information. He was short and blond and had a strut that might have suited Napoleon himself.
Chellis followed him to double doors over which hung a sign indicating MOLECULAR BIOLOGY. Inside, a second set of doors was marked PRIMATE WING NEUROLOGY.
They stopped in a large room with multiple cages housing pigtail macaques. In all there were six. Four appeared completely normal.
Behind a plate-glass stood a large cage outfitted with gray tree trunks, rope swings, and a multilevel climbing frame. An obvious effort had been made to introduce natural elements to the enclosure.
“Aren’t these critters mostly terrestrial?”
“More than most but they are still monkeys.”
To one side of the plate-glass was a door that admitted them to an area immediately outside the cage that contained four chairs, small writing desks, and a console. Housed in the cage were a male macaque, Centaur, and a female, Venus. Centaur busily groomed Venus, his eyes concentrating on his fingers as they picked through her coat. Each monkey wore a harness with a small pack in the center of its back. Standing by was a young man dressed in a khaki uniform.
Jacques walked to the console. “Where we can control everything and have instant injection of the various juvenile hormones, we are making rapid progress in our behavioral studies,” Jacques began. “Of course to get the range of behavior that I will now display, we need to have altered neurons from several regions and a direct-access IV drip of the various juvenile hormones. Note Centaur’s calm demeanor.” Jacques reached to the console and typed in a code.
Centaur sat back on his haunches, yawned, and looked out at them, Buddha-like, as if he were gazing into eternity.
“He looks like the Dalai Lama,” Chellis joked. “I understand macaques are cannibals.”
“No. That’s chimps you’re thinking of. But then people are cannibals if they are hungry enough.” Jacques punched in another command.
Centaur began vocalizing and pacing up and down the cage, stretching his arms and making breathy screeching sounds. Again Jacques punched in a code, and the monkey began racing at the bars and screaming with a blood-lust trill. Suddenly he charged Venus, who at first cowered, then ran to a perch in the tree. Centaur followed. When he arrived at the perch, he stood over her, shrieking. Again Jacques typed a code, and the male grabbed the female, attempting to push her from the perch; a fight erupted, and quickly Jacques typed in another code.
Immediately Centaur sat on his haunches as if nothing had happened. After a moment he climbed down and approached the female, who was still trembling and baring her teeth in a grimace.
“That’s actually a submission display.”
“It looks like she’s pissed.”
“No, that means she’ll play ball by his rules.”
Methodically he began once again grooming her, and gradually she calmed.
“And what if you had not canceled the last command?”
“He would have become progressively more agitated and aggressive until he killed her.”
“Very impressive. When will it be ready for the real world?”
“Don’t know. We’re working on it. What you observed is much more advanced in the mood control than we can get without IV access. And of course we placed the receptors over a long period and with much trial and error. We went through five animals.” Jacques stepped away from the console. “Jason Wade is a phase one. These animals are phase three. We use both activating cells and suppressor cells in many cell types.”
“Let’s go get some lunch,” Chellis said.
Jacques did not care for cafeterias, so they adjourned to a conference room adjoining his office that each day was turned into a private dining room, where he entertained various researchers and high-level staff. Chellis was perfectly happy to eat in the cafeteria, and even enjoyed the curious glances of all the employees, but he deferred to Jacques when in Kuching.
Chellis only visited every couple of months, and he appreciated that with Jacques running the facility more frequent visits weren’t necessary. Benoit Moreau, his assistant and his mistress, came a little more frequently. Marie, Chellis’s wife, didn’t care for Malaysia, and although, for appearances, he did not like traveling alone with Benoit, he would not be without a woman. That was the main reason he’d assigned Benoit to monitor Kuching. She had been his assistant for eight years and his mistress for seven of them, and therefore only occasionally resided in Kuching. Chellis’s life was further complicated by that fact that Benoit was Marie’s sister.
This trip he had Benoit meeting with the heads of each department to obtain research summaries and to keep her away from the macaques demonstration.
“You don’t think the aerosol is ready yet, even if we just limit ourselves to a phase-one paranoia continuum.”
“Not quite.”
“If we want only to achieve phase one on Samir with a simple paranoid continuum, do we need to put him to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“But you know the effect?”
“We’ll get the receptors, but the magnitude of the effect isn’t completely dear. It’s a question of how well the gene expression comes through, which depends primarily on the volume of vector particles. And frankly, the human will has incredible powers of adaptation. The mind with all its abilities is created by an odd composite of neuronal activity. The neurons, billions of them working together, trillions of interconnections create consciousness, but they are not consciousness. People can literally sometimes think their way or learn their way out of a change in physiology. Maybe we could say that training or thinking creates physiology. In the end physiology wins.”
“So if I go ahead with my little plan, we don’t know exactly how good the result will be on Samir?”
“That’s right.”
“But he will be nervous.”
“Yes. It would be shocking if he weren’t at least somewhat paranoid. Especially for the first few months.”
“But not completely crazy. And we alone can provide him relief.”
“It should make him a lot more manageable. We will see. You know I can guarantee nothing. We are reasonably sure but we don’t have the controls, and the volume for a human-sized mammal remains a question.”
“I know. I know. But let’s do something.”
“Imagine what you could do to a head of state, or an entire parliament…”
Chellis didn’t mind Jacques’s probing; he wasn’t going to get anywhere with it.
“Is the gas chamber foolproof?”
“You must get him placed between the nozzles. If you don’t we’ll have to try again on the way back, maybe use force and rely on memory blockers.”
“Samir should be here any moment; I need to get to my office.”
“You could use mine,” Jacques said.
“No. No. I don’t need to impress this man.”
When Samir entered Chellis’s office, Chellis stood and greeted him in quiet tones. Samir was a big man, thick like a wrestler with glasses like Coke bottles, and an aura of confidence that was palpable. They had met for the first time fifteen years earlier, and since then had actually met face-to-face on perhaps a dozen occasions. They had become not so much friends or acquaintances as uneasy joint venturers, each keenly aware at any given moment of what the other might hold for him.
“Well,” Chellis said, interrupting the mutual pleasantries. “I know you’re a busy man and would no doubt like to get on with business.”
“I’m not like the Orientals who require an hour’s socializing before getting down to work,” Samir said, “but I do need to see what you’re developing so I can begin thinking about how we might employ it.”
“I’d like to ask that only you view the demonstration. It’s top secret.”
Samir hesitated but was unreadable. “My men can wait outside the door?”
“Of the molecular biology wing.”
