Law Of The Gun 019: "New Babylon"

All this rumble made the research regress drastically. First, the patients had to be relocalized. The ones that were ongoing treatments first. Moving them around in the state they were in was no easy task. Life support is a magnificent invention, but if someone had an incurable heart, lungs or brain disease, life support had its limitations. Stability, stillness could compensate a bit, but the attention to detail was critical. Moving giant glass coffins full of conservation fluids was out of the routine for someone it between death and immortality. Any wrongdoing could make the balance toggle the wrong way. The business being still underground and illegal, one had to go where the money was and ask as few questions as possible.

The faceless man was not without a heart though. He organized frigorified convoys with a full life support unit inside. Three coffins at the time, so the move to the new location took only three hours and was done with minimal losses. Two patients had been toggled towards death. One had rotten blood and the other was in the process of beating a generalized cancer. They were risky patients anyway, they knew what they were getting into, the doc told himself while getting moved in a normalized urban car. He was just happy he has still seven patients to work with. That was still seven more tries to achieve a perfect success. He was getting tired of the gimps and failed experiments, but his technique was getting more refined and his research more documented so each one of his painful failure was one step closer to the ultimate truth he was looking for. He felt it, he felt the truth lumbering, looming over him with the slow thud of a giant.

He couldn't have got there without the help of the faceless man though. He had been the driving force and the main money guy behind his latest operation. For the first time, the doctor felt he had the necessary conditions to achieve what he truly wanted: Complete cellular regeneration, the elimination of tainted composition within the human body by a unique process of his invention. The mix of synthetic alcaloid material in the blood stream and the implementation of the brain zones of the (so called) consience on an microchip. His goal was to transfer muscle and cellular memory in concrete data to be encoded and transfered from body to body if needed. The first part of the Project New Eden now worked at a 60% rate. The mixture was still highly unstable, but so was the state of chemotherapy as a cure for cancer. Plus, with the mixture in the bloodstream, a patient's resistance to pain and extreme temperature was increasing by 500%.

The second part of the New Eden was a failure as of far. The only successful patient had been the faceless man himself and due to the gun sight nervosity, he completely forgot how he achieved it. Since then, the faceless man had been nothing more than a pocket fitting microchip inhabiting what used to be his former body. The first physically able specimen was going to be reserved as his new host. No matter what the ongoing patient was going to think about it, he'd remove his conscience and destroy the chip. For the moment that was what needed to be done, the replication of faceless man's success under less stressful conditions. It had been two years since it happened and success was around the corner, like the giant in the forest.

The new laboratories were better than the first. They were situated in a warehouse and the office was this small room hidden in a double wall inside the guardian's booth. This was how the doctor was used to work. With efficient secrecy. The american urban hoax had been a failure so now he was back at the good old methods that made him comfortable to work again. Patients would be screen and filtered before arriving to him. He felt very good about this and thanked the faceless man quietly. He finally understood that the American way wasn't the right way always. It had its upsides, but when it came to working undercover efficiently, the Turks knew a thing or two about it. The doctor more than the common Turkish warrior. He had learned some tricks from the Turks, the Soviet, the Afghan and the American. He considered himself like a walking library of war secrets.

By noon, the doctor could resume the work with his patients. The first one, Scott McKinney has been moderatly beat up by the transport. He was in a state of shock so he was the priority. During shock, the body loses the capacity to regulate its temperature, so the body of Scott was taking the temperature of the conservation liquids. Due to his top shelf technology, the doctor could step in at the right time to save the man from becoming a human pop scicle. His glass coffins were bleeping red when life signals were starting to dwindle. Scott was the only bleeping coffin, the doctor was relieved. There was nothing he thought he couldn't do as long as he wasn't asked to be at two different places at the same time. That would come too, but before being selfish, he had to concentrate on the others.

Stabilizing Scott took him an hour. He made sure to re-balance the mixture in his blood in order to slow down his heart rate and make him unsensitive to the cold again. No need for a big injection, that would make his body react even worse. The doctor had bypassed the stage of body rejection by developping a progressive injection machine that would adapt to the patient's biorythm. The more progressivly the patient would receive the mixture, the less he would feel the cold and the more he would regress back to the comatose state that was necessary to his recovery. McKinney was suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease so he'd need gradual, gentle surgery in order to beat his cellular debilitation.

In the back of the doctor's mind, the film of his first encounter with a post-surgery faceless man happened. The surreal impression of success was something else. He had experienced height that he never did before. Imprisonned in between two armed soldiers, in a little, cheap vinyl chair, in front of an obsolete computer, the greatest victory of his lifetime had been achieved. This green waving line on the computer was talking to him. He had done it, he had encoded human consciousness through DNA data. The drama in all that was that he was in such a hurry and fear of getting executed by the foreing soldiers that he had completely forgotten how he had done it. Natural instinct of survival. His animalistic self knew how to encode DNA, but his conscious self didn't. That's how he saw it. He saw that his destiny was into building the man of the future.

The very concept of identity would become obsolete. Why should someone bother accepting who he was when he could be anything, anyone he ever dreamed to be. The DNA encoding was only going to be the first step in the raising of a new breed of human. The doctor had been working on how to synthetize and mass produce organs, but he had to concentrate on keeping life before. On making in tangible, touchable. Life was now a consumer object and that was all his realization. He just needed to extract the information out of himself with the old fashionned way of reflection and efforts, but he had an enormous confidence in his potential as an ¨old school human¨.

As soon as McKinney was out of danger, the phone rang at the other end of the warehouse. The doctor didn't even realize there was a phone there. It was old, black, with a spinning wheel, just like in Turkey. It had the same ring too, the old organic bell one. None of that digitalized uselessness. Fear was the first feeling that gained him. Who knew he was here? Why would he need to contact him? Then, rationalization. He couldn't see who, but the faceless man would contact him. He didn't take appointments anymore. He didn't need a secretary or any unecessary staff. It was him and his patients. Him and his researches, separating him from the ultimate goal he tried to reach for so many years, immortality.

¨Hello, who's this? ¨ answered the doc.

¨Hello doctor Aksoy¨.

He recognized the digitalized voice of the faceless man.

¨Oh it is you¨

¨How are the researches going?¨

¨Well, well, the move has went good, patient number 01-47 has been destabilized, but he's out of danger now...wait...you know about that¨.

A chill went down the spine of the doctor as he heard a laugh that couldn't hide it's sinister nature through a digital encoder. Nervousness gained the doctor again. The faceless man knew about the move because he organized it himself. Plus, he never called it ¨researches¨, that term was so vulgar. He called it ¨New Eden¨ with all the pride and respect it should have. This breach of security was more important than any other beforehand.

¨Who are you?¨ he asked, afraid of the answer.