Doctor Jerry's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Stacie walked out of the lab on her own feet, and Jerry locked the door behind her. He had one enhanced human. He needed a hundred. One girl who might come back or might not was not an army. He sat at the bench and opened the notebook where he kept the real formula, the pages crowded with colored symbols only he could read. The math worked once. He needed it to work every time, in every body, without him standing over the chair. He could not do that alone. He needed hands that already knew how to cut people open without asking why. He picked up the phone and called the lead surgeon. Doctor Zahir came down the back stairwell twenty minutes later, still in scrubs. Jerry had two folders on the bench. One held the off-label surgeries with the mismatched paperwork. The other held a photograph of a gray puppy biting through wire. Jerry slid the second folder across first. "Look." Zahir looked. His face did not move. He turned one page, then another, and stopped at the readout from the chair. "That's a child's weight." "She walked out an hour ago." "Alive." "Better than alive." Zahir closed the folder. "No." Jerry tapped the first folder without opening it. Zahir's jaw set. He knew what was in it. He had known since the day Jerry pulled him into the room with the rats. "I need the process scaled," Jerry said. "One at a time in a chair is a hobby. I need a sequencer that can run twenty samples at once and print stable batches. You've ordered gear like that for the surgical wing. You can order it again and route it here." Zahir stared at the folder under Jerry's hand. "What do you do with twenty." "That's not your part." "Then it's not my order." Jerry lifted his hand off the folder. Zahir did not move. A soft sound came from the hall. Judas stood in the doorway in his gown, one wrist band loose, the other tight. He was seven and small for it. He looked at Zahir the way he looked at every new adult, measuring whether to be quiet or quieter. "He came out of the chair three days ago," Jerry said. "Watch." Judas lifted his eyes to the steel tray on the bench. The tray slid two inches and stopped. He looked at Jerry to see if that was enough. Jerry nodded once. Judas dropped his eyes to the floor. Zahir's hand went to his mouth, then down. "I want to know everything," Zahir said. "Every serum. Every child. Every name." "You'll know what you need to build the line." Zahir was quiet a long moment. "Order goes out Monday." He walked back up the stairs. Jerry watched him go and understood he had traded one owner for two. Garrett held the power. Zahir would soon hold the machine. The army was closer. Jerry was smaller inside it.