Window-plastic shattered. A wall-crawling police robot broke into the genetic speakeasy. It closed its gecko feet with a sound like venetian blinds, and deployed a bristling panoply of lenses and spigots.
“Amscray,” Malvern suggested. The duo and their animal familiars retreated from the swab machine’s clumsy surveillance. In their absence came a loud frosty hiss as the police bot unleashed a sterilizing fog of Bose-Einstein condensate.
A new scent had Spike’s attention, and it set Malvern off at a trot. They entered an office warren of glassblock and steel.
The Mixogen executive had died at her post. She sprawled before her desktop in her ergonomic chair, still in her business suit but reeking of musk and decay. Her swollen, veiny head was the size of a peach basket.
Fearon closed his dropped jaw and zipped up his Kevlar vest. “Jeez, Malvern, another entrepreneur-related fatality! How high do you think her SAT got before she blew?”
“Aw, man—she must have been totally off the IQ scale. Look at the size of her frontal lobes. She’s like a six-pack of Wittgensteins.”
Malvern shuddered as Spike the weasel tunneled to safety up his pants-leg. Fearon wiped the sweat from his own pulsing forehead. The stench ofthe rot was making his head swim. It was certainly good to know that his fully-modern immune system would never allow a bacteria or virus to live in his body without his permission.
Malvern crept closer, clicking flash-shots from his digicam. “Check out that hair on her legs and feet.”
“I’ve heard about this,” marvelled Fearon. “Bonobo hybridoma. She’s half chimp! Because that super-neural technique requires...so they say...a tactical retreat down the primate ladder, before you can make that tremendous evolutionary rush for breakthrough extropian intelligence.” He broke off short as he saw Weeble eagerly licking the drippy pool of ooze below the dead woman’s chair. “Knock it off, Weeble!”
“Where’d the stiff get the stuff?”
“I’m as eager to know that as you are, so I’d suggest swiping her desktop,” said Fearon craftily. “Not only would this seriously retard police investigation, but absconding with the criminal evidence would likely shelter many colleagues in the scab underground, who might be righteously grateful to us, and therefore boost our rankings.”
“Excellent tactics, my man!” said Malvern, punching his fist in his open palm. “So let’s just fall to sampling, shall we? How many stomachs is Weeble packing now?”
“Five, in addition to his baseline digestive one.”
“Man, if I had your kind of money.... Okay, lemme see... Cut a tendril from that kinesthetically active goo, snatch a sample from that wading-pool of sushi-barf—and, whoa, check the widget that the babe here is clutching hand-wise.”
From one contorted corpse-mitt peeked a gel-based pocket-lab. Malvern popped the datastorage and slipped the honey-colored hockey puck into his capacious scabbing vest. With a murmured apology, Fearon pressed the the tip of his sampling-staff to the woman’s bloated skull, and pneumatically shot a tracer into the proper cortical depths. Weeble fastidiously chomped the mass of gray cells. The prize slid safe into the pig’s gullet, behind a closing gastric valve.
They triumphantly skulked from the reeking, cracking high-rise, deftly avoiding police surveillance and nasty street-spatters of gutter-goo. Malvern’s getaway car rushed obediently to meet them. While Malvern slid through traffic, Fearon dispensed reward treats to the happy Spike andWeeble.
“Mal, you set to work dredging that gel-drive, okay? I’ll load all these tissue samples into my code-crackers. I should have some preliminary results for us by, uhm...well, a week or so.”
“Yeah, that’s what you promised when we scored that hot jellyfish from those Rasta scabs in Key West.”
“Hey, they used protein-encrypted gattaca! There was nothing I could do about that.”
“You’re always hanging fire after the coup, Fearon. If you can’t unzip some heavy-duty DNA in your chintzy little bedroom lab, then let’s find a man who can.”
Fearon set his sturdy jaw. “Are you implying that I lack biotechnical potency?”
“Maybe you’re getting there. But you’re still no match for old Kemp Kingseed. He’s a fossil, but he’s still got the juice.”
“Look, there’s a MarthaMart!” Fearon parried.
They wheeled with a screech of tires into the mylar lot around the MarthaMart, and handed the car to the bunny-suited attendant. The men and their animals made extensive use of the fully-shielded privacy of the decon chambers. All four beings soon emerged as innocent of contaminants as virgin latex.
“Thank goodness for the local franchise of the goddess of perfection,” said Fearon contentedly. “Tupper will have no cause to complain of my task-consequent domestic disorder! Wait a minute— I think she wanted me to buy something.”
They entered the brick-and-mortar retail floor of the MarthaMart, Fearon racking his enhanced memory for Tupper’s instructions, but to no avail. In the end he loaded his wiry shopping basket with pop bottles, gloop cans, some recycled squip and a spare vial of oven-cleaning bugs.
The two scabs rode home pensively. Malvern motored off to his scuzzy bachelor digs, leaving Fearon to trudge with spousal anxiety upstairs. What a bringdown from the heights of scab achievement, this husbandly failure.
Fearon faced an expectant Tupper as he reached the landing. Dismally, he handed over the shopping bag. “Here you go. Whatever it was you wanted, I’m sure I didn’t buy it.” Then he brightened. “Got some primo mutant brain-mass in the pig’s innards, though.”
* * * *
Five days later, Fearon faced an irate Malvern. Fearon hedged and backfilled for half an hour, displaying histo-printouts, some scanning-microscope cinema, even some corny artificial-life simulations.
Malvern examined the bloodstained end of his ivory toothpick. “Face defeat, Fearon. That bolus in the feedline was just pfisteria. The tendril is an everyday hybridoma of liana, earthworm and slimemold. As for the sushi puke, it’s just the usual chemosynthetic complex of abyssal tubeworms. So cut chase-wise, pard. What’s with those explosively ultra-smart cortical cells?”
“Okay, I admit it, you’re right, I’m screwed. I can’t make any sense of them at all. Wildly oscillating expression-inhibition loops, silent genes, jumping genes, junk DNA that suddenly reconfigures itself and takes control— I’ve never seen such a stew. It reads like a Martian road-map.”
Malvern squinched his batrachian eyes. “A confession of true scabbing lame-itude. Pasting a ‘Kick-me, I’m blind’ sign on your back. Have I correctly summarized your utter wussiness?”
Fearon kept his temper. “Look, as long as we’re both discreet about our little adventure downtown, we’re not risking any of our vital reputation in the rough-and-tumble process of scab peer-review.”
“You’ve wasted five precious days in which Ribo Zombie might radically beat us punchwise! If this news gets out, your league standings will fall quicker than an Italian government.” Malvern groaned theatrically. “Do you know how long it’s been since my groundbreaking investigative fieldwork was properly acknowledged? I can’t even buy a citation.”
Fearon’s anger transmuted to embarrassment. “You’ll get your quotes and footnotes, Malvern. I’ll just shotgun those genetics to bits, and subcontract the sequences around the globe. Then no single individual will get enough of the big picture to know what we’ve been working on.”
Malvern tugged irritably at the taut plastic wrapper of a Pynchonian British toffee. “Man, you’ve completely lost your edge! Everybody is just a synapse away from everybody else these days! If you hire a bunch of scabs on the net, they’ll just search-engine each other out, and patch everything back together. It’s high time we consulted Dr. Kingseed.”
“Oh, Malvern, I hate asking Kemp for favors. He’s such a bringdown billjoy when it comes to hot breakthrough technologies! Besides, he always treats me like I’m some website intern from the days of Internet slave labor.”
“Quit whining. This is serious work.”
“Plus, that cobwebby decor in Kemp’s retrofunky domicile! All those ultra-rotten Hirst assemblages—they’d creep anybody out.”
Malvern sighed. “You never talked this way before you got married.”
Fearon waved a hand at Tupper’s tasteful wallpaper. “Can I help it ifI now grok interior decor?”
“Let’s face some facts, my man: Dr. Kemp Kingseed has the orthogonal genius of the primeval hacker. After all, his startup companies pushed the Immunosance past its original tipping point. Tell the missus we’re heading out, and let’s scramble headlong for the Next New Thing like all true-blue scabs must do.”
Tupper was busy in her tiny office at her own career, moderating her virtual agora on twentieth-century graphic narrative. She accepted Fearon’s news with only half her attention. “Have fun, dear.” She returned to her webcam. “Now, Kirbybuff, could you please clarify your thesis on Tintin and Snowy as precursor culture-heroes of the Immunosance?”
Weeble and Malvern, Spike and Fearon, sought out an abandoned petroleum distribution facility down by the waterfront. Always the financial bottom-feeder, the canny Kemp Kingseed had snapped up the wrecked facility after the abject collapse of the fossil-fuel industry. At one point in his checkered career, the reclusive hermit-genius had tried to turn the maze of steampipes and rusting storage tanks into a child-friendly industrial-heritage theme park. Legal problems had undercut his project, leaving the aged digital entrepreneur haunting the ruins of yet another vast, collapsed scheme.
An enormous spiderweb, its sticky threads thick as supertanker hawsers, hung over the rusting tanks like some Victorian antimacassar of the gods.
Malvern examined the unstable tangle of spidery cables. “We’d better leave Weeble down here.”
“But I never, ever want to leave dear Weeble!”
“Just paste a crittercam on him and have him patrol for us on point.” Malvern looked at the pig critically. “He sure looks green around the gills since he ate that chick’s brain. You sure he’s okay digestive-wise?”
“Weeble is fine. He’s some pig.”
The visitors began their climb. Halfway up the tank’s curving wall, Kemp Kingseed’s familiar, Shelob, scuttled from her lair in the black pipe of a giant smokestack. She was a spider as big as a walrus. The ghastly arachnid reeked of vinegar.
“It’s those big corny spider-legs,” said Malvern, hiding his visceral fear in a thin shroud of scientific objectivity. “You’d think old Kingseed had never heard of the cube-square law!”
“Huh?” grunted Fearon, clinging to a sticky cable.
“Look, the proportions go all wrong if you blow them up a thousand times life-size. For one thing, insects breathe through spiracles! Insects don’t have lungs. An insect as big as a walrus couldn’t even breathe!”
“Arachnids aren’t insects, Malvern.”
“It’s just a big robot with some cheap spider chitin grown on it. That’s the only explanation that makes rational sense.”
The unspeakable monster retreated to her lair, and the climbers moved thankfully on.
Kemp Kingseed’s lab was a giant hornet’s nest. The big papery office had been grown inside a giant empty fuel tank. Kingseed had always resented the skyrocketing publication costs in academic research. So he had cut to the chase, and built his entire laboratory out of mulched back issues of Cell and Nature Genomics.
Kingseed had enormous lamp-goggle eyeglasses, tufts of snowy hair on his skull, and impressive white bristles in his withered ears. The ancient Internet mogul still wore his time-honored Versace labcoat, over baggy green ripstop pants and rotting Chuck Taylor hightops.
“Africa,” he told them, after examining their swiped goodies.
“’Africa?’”
“I never thought I’d see those sequences again.” Kingseed removed his swimmy lenses to dab at his moist red eyes with a swatch of lab paper. “Those were our heroic days. The world’s most advanced technicians, fighting for the planet’s environmental survival! Of course we completely failed, and the planet’s ecosystem totally collapsed. But at least we didn’t suck up to politicians.”
Kingseed looked at them sharply. “Lousy, fake-rebel pimps like that Ribo Zombie, turned into big phony pop stars. Why, in my generation, we were the real, authentic transgressive-dissident pop stars! Napster...Freenet.... GNU/Linux... Man, that was the stuff!”
Kingseed beat vaguely at the air with his wrinkled fist. “Well, when the Greenhouse started really cooking us, we had to invent the Immunosance. We had no choice at that point, because it was the only way to survive. But every hideous thing we did to save the planet was totally UN-approved! Big swarms of rich-guy NGOs were backing us, straight out of the WTO and the Davos Forum. We even had security clearances. It was all for the public good!”
Malvern and Fearon exchanged wary glances.
Kingseed scowled at them. “Malvern, how much weasel flesh do you have in your personal genetic makeup?”
“Practically none, Dr. Kingseed!” Malvern demurred. “Just a few plasmids in my epidermal expression.”
“Well, see, that’s the vital difference between your decadent times and my heroic age. Back in my day, people were incredibly anxious and fussy about genetic contamination. They expected people and animals to have clean, unpolluted, fully natural genelines. But then, of course, the Greenhouse Effect destroyed the natural ecosystem. Only the thoroughly unnatural and the totally hyped-up could thrive in that kind of crisis. Civilization always collapsed worst where the habitats were most nearly natural. So the continent of Africa was, well, pretty much obliterated.”
“Oh, we’re with the story,” Fearon assured him. “We’re totally with it heart-of-darkness-wise.”
“’Ha!” barked Kingseed. “You pampered punks got no idea what genuine chaos looks like! It was incredibly awful! Guerrilla armies of African mercenaries grabbed all our state-of-the-art lab equipment. They werelooting...burning...and once the narco-terror crowd moved in from the Golden Triangle, it got mondo bizarre!”
Malvern shrugged. “So how tough can it be? You just get on a plane and go look.” He looked at Fearon. “You get on planes, don’t you, Fearon?”
“Surewise. Cars, sleds, waterskis, you bet I get on planes.”
Kingseed raised a chiding finger. “We were desperate to save all those endangered species, so we just started packing them into anything that looked like it would survive the climate disruption. Elephant DNA spliced into cacti, rhino sequences tucked into fungi.... And hey, we were the good guys. You should have seen what the ruthless terrorists were up to.”
Malvern picked a fragment from his molars, examined it thoughtfully, and ate it. “Look Dr Kingseed, all this ancient history’s really edifying, but I still don’t get it with the swollen, exploding brain part.”
“That’s also what Ribo Zombie wanted to know.”
Fearon stiffened. “Ribo Zombie came here? What did you tell him?”
“I told that sorry punk nothing! Not one word did he get out of me! He’s been sniffing around my crib, but I chased him back to his media coverage and his high-priced market consultants.”
Malvern offered a smacking epidermal high-five. “Kemp, you are aces guru-wise! You’re the Miami swamp yoda, dad!”
“I kinda like you two kids, so let me cluetrain you in. Ever seen NATO military chimp-brain? If you know how to tuck globs of digitally altered chimp brain into your own glial cells—and I’m not saying that’s painless—then you can radically jazz your own cortex. Just swell your head up like a mushroom puffball.” Kingseed gazed at them soberly. “It runs on DNA storage, that’s the secret. Really, really long strands of DNA. We’re talking like infinite Turing-tape strands of gattaca.”
“Kemp,” said Fearon kindly, “why don’t you come along with us to Africa? You spend too much time in this toxic old factory with that big smelly spider. It’ll do you good to get some fresh jungle air. Besides, we
clearly require a wise native guide, given this situation.”
“Are you two clowns really claiming that you wanna pursue this score to Africa?”
“Oh sure, Ghana, Guinea, whatever. We’ll just nick over to the Dark Continent duty-freewise, and check it out for the weekend. Come on, Kemp, we’re scabs! We got cameras, we got credit cards! It’s a cakewalk!”
Kingseed knotted his snowy eyebrows. “Every sane human being fled out of Africa decades ago. It’s the dark side of the Immunosance. Even the Red Cross ran off screaming.”
“’Red Cross,’” said Malvern to Fearon. The two of them were unable to restrain their hearty laughter. “’Red Cross.’ Man, that’s rich.”
“Okay, sure, have it your own way,” Kingseed muttered. “I’ll just go sherlock my oldest dead-media and scare up some tech-specs.” He retreated to his vespine inner sanctum. Antic rummaging noises followed.
Fearon patiently sank into a classic corrugated Gehry chair. Malvern raided Kingseed’s tiny bachelor kitchen, appropriating a platter of honey-guarana snack cubes. “What a cool pad this rich geezer’s got!” Malvern said, munching. “I am digging how the natural light piped in through fiber-optic channels renders this fuel-tank so potent for lab-work.”
“This place is a stinking dump. Sure he’s rich, but that just means he’ll overcharge us.”
Malvern sternly cleared his throat. “Let’s get something straight, partner. I haven’t posted a scab acquisition since late last year! And you’re in no better shape, with married life putting such a crimp in your scabbing. If we expect to pull down big-time decals and sponsorships, we’ve just got to beat Ribo Zombie to a major find. And this one is definitely ours by right.”
After a moment, Fearon nodded in grim commitment. It was impossible to duck a straight-out scab challenge like this one—not if he expected to face himself in the mirror.
Kingseed emerged from his papery attic, his glasses askew and the wild pastures of his hair scampering with dustbunnies. He bore a night-dark raven in a splintery bamboo cage, along with a moldy fistful of stippled paper strips.
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