Evil Genius (Part 15)

Chapter 3

The note arrived just as Meg was finally getting settled.

After stepping out of the Four Seasons, Meg had spent the next couple of hours just wandering around the city. It didn’t take long for her to realize that the suspicions she had had from inside her luxury prison were indeed true. The world seemed to have woken up again. Down each street she passed groups of pedestrians engaged in trivial chatter, bustling shops where customers waited patiently and impatiently for their turn, and the air was filled with the familiar engine revs, honking horns, and exhaust fumes. It was almost enough to make you forget that you were living under the authoritarian rule of the most evil man that ever lived.

Once the general joy and exuberance of being free started to wear off, Meg started to realize that she hadn’t the slightest idea where she should go or what she should do. A funny thing happens when you think each day is going to be your last – your long-term planning tends to suffer. So, short of any better idea, she decided to go home. Or at least the place that had been her home up until her impromptu vacation almost 2 years ago.

She approached the high-rise condo building and went inside. Before the end of everything there had been a 24-hour doorman but now there was no one, so she encountered no resistance when she walked in the front door and went to the elevators. As she emerged from the elevator and walked down the 11th floor hallway, she really didn’t know what to expect. Most likely the door would simply be locked. Would she knock? What if it was open and she walked in only to find the place redecorated and an extremely surprised couple asking her who the hell she was? Meg didn’t have the answers to any of these questions, but that didn’t stop her. She walked straight up to the door and turned the handle. Just like at the Four Seasons, it turned easily in her hands. As she pushed the door inwards she felt that she was prepared for whatever she might see. Only she wasn’t prepared for this.

It was dark and it was dusty, but it was unmistakable. All of her possessions, exactly as she had left them.

With all of today’s good fortune, she started to think that she must be dreaming but no; dreams didn’t have dust. She plopped herself down on the living room couch and was momentarily enveloped by a thick dustcloud. She tried to make sense out of all that had happened to her today, quickly decided with complete certainty that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever and thus determined to waste no more time thinking about it.

She now turned her mind to more practical matters. She had no food in the house – at least nothing edible. Fortunately, she still had valuables in the wall safe behind the picture in the bedroom. Again she registered no surprise when it was still there and the combination hadn’t been changed. Inside was a bag that contained a small collection of diamonds. Terry had liked to impress her by taking lumps of coal and squeezing them into diamonds. It was the superhero version of winning the giant stuffed panda at the Ring Toss.

She pocketed a few of the diamonds, returned the bag to the safe, and headed out again. If the world had really gone back to normal – or at least a new normal – then the row of jewelry shops on Connecticut Ave should be open again. And unless women were suddenly no longer interested in very shiny jewels, she should be able to get a decent price for them. She turned out to be right on both counts, though she just about had a seizure when the jeweler paid her. 50 crisp $100 bills, all with the giant visage of Doctor Destructo smack in the middle of them. But since this didn’t even remotely qualify as the strangest thing that had happened to her today, she simply sighed, shrugged, and pocketed her bounty.

On her way back home she stopped in at the grocery store and bought some fresh fruit, bread, and cleaning supplies. She half-expected the clerk to laugh at her when she tried to pay with her ridiculous currency, but he just took it without looking at her and handed her back her change – bills with smaller denominations but the same obscene image of the Doctor.

As she walked back into her building, she spotted John McDonald coming out of the elevator. John had been the condo association president. He spotted her and jumped back momentarily, then he smiled broadly as he ran forward and hugged her.

“Oh my god, Meg!”

“Hi John, good to see you too.” She had officially lost the capacity to be surprised anymore today.

John pulled back but was still beaming.

“I knew you’d be back. Somehow I just knew. We’ve been renting out the units left and right. Most of the owners being, um, gone. But I saved yours; wasn’t going to let that one go till I absolutely had to.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“It was the least I could do.” And now he whispered. “I heard how you snuck in and almost killed him. Everyone did. A lot of people didn’t believe it but I knew you and knew that if anyone could do it it’d be you. Then I heard that someone spotted you getting led into the Four Seasons by the Doctor’s goons and I thought to myself ‘I don’t know how she’s still alive but I bet if she ever gets outta there she’s going to wanna come on back home’ and now here you are!”

John continued to smile at her and for the first time since she could remember Meg smiled back.

“I don’t what to say John, it’s . . . I just . . .thank you. Listen, I just got back and need to get settled in . . .”

“Of course, of course. I’ll make sure you’ve got electricity by the end of the night and I’ll get you all set up with all the rest of the essentials – gas, phone, whatnot – by the end of the week. Um, and I’m sure you know that the rules have all changed since, well . . . anyway we can talk about that later.”

They hugged again and then Meg headed towards the elevator. As the doors opened and she headed inside, John called out to her again.

“Meg.” She turned. “Welcome home.”

She got back to her condo and got down to work. Everything that could be cleaned was and what couldn’t be was thrown out and replaced. John was true to his word and within a few days Meg was set up again with all her pre-Apocalyptic luxuries – electricity, gas, phone, and even cable TV. Along with that he also explained that she no longer owned her condo, since Doctor Destructo now owned everything. So she’d be paying rent again. But that didn’t bother her. Eventually more diamonds would have to come out of the bag but no worries, there were still plenty more. And now that television was back on the air she was even thinking that she might be able to resume her career as a journalist.

She woke up one morning with that thought in her mind when she noticed a note had been slid under her door. It said simply “Call Dr. Richter. Ask him about his work.” Printed underneath was a phone number.

She sat down on the couch and regarded the note curiously. The world had just started to make a small amount of sense again and now this. She started contemplating what to do, but knew almost immediately that not calling wasn’t going to be an option. Curiosity doesn’t kill the cat every time, but it does eventually because the cat is always curious. She picked up the phone and dialed. He answered on the third ring.

“Hello”

“Hello, is this Dr. Richter?”

He hesitated for a second. “Yes”

“Dr. Richter, my name is Meg Courtland and this is probably going to sound crazy but I . . .”

“You got a note that told you to call me.”

“Yes; is it from you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then how did you know?”

“I received one as well. It said ‘You will be contacted by Meg Courtland. Tell her about your work.’ I thought that maybe it was from you but I could already hear in your voice that you were as surprised as me. So what did your note say?”

“The same thing essentially. That I was to call you and ask you about your work. So what can you tell me?”

She heard Dr. Richter exhale audibly.

“I’m really not sure. At the present time I’m not doing anything that most people would consider to be cutting edge or even very interesting. Certainly nothing that warrants these kind of cryptic messages.”

Meg bit on her thumbnail and thought for a minute. This didn’t seem to add up. She sighed.

“Well, we certainly can’t rule out the possibility that somebody’s just decided to screw with us. But maybe you should tell me more about your current work anyway and we’ll just see where it takes us.”

“Mostly I’m doing basic genetic research, which might sound high-tech and glamorous but in reality it’s a lot of repetition and crunching numbers. Mainly we’re trying to work out genetic markers that will tell us which people are at greater risk for certain illnesses so we can give them an early warning sign.”

Meg started to pace.

“Well, I’m a journalist. Or at least I was one before . . .before. Maybe somebody wants me to publicize your work more. Are you close to any breakthroughs?”

Dr. Richter laughed.

“If I am that’s news to me. I can’t imagine the headline ‘14th chromose linked to additional 2% risk of irritable bowel syndrome’ moving too many papers off shelves. In all honesty, I can’t say that I’ve been a part of anything very interesting in the last 10 years. Not since my time with the Captain, God rest his soul.”

Meg froze and her heart suddenly shot down into the pit of her stomach.

“What?!?!”

Dr. Richter could tell he’d hit on something.

“Captain Invincible. He volunteered to do some tests for us about 10 years ago.”

“What do you mean? Tell me everything” Her voice took on a little bit of a desperate tone and her hand started shaking involuntarily.

Dr. Richter could sense it and he started to get a little excited too.

“Oh . . .well, I, uh, didn’t think that you meant that. I mean it was reported on very heavily at the time. At least in the scientific journals. But I suppose it never got as much mainstream coverage as we thought it deserved, probably because everything that we found just led us to have more questions. In any case, obviously everyone always wondered what it was that gave him all those incredible powers. Well, it turns out that no one wondered more than the Captain himself. I was doing research for John Hopkins Medical School when he contacted us one day. Would we be interested in running some tests on him to see if we could formulate any theories on why he was the way he was? I don’t think I need to tell you how quick we jumped to say yes to that question. The man – if you can call him that – was a scientific marvel. The ultimate research specimen.”

Meg cringed to hear Terry dehumanized in this way but decided not to speak up.

“So the whole staff pretty much instantly dropped everything else they were doing to concentrate on him full-time. We ran him through every test and medical examination we could think of. He gave us so much data that my grandchildren will still be sorting through it.”

Meg sat down on the couch and frowned slightly.

“You said that the whole staff was involved in examining him?”

“That’s right. About 50 of us.”

“Were you in charge of the whole project.”

“Oh no! That’s for the bureaucrats – the ones who have put in their time in the lab and don’t feel like getting their hands dirty anymore. No, I was only a few years out of school then so I was down on the front lines.”

“Well the note wanted me to contact you specifically. Who knows, maybe you’re the only one that whoever wrote it knew how to get a hold of. On the other hand, maybe it has to do with your specific role in the experiments on Ter . . . er Captain Invincible. What exactly did you do with him?”

“Oh that.” And now Dr. Richter’s voice swelled up a bit and Meg could hear the pride in it. “At that time my principle concentration was on the mind and memory. We had an ambitious goal – to completely map out the mind and record all the memories of one person. We knew that the technology was there but there had always been one thing that stood in our way – funding. No one wants to pay money to completely record the entire life of your average Joe Sixpack, but this was our perfect chance. Everyone would be interested in having a record of the most powerful man in the world for all eternity.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened was that we succeeded! I’ve still got the complete mind and memories of Captain Invincible captured on 192 DVDs at my research facility in Baltimore.”

Meg’s jaw almost hit the floor.

“My god! How is it that no one ever heard of this?”

“Well, it was classified for a while. For obvious reasons the government decided it wasn’t a great idea for everyone to know that the most intimate secrets and inner workings of our savior and protector were available for anyone to peruse. Then there was the problem that apart from scientific curiosity, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do with it for a while.”

“What do you mean ‘for a while’?”

“Well, the mind is certainly the most important thing but without the body it’s not all that useful. Sure we could have tried to hook it into some computer program and develop an advanced AI, but that’s not really my field. So we were a bit stuck. That is, until we heard about Dolly.”

Meg tried to remember where she had heard that name before. Then it hit her.

“The cloned sheep?”

“Exactly.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Once we knew for sure that it was possible to clone based purely on a DNA sample, that opened up a world of possibilities for us. We could now reproduce the body that we didn’t have before. Now the data that made up our mind had a destination! All that remained was to figure out a way to implant the data into it.”

“So what happened? Did you do it?” Meg was almost getting delirious. Was there a possibility that there was another Captain Invincible out there somewhere? Another Terry?

“Unfortunately not.” Meg’s heart sank. “For one thing we never solved the problem of transferring the data onto a real mind. But that’s a problem that could have been overcome. No, the real problem was both a practical and ethical one: getting Captain Invincible’s DNA. Sure we could have invited him over and scoured the floors for a few hair follicles after he left, but that wouldn’t have been right. So we told him about our research and asked him and he said no. Can’t say that I blame him. Not sure I’d want another one of me walking around somewhere either while I was still around.”

“So wait a minute, are you telling me that it’s still possible? That if you somehow had his permission that you could still do it?”

Dr. Richter waivered.

“In theory yes, but practically speaking it’s just not possible. It’s not a problem that he died; the problem is how he died. He was vaporized in a nuclear blast. Any DNA that survived would have been scattered over a 200-mile radius.”

Meg shot up off the couch, her eyes wide.

“But if you had an intact sample; something that was pure and undoubtedly his . . .”

“If I had that and a few million dollars to get my lab up and running again, I could make you another Captain Invincible in less than 6 months.”

“I can do that.”

“What? How?”

But Meg had already hung up the phone. She raced into her bedroom and to the wall safe. She knew just what she was after. She reached in and grabbed the jewelry bag. Who knew that something much more valuable than diamonds was inside? Certainly even a superhero, in the act of crushing a lump of coal into a diamond, would shed a few skin flakes, right? Meg removed the bag gingerly and walked over to the table. She dug out a magnifying glass and began her search. Somewhere in this bag she would find a piece of Terry to bring to Dr. Richter. It was hard to imagine that something so tiny could have the power to change the world forever.

The next day she called Dr. Richter to tell him she thought that she had what he needed. He told her that he woke up this morning and discovered another envelope slipped under his door. In it was a check for $5 million.