But at the same time, I knew that whatever bad there was to come was better than the alternative. The worst had been averted. Close on the heels of that hope came grief, for Dymphna and Del, Reverend Calkin and the others, even Stan, whose life I mourned as much as his death. It was all so sad.
I held the kiss because I wanted to, because I was desperately relieved that Rex was okay and also because I needed time to get my emotions under some semblance of control.
When we finally parted, I helped Rex to his feet and we looked at the chaos surrounding us. The cube was gone, reduced to shards. The office was shot to pieces. To our left was the new Wellplant sculpture garden: Howard Wells, along with dozens of his commandoes and the FBI agents, all standing there immobilized, except for their rhythmic breathing and occasional blinking. To our right, the windows looked east over the city and across the river to New Jersey. With all the smoke, the blinking lights and the dense, frenetic drone and copter traffic, it seemed like a war zone.
“So…I guess we stopped them?” Rex asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We did.”
“Looks like a lot of work to do out there.”
“Yeah, it does.”
We stood there looking out at it for a few minutes, then an agent I didn’t know walked up to us, an African American woman whose tag said MUNROE. “Jimi Corcoran?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Your mother is downstairs, waiting outside. She’s, um, kind of agitated.”
Rex laughed. “That was fast.”
“She saw the caller ID when I called,” I told him. “She must have left as soon as we got off the phone.” And driven at twice the speed limit.
“We can’t release you, yet,” Munroe said, “but I can escort you down if you want to see her.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That would be great.”
As we followed Munroe toward the elevator, the medical team was just starting to load the immobilized Plants onto stretchers: wheeling the stretchers up to them upright, strapping them in place, and then tilting the stretchers back.
I wondered if the Plants could see us, hear us. I knew the malware had frozen their motor functions, but I imagine their senses still worked.
They were edging a stretcher up behind Howard Wells, when I stopped in front of him.
I also didn’t know how much of him was left in there anymore, and how much was the network. At the end, he wasn’t saying “I” or “me” or “my,” he was saying “we,” and “us,” and “ours.” But the network was down now. If he was in there, he was in there alone.
I stepped closer and looked into his eyes. “I don’t know how much of this was on you, and how much was your…your creation, but I want you to know, it didn’t work. And I’m nothing like you. Neither was Dymphna. We have nothing in common with you. She was disgusted by you, by what you’d become. She told me so herself.” I shook my head. “You had such gifts—intellect and wealth and power. You could have made the world a better place. You could have fixed what was broken, made sure there was enough for everyone. But instead you made it worse, trying to kill billions to make sure there was plenty for you and your chosen few. And using hatred and fear to do it.”
As they tilted him back, I leaned over him, making sure his eyes were on me. “Dymphna was about love and compassion,” I said. “And that’s what triumphed. That’s why you lost.”
FIFTY-SIX
The destruction of the world as we knew it had been stopped, or at least postponed. But it wasn’t really a time for celebration. The climate was still a mess, and as Howard Wells himself said, perverse as it was, by thwarting his plot—which was ghastly and terrible and needed to be thwarted—we had also thwarted the closest thing there was to a concrete plan to fix it. And while we had prevented the widespread release of Wells’s super-flu, what was already out there was tearing through the population.
Philadelphia had been one of the hardest-hit places in the first big flu pandemic, back in 1918, and it was the hardest hit this time, too. Even with the news blasting out the message that contact with chimeras would make people immune, it took weeks for Dymphna’s chimera virus to outpace Wells’s super-flu and choke off its supply of fresh victims. In that time, millions of people got sick, and many of them died.
People died from the Wellplant crash, too, and everyone involved faced weeks of tough questioning. This was not like after Pitman or Omnicare, a couple of stern interviews and then that’s that. We were held in custody for weeks—me, Rex, Claudia, and Ogden, plus Roberta, Sly, and Dara; and, from what I heard, Martin and Gary and Audrey and the rest of the Chimerica council, as well.
Around the world, folks with Wellplants were gathered into special hospital wards set aside to care for them. After a week or so, one by one, they began to snap out of their comas or fugues or standby modes or whatever, and they acknowledged the horrors of what they had almost done, and expressed gratitude at having been prevented from doing it. They also described being passengers in their own bodies, in their own brains, as their humanity, their individuality, was overwhelmed by a superior force. It was only then that the heat on us began to let up, and it was recognized—unofficially, of course—how essential our actions had been. But Marcella DeWitt made sure I got it in writing that there were no arrests, or anything like that, on my record.
Having been temporarily freed from their implants, most of the Plants realized how much they had been changed by their Wellplants, controlled by them. They had them removed voluntarily, despite the clear risks of doing so. Chris Bembry, as one of the newest Plants, had a fairly easy recovery. After a few months of physical and occupational therapy, he was pretty much back to his old self.
Wells, as the earliest adopter, had the hardest road ahead of him. He regained the ability to walk and talk, but his brain had grown so dependent on his Wellplant that he was left terribly impaired. Still, he insisted he made the right choice in having it removed. For the first time since he implanted the prototype, he was free to be his true self. That would be the extent of his freedom, probably for the rest of his life. He was charged with dozens of crimes, multiple counts of each, some I’d never even heard of. He pled guilty to pretty much all of them. Some thought that was proof he was too mentally impaired to stand trial or advocate on his own behalf. Others said it was because his Wellplant itself provided overwhelming physical evidence of his crimes. But even spending the rest of his life in jail, he said, he was freer than he had been in decades.
Not surprisingly, he was not elected president.
The government declared Wellplants unsafe and issued a recall, which was wending its way through the courts, opposed by the handful of people who wanted to keep their Wellplants.
Many questions remain unanswered about what exactly happened with the Wellplant network. Had the network become a sentient being? And if so, what happened to it? Could it remain sentient once detached from all those brains, or were those brains an essential part of the network?
The U.S. government confiscated all the removed Wellplants in America, to study them, they said. Other countries followed suit, prompting another wave of lawsuits, this time in the international courts, about state secrets, intellectual property rights, and national defense. People were seriously freaking out about what the Wellplant network had become and who got to keep what pieces were left of it.