Brian Hodge - Prototype

It all worked out well, and shaped direction in a life that had for its first forty years seemed to him to be absolutely without meaning.

Chicago-born, Chicago-bred, Patrick Valentine had grown up, if not the toughest boy in his surrounding neighborhoods, at least the fiercest. His furies knew no logic, they were just there, so much a part of him that childhood acquaintances who committed no mayhem seemed another species entirely. Life was something to be consumed, not savored, then shit out as quickly as possible. Years of turmoil and restless energy and a formless anger had brought him nothing but welts across the back from a distraught father who continually threatened disavowal, and a succession of run-ins with the law.

What a strange, strange lad. What a disappointment. He was educated, but not civilized. He looked in the mirror and saw only the dimmest capacity for greatness, buried in the roughest ore.

Great men must first become great masters of themselves, and connections eventually formed in his mind. The blue uniform that had heretofore meant only trouble gradually took on an air, not of mystique, but of practicality. Here was a channel for his violent exuberance. Here was a job he could love.

The Chicago Police Department was a most unexpected choice to those who knew him.

He applied. He was accepted. He was amazed.

The feel of the baton, the comforting weight of the service revolver… these became extensions of himself. They were the distillations of potent rage given a vessel to contain it. That he represented law and order was incidental. Far better was that he had been given both a license to inflict controlled miseries upon those whose word could never stand up to his own, and a support system that backed him up when there were doubts. Valentine knew no fatigue when it came to subduing the guilty with bruising ferocity. He was respected by some, reviled by many, and feared by all, but the opinions of others had always been of low priority.

Six years it lasted, this urban bounty of bleeding heads and broken bones, cowering lowlifes and intimidated lovers. Six years before termination for repeated use of excessive force; you really had to be a monster to get the pink slip from this outfit. He tried to take the turn of events philosophically — only so many complaints could be lodged before the scales tilted inevitably against him. He’d had a fine run.

As well, he had long since taken measures to ensure a bonus to his income, a supplement with the potential to far surpass any paycheck the city of Chicago would ever cut him.

He had found the streets and weedy lots and decayed tenements to be a blue-steel cornucopia. Guns were everywhere, yet it seemed there was no end to the demand — a fine paradox. No gun made it to the evidence room if it could be avoided. Even those that did were occasionally misplaced. Shakedowns of suspects led to confiscations, as easy as picking apples from a tree.

It was a good racket. Investment was nil; the proceeds, 100 percent clear profit. His day job was such that he was in frequent touch with those who made the best customers, and some of them led him to connections greater still. By the time Valentine was fired from the police department, he was already masterminding break-ins at National Guard armories and manufacturer warehouses to truck away heavyweight hauls. Within another three years, he was plugged into an underground pipeline capable of supplying demolitions ordnance, rockets, mines, mortars, nearly everything that dealt a lethal blow short of nuclear.

Eternal demand, infinite supply. He had stumbled upon the one business that remained untouched by the whims of fickle economies. So long as one took precautions to avoid federal scrutiny, it was a seller’s market. The groups all but lined up and took numbers: slothful insurrectionists and supremacist militants, international terrorists, private mercenary armies out to create third-world bloodbaths, and, after he had relocated operations to Boston, the IRA.

He took no sides, took only the rewards, but even the money paled beside the hypnotic thrill of tuning in news footage of some trouble spot in the nation or halfway around the world and knowing he might have contributed. Here, the flaming wreckage around a car packed with a quarter ton of plastique; there, the stilled body of some leader cut down by an assassination squad. I am there , he would think. He would stare with sated hunger at blood sprays on walls, at churning smoke, at fragments of devastated buildings. Where others saw misery, he saw poetry. Where they mourned senselessness, he recognized the fractal chaos of inevitability.

All things tend toward entropy.

His prayer: Let them burn and let them bleed, but most of all, let them go their way.

Had he believed in the divine at all, Valentine could surely have seen himself as its instrument; but he did not. He was but a man of his world and his times — to an extent a self-made man, but augmented, he came to understand, by deviant biology.

A decade ago, while in his mid-thirties, he had survived another facet of the world’s patterned chaos. A malignant tumor had taken root in his scrotum and claimed both testicles before being excised. In the years to follow, while cancer stayed a vanquished foe, the obsessions it had inspired remained. Patrick Valentine could not get enough medical magazines written for the serious layman. Disease was fascinating. Disease was systemic failure that broke down the status quo.

Four years ago he had come across an article on misbegotten chromosomes and their exploitation in the sentencing hearing subsequent to a murder conviction in Texas. The name of Mark Alan Nance sparked dim recollection — a robbery and shooting spree, three days of outlawry in and around Houston. He’d had his fifteen minutes of infamy, then been forgotten by all but those involved.

Don’t sentence my client to death, the defense attorney was arguing, because he could be genetically predisposed to commit the crimes for which he’s been found guilty. Several months before his rampage, Mark Alan Nance and his wife had been genetically tested to determine why they had conceived a child with severe birth defects, a child that had eventually died. While the abnormalities had been traced to the maternal bloodline, Mark Alan Nance had exhibited an unrelated deformity never suspected, not even known of until two years prior.

It was the first time Valentine had ever heard of Helverson’s syndrome.

The article cited comparisons between the defense attorney’s wrangling and trials conducted in the late sixties in which reduced sentences were requested for convicted murderers who had double-Y genotypes. Nance’s attorney must have done his homework well. Many of the arguments were the same as those of twenty years before. Unhappy case studies of the scant handful of known Helverson’s subjects were introduced as evidence.

But in the end, the Texas courts were unforgiving. Death row for Mark Alan Nance.

The arguments in mercy’s favor and the portrayal of Nance’s miserable life — social malcontent, uncontrolled rages, emotional cripple — rang enough common chords that Valentine began to feel a strange kinship with the convict, loser though the man may be. Above all, though, he had been riveted by the single jailhouse photo accompanying the article.

He looks exactly like I did at his age.

The article had mentioned a certain physical similarity among Helverson’s progeny.

It was enough to drive Valentine to a private investigator, paying him well to compile data on the top researchers at MacNealy Biotech, the site of Helverson’s original discovery and the primary data bank for its subsequent research. Most looked far too clean to even consider approaching with the kind of offer he was planning. Among them, surely at least one would possess less than bedrock ethical foundations… but which to choose? One wrong selection and he might never get another.