Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“Brixton,” he said.

She nodded, slowly, sincerely. He didn’t feel bad for having said it.

After dinner, they walked to the end of the pier to enjoy the blackness over the lake. To their left was Festival Hall, part of the original pier built in 1916. He and Jackie had been married there, in the Grand Ballroom, and it suddenly struck Davis as inappropriate that he should be here with Joan. Some subconscious gremlin had caused him to make reservations at Abbott’s, where he and Jackie had celebrated a handful of their early anniversaries (although the restaurant had another name then). It was impossible that this wouldn’t have occurred to him before now, impossible that he couldn’t have seen how callous it was to be here with Joan on what amounted to, if he was being honest with himself, their first date – his first date with the woman Jackie had accused of threatening their marriage. And although Jackie might have been half crazy, about that she was at least half right.

For that reason, demonstrating what he recognized as too-little-too-late respect for the memory of his wife, Davis didn’t take Joan’s hand as they walked, and if she had expected him to, she didn’t show it. Joan, her fingers holding a light black sweater over her bare shoulders, seemed content, commenting on the wonderful smells of the shore and the pleasant breeze and the number of children about at so late an hour.

At the tip of the pier stood a crowd of maybe thirty people, staring off into the darkness. In the back a young man in shorts hopped on his toes for a better view, but all Davis could see from his six feet three inches was a couple of midsized boats – not pleasure craft, but not the massive party-and-tour yachts that docked here in the summer, either – about seventy-five yards out. They were working boats, with electronic gear and a radio dish and men in uniform scurrying on deck and men in diving gear going over the side.

“What happened?” Davis posed the question to the back of the crowd, offering it to anyone who thought they knew the answer.

“They found another girl,” somebody said without turning around. “Another dead girl.”

Davis pushed the remains of an overcooked chicken back and forth across the heavy white Prince Hotel Palm Springs catering plate. He knew he was being watched, and the scrutiny had poisoned his appetite. Every one of the three hundred or so doctors and researchers and ethicists in this room probably brought with them to this conference an opinion, rumor, or assumption about Davis Moore. He still wasn’t comfortable with the kind of celebrity he had become.

His difficulties with the Lake County state’s attorney had resolved themselves much as Graham had promised. Davis pled to a misdemeanor and paid an affordable fine, was sentenced to seven days in jail, suspended, and worked at a free clinic on Chicago’s West Side every Tuesday for six months. Martha Finn followed up with a civil suit, which Graham settled out of court for less than $75,000. Following his community service, the Congressional Board of Oversight and the AMA suspended his license for another four months, a slap on the wrist considering the full menu of their options.

When the suspension was up, however, he didn’t return to the clinic. The Chicago dailies lost interest in him after Ricky Weiss was sentenced, but the stalking charges against him became front-page news in the suburban papers. That brought him notoriety, and not just the shaming kind he expected. People sympathized with him. He had lost his daughter and his wife, and for the love of God he’d been shot himself by a religious zealot, and maybe he had crossed some ethical lines with his mysterious “study” of Justin, but no one suggested he’d been a danger to the boy, no one except for Martha Finn in her restraining order (which remained in place until Justin was eighteen).

In place of his practice, Davis accepted generous fees to speak at seminars and dinners and fund-raisers. He became a regular pundit on the Sunday television roundtables as the violence at fertility clinics became more intense and the ethics of cloning were debated with increased frequency on the front pages of newsweeklies. At the age of fifty-six and with no patients of his own, Dr. Davis Moore had become cloning’s most distinguished spokesperson.

Of course, he could never admit publicly the real reasons he quit his practice. For one, he was exhausted, weary of the violence that had now taken four of his close friends in the profession, and too tired to cope with new clinic security – the armed guards, the gated parking garage, the metal detectors, the name badges, the bomb-sniffing dogs, the drills, the threats, the bimonthly evacuations and the subsequent “all clear’s.” Even here at the conference uniformed guards stood by the exits, making and remaking every attendee, memorizing faces, and quantifying risk.

Davis also felt guilty. Guilt over the bodies of Anna Kat and Jackie and even Phil Canella, whom he never even met. Guilt over the trauma he’d caused the Finn family. Guilt over Justin, a boy who never should have been, and guilt over Eric Lundquist’s discarded DNA, the blueprint of a boy who should have been but never was.

The conference was sponsored by the California Association of Libertarian Scientists. Traditionally, they lobbied Congress on any issue related to “researcher rights,” but over the past year, as the anti-cloners in Washington gained support (up to forty-three percent in some polls), CALS had become almost exclusively a cloning advocacy group.

“Our guest tonight has made many sacrifices in the name of science,” began the introduction from a Berkeley-educated medical doctor named Poonwalla. “He has been persecuted, prosecuted, and has even taken a bullet for the causes all of us in this room hold dear. But you can’t keep a good man down, especially a good man who has right-thinking, free people like you on his side. Ladies and gentleman, from Chicago, Dr. Davis Moore.”

Davis stood up and smiled and shook hands with Dr. Poonwalla. As he took a breath and began, Davis thought of three true statements: This speech wasn’t especially good. He was a hypocrite for giving it. This audience would love it.

“There is a computer game, maybe some of your kids play it. Actually, about forty percent of the adults in this room play it every week, if the adults in this room are typical and the statistics I read in the paper are worth a damn. Worldwide, they say five thousand new players sign up every day. The game is called Shadow World.”

A murmur of recognition pulsed from table to table. Everyone had heard of Shadow World. It was the most popular multiplayer game in America. At several tables, husbands elbowed wives and wives elbowed husbands as if to say, He’s talking about you, hon. Couples who played the game together, and there were many, squeezed hands.

“I’ve never played Shadow World myself, and I don’t have any children” – Davis hadn’t meant this as an oblique reference to Anna Kat, but guests who were familiar with every part of his biography became suddenly silent, as if any noise they made would be interpreted by the speaker as pity – “but in its ads the makers ridicule other online games, in which the players take on fictional personas and go on magical adventures in make-believe lands. The Shadow World is the exact world we live in, every building, park, bus stop, and store in the thirty-five hundred cities around the world – and counting – that the TyroSoft programmers have drawn in the game to date. Within any city, you can walk or drive down most any street or alley, enter any building if the door’s open or you have a key. You can even travel from city to city through working airports and train stations and a skeletal interstate system. Every player begins the game with a character representing himself. You start with your real-world job, your real-world family, your real-world education. But in Shadow World, the player can do all the things they are afraid to do in real life. You can choose new destinies or take outrageous chances. You can ask models out on dates or tell off your boss. The price of failure is nothing worse than the forced start of a new game, beginning again as the real you, with another shot at deciding what choices will make you happy.