Excerpt from my third chapter

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A lovely bit from the current chapter of my WIP sci-fi psycho-thriller, Redesigning Eva. Tell me what you think about it, if you want to.

James Ulysses Holden.
I shouldn’t recognize this face, I don’t want to see this face, but he is here. He is here, and he probably put me through all this to get me back, or some s**t like that and I can’ttakeanyofit
“It’s okay, Eva…” Holden says.
“Da… Daddy?” My voice is weak. I feel like a kid who just bruised herself really bad on the playground.
The blonde is also above me. Her eyes are bugged out and her mouth is wide open.
“Do you know this woman, Doctor?” Her question is similar in tone to something asked by a cop in a police interrogation room.
“Of course I do! This is my daughter!” Holden bellows in that unforgettable Cockney lilt.
“I guess this is one way to arrive to an interview,” the blonde says with a hint of wit.
“An interview?” I ask.
“Don’t you remember?” the blonde asks. “What do you think you’re here for?”
If I could say that I don’t know, I would. Right now, I’m reminded of a time when there was a little red-haired girl who hurt herself on the playground. She had bruised her leg after falling from a monkey bar. It was a cloudy afternoon, and the metal workings of the playground were rusted, and rough. Mom, Holden, and I were probably the only ones there.
Mom gave me a bit of advice as she was tending to the bruise. If I just think that I’m not hurting, that there’s nothing to be afraid of, the darkness will go away. I don’t know what to make of that, I really don’t.
“An interview… if that’s the case, I’d best get up, huh?” I rise, stroke my lips and put my hand back in my pocket. “I didn’t know you were working for a major corporation, Dad… I mean, Mr. Holden.”
“Please,” he replies quickly, “call me Jim.”
The doorway is a window into a dark room. Perhaps I had reason to freak out a bit.
“…and you can call me Imogen. Now let’s get on with it, shall we?” The blonde finally introduces herself. She shows me and Holden into the room. Imogen steps in, claps. The lights come on, and I see, to my astonishment, that the room has a lot of empty space. There’s a door in the back, to our left. There’s a long rectangular table, made of marble, at the far right of the room, revolving business chairs behind them. Behind the chairs is a window showing the rainy world outside. Dead center in the room is a chair akin to what you see in a dentist’s place.
“Looks like we’ve caught the worm,” I say.
“I’ll ring the necessary people. In the meantime, you can have a seat over there.”
No reply from me.
“I think it’s best that you do what she says, Ms. Elliot,” Holden says.
“Tell me about it,” I say under my breath as I head down the Green Mile.
Taking a seat in the dentist chair, I notice Imogen going behind me, to the door in the back.
“Imogen, be sure to bring out the EEGs, and make sure to get out the EKG and remote cuff,” Holden says. I hear the door in the back close, and I gulp.
There is a silence in this bright, squeaky-clean shiny room. My eyes lock on to Holden, and his eyes lock with mine. “Hell of a way to reunite with your daughter. How long has it been? Three years?”
“Four,” he replies with an assertiveness typical of a Cockney who went to John Hopkins.
“Well, what do I call you? This is a business setting, right?”
“Oh, anything you like.” He says this not with assertiveness but with passivity. He probably knows the feeling.
“Love the interior. Beats my house near the college any day.”
“Benefits of American enterprise. You couldn’t get this in my part of London,” Holden says. Now, I’m beginning to notice similarities between my speech patterns and his. Either I inherited it, or he’s messing with me. The reds of his eyes are more noticeable in the white light of the room, now more than ever. They don’t seem like business eyes. They’re more like the eyes of someone who’d been lost at sea, and had just been picked up. Who am I to judge? Figure it out.
The door in the back opens. Imogen steps out with the EEG and EKG sets, as well as the blood pressure cuff. “He said he’d be down here shortly. He’s busy in Adjustment.”
“Adjustment?” I ask.
No response from her or Holden. You know what? f**k it.
Imogen makes her way to the dentist chair. “Take off your jacket, please.”
“How did you get that bandage on your left hand?” Holden asks as I remove the jacket.
“Some dragon lady sliced it.”
Holden and Imogen look at each other briefly. It is a mutual look of surprise and suspicion.
I feel like a character in a thriller novel. Everything builds up, everything leads to everything else. How long can you leave a girl kept in the dark? Whoever’s behind all of this should be coming soon.
“Undo the top button of that shirt, will you?” Imogen asks.
I do so, like a good little girl. Imogen applies the EKG thingamajigs to my left breast. I move the bangs of my hair aside so she can put on the EEG pershnuckers. I am reminded of examinations during my long tenure in the pre-college system.
Check.
Check.
Check.
“Just like old times,” I say. Holden has no response.
“Mind if you hold your arm out for me?”
Suddenly there’s a boom, and then darkness. Save for the lights of Janus outside the windows.
“The power’s out…” Holden says.
And now, a voice: “There’s no need to worry, Dr. Holden, just as there is no need to draw blood from Ms. Elliot.” My sight turns to the doorway, in the direction of the voice. The voice is unusual, a mix of German and British, nasal in quality.
The lightning crackles outside the windows, illuminating the room in flashes. The figure in the doorway is slim, but well-built. His hair is long, stretching below his earlobes. Another flash, and I can see him adjusting his glasses. There’s a black void where his right eye is.
“Forgive the outages. They are expected to be intermittent throughout the month.”
“No s**t, Sherlock. I watch the Weather Channel.”
The black figure touches his ear: “52nd floor, outage, backup.”
The lights come on.
No.
f**k no.
“Klaus Krieger?” I ask.
“Shut the front door,” he replies, “who else?”
Another figure appears behind Krieger. “Oh, excuse me.” He steps aside. It’s the Japanese Wayfarer girl. “Ladies first,” he says with class.
The Wayfarer vixen cuts her eyes at me through the lenses. Going behind the desk in front of the windows, she grabs a seat and takes it to the corner.
“She looks familiar,” I say.
“Don’t mind Patricia. She won’t bite,” Krieger says.
“We go to the same college.”
“University California Janus,” he swiftly shoots back.
He walks to the desk, takes a seat dead in the middle, adjacent to my dentist chair. “I apologize if my arrival caused any upset. Nature is the greatest special effects man, and very punctual. You have arrived on time, Evangeline Elliot. Or is it Evangeline Holden?”
“Call me Eva.”
Imogen wraps the blood pressure cuff on my right arm. There is an Apple console on the desk, and Krieger types one handed, gray eye still trained on me. The white of it reflects the light of the room in sparkling tinges. There is something really unnerving about the sight of him, just looking at me, frenetically fingering the keyboard of the Apple like a machine operating on programming alone.
Beneath the right lens of his glasses, he slips the forefinger and birdy under that eye patch of his, rubbing whatever is underneath.
“I’m glad you came this morning,” Krieger says. “Most of the candidates and volunteers for Catharsis are yuppies or wayward wolves. Unpleasant and unfriendly, the lot. I trust that you understand why you’re here.”
“Not really,” I reply. “Actually, I’m kind of at a loss for words. Trish over there gets your blood sample, richest girl in Janus gives me a business card for this place, I get an anxiety attack on the way down the hall—“
“Anxiety attack?” Krieger looks surprised, and he eyes Holden. “Is this true?”
“Yes, Dr. Krieger, it is indeed.”
“How did you react to it?”
“I held her as she lay on the ground.” Holden gestures towards me, and he looks like he’s opening up. About what, I don’t know.
Krieger lets out a “huh” noise through his closed, perfect lips. “Tell me, Eva, how much do you know about me…?”
“Born April 28, 2062 in Hamburg. Father, Johannes Krieger, former head of Prometheus Corporation’s Anthro Division, died when you were eighteen and a half. Mother, unknown. Shortly after Dad died, you enrolled in Oxford, graduated third in your class. Nominated for the Nobel Science Prize for developing the GENEsis therapy system. That was when you were, what, my age?” I shoot all of the words out like a gun turret.
“Twenty-two,” Krieger says.
“I see that you’ve done your homework on Dr. Krieger,” Holden says.
All for you, Holden. All for you.
“Go on, Eva,” Krieger says.
“Yeah, I was just wondering why I’m here, you know. What is this Catharsis project?”
Krieger smiles as I say the word “Catharsis”.
“You can think of it as a form of therapy,” he says.
“For what?”
Krieger claps his hands, and the room darkens once more, but there remains some light so that I can see his face. Already, the cuff on my arm is beginning to tighten, thanks to Imogen. Krieger turns his chair around, and stands up as the windows go dark as well. Trish, in the corner, slides out slip of what looks like notebook paper from her right sleeve.
“You were born during the Redesign Boom of the 60’s, am I correct?” Krieger asks as he fiddles with the keyboard again.
“So were you.” The screen is now illuminated in bright blue, with a timer at the top of the screen.
“Yet Dr. Holden over there, along with your mother—may she rest in peace—insisted that they raise a Norman child, bound by human imperfection and susceptible to weakness.” Krieger says this with an eerie coldness, a detachment from the atmosphere. I look over at Holden, whose arms are crossed, his wrinkled fifty-something face showing a look both stunned and stern.
The blue screen directly behind Krieger cuts from bland blue to old documentary footage. It shows a maternity ward, incubators and glass cradles interspersed with whitecoats taking notes about trivial things, like eye color, skin pigmentation, and so on. The things that really don’t matter. There’s something really depressing, really cold about this sight. I shudder slightly.
“How does this make you feel, Eva?” Krieger asks. “Don’t be shy. Be honest.”
“Left out,” I mutter. “Disgusted really.”
“Why is that?” He asks.
“It’s like they’re being told from the moment they’re born that they won’t achieve anything, won’t be anybody.”
“Yes. Since the Human Genome Project was completed in the dawn of the century, it gradually became easier and indeed, more socially advantageous, to give our children the best traits imaginable in order to get ahead in life. I’m certain that you know of that old saying, ‘survival of the fittest.’ It’s a bit juvenile, when viewed in retrospect.”
Krieger snaps one of his gloved fingers. The footage switches from the maternity ward to a setting that is worse: a still frame of an interview room, much like this one, only there are armed cops leaning on the wall near a handsome guy about my age. His hands are cuffed, and drool is coming through his lips as if on drugs.
“Thomas Greene,” I say.
“You’re familiar with him?” Holden asks. His wrinkled face shows a look of surprise.
“Not really. We went to the same elementary school together. I remember seeing this on the news.”
Krieger makes a “huh” noise through his girly lips again. “Of course you do. As you may already know, poor Thomas had been transitioning from normal to Redesign for the past three years. When he finally got there through gene therapy, well…” Krieger touches the screen, and the still frame becomes unfrozen, alive.
The drool falls from Tom’s lips, and he bends his head, face aiming at his crotch.
“Do you understand why you’re here, Thomas?”
“Nuh… I don’now. Your witdem… maybe.”
“With who?”
“Chuldrun. With the… chuld-ren.”
“Do I disturb you, Eva?” Krieger asks as the video goes on.
I don’t know what to say to this. My eyes are wide open, and I can’t take them off the image of Tom.
“Poor Thomas had the bright idea of gunning down a Redesign woman just four weeks after the change. Psych-evals prior to the interview indicated that he had developed acute PRAD,” Krieger said.
“Post Redesign Adjustment Disorder,” Holden noted.
“Now I see a reason why some of them are pricks and basket cases,” I blurt. Krieger’s gray left eye shrinks at this. He stops the video.
“Are you prejudiced, Eva?”
I gulp and say, “No.” The blood pressure cuff has a tighter grip on my arm.
“… and yet, you’ve referred to Redesigns as mentally unsound or despicable. Why is that, Eva?”
“I don’t know. I guess being a Norman can do that to you. Make you prejudiced.”
Krieger makes a tsk sound at this. I’m starting to get seriously unnerved by this supermodel man. Throughout this conversation, he’s been reading me, poking at my mind. His monotone voice doesn’t help either; he’s conditioning me to say what he wants me to say.
Holden rubs his dark brown hair, graying at the temples. His forehead is sweating. “Dr. Krieger, I think we should get down to business,” he says.
Krieger’s gray eye grows back to normal size. “Yes. We should.”

Interesting.