Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Read online

  He hoped it would work with his uncle.

  Some men did not react at all.

  “All right. I—promise.”

  “Good enough.”

  Brandon turned slowly and stalked out of the room.

  * * *

  At six-fifteen on a Thursday evening, two days after meeting with his nephew, Richard Praxis left his office and took the executive elevator down to the building’s underground garage. His car was in a reserved stall twenty feet from the elevator door. He thumbed his key fob, heard the cheerful bee-rup! echo against the concrete walls and ceiling, and saw his parking lights flash. He was at the driver’s side door with his hand on the latch when he saw movement in his peripheral vision.

  “Mr. Praxis?” A man in a short tan raincoat and a snap-brim hat came toward him along the row of sleek cars. Richard wasn’t sure where the man had started from, because no one had been standing anywhere near him a moment ago.

  “Yes?” he said, turning toward the stranger.

  “Phut!” The sound was barely audible, just a suggestion of a sound, compared to the chirping of his door lock. It was accompanied by a barely visible flash—or maybe just a puff of dust that caught a reflection from the overhead strip lights.

  After a second or two of sheer surprise, Richard felt a burning sensation in his lower belly, just above his groin. Only then did he realize the stranger had shot him. He could also feel a pain in his butt, as if he’d fallen on his tailbone, and realized the shot must have gone right through him.

  He was still standing, one hand on his car, but his legs felt rubbery. He suddenly remembered a lot of arteries and veins going through that part of his anatomy. His groin felt soggy, as if he had wet himself.

  The man raised the weapon—a short, dark tube—and pointed it at his face.

  “What do you want?” Richard asked. “I thought we had an agree—”

  The world exploded, taking Richard Praxis out of it.

  5. New Body Work

  At Antigone Wells’s first visit with Dr. Catherine Bellows, the plastic surgeon had made a number of scans of her head and neck. These included computerized tomography to trace the underlying muscle and bone structures. With each of the slicing x-ray images taken on one-millimeter spacing, this scan functioned as a virtual three-dimensional composite that the doctor could manipulate along the x, y, and z axes. Other scans included a full-head hologram of Wells sitting still with her face forward, like Queen Nefertiti, and a full-motion capture of her in various poses and actions: smiling, frowning, grimacing, laughing, screaming, chatting, and whispering. It was like the motion captures made of actors wearing bodysuits with strategically placed ping-pong balls or tiny points of light, except this technique used tiny circles of fluorescent paint dabbed on her skin.

  At her second visit, Wells and the doctor discussed her concerns and the available options. On a wall-sized display screen, Bellows called up these scans and used a wand to magically alter Wells’s face. By making incisions around her ears and pulling and removing excess skin, Bellows could tighten her cheeks, reduce the folds around her nose and mouth, and trim her jaw outline. An incision at her chin tightened the folds of her neck. One in her hairline lifted her forehead and repositioned her eyebrows. Others around her eyes reduced excess tissue and folding in her upper lids, removed the bags under her lower lids, and enhanced her cheekbones. With each virtual incision, the full-color hologram reacted to show a younger, smoother face—more like the face Wells had seen and touched and made up twenty or thirty years ago. Bellows then tested each of the cuts with results in the motion capture. It all seemed very real, very precise. And yet …

  “I look rather—I don’t know—pinched. Like a skirt that’s been taken in.”

  “The end result will look better than this,” Bellows assured her. “The computer image is a just suggestion and can’t entirely account for all the work I’ll be doing.”

  “What kind of work? I thought cutting and pulling were what you did.”

  “Well, I can also redistribute some of the fatty tissue, for a fuller look. Going deeper, I could reposition some of your muscles, especially along the jaw and over the cheekbones, and then redrape the skin on that new framework.”

  “I don’t know. …” Wells didn’t like what she saw. The reworked hologram had a prickliness about it, a predatory cast, like a hawk eyeing a mouse at a distance. The new Wells was not a soft-skinned girl but a hard-edged—although still recognizable and beautiful—woman.

  “How long do the results last?” Wells asked.

  “That depends on you,” Bellows said. “If you keep out of the sun and wear solar protection, avoid alcohol and tobacco use, take care of your body—but I can see you already exercise regularly—and eat a healthy diet, your face should retain this youthful appearance for five to fifteen years.”

  “That’s a long time. … I guess.”

  “We all experience the burdens of time. This will still be the skin you were born with, just enhanced and repositioned. With advancing age, your skin is destined to become thinner, weaker, and lose its elasticity. Whatever I do, gravity is still not our friend.”

  “I suppose there’s no other option. What about chemical peels, dermabrasion—things of that nature?”

  “They’re good. They’ll extend your time by a few years. But mostly these are less invasive procedures, mostly used for surface blemishes, like scarring from acne.” Bellows paused. “There is another option, but it’s new and still somewhat risky. Have you heard of the work they’re doing with stem cells these days?”

  “Have I heard?” Wells laughed. “Half of my brain and both my kidneys have been regrown from stem cells. Are you saying you can regrow my face?”

  Bellows nodded. “It’s a mixture of cells—myosatellites to generate the underlying muscle, and epidermal stem cells to create new skin. The attachment points are complex, and we must reconnect the nerves for both sensation and motor control. It’s a long surgery under general anesthetic.”

  “Have you done these stem-cell implants yourself?”

  “A few times—three cases. All experienced good results.”

  “It will be my own skin, all new? Not just old skin stretched out?”

  “Chronologically, it won’t even be your skin. Early stem-cell procedures did not address the aging of the telomeres—the little bits of code on the ends of chromosomes that count down as your cells reproduce and copy the original DNA. In the old days, the donor cells were all just as old as your body, and they continued aging along with the rest of you. Today, we treat the stem cells with telomerase, an enzyme which adds the missing sequences back to the ends of the DNA. These will be, effectively, baby cells.”

  Antigone Wells studied the images of her face on the screen—the blown-apart and excised x-ray scans, the pulled and tightened hologram. She made her decision.

  “I want the new procedure,” she said. She had done it before for her body and her brain, why not once more for a boost to her ego?

  “All right,” Bellows said. “I’ll schedule you for a stem-cell extraction.”

  * * *

  When word came from Houston that Richard Praxis had been murdered, Callie was called into a family meeting at the Praxis Engineering headquarters. Her father sat at his desk like a graven image, unmoving and unreadable. She could sense his anger and his grief but not see it in his face.

  Her nephew Brandon, who came into the room after her, clearly had not heard the news, because the first thing he said was, “Hi! What’s up?”

  Her father’s head and eyes shifted focus toward him slowly, almost blindly. “Your uncle is dead. Gunned down in a parking garage in Houston.”

  “Oh,” the younger man said. “Oh, gosh! That’s too ba-aa—”

  The elder Praxis erupted. “I thought we had an understanding!”

  “We did! I did! I gave him your message. I never touched him.”

  “What message?” Callie asked. “When did you arrange all th
is?”

  John looked at her coldly. “I sent Brandon down to meet with Richard personally. Get him to change out that Stochastic Design software with a new copy. Then to leave us—leave you—leave the family alone. No more spying. No more contact of any kind.”

  “And that’s what I told him,” Brandon said. “And he promised.”

  “If you didn’t kill him, then who did?” John stared at Callie as he asked this.

  “Maybe it was a simple mugging,” she said. “Some kind of street violence. It happens in Texas, after all, where everyone’s got a gun.” She took a breath to focus her thoughts. “And maybe he had other enemies. Richard was—you’ll have to forgive me, Dad—but he was a devious weasel. Maybe he was making a play for Tallyman this time, or some other client, and someone objected.”

  “You are the one who wanted him dead,” her father said. “ ‘Make him stop breathing,’ you said.”

  “That was my anger and confusion speaking,” she said. “I didn’t really mean it.”

  But she did, of course. Every word. She just shouldn’t have said it aloud.

  “And now it’s come true,” John said. “Now my own son is dead.”

  “Do the police have any, well, leads?” Brandon asked.

  Callie had read the newsfeed from the Houston Chronicle, as forwarded by Richard’s widow, Julia. “They say the killer used .22 caliber rounds, probably from a pistol, at close range. They were hollow points—”

  “Ouch,” Brandon said.

  “You know about this?” she asked.

  “With the right load, it’s a devastating round. Cuts you up inside.”

  “Well,” she went on, “he was shot once in the groin and once in the head.”

  “Execution style,” Brandon said. “First put you down, then finish you off.”

  “Could we please not talk about this?” John said.

  “Sorry!” Callie and Brandon echoed at the same time.

  “We have to go down for the funeral, of course,” her father said. “Comfort Julia, as well as Jeff and Jacquie.”

  “I’ll go with you, Grandpa,” Brandon said.

  “I appreciate that,” John replied. “Callie?”

  She stared at her father. She could keep a straight face in a meeting like this. But … spend a week with her sister-in-law, her niece and nephew? Recalling all the good times, remembering and idolizing her brother? And never once let her bitterness come through? Never once say what she was thinking? That was not possible.

  “Someone has to stay here and run the company,” she said. “You two go and give them my regrets. … And my condolences.”

  * * *

  The chest pains had started when John Praxis was in Houston for his son’s funeral. At first he felt a twinge, or more like a deep, internal twang, while he was sitting with the family after the ceremony. He was trying to assure them that, although Richard might be gone, and they all had not seen each other in a long time because of war and distance, Julia and the children—grown now, young adults almost Brandon’s age—were definitely still his family. They could call on him for any service, anything they needed. He and Callie and Brandon were there to help.

  At the time, he thought the pains were a reaction to something he had eaten—heartburn or some variant of acid reflux. When they persisted for more than a night and a day, he considered briefly that the intermittent spasms and the continuing ache might be some aspect of his grief, manifesting itself psychosomatically. But after the agony he had felt on the golf course all those years ago—what? thirteen years? fifteen now?—he couldn’t fool himself. The pain was real. Something had gone wrong with his heart again.

  When he and Brandon returned to San Francisco, he made an appointment with his internist, Virginia Mills. After taking the routine diagnostics of blood pressure, pulse, and blood oxygen, she listened to his chest and asked about his symptoms.

  “Burning … aching,” he replied. “Kind of a heaviness.”

  “Any soreness in your arms or neck?” she suggested.

  “Sometimes, but mostly centered in the chest area.”

  “Your chart shows you’ve had a heart implant …”

  “I was one of the first,” he told her proudly. “Done right here in San Francisco. Within a year I was running marathons. I felt like I had the heart of a year-old baby.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows came together. “Well, not exactly.”

  “Are you telling me I didn’t get a new heart?”

  “Oh, no. I’m sure you got a freshly grown organ. But with those early treatments, the doctors focused more on the basics of technique—culturing the stem cells, giving them the right chemical growth signals, constructing and loading the armature—and so they missed some of the subtleties. Any cell that came out of your body then had the exact chronological age of your body, which was what? Mid-sixties?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  “We’ve since learned to reset the chronological age of extracted stem cells by rebuilding the telomeres, effectively making them younger. The doctors did that with your more recent regenerative treatments. But back when you got your new heart, we didn’t understand the importance of those little bits of DNA. And early researchers into cellular regeneration were getting mixed signals from the cancer crowd, suggesting that telomerase—the enzyme that adds back those fragments—might cause the cells to become cancerous. We’ve learned a whole lot more now and can handle the enzyme without creating monsters.”

  “But this heart?” he asked.

  “Is aging naturally, along with the rest of your body. I can run some tests, but I think they’ll just show you’re getting the normal deterioration—muscle thickening, arterial dissection, plaque buildup—that comes with growing old.”

  Praxis could hear angel wings fluttering in her voice, soft as clods of earth falling on his coffin lid. “Is there anything you can do?”

  “Oh, sure! Grow a new heart—a better model this time—then crack you open and pop it in.”

  “And how long will this new heart last?”

  “Oh, years and years. It really will be a young heart now.”

  “To go along with my gracefully aging body?”

  Dr. Mills grinned. “Take care of yourself and you could go on for—oh, I don’t know—” She beamed at him without saying more.

  “Indefinitely?” he suggested.

  “Something like that.”

  * * *

  After his third date with Penny—real dates, not just business discussions as an excuse to have lunch: dinner and a movie, dinner and a dance club where the bouncer recognized her, Sunday brunch and a stroll in Golden Gate Park—Brandon Praxis knew it was time to make a declaration.

  “You know, Penny—”

  “What do you suppose that is?” she asked. They were walking through the Museum of Modern Art on Third Street. When he looked up, Penny was pointing at a pile of polished wooden blocks, oak or maple or some other light-colored wood, about three feet high on the black-tile floor ahead of them.

  “I don’t know. There’s a card on the wall behind it.”

  “Would it tell me anything I don’t already know?”

  “The artist’s intentions, maybe,” he said, squinting at it.

  “You take a guess,” she insisted, “without looking.”

  “Well … children’s blocks? Something about interrupted childhood?”

  “A really cool construction?” she offered. “A castle or a cathedral. And somebody just knocked it down?”

  “A really cool piece of art—a big ceramic, maybe—that the blocks were holding up. And somebody just stole it?”

  She turned to look at him. “Not bad, sir. Not bad at all.”

  “Penny, look. Uh … You know I like you.”

  “Whups!” she said. “Here it comes.”

  “What?” He was confused.

  “The dump speech.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  She took his hand and
led him over to a bench, sat down herself, and pulled him down beside her. “You like me? Sure. And you’ve shown it how? Kind of a shoulder squeeze, once, after we cracked open that lying piece of shit software your uncle installed. One tentative good-night kiss—a nice kiss, but no follow-up—on our second date. And one hug in the daylight, the sort you’d give when you’re sending Aunt Maude off to Des Moines. … Brandon, are you gay?”

  “No! Oh no! It’s just—what I’m feeling—it’s not just about sex.”

  “Well, that’s good, because it hasn’t been about sex, has it?”

  “I was raised—that is, we go slower … Do you want sex?”

  “You can’t ask me that! How do I know? Make your move.”

  There was only one answer to that. He wrapped his arms around her, low below her elbows, pulled her closer, and kissed her. Hard. Then he released one hand, passed it under her thighs, lifted her onto his lap for a better angle, and kissed her again.

  “Ahem!” The sound came from some distance away. “Ahem!”

  Brandon and Penny both turned their heads, breaking the kiss, and looked up. One of the uniformed guards was staring at them from beyond the far end of the bench and wagging a finger.

  They turned back to look at each other. He shrugged. She grinned. And he kissed her again, another long kiss that only ended by mutual consent. But still she made no attempt to pull away.

  “Whew,” Penny whispered.

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  The guard was starting toward them, so she slid off his lap, stood up, and straightened her skirt. He stood up beside her and took her hand when it drifted free.

  “Shouldn’t we be making some kind of plans?” he suggested.

  “You mean, ‘your place or mine?’ Moving in? Wedding bells?”

  “Any of the above. All of the above. Anything you want.”

  “My mother taught me to go slow, too, you know.”

  “I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said.

  “Your grandfather and aunt hate me.”