Day Twenty-Six
Now, you may be wondering why I chose not to hit 60,000 today and instead remained at 59,500. The answer in simple: I reached a part in the writing where I’m better off brainstorming for a day to see what more I can come up with. because let’s face it: This part is interesting and could use some good thought.
Word Count: 59,528
The rest of the day was meant to be free to explore the town, to continuously shove their way through people who did not look like people. It was a shame that it was this very aspect of human form that made all cities next to a station so incredibly similar. That fact that nobody looked the same, not that anybody had ever looked the same before, but now everybody was so utterly different in ways that were not describable; so different that an entire crowd of these people looked exactly the same as the crowd of them back by the NSGR. What was the most frightening was when these people, up close, did not look different, but exactly the same. The mass-produced generic Genomes were spreading, as they had spread before, but now in wider numbers. More people walked around “wearing” (which was the newly developed slang term for having shapeshifted oneself with a pin-Genome and ATC) generic Genomes than ever before. When two people wearing the same Genome would walk by each other one would normally compliment the other on their good taste, or make a joke about how good looking their mirror image was.
All of the shops were identical to the ones that had appeared by the NSGR. It was as though Walters hadn’t left home. He wondered if somewhere along this strip mall was a copy of Carpenter, a copy of him, wandering the strip mall. Perhaps, along this place, there was someone just like him, in the same situation…
He paused. Of course there was. That was why he had come here.
Carpenter was with him, walking around. They would move to the outskirts in no time to begin to get a feel for what the area itself was like. There was no real point in this other than for touristic reasons, but it was nice to have a break, to not have to think about anything, to spend the time with a person he felt completely comfortable with – though he still did not know why it felt more comfortable than a normal friendship. They had only gotten a taxi ride’s worth of a glance at the strange homes of MARS, but now they would be walking through the yards of the people, see them come out and greet them, see what strange forms were most popular to the common folk of the village. It was, on top of sightseeing, learning about the culture.
The people of this area seemed to have very tanned skin, as though they were not the indigenous Caucasian settlers, but the original Native American tribesmen that roamed the land before the New World wars. In front of each home was a primitive knocker, used in favor of an electronic doorbell. Walters wondered what was inside each stone dome. Would they use stoves heated by a manual fire? Would there be candles instead of light bulbs?
As if reading his mind, Carpenter answered, “They use electricity here, if you’re unsure by the outward appearance.” Her straightforwardness baffled Walters, but answered his inner questions completely.
They could have very well gone to meet this man now. They had not called him nor arranged anything, so did not know when he would be home. They had gotten information from MARS, who, for some strange reason that they kept to themselves, had been silently tracking this man. They assumed by his average schedule that he would be home at 4:03pm, his usual time. The schedule ran like a Swiss watch – whoever lived in this dome was incredibly efficient and certainly not one to waste time. Carpenter and Walters had two options: To meet and greet the man at the door, or to wait until after four o’clock to see him. They decided the latter sounded less conspicuous.
There was, unlike nearby the NSGR, a large bell tower that rang every hour in an unknown pattern of rings. At this time, almost two o’clock, Walters was preparing to hear it again to make sense of the ringing bells. When it came, he still could not understand why it rang thirteen times for two o’clock in the afternoon. If it was twenty-four hour time, it would have been one o’clock. If it was twelve hour time, then something was completely wrong. Either way made no sense at all.
Walters got a quick peek inside one of the houses while someone came out for a two o’clock appointment to what he assumed was some sort of meeting. Oddly enough, the place looked normal on the inside – an entire small house, simply warped into the shape of a dome.
Carpenter was walking unusually close to him, keeping an unusually keen eye on him. He did not notice for a good half hour until, for the first time since they met, she bumped into him by accident. She had never stood so close before. He was tempted to shove her away, but his body prevented it. It somehow didn’t mind being shoved. His mind tried to fight it, but it too gave in. It was then that he realized: There was nothing within him to stop Carpenter from doing whatever she wanted, from making him do whatever she wanted him to do. His body had put its trust in her for one reason or another, and while his mind couldn’t find the reason why, it too was giving up in the meantime.
It wasn’t long before the next day arrived, and Walters was awaking in the small bed next to Carpenter, who was still sound asleep. He walked across the room over to the small window above the white-painted wooden desk and flung the window open, looking across the hotel to its other side. It was quite large for what it was, not being a full-blown luxury hotel but not being quite as run-down as a motel either. It was a comfortable place that he was happy to stay in. The hustle and bustle that had occupied a good portion of their time getting back to this building the night before was gone, and the air smelled peaceful. If there were more people at the hotel willing to get up so early, Walters would have waved to them who would have sat on the balcony far across from his window.
In fact, the traffic that night was even worse than the nightly traffic on the pedestrian road nearby the NSGR. There it was simply crowded; a pain to walk around people. Here it was an absolute nightmare. To move one would have to climb on top of other people. Walters was sure he had noticed a few birds too smart for their own good – possibly people who had shapeshifted themselves temporarily in order to avoid the buildup of people, presumably by purchasing two ATC’s and bringing one to keep at work with them. The buildup occurred not because there were more people than by the NSGR, which there were not, but because many of MARS’s denizens were incredibly impolite and selfish. This was the most well-known generalization about the people from MARS, and held true mostly in the strip mall and the roads surrounding it. There were constant thefts. Walters was curious to ask someone if the any of the thieves had looked like ambiguous figures.
It was decided that at 4:30pm they would depart for the unknown man’s house. Carpenter was more confident about the visit than Walters was, but Walters trusted what Carpenter had led him out to do. He was prepared to extract all of the information he could. If there was a cure, he would find it here. If there was any hope to regain his old life, he would hope to find it in this man, who must have gone through his own transformation of free will. Nobody could accept this the way it was happening to Walters, even a person who thought that this nameless higher up was the greatest person in the world, and that becoming him meant becoming a saint. Walters liked his old, frailer body much better. Even though it was indeed old, it was his body, and humans were never likely to give up their property without a good fight. It had never happened before, and it would not happen now. War was inevitable, and the war for Walters’s own body was no different.
It was most peculiar that, on that very day, some strange news broke out about a war. A war over the Genome technology – a patent war. Some nameless company had sued the GSS for patent infringement, claiming that over fifteen years ago they had filed a patent for a similar pin-like genetic alteration tool. They were doomed for failure in the case, but would not go down without a fight, taking some money with them. It was seemingly the only way for a company such as that to make a profit. One company must sue another, get the money and run away, never to be seen or heard from again. These companies never did well, but they got what they came for. None of them ever expected to overtake the GSS. The GSS was too large. It was its own entity, and could not be eradicated by simple lawsuits. To break up the GSS would be to break up a system that was created of loose ties and connections. There existed a central Genome Surgical Society headquarters, but beyond that was nothingness. There was a hierarchy system, but, although it stressed great power in between ranks, was very loose and ambiguous.
The truth was that none of the stations ever spoke with one another or acknowledged each other’s existence. Instead, it all funneled down to the GSS headquarters, where some of the findings were implemented and some were not. That was the end result of all of their hard work. Much of it resulted in rejection, but the communications between the lower-level workers and the headquarters was literally none at all, so those who had made discoveries seldom found out if it had done any good for the world, or if it was all a waste of time. The GSS did not want its employees knowing that their work was a waste of time. In fact, it was the last thing they wanted to know, or perhaps the penultimate thing. There were various other secrets, but they were what they were – secrets. Theories. Rumors such as the new technology the GSS was supposedly working on.
They had also recently, very recently, accepted human test subjects for this technology. Supposedly. Though in the end of it these test subjects would not know who they were or where they had been. They would be different people, not simply in appearance. That was their wish when they signed the contract that tore their life away. It was their goal to tear their life away.
At four o’clock they packed their things, which really only consisted of the information they’d gathered and, of course, the lapel pin Genome that Walters always carried with him, and departed for the house of the unknown shapeshifter. His was not too far away, nearby where they had visited the other day, but in the opposite direction. It was all still walking distance. The homes on this side of the town were significantly larger than the ones on the east side of town, but were really just larger stone igloos. What made them more unique was their odd deep blue coloring. While the other domes had been desert-sand yellow, these were a dark, icy blue. Walters could just imagine this man stepping out of his front door (or whatever it was that served as the entrance and exit) and being completely covered in frost. The stove on the inside, which in his mind was still powered by the hand-created fire, would be frozen or spewing out ice instead of flames. It was as though on the west side of the village everybody was still living in the North Pole.
Because of pedestrian traffic buildup, they reached the house at precisely 4:30pm. Walters felt embarrassed, still not knowing the man’s name, yet about to greet him. Carpenter said that he would know the man just by looking at him and seeing how strikingly similar he was, but Walters disagreed that by knowing someone’s appearance you could also know who they were on the inside, and what their name was on top of that.
Walters used the large circular knocker and boomed on the seemingly weak wooden frame of the door. Someone veered through the metal mesh, and the door subsequently swung open, much like a normal door would have. Standing in front of him was the man they had been looking for. He looked exactly like Walters.
For a moment, Walters did not know what to say. He was shocked. He had seen people who looked the same before, but had never been one of them. He never had wanted to be one of them. If was incredible, the likeness of the two. But what came out of the man’s mouse was even more incredible.
“Hello?” said the man. “Who are you? I see you’re wearing something quite special. I dare say that I’m flattered.”
He wasn’t surprised at all as Walters was.
He looked over at Carpenter, as though he knew her. He waved, and asked again who they were and what their business was.
“We’re here to meet you,” Walters said, “because of who you are. Because you look, well, just like me. Presumably you also have something like this?” Walters took the lapel Genome out of his pocket and displayed it to the man. He seemed to recognize it, but not entirely, s though it was some sort of long forgotten item. The man allowed them to come in, though he did not seem entirely sure why he allowed them to come in.
“Please sit down,” the man said, pointing to what little area in the dome there was to sit. There was a circular couch in the very center where every sat down. “I should introduce myself, then. My name is Greg Walters, and I work at the Midwestern Alteration Research Station doing mid-level alteration research.”
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