"Max?" I leap cool as a cat over the side of a building and land on all fours on the fire escape. "Maxie, can you hear me?" The familiar damp cold wraps around me with chill certainty. She isn't here. There isn't anybody here. The silence is nearly too much, but I hold onto the knowledge that she's out there somewhere waiting for me; whoever, she is.
"Hey John? John wake up." The dull tinny thudding of Corri banging on the door to my quarters wakes me out of my dream and I go from a sensation of cold sweat to one of overripeness. This island seems to stay at a pretty regular temperature of fry an egg on your head, even a few stories under the ground. "John? Can you hear me?" Corri has decided that in absence of knowing my name that she'll call me John, for John Doe. She thinks that it's terribly clever, but I don't feel very much like a John. The name from my dream comes back to me and I hold onto it tightly.
I throw on a t-shirt to go with the sweatpants that I wore to bed and open my door to admit the impatient girl on the other side. "God you're not still lying around, are you? You've probably missed breakfast in the mess hall by now, we all eat like pirrhanas." There must be something in my face because Corri pauses and looks me up and down. "You've remembered something haven't you? I can tell by the look in your eyes."
"Just a name, in my dreams. I don't even know if it's really from my past or not. It seemed pretty familiar to me though." Corri smiles at me, excited.
"Do you think it's the girl that marked you? I bet she's wild with looking for you by now." I shake my head slowly. "Well I won't pry at you anyhow, it's your business I suppose. Anyway I'm supposed to come and bring you up to see Father." The change in topic doesn't fool me, she's still got a shrewd interest in finding out what and how much I've remembered. "You'd better get changed though. Wouldn't due to go see him looking and smelling like that. I'll just wait outside for a few minutes."
Ten minutes later and a good deal fresher I find myself being ushered into Father's rooms.
"Please son, sit down." The study smells of cedar and dusty tomes, a fire in the left corner keeps it almost unpleasantly warm. In the mottled dimness of the room I can make out quite clearly the form of an aging and slightly bent old man. His hair has grown long around his ears and bushes out in fluff of snowy white around a face of wrinkled parchment. He smiles gently as I enter the room causing his wrinkles to grow wrinkles, and his eyes to glow with an odd light. At his suggestion I sit gingerly in an ancient looking green upholstered wingback chair. "Would you care for something to drink, perhaps some coffee or tea? I've just received some lovely oolong from a colleague in Singha." His voice is a rich baritone that seems to fill the room and it fills me with an odd sensation of deja vue, not that I can be certain but I feel that I must have met this man before.
"No thank you sir, I've just grabbed a snack in the dining hall." I don't know why I feel the need to be so polite to this guy, not when I get the distinct feeling that social conventions have never meant a great deal to me. Somehow, there is an air about this dowdy old man that commands respect, as though he can see right through a person. I shake my head to recover my footing as the old guy smiles at me. He presses in a button on the intercom on his desk and waits a moment until the faint sounds of static fill my ears.
"Nora dear, please bring up a nice pot of oolong and a plate of those delightful ginger cookies of yours that I've been smelling baking all morning." A maternal giggle twitters on the other end of the speaker before the device shuts off with a click. "I know you've just had some breakfast dear boy, but I have found in my long life that there is always room for cookies." This geezer's breezy pedantic speeches are starting to get on my nerves, at this rate I'm never going to find out anything from him. As if sensing my building irritation, the old man leans forward and places his elbows conspiratorily on his desk. "I know you are losing your patience with me, but I ask you to bear with an old man's ramblings."
Something in his gentle tone of voice and easy manner make me ashamed of my building annoyance and I force myself to relax and sit back in the chair. "I just had a few questions to ask you Sir, about this island and the compound that we're currently sitting in." I'm interrupted by a gentle knock on the door, as a large woman in her sixties floats into the room bearing an overladen tray that sets my barely filled stomach rumbling.
"No need to stand on ceremony Son, you must be hungry, dig in." The old man pours a steaming cup of aromatic tea from a silver service and sets a dainty willowware teacup and saucer in front of me. Without many manners I pick up a warm ginger cookie and pop it in my mouth. It's pure ambrosia. "Now where were we?" He smiles and takes a sip of his own tea. "I imagine that in your current condition, you're just bursting with questions. The fact is, that some of these questions I can lay to rest, the others you must discover answers to on your own. But where to begin. My name is Aloysius Hubble, and I was once one of the finest genetic scientists in America. It was myself and a colleague named Sandeman who finally broke the redundancy problem of human cloning, however, I'm sure this means little to you. Myself and Sandeman were recruited by the a branch of the U.S. government to work on a project known as Manticore, a project which would see the development and perfection of the human species."
I can feel something clicking in my head, as though painful bright images are flashing in my eyes through a projector on LSD, snow, blood, children in gray sweats standing at attention, and a blank white room that makes me feel unbearably trapped. It is this claustrophobic feeling of being trapped that forces the images in my mind to a sudden stop, halting the flow of my memories, forcing them to fade quickly back into the unreachable recesses of my consciousness. I look darkly at Hubble, "tell me more about Manticore."
"You're beginning to remember aren't you? That's okay it will take time for the memories to fight there way back to the surface. I wasn't at a part of the Manticore project when you were born. I had been moved to the Ouroboros project, but Sandeman remained in contact with me while he continued to oversee the project. Over the next few years he began to tell me of alarming circumstances. The army was abusing our creations, the government wanted ever stricter control over the project, and he kept hinting about a war coming, one which he would not be able to stop. It was at that time that I met a man named Pardidos. Our first meeting was nothing special, he wrote to me claiming to be a friend of Sandeman's and a deep admirer of our work. I admit that my vanity overcame any caution I felt in meeting the man, so I agreed to meet him for a civilized dinner and some conversation. His knowledge of my subject was frankly quite stunning and I had no doubts about his legitimacy. I agreed to have him to my home for supper the next night, and that's when he struck. He drugged my food, made copies of my finger and retinal prints and a topographical scan of my face, and with these he broke into my lab and stole wholesale all of my precious notes and research. At that point I knew two things for certain, if the government found out how I had been duped I would be put to death, and I could not leave my precious research in the hands of an imposter."
I lean forward to scrutinize him more closely. "I know that project Manticore involved genetic engineering, but what was the focus of project Ouroboros?"
"It's all in the name Son. When Pardidos robbed me I was a hair's breadth away from finding the secrets of immortal life."