Better Angels by Howard V. Hendrix Page A

Egan said as the treadmill—long since programmed by unseen medical personnel—rose in pitch, both in its angle of steepness and in the frequency of its motor’s sound. “That’s right, I am. Is there a problem?”
    “Maybe,” Paul said with a shrug. “Yesterday evening I got an unsolicited web sticky-bomb. A unfinished documentary called The Five Million Day War. By a woman named Cyndi Easter.”
    Egan Ortap gave him a pained look.
    “She must be out of re-education again,” Ortap said quietly, absently stopping his right hand before he could scratch at one of the electrode disks stuck to his chest.
    “You know her?” Paul asked. His treadmill sped up of its own accord and the pressure cuff on his left bicep inflated automatically. Somewhere a sphygmomanometer recorded his systolic and diastolic pressure as the cuff deflated.
    “Not personally, no,” Ortap said. “Only by reputation.”
    “Who is she?”
    “Some crazy political filmmaker,” Ortap said. “Subversive type. During the last crackdown, she got sent up for drugs or child molestation or whatever the cover charges were at the time. Sounds like she’s on the loose, if she’s sticky-bombing people through the infosphere.”
    As he listened, Paul could feel on his chest and sides the scratchy pressure of the plastic limpets of the cardio-monitoring electrodes. They followed his every motion and threatened to follow his emotions as well—at least as well as those might be deduced from his heart rate.
    “Ms. Easter has some interesting things to say about Tetragrammaton,” Paul said, pounding along on the treadmill. “Confusing stuff, though. She says that this problem drug I’ve heard about in the media, Ketamine Lysergate-235, is extracted from our tepui fungus, Cordyceps jacintae. Of all the ‘combined tryptamines’ from the tepui our research has uncovered, though, I’ve never come across anything that would fit the name ‘ketamine lysergate.’ Sounds like some sort of joke or code name.”
    Ortap shrugged but said nothing. Glancing down at the treadmill, Paul continued.
    “What I really don’t get,” he said, flicking a bead of sweat from his brow, “is that Easter claims she was exposed to this KL stuff while she was still in her mother’s womb.”
    “And?” Ortap prodded, carefully.
    “And from what I’ve seen in the docu-film she bombed me with,” Paul continued, “Easter’s got to be well along in her twenties at least. That documentary looks a couple years old, too. That means her mother would probably have to have been given this KL-235 as early as the 1980s.”
    “Which means—?” Ortap asked, as his treadmill sped up again.
    “My sister Jacinta didn’t make her first trip to Caracamuni until 1995,” Paul said. “I didn’t obtain a copy of the spore-print until 2002. And I didn’t go to Damon and Griego and Vang with the spore-print until a couple of years ago, 2012. So how could this KL stuff have been extracted from Cordyceps jacintae thirty years before Cordyceps jacintae was even studied in a lab? It doesn’t make sense.”
    Ortap laughed—a bit breathlessly, given how fast his treadmill was moving.
    “Of course it doesn’t,” he said. “What did you expect? Unless you’re a Kennedy you’d have to be pretty paranoid to think your family was the subject of a conspiracy—or that your life and everything that’s gone wrong with it is a product of a secret experiment. So far as I can tell, having sex was the only secret thing my parents did to having me. Everybody’s life is a product of that ‘secret experiment’.”
    Ortap inhaled heavily, then wiped sweat from his face with his right bicep in such a way that the latter motion degenerated into a shrug.
    “Easter is a paranoid crazy,” Ortap continued, “with a vendetta against the Tetragrammaton project in general and Dr. Vang in particular. She’d be the last person in the world to give you the straight story on anything.”
    Paul looked