Genesis Rising (The Genesis Project Book 1) Read online

  Genesis Rising

  Book One The Genesis Project

  S.M. Schmitz

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Also by S.M. Schmitz

  Genesis Rising © 2016, S.M. Schmitz

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Chapter 1

  A strange beeping sound woke me up, but I couldn’t identify its source. I slowly opened my eyes and squinted at the bright lights surrounding me. I tried to shield my eyes with my hand but couldn’t lift my arm. I struggled to raise it again and my sluggish mind began to register why I couldn’t move. You’re restrained. Your arms are tethered to this bed.

  I blinked and waited for my eyes to adjust to the unrelenting light then glanced down the bed toward my arms. They were, as I’d suspected, strapped to the cot I was lying on. I had no idea why I was restrained. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here or why I was on this bed. I had no idea why I was lying there naked with only a thin white sheet covering the lower half of my body.

  I had names for most of the equipment I could see around me now. And I had what seemed like memories, but somehow, I knew they weren’t really memories.

  But I knew things. I knew how to use an MK11 and MK13, although as I lay motionless on that bed, I struggled to recall any time I’d actually ever fired one. I couldn’t seem to find that memory, yet I was confident I could use either rifle with deadly precision.

  And I was able to pull up all of this information about close combat training, but when I tried to place myself in any of those training exercises, I was always missing.

  A tickle on my nose made my left arm twitch in response. I tried to lift my hand again and again, it was met with the resistance from the restraints around my wrists. I sighed and looked helplessly at my arm as the heart rate monitor to my right continued to beep at me.

  It was then I noticed the black mark on the inside of my forearm.

  I twisted my wrist so I could turn my arm and see the mark better. I lifted my head and tried to remember if I’d ever gotten a tattoo, and if I had, why would I have chosen this?

  It was fairly small, a rectangular black box, unremarkable in its shape and coloring. Sporadic blue lines intersected the blackness, but that was it. No other shapes or letters or implied significance.

  The origins of the tattoo, if that’s what it was, remained as completely mysterious as how I knew things I shouldn’t have known.

  I heard a door open behind me, and my heart accelerated. The heart rate monitor beeped faster in response.

  “Drake,” the man’s voice said. “You don’t need to fear me.”

  That name.

  That was my name.

  And there was something familiar about his voice.

  My heart rate slowed and the beeping slowed with it.

  His tall, lanky figure appeared at my side and he looked down at me, studying me like a specimen under a microscope.

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.

  “Do you know who you are?” he asked me.

  “You just called me Drake. Even if I didn’t know my name, I could have guessed it.”

  The man snickered and tapped something into a tablet he carried with him.

  “Why am I restrained?” I asked him.

  He glanced up at me and tilted his head. “Because you might be dangerous. We can’t allow you to move freely until we know you won’t harm us.”

  I sighed loudly and retorted, “I’m naked and disoriented. How dangerous could I be?”

  The man just smiled and kept tapping on his tablet. I wanted to snatch it out of his hands and grab him by the throat until he answered my questions… and then I realized that might be why they thought I was dangerous.

  Why did I want to hurt a man I’d just met who hadn’t threatened me?

  “You’re angry,” the man told me. “What’s made you angry, Drake?”

  “I’m not angry,” I lied.

  The man held up his tablet and turned it so that the screen faced me. “Do you see this graph? It charts your adrenaline, noradrenaline, and testosterone levels. They’ve recently spiked.”

  I swallowed and blinked at the screen. “How are you charting that?”

  The man turned his tablet back toward him and studied me again. I suspected that chart was recording another spike right now. “Do you know what you are, Drake?”

  “Tied down?” I answered. “Naked and a little cold?”

  “We’ll get you another blanket,” the man promised. “You’re our first survivor. The first successful outcome of The Genesis Project.”

  Something prickled the back of my mind and I wanted to get off this table and away from this man. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide.

  But I already knew hiding would be impossible.

  There would be no escaping this man or this place.

  “Then what am I?” I asked, my voice small and distant.

  “You,” the man said with a smile, “are a four billion dollar investment. If you work as we hope, then you are only the first.”

  “What am I?” I asked again, louder and more insistent, even though I had begun to fear his answer.

  “A breakthrough in genetic engineering,” the man answered. “Completely designed by The Genesis Project. Part human, part computer, created to be the ultimate lethal machine.”

  I shook my head to protest, but he had typed something into his tablet again and an unsettling buzzing sensation filled my head. I closed my eyes in a feeble attempt to drown it out or ignore it, but there was no ignoring the message being directed to my brain – if that’s what I actually had inside my head.

  I will not harm the men in this building. I will follow their directions. I will obey. I am not a man.

  I am not human.

  Chapter 2

  “Drake, do you understand the command?” Parker asked me.

  I knew his name now. Mike Parker.

  That annoying buzzing sensation filled my head again and I closed my eyes. “I understand,” I replied.

  I crossed the room to a shelf lined with identical boxes and picked out the fourth one to my left. I held it up to show him I’d understood what he wanted me to do.

  “Very good,” Parker acknowledged.

  I put the box back. We’d been doing this for almost an hour: inputting commands into my mind, into the computer in my head that controlled me, then demonstrating that I could follow through on those orders.

  Another man wa
ited in the room, silently watching by the door. I knew his name now, too. Eventually, they’d decide I either passed or failed their tests. If I passed, Cade would be the man who went into the field with me, and who would be able to control me with a device no larger than a cellphone in emergencies.

  I didn’t know what to make of Cade. He looked fairly young, maybe late twenties, and always watched me with a kind of horrified curiosity. He didn’t work for The Genesis Project. He’d been plucked from the elite group of SEALs he belonged to and told one day that he was being entrusted with a secret few people would ever know about. He never talked to me, but I suspected he didn’t like that I existed at all.

  And I honestly couldn’t blame him.

  I didn’t like that I existed either.

  I’d woken up almost two months ago, and I’d learned how they’d made me and why and that I wouldn’t be the last. The Genesis Project itself had cost over a hundred billion dollars so far, but each one of us averaged about four billions dollars to make. And the government thought that was a small price to pay for a man who wasn’t really a man and a machine that wasn’t really a machine.

  I was the product of advanced genetic engineering, constructed from carefully selected genomes that the Project’s scientists could pluck certain traits from and insert into a blank template. But there’s no way to control a genetically engineered human, and that’s what the Project aimed to do: create a new class of soldiers who were faster, stronger, deadlier.

  But computers can be controlled so the idea to combine organic and inorganic materials was born. Early in the gestational phase, I was cursed with the microchips that I’d never be able to rid myself of.

  None of the other fetuses survived the implantation.

  Unfortunately, I did.

  The small black mark on my arm wasn’t a tattoo after all. It was like a backup access port in case the remote access they normally used failed.

  That annoying buzzing sound filled my head again and I tried not to flinch. I tried to hide that anything ever bothered me. I was convinced if they found out I had my own thoughts, they would operate on me. I wasn’t worried about them killing me. I didn’t fear death. I feared them getting into my head and figuring out how to take away whatever free will I had.

  Pick up the last box on the shelf.

  I resisted the urge to sigh out of utter boredom and frustration and obeyed. I picked up the last box on the shelf.

  “Good,” Parker said. “I think you’re ready to move on to more challenging tasks.”

  I put the box back and glanced at Cade who still waited by the door, but he’d no longer meet my eyes.

  And I found myself wishing I’d appreciated the boredom and monotony of picking up ridiculous empty boxes.

  Six months.

  It took the men at The Genesis Project six months before they decided I could be trusted to enter the world with Cade. It wasn’t until I left their facility for the first time that I began to think I might not be as normal as I’d hoped.

  Cade still seemed uneasy around me, unsure of what to say or do, and I certainly didn’t know. I’d awakened as a grown man, most likely in my mid-twenties, and I had no experiences as a child or young adult to tell me how to engage in interpersonal relationships or how to navigate social interactions. I woke up with the knowledge they’d wanted me to have already programmed in those microchips embedded in my brain, but apparently, they hadn’t thought it was necessary or beneficial to them for me to know how to talk to strangers or how to behave around normal people.

  On the day The Genesis Project instructed Cade to take me with him to the base where he was stationed, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch since it was a six-hour drive. As soon as we stepped inside, I knew stopping had been a mistake.

  The noise and smells and sights overwhelmed me. I backed up toward the door, but Cade had already asked the hostess for a table and he motioned for me to follow him. I didn’t want to follow him. I wanted to wait in the car. I wanted to get out of this building and away from all of these people.

  But that annoying buzzing in my head started up again because they’d made sure to program me to obey any directive from Cade before I left the grounds of The Genesis Project. And my feet carried me toward him even though I didn’t want them to.

  The hostess stopped by a booth and set our menus on the table. I sat across from Cade but didn’t touch the menu. I’d lost my appetite. Televisions scattered throughout the bar area of the restaurant mixed with the conversations of the diners and for the first time in my short life, I felt nauseated. I didn’t like this new sensation.

  Cade looked up from his menu and gestured toward mine. “You know what these are, right?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I’m not hungry.”

  Cade lowered his eyes again. “You should order something anyway. This is probably the last decent meal you’re going to have for a while.”

  I didn’t pick up the menu because he’d only suggested I order something. He hadn’t actually told me I had to. The waitress approached our table and smiled at me. I didn’t smile back at her.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  She’d asked me if I wanted something to drink. Nobody had ever asked me something like that before. Employees at The Genesis Project just brought me stuff. Every meal, every article of clothing I owned, every book I’d read, had been selected for me and given to me. No one ever bothered to ask if I had an opinion on how I liked my steak or if I preferred baked potatoes over French fries.

  I had no idea how to answer her.

  Did I want something to drink?

  And if I did, what did I want?

  I looked helplessly at Cade.

  “Water,” he told her. “For both of us, please.”

  The waitress smiled at me again and asked, “And can I start you off with an appetizer?”

  The tone of her voice changed, but its meaning was as mysterious and bewildering as the rest of this experience.

  I heard Cade sigh and he answered for me again. “No, thanks. Just give us a few minutes.”

  The waitress shot him a strange look but walked away. Cade folded his menu and pushed it aside. “Drake, she’s flirting with you. Do you know what that means?”

  Of course I knew what the word meant. I had a built-in dictionary in multiple languages.

  “Why?” I asked. “I haven’t done anything to attract her attention.”

  Cade rolled his eyes and sat back in the booth. “Dude, I am not having this conversation with you,” he muttered. “Call the guys back at the Project. I don’t get paid enough for this shit.”

  “Paid enough for what shit?” I asked stupidly. I didn’t want to call anyone back at the Project. When I’d left that building, it had felt like being released from prison. But just as I’d read about prisoners who’d spent decades behind bars not being able to adjust to the world outside, I was already beginning to wonder if I’d be able to survive outside of that place as well.

  Cade waved me off and pointed to my menu again. “When she comes back just order a hamburger. We don’t have all day. We’re expected at the base by 1600, which gives us one hour to eat.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for a hamburger, but he’d just told me to order one. When the waitress returned, I had no choice but to ask for one anyway.

  She tried talking to me several more times, but I continued to ignore her. Cade watched the football game on one of the televisions and ignored me except when I stopped eating, and then he’d gesture toward my plate again and remind me we had so many minutes left before we had to leave and I needed to finish eating.

  I’d begun picking at my food again when he got the waitress’s attention and asked for our check. She wouldn’t even look in my direction now.

  I was perfectly fine with that.

  The rest of the drive to the base was completely uneventful. Cade didn’t even attempt to talk to me.

  I was perfectly fine with that, too.

  Once
we arrived on base, Cade brought me to a highly secure area where I was shown a room where I could stay while there. We wouldn’t be on base long. Our first mission was only days away. All of the information, the directives, the preferred methods for accomplishing those goals, everything, had been uploaded to those microchips in my brain already. There was nothing for me to do now except wait.

  Unlike Cade or anyone else, any other human, I wouldn’t forget a crucial piece of information. I wouldn’t overlook an important detail. I couldn’t possibly forget or make mistakes.

  They’d designed the perfect special-ops soldier.

  Except I wasn’t supposed to think.

  And ever since I’d awakened in that cold, sterile room, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking.

  Chapter 3

  A thick blanket of cigarette smoke assaulted me as soon as I walked into the bar. I spotted Cade at the counter talking to a woman and tried to get his attention, but he never looked away from her. I grunted in his direction, annoyed that I’d have to walk farther into this place where everything nauseated me. I wasn’t sure what I hated more: the smells or all the people.

  Five years had passed since that day in the restaurant when I’d first encountered crowds. I liked them as little now as I did then. I’d long speculated that I’d just been programmed not to like people, either collectively or individually. It had taken almost two years for me to get used to Cade. I supposed he was something of a friend now, but really, he was still just the man who made sure I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. He was still just the man they expected to be able to make last minute decisions in the field and redirect me when necessary.

  I never told him I’d already realized we needed to change our plans and do something differently because then I’d have to admit I could think for myself. I never told him I sometimes had reservations about what I was doing at all.

  Someone bumped into me as I neared the bar’s counter and I scowled at the woman who held onto my arm too long just to steady herself. Her smile faded and she mumbled a drunken apology.