the means!”
***
I watch Eugene Galton’s descent down the steps, with a macabre curiosity as to whether he will stumble and break the bones in his frail legs. An accident would happen so quickly, and no one would miss this man. Certainly not this family created for the sole purpose of allowing him to live forever. I’d say he was rational, but with the little hindsight I have on this affair, what madness could drive a being to set up such a plan? To consider his own life infinitely more important than those he could bring out of nothing? How can a man run with such force and energy, with such an expenditure of means and inhumanity, after such a chimera? And if he really could have duplicated his spirit in a body that genetically resembled him nearly one hundred percent, what would have been the next step? Protect himself against all the potential dangers of microbes, viruses, street crossings and fires? Create back-up copies scattered around the globe in the same way that computer data is duplicated for backup?
Finally, the doctor reaches the staircase without losing his balance. He looks in all directions and suddenly raises his arm. The back of his skull explodes and spatters red on the staircase, an instant fresco in honor of death and the bullet that took him. I barely react as the police station panics. Officers come out, and one of them rushes to Galton’s side. For my part, I merely raise my head in the direction he had pointed before being thrown by the impact. In the darkness of the facade, I distinguish a white face, unkempt hair haloing that head. A thin boy stands up and walks away. Eighth generation perhaps, I think. And in the back of my mind, this question: What if Galton had succeeded in his gamble of transferring his spirit into a younger, genetically identical body, would he be able to bear for a single moment the vision of himself older?
