Читать книгу Mars Needs Books! - Gary Lovisi - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

THE WHEELS ARE SET IN MOTION

It took twenty years for her plan to come to fruition. She had been careful—she has had to be so very careful. She used Simon’s DOC science. However, instead of bringing back the monsters of the past as Simon had planned—freaks like Hitler, Stalin, Usama Bin Laden, and their insane evil ilk—she had cloned the personalities and minds of truly great people—men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Albert Schweitzer, and Albert Einstein—women like Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, Corazon Aquino, and Golda Meir.

Then just for pragmatism purposes and security concerns she rounded things out by including the psyches of great warriors like George S. Patton, George Washington, Robert E. Lee. Moshe Dayan, and Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. When all these outstanding minds and personalities were combined, the amalgam was placed into a human replicant and named Moses Sage.

Then Moses Sage was set to lead the revolution for human freedom and dignity on the Earth.

Some day.

Arabella Rashid called it the Janus Project. It was named after the ancient Roman god who had two faces. The two-face. She smiled at the idea. She liked the duel purpose of it all. When she explained the Janus Project to the DOC scientists and DOC Board, she did so as if it were merely the continuation of Simon’s genius plan. That plan had been to milk the DNA of the worst past masters of murder and mayhem in order to create a group of future DOC soldiers and leaders unlike anything the human race had ever seen. All working for Simon, and the DOC, of course.

“Simon’s grand intent,” Arabella Rashid told the members of the DOC Board through secure link holochannels, “his Janus Project, was to offer through the bodies of a new generation of clones, the DNA and actual minds of some of the most ruthless men in history. These would serve the DOC and become the new shock troops of the empire. The new leaders for a new era of the world and then outer planetary domination. These were Earth’s most ruthlessly talented, and now from every past era of human history, they will be brought together again to work for us.”

The applause from the Board members was staggering, the smiles and nods from the scientists was all the approval Arabella Rashid needed to secure her position as the new Director of DOC.

“We see that now the proper choice has been made for Director,” Emilio Chávez said over a secure link from his region of planetary control in the North-South American Security Sector.

“You will prove a worthy successor to Simon. This Janus Project is sheer genius,” Mildred Millian added, offering the younger woman a fist salute, a term of respect lately popular in the Southern European Security District, her area of planetary dominion.

“The Janus Project,” Arabella Rashid continued, “will transform seemingly innocuous young men to grow up and become educated as per our direction. Their minds and thoughts bent with purposeful design to your every want and desire.”

There was immediate and resounding applause from the Board members. They liked what they were hearing.

Arabella Rashid smiled glowingly at them all. Yet inwardly, she shuddered and prayed that none of them would ever suspect the deadly dangerous game she was playing.

For it was well known by those in the know, the Janus Project would create a group of the worst monsters culled from human history. Artificially bred and created, with memory and obedience implants. These clones of the most dangerous people who ever existed, were set to change human history forever. They were just what the DOC wanted, just what the hated Authority needed to further tighten its grip on everything human. An army of truly murderous monsters without one scintilla of humanity to stay their hands.

Arabella Rashid clicked off her view screen and sat back comfortably in Simon’s old chair. Her feet were perched upon the console in front of her as she picked up the old science fiction paperback she had taken away from James Ryan days before. She sighed, thinking of him again. He would be on his way to Mars soon, with a cargo of a few hundred men who would become new settlers. They would be miners, many would work themselves to death in the mines. On the ship with them were crates of old paperback books. She smiled. What a cargo! Human reprobates and crime paperbacks. They did seem to go together. Ryan would never be able to figure it out. He would never even imagine such a plan, and whether he suspected he’d been tampered with or not, he’d perform as he’d been programmed. They would all perform as they had been programmed and that was all that mattered.

The girl who now called herself Arabella Rashid looked at the garish cover art on Ryan’s paperback copy of Mars Needs Books. The spaceship and supermen motif was colorful and quaint. The sexy girl in very abbreviated outfit, was crass and exploitative, and the old paperback book she held was so....

She just laughed now, remembering one of the characters had been named Arabella Rashid. She’d taken her name from that powerful young woman in the book. She’d seen a copy of the book long ago, years ago, maybe this was even the very same copy she’d seen back then? She looked at the old paperback carefully. The entire package was antique. Certainly obsolete as an information medium. For a second she thought she should do a search/scan for info on the author. The book was credited as written by someone named Philip K. Dickson. Perhaps a pseudonym or a play on words? She decided it did not matter. The author did not matter. Not now. What did catch her attention was the sentence printed in bold print at the top edge of the cover. These phrases she knew now had been called by the unlikely name of “blurbs,” back when actual hard copy books had still been published. Arabella Rashid was drawn to one sentence on the cover. It said, “The story of Moses Sage—the Superman who brought the promise of revolution and freedom to Earth and the spaceways....”

“Moses Sage?”

Arabella thought of the Janus Project. Now it seemed there might be even more to Janus than the DOC Board and even she knew about. Arabella Rashid’s secret part of the Janus Project—its other face—had been more two-faced than the ancient Roman god’s namesake could ever be imagined. Instead of the clones being implanted with the DNA from the minds of monsters—she had managed for one replicant to be implanted with all the forbidden data of the saints and heroes. That one single replicant was now to be called Moses Sage. His mind would contain the DNA combinations from the minds of the best men and women in human history. Including some of the greatest military leaders and strategists of all time to ensure the success of the revolution.

Meanwhile, next to him in the vats, dozens of monster clones would continue to grow and evolve, but they had already secretly been infected with a timed self-destruct virus. Those Janus clones would all mysteriously die upon the attainment of their twentieth birthday. All but one. All except Moses Sage. But he will be gone and in hiding long before his sibling clones began their death dances.

“You will grow into manhood unfettered by the world to learn and develop into a great leader. Then, decades from now, when all is ready, you will take the name Moses Sage and lead the underground and its revolution against the Authority and the DOC,” she said, gently putting down Ryan’s old paperback.

Arabella Rashid knew she had planned well but it was a complicated plan. It was a long plan of many years duration and anything could go wrong at any time. She had just passed her thirteenth birthday. She would be a woman well in her thirties once Moses Sage presented himself to the citizens of the world and began his revolution to free Earth of the DOC. Meanwhile, Ryan and his group of malcontent mining settlers would be gone from Earth and safe on Mars. Where for the time being, they would be reading paperbacks and dreaming of revolution.

She smiled, the wheels were set in motion.

Arabella Rashid picked up the old paperback from the console again, flipped the paper pages. “Mars Needs Books, indeed!” she said with a shake of her pretty head. “We’ll see where this all leads us, one day, James Ryan.”

Then Arabella Rashid placed the book in a plain manila envelope, writing upon the outside of the envelope, “For James Ryan, Eyes Only!” and placed in gingerly in her outgoing mail slot for immediate delivery.