Chapter 8 - The Price of Creation
"Where is Binder I, Matthias?" I demanded, holding my sidearm steadily leveled at his chest.
Keller let out a low, aristocratic laugh, folding his hands over his knee. "Do you really think a few paper ledgers matter in the grand design of what we have accomplished here, Victor? You are a venture capitalist. You understand investment. You understand that true scientific breakthroughs require immense, uncompromising capital."
"You stole my daughter!" Evelyn shouted, stepping past me, her fists clenched at her sides. "You told me she was dead! You put a empty box in the ground and let me live in hell for two years!"
Keller turned his calm, analytical gaze onto Evelyn. "Your daughter was not stolen, Ms. Ward. She was requisitioned. You were an unemployed twenty-two-year-old with three hundred Swiss Francs to your name and a high school education. You could offer that child nothing except a life of poverty and struggle."
"You monster," Evelyn spat.
"In exchange for your contribution," Keller continued coldly, "the Vance Foundation paid your mother's hospice care bills in full until the day she passed away. You were compensated, Ms. Ward, even if you were too intellectually primitive to understand the contract."
"And Helena?" I interjected, keeping my weapon fixed on his face. "Did Helena know you were going to murder Evelyn to harvest her tissue?"
Keller’s expression shifted slightly, a flicker of irritation darkening his blue eyes. "Helena was a desperate woman. Her mind was already decaying from Huntington’s disease. She didn't care about the ethics of procurement; she cared about survival. She wanted a child who would carry her family's name into the next century without the curse of her bloodline."
He stood up slowly from his chair, raising his hands in a gesture of mock surrender.
"Look around you, Victor," Keller said, gesturing toward the glass tanks filling the room. "The neural tissue we extracted from Sophie’s umbilical cord at birth has yielded three major therapeutic breakthroughs for pediatric neuro-degeneration. We are on the verge of curing infant epilepsy! We are restoring sight to blind children! Your daughter's existence has funded the salvation of hundreds of lives!"
"My daughter is a six-year-old child who hasn't spoken a word in two years because of the trauma you inflicted on her!" I roared.
"She didn't speak because she was conditioning!" Keller snapped back, his smooth persona cracking. "When Helena died, the emotional tether broke! We designed Sophie to respond exclusively to specific neural stimuli—her biological mother’s voice! That is why she recognized Ms. Ward in that restaurant! It was a hardwired evolutionary trigger!"
Evelyn gasped, stepping back as the horror of his words sank in. "You... you programmed her?"
"We optimized her," Keller corrected her coldly. "And now, Victor, you have brought both key elements back to my facility. The child and the host."
He reached beneath his desk.
"Nolan! Down!" I screamed.
Keller pressed a red emergency button built into the underside of the desk frame.
Instantly, thick steel security shutters slammed down over every glass wall in the laboratory, sealing the room into an impenetrable metal box. High-voltage strobe lights began to flash wildly from the ceiling, accompanied by a deafening, high-pitched alarm siren that tore through the air like a physical knife.
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The heavy steel door we had entered through locked down with four massive deadbolts.
"Welcome to the quarantine suite, Mr. Hale," Keller’s voice echoed through the ceiling speakers as he stepped behind a reinforced bulletproof glass partition at the back of the room. "Here, the air is recycled every forty-five seconds. And in thirty seconds, the nitrogen displacement system will begin."
