BALLISTA sample 1 OUR SKIN IS UNBROKEN 'SO, LET ME GET THIS RIGHT,' I said, looking not across the polished boardroom table but above me, into the giant whirling fans. ‘What you are effectively asking me to do is give the order for my own murder.’ ..... I let the sentence sink in a bit before turning my attention back to the emergency executive. Just three directors were present: Charles Longeur, my suave and ambitious finance director; Harrison, the Head of Legal Affairs; and Bill Hudson, the bull necked Australian, director of corporate security. No one else needed to be involved. Sitting apart from the rest of us, on a seat near the door, was Linda Hilversum, a private detective, whom we often employ when extreme discretion is called for. Linda has fascinating hair, huge sheaves of white which hover unnaturally about her square head. She is brilliant, and I don’t know what I would do without her. ..... ‘Firstly, David, he’s not you,’ she said. ‘Secondly, we can’t murder him, at least not in the legal sense. He’s an unnatural person. He is not recognised as having any rights at all.’ ..... ‘One couldn’t murder a monkey, could one?’ said Longeur. ..... ‘He’s not a monkey,’ I replied curtly. ‘Whatever the law says he is, he’s a human being. There’s a moral issue here, surely, if not a legal one.’ ..... Longeur opened a folder in front of him. ‘It’s just another business problem, David.’ He held up a tabloid newspaper. ‘You’ve seen these, I’m sure, but it’s worth looking at them again. The Sun from Friday: “Zakiro CEO in mystery arrest”. The Telegraph: “Zakiro shares plunge after Gusev charges dropped”. The Saturday Horizon: “Gusev denies “savage” assault; “not mistaken identity” insist police”. David, you absolutely cannot get arrested again.’ ..... I leafed through one of the newspapers. ‘I might not be.’ ..... ‘We know this is hard for you, David,’ said Harrison. ‘But there is a man - a criminal - someone who thinks nothing of tearing off half a man’s face with his teeth - a credit card fraudster - who is walking around out there with your DNA in his cells. You were lucky this time with your alibi. But supposing he murders somebody, and you’re not having dinner with the Deputy Prime Minister?’ ..... ‘We don’t have to kill him, surely? There must be another way.’ ..... Longeur smirked and shook his head. I wanted to punch him, the arrogant shit. ‘There isn’t.’ ..... I stood up and walked to the window and clicked open the blinds. The light was failing, and the volcanic red sun seemed like an evil eye glowering down on the old city. London was a sprawling, exhilarating conglomeration of matter and space beneath whose bright corporate towers the shadows were dense. ..... ‘He’s down there somewhere. My fucking double.’ I turned back to Linda. ‘I suppose you know where he lives.’ ..... She nodded. ..... ‘You’d better give us the gruesome details, then Bill,’ I said. My second, decisive meeting with Dr Lukas Skaparis took place twenty nine years ago this very week - June 2022. I always think of it as our second meeting, even though it was actually our third; we’d met casually a few months earlier at one of my richer friend’s parties, on a big yacht moored in Poole harbour. On that first, unofficial meeting I had been much impressed with him. He was very tall indeed, with steely grey hair and magnificent sideburns, and he had a handsome, tanned, European face. He possessed the longest fingers I had ever seen with which he twirled the stem of his wine glass. He reminded me of my father, I suppose. I met him again in his offices in London, when we discussed his offer, and some of the legal implications, although I didn’t properly listen; I was thinking about the twenty thousand dollars he was going to give me. By the time of this second official meeting half that twenty thousand was already marked out for gambling debts. ..... His office was very white, and clean. He perused me for a while as if weighing up my genetic content. Or something else, perhaps. ..... ‘I have been doing a little research on you, David,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, this is quite normal with our donors. I need to be sure on certain issues.’ He twiddled his pencil with those long fingers, and purred, ‘You are the son of Alexander Gusev, the owner of Zakiro Corporation. Quite a legacy for you.’ ..... ‘Yeah, he’s my Dad,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t matter, does it?’ ..... ‘Well, it confuses me. When we spoke at our first consultation you gave me the impression that the twenty thousand dollar payment was the prime motivation for your selling your genes. But when I consider your background, this motivation does not seem very credible to me.’ ..... ‘He might be rich, but I’m not. He expects me to make my own way in the world and says he doesn’t intend to help me.’ ..... ‘That is unusual.’ ..... ‘You wouldn’t think it was unusual if you met my Dad. He was born into poverty in Russia. He never stops talking about the old days. He made his money renovating clapped out Russian airliners and selling them to Africa and the Philippines. He thinks I should do something similar. He despises me because I’ve been born into his money.’ ..... ‘So, you argued.’ ..... ‘He did. He says I can forget about taking a position with his firm until I’ve proven to him I can make a success without his help. Like I’d want to join his shitty company. It’s a malignant tumour on the face of the world.’ ..... ‘I see how the money would be an attraction for you, then. You are poor?’ ..... ‘Potless.’ ..... He produced a sheaf of legal looking papers from the drawer of his desk. ‘Just to reiterate the procedure. We take some healthy skin cells from you. We will treat those cells, remove their nuclei, and replace them in… well, empty eggs. We then grow these eggs, use them for research, for stem cell studies, and other things. The reason why we are paying you this fee is because we are buying all your genes, that is, your genome. We can do whatever we like with your genetic material, and you will have waived all your rights to it.’ ..... ‘Why me?’ I asked. It was a question that had been bothering me for some time. ..... He smiled. ‘We are looking for certain physical profiles for this strand of research. We want people with a particular background as well. If I may be honest with you, I only became interested when I found out who your father was. But as I said before, maybe we do not use your genes at all.’ ..... ‘But I still get the money?’ ..... He nodded. ‘Once you sign this total gene waiver, the funds will be guaranteed in your bank account Monday morning.’ ..... I reached for the pen. ‘Are you going to clone me? That’s what some people are saying, that you are trying to grow clone people.’ ..... ‘Clone is an emotive and unhelpful word,’ he said. ‘But you don’t have to worry.’ He watched me sign, then eased the pen from between my fingers. ‘This is research only. You will not have to worry about a fully grown David Gusev knocking on your front door demanding his inheritance in twenty years time, I promise you.’ Hudson placed a plastic transparent box on the table and opened it. Inside was a tiny object which looked like a pixie’s feather duster. ..... ‘This is a toxin dart,’ he said, picking it up carefully between his thumb and forefinger. ‘You fit it into the barrel of a special airgun. We shoot it into the target’s neck, here.’ He touched his neck to demonstrate, as though we didn’t know where his fucking neck was. Next to me Charles Longeur leaned forwards and made an impressed sounding little whistle. ..... ‘The target will barely notice it,’ continued Hudson. ‘It’ll feel like a gnat bite. This guide feather dissolves upon impact. A tiny capsule injected by the dart releases a slow poison into his bloodstream. After a couple of hours he feels the urge to sleep. He goes to bed, and he never wakes up. All but the most stringent autopsy will reveal nothing. His death will seem like natural causes. ‘Course, being an unnatural person, he wouldn’t receive anything more than the most cursory of post mortems anyway. There we go,’ he added, ‘painless.’ ..... ‘But not for me.’ ..... Charles put his hand on my arm, the pernicious reptile. He didn’t care about me. He was thinking of the value of his shares. ‘Give the go ahead, David.’ ..... ‘While he is alive this firm is under threat,’ said Harrison. ‘We don’t know what Vertigo Corporation, for instance, could do with him if they got hold of him, how he could be used against us. Blackmail, for instance.’ ..... ‘It leaves us open to all kinds of espionage, forgery… your retinal pattern is no longer unique.’ ..... ‘He’s an unhappy soul,’ said Linda Hilversum. ‘Let’s help him, David.’ ..... I leaned back and stared at those chopping fans for a few moments, then said, ‘I want to meet him.’ ..... Hudson shook his head. ‘Not in any circumstances. He’s a dangerous criminal, sir.’ ..... ‘Nevertheless, I want to look into his eyes as the dart goes in. I owe him that much. If I’m going to give the order to kill me, at the very least I want to be there when it happens.’ Linda Hilversum, who had been in contact with my clone son, arranged the meet, and two weeks later I found myself sitting at a table in the crypt of an Islington church which had been converted into a cafeteria. A large murky area paved with huge ancient flagstones, it was overlooked by a gallery which had been created by removing an area of the ground floor above us. Hudson described it as a suitable venue for the kill. There was a line of crumbling alcoves on the galleries, invisible from the cafeteria, where Hudson and another man would be able to secrete themselves. A wide stone staircase wound up towards the ground floor. There was a fire door exit on the opposite wall, which led, I suppose, to another staircase. Linda had made it clear to my son whom he was meeting, and he was under the impression that there was money in it for him, so I’d brought my wallet. His name was Robin, apparently. This knowledge was disconcerting. As soon as she told me, I wished she hadn’t. ..... I had been wired by Hudson, plugged into a minuscule one-way earpiece through which he could speak to me. It chirped in my ear just at that moment when, after twenty minutes’ fruitless, nervous wait, I was determining to call it a day. ..... ‘He’s heading down the stairs now.’ Then a crackle. ‘Fucking Hell.’ ..... I didn’t look up. I was too scared. I kept my eyes fixed on the far side of the crypt, where a clutch of Japanese students were laughing at something which jerked on a computer screen. I heard a chair scrape. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I suppose I should call you Daddy.’ ..... My clone son was a tattooed freak. Hellish images snaked and rippled over bare arms, blue skull, mottled eyelids. Pink eyeballs in painted sockets. Chains swinging and clanking through splayed flesh. As I stared, he smiled, and I saw that his teeth had been filed into points. A large glistening bead was buried in his tongue. ..... ‘Good God,’ I gasped. ‘Your tattoos.’ ..... He raised his purple eyebrows. Then he looked down at my round white-shirted belly which peeped over the table. ..... ‘I choose to look like this. Did you choose to be fat?’ He spat onto the floor, and I looked down at it, half expecting his sputum to emerge pigmented. ‘So you’re what I’m going to look like in twenty years. Fat old David, my Dad.’ ..... He asked if he could smoke, and when I agreed, proceeded to roll an enormous joint. I must have looked disapproving, for he smirked throughout the whole silent procedure, before sealing the tube up with his mutilated tongue. I watched him with fascination and a small degree of alarm. The arch of the nose, the shape of the mouth, the large ears - were all mine, mine. Not like when a father looks for resemblances in his child, far from it. I looked at a fantastically distorted reflection of myself, as if I was gazing into one of those twisted mirrors at the fairground. ..... ‘So what do you do?’ he asked eventually. ‘Not that I care, but it’s the sort of thing I suppose you want me to ask.’ ..... ‘I work as a bank clerk,’ I lied. It was what Linda had told me to say. In my ear there was a sudden crackle and Hudson spoke again. ..... ‘He’s got a knife in his pocket. He looks to be getting agitated already. Say what you have to say, sir, then get out. I have a clear shot of his neck now.’ ..... ‘That detective woman of yours told me there was money in this for me,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine as a bank clerk you would have that much to spare.’ He nodded towards my wrist. ‘Nice watch. I sell imitations for two hundred dollars a piece, but those originals go for over ten thousand. As you know, imitations attract a lesser premium.’ He looked across at me again, and I could swear I detected something behind the anger and the garish skin, a kind of yearning. The more I watched him, the more I saw myself. He touched his head exactly the same way I do; the way he rolled his cigarette told me he was left handed, like I am. He had my purplish birthmark shadow under his right ear which the tattoos could not conceal. My God, I thought. He is not just like me - he is me. Did he think the same thoughts as me, then? Did he share the same tastes, the same dreams? ..... He tapped out his joint. ‘It’s kinda spooky looking at you. I always knew that I came from someone else - but - only when you meet the person does it really hit home. Do you know what I mean?’ He paused, and for a moment, the mask of hostility slipped. ‘Skaparis told me you were dead. But he would always do things like that. He liked playing mind games with us.’ ..... ‘Apparently he died in a car accident ten years ago.’ ..... He laughed flatly. ‘No he didn’t. He got himself killed by one of us. One of us unnaturals, I mean. My mate Allen strangled him in his bath. Fucker deserved it.’ ..... ‘How did he deserve it?’ ..... ‘He would torture us. Starve us. Burn us with cigarette butts. That school of ours was as good as a prison. I bet you didn’t know that. ’ ..... ‘No, I didn’t. When I met him, he seemed so… urbane.’ ..... My clone son shrugged. ..... ‘What do you do, then?’ I asked. ‘What’s your… thing?’ Over his reply, I heard Hudson urging me to get a move on. ..... ‘My thing is me. I’m an unnatural person in the eyes of the law, which means that strictly speaking I’m not real. Which means that I must be fucking art.’ He raised his right hand and I was astonished to see that he had a perfectly round opening, about a centimetre across, in the middle of his palm. It was lined with a silver metal, with a narrow flange which protruded onto the flesh. He put his hand close to his face and puffed blue smoke through the hole. ..... ‘That’s quite a party piece.’ I watched him examine his hand. His arms were very thin. ..... ‘Cost me a fortune. Me surgeon had to bend the bones right back… reinforced them with titanium. See, they gave me a load of money when they got rid, thought I’d do something special with it.’ ..... ‘I like that,’ I said, and I meant it. ..... ‘Thanks.’ ..... I reached into my pocket and took out my wallet. He watched me. I could see he was intelligent and wary, the way his eyes dodged. He may have expected some sort of trap. Maybe he came here expecting to be killed, just wanting an end of it all. I pulled out a photograph of my two daughters. ..... ‘My daughters,’ I said. ‘Rene and Stella.’ ..... ‘Nice kids. What would these be to me, then?’ He took it, stared at it for a moment, then returned it to me. ..... ‘I don’t know. Daughters? Sisters? There’s not really a word for it.’ ..... ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s a regular problem. It’s tough to find the words to explain who we are.’ I stared into his face of dreams, and wondered at the existential themes that were the fabric of his everyday life. I wondered what pressures had compelled him to do the awful thing he did. ..... ‘That’ll do, now, sir. Stand back. Let him go, and we’ll take him.’ ..... I looked over my shoulder towards the balcony. I could see one of the guys’ shoes sticking out of the alcove and the tip of his gun. ..... ‘My mother,’ said Robin. ..... ‘What?’ ..... ‘The woman who carried me. I wondered if you knew her. Is she still alive?’ ..... I stood up and leaned across the table, positioning my body exactly between Robin and the line of fire. There was an indignant squawk in my ear. ..... ‘What’s he doing?’ ..... I grasped Robin’s hand. He looked at me, surprised by the contact. His eyes widened, and the green rat on his forehead concertinaed into an indistinct, unthreatening splurge of colour. ..... ‘You’re in terrible danger,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t move or do anything till I tell you. There are two men on the balcony who have their guns trained on you.’ I felt him stiffen, try to rise. I held him down with my other hand - his musculature felt so familiar to me. I could tell which muscle, which reflex, would engage next. I glanced down at our clasped hands. His hand was on top and I could see my pink flesh through the hole in his circus skin. I was plugging the gap. ‘When I tell you, run for the fire exit. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t run in a straight line. I’ll try to stop them.’ He looked down at our joined hands. ..... ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him. ..... He sprang from his seat, and our table toppled over, scattering china and tablecloth. Someone at another table cried out. I staggered after him, keeping my eyes on Hudson, who had appeared on the gallery and was trying to get a bead on him. In my ear I could hear incoherent cursing. Another armed man was hurtling down the stone stairs three at a time. He knocked one of the Japanese students over and I heard a woman scream. As the man came past me, I picked up a chair and tossed it into his path, and he clattered spectacularly to the floor. Robin was at the fire door, opening it. I was about to call out to him when something thwacked into my shoulder. I was unbalanced by the small impact, and fell to my knees. I heard the fire door bang to. ..... ‘Let him go,’ I shouted to Hudson. ‘Just let him go.’ ..... Within seconds Hudson had reached me, and he began hauling my jacket off. I saw that it was ripped along the shoulder, a three inch tear where the pellet had hit. The other guy quickly removed my shirt, was kneading and studying my naked shoulder. ..... ‘It’s all right,’ said Hudson. ‘He’s not hit. I didn’t hit you, sir. The skin is unbroken.’ I think about him a lot. It’s kind of comforting to me to know that he’s out there somewhere, scratching an unregarded living in one of those interminable, forgotten ghettoes. He makes me realise how lucky I am. He carries with him some reminder for me of the indefatigability, the sheer toughness of the human soul. But most of all, when I am overtaken, as I frequently am, by a sense of complete futility in my life, it’s good to know that somewhere else I am living a completely different existence, creating a whole new bunch of alternatives. Longeur and the rest didn’t like it, but they’ll have to lump it. I think Linda understood, though. ..... They say he is the copy of me, but I don’t buy that. It implies that there is a “true” me, and that there is a “fake” me. An original and a duplicate. That’s shit. He is the most original person I’ve ever met. Maybe it’s me who is the copy. Or maybe neither of us are; for while he continues to exist, I feel pretty unique as well. © Andrew Myers 2006

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