Prototype by Brian Hodge Page A

true.
    Clay learned to appreciate the irony: Even among their small, pitiful ranks he did not wholly belong.
    For he alone recognized the fundamental truth that people seem to function best when they have someone to hate. Nothing else stirs blood so energetically, or heats such emotion. Nothing else motivates with such ferocity. Nothing else flickers so brightly in dying eyes.
    Crusades had been launched and wars declared, lands besieged and races exterminated, because someone had refined their hatred of the different, of the other , into something they could wield as effectively as a weapon. It was progress.
    And there were times when Clay wondered, if there really was a God, if He hadn't created the world because He’d already known He would hate it.
    These things the teenage Clay understood, day by day, year by year. Every fresh scar carved upon his body, and drop of blood spilled, and each tear that squeezed free of his eye, just seemed to confirm it.
    Tears…? Even these. A world ignored may react with indifference, but a world hated seeks its own revenge.
    A stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet.
    With the sun fallen beyond window and horizon, Clay moved across the room to stare out into the night. The ceiling light still burned, and the glass just beyond the chain mesh became a ghostly mirror that floated against the black. There hung his face and shoulders, little more than outlines; a faint glimmer of each eye, the suggestion of his mouth, his nose; the rest obscured.
    There, against the night: a stranger to himself, a living portrait of the enemy within.

Seven
     

    Adrienne proved to Mendenhall's satisfaction that a simple genetic karyotype would break no hospital bank account, even if insurance balked, and she was given clearance to have it run.
    That Wednesday afternoon she came in early, escorted Clay down to the lab where a tech sampled his essences: a few hairs plucked from his scalp, and, to be thorough, a bit of blood drawn from his arm. Quiet and still, she gazed down as he submitted to the needle, watched it pierce skin, watched the vial fill with ruby brilliance. On his bared arm were the ghosts of old scars, five or six, white, emphatic like accent marks in a private language.
    "Today's the thirteenth," he said, "isn't it?"
    "Right." She found it fairly remarkable the way he kept track without a calendar.
    "Maybe that's a bad omen." Clay frowned as the lab tech pressed a cotton ball over the violated vein.
    "You never seemed superstitious before."
    He raised his arm for a minute, as instructed by the tech. "And maybe I'm not serious."
    Sometimes, she had to admit, it was not easy to tell.
    The samples were packaged and sent across town by courier, to Arizona Associated Laboratories' bio-med division, on University. It was out of her league, but a fascinating procedure nonetheless. As she understood, it involved taking a cellular sample — a hair follicle, say, or plasma — and chemically treating it to suspend the movement of the chromosomes in cells undergoing division at that moment. The cells were then squashed and smeared across a glass microscope slide and stained to improve visibility. The inventory of chromosomes in a single cell's nucleus was then photographed through the microscope, after which each chromosomal image was cut from the print, sorted according to size and structure, matched into corresponding pairs, then pasted into a composite photo.
    Any gross abnormality such as an extra Y sex-chromosome could not escape detection. The karyotype was a living diagram.
    They would wait, they would see, and she would prove his fears groundless.
    Later that afternoon, his session, on schedule: October sun slanting through the window, and the insistent whisper of the tape recorder, tiny cassette reels spinning to immortalize Clay's silence from the couch.
    Eventually: "You were looking at the scars, weren't you?" He wore the long engulfing sleeves of a robe but proffered both arms