by Mark Budz
Fola’s head aches. She touches her temple, where a vein pulses against the tip of one finger. “Bloody Mary isn’t real.”
“She is to those who believe in her. Sometimes that’s all that matters.”
Is the IA talking about itself or someone else? A living, breathing person? Or another IA? She starts to shake her head . . . stops when the nausea kicks in. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I need your help.”
“With what?”
The datahound cocks its head, as if listening. Dr. Villaz takes this opportunity to interrupt. “You have a visitor,” he says over her cochlear implants.
Before she can ask who it is, the image of a man, a complete stranger, replaces the image of Pheidoh on the wallscreen. He’s stuffed into a biosuit that’s cinched as tight as a corset. It doesn’t help that the picture is distorted, sphere-ized, as if she’s looking at his reflection in a glass ball.
The man smiles, his lips stretching in a huge, bloated grin. “Fola, I presume.” He drags out her name, pronouncing it like the first part of “follicle.”
She ratchets down her gaze. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Rexx.” The slack grin widens. “I’m a gengineer from Tiresias. How’re you doin’?”
“Okay,” she says. “I guess.”
“You guess.” He pounces cat quick on the qualifier, like it’s a half-wound ball of yarn. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Nothing,” she says, “I’m fine,” trying to erase all lack of conviction. It’s tough. The last thing she’s feeling right now is confident. “Exactly what kind of gengineer are you and what are you doing here?”
“I’m an ecotectural gengineer. I design warm-blooded plants for the Kuiper belt colonies.”
It clicks, why he’s talking to her. “You’re investigating the accident.”
His nod is molasses slow. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you some questions about what happened.”
“Where are you?” Judging by the fish-eye perspective and the claustrophobic arrangement of biolum panels and datawindows, he’s wedged in the nacelle of a shuttle pod.
“On my way to Mymercia. I should be there in a couple hours. In the meantime, I thought I’d take the opportunity to chat with you.”
“I don’t know.” A dubious twinge pinches her stomach.
“I know it ain’t easy.” He leans forward, earnest. “But anything at all you can tell me would be helpful.”
Something uncomfortable plucks at the seams of her thoughts. “I really don’t remember very much. It happened kind of fast.”
“What did it feel like?” he asks.
“Like”—she barricades both arms across her chest—“like this thing had crawled inside me and was looking for something.”
The flaccid skin around his eyes tightens. “What sort of thing?”
Her shoulders hike up, more a squirm than a shrug. “A snake.”
He frowns. She’s not sure if it’s because he thinks she’s off her rocker or if he’s taking her seriously.
“A poisonous one,” she adds.
“What was it looking for? Do you know?”
She squeezes herself tighter. “Me. What I am. Who I am.” She can still feel the tongue probing, tickling, hunting for her soul.
Rexx pauses for a moment to suck at his teeth. “Did it hurt?”
She bites her bottom lip. Describes the dull tingle in her arm. The gray, creeping cold and subsequent numbness.
He listens attentively. Then, “Any idea why it stopped?”
“Stopped?”
“Yeah. Why it quit when it did.”
“I don’t know.”
“It must have given up for a reason. Right?”
Right. Otherwise she’d be dead. “Maybe”—she wets her lips—“maybe it found what it was looking for before it finished with me.”
“You mean the construction workers who died? Liam Vitt, Ingrid Sorensen, and Tamika Wong?”
Fola swallows, nods, her breath tight against her ribs.
Rexx scratches his brow, pushing the wrinkles around with one clamshell-thick nail. “No offense, but I don’t buy it. There has to be another reason than it just gave up.”
“Like what?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”
“You think it was some kind of mutation?” Fola prompts. “Or a corrupt piece of code?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. For all I know, a politicorp or some other org on earth could be responsible. About the only thing I am sure about so far is that I feel like spit on a hot skillet.” He rubs his chin with one perturbed hand, pinching the loose flesh into a butt crack. “Did you see anything else? Anything at all that struck you as strange or out of the ordinary?”
She pauses for a moment, and then shakes her head. “Nothing that I can think of.”
Rexx seems to accept this. Or, if not, he at least doesn’t continue to pressure her. “Well, if somethin’ comes to mind, let me know.”
She nods. “All right.”
“Thanks.” He tips his head to the side, the way he might a hat. “Take care, now.”
The conversation leaves Fola rattled. She gets the feeling he left dissatisfied, convinced she was lying.
As soon as he’s gone, Pheidoh reappears. “Were you listening?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“And?”
A furrow creases the datahound’s forehead. “He’s asked that your recent biomed scans be cross-referenced against a library of all known artificial atoms.”
It takes a second for this to sink in.
“He performed a postmortem on remains found at the site of the accident,” the IA says. “The autopsy results indicated the possible antemortem presence of programmable matter in the deceased.”
The same thing that the sick migrant is infected with. So Pheidoh hasn’t totally lost it. Not if a gengineer is investigating the possibility that quantum particles were responsible for the accident and is worried she might still be infected. “Does he know about the outbreak?”
“He knows what’s happening on earth. But not with Lejandra.”
A public newsfeed streams across the wallscreen next to the IA. The datasquirt is jerky, a maniacally edited collage of grainy bitcam images spliced with professional high-rez digital video. The scene is a refugee overflow camp on the outskirts of some large metro area. Bombay, maybe, by the look of the cityscape. Squalid curtain-glass interspersed with a lot of habitrail biomes on stilts, the carbyne-frame structures tented with heat-reflective thermal mesh. Through the translucent membranes, she can make out the black-anodized supports—struts and joists arranged in stable isometrics.
In contrast, the refugee camp looks like a deck of playing cards, stacked and propped in fragile, impossibly configured angles. Dead piezo panels, warped lichenboard, and mucus-hardened foam glued together to form shacks, apartments, and mounded minicombs.
She’s been here before. Not this camp exactly, but camps like it. She can almost smell the urine in the dust, the stink of hydrogen from leaky fuel cells, and the collective stench of rotten teeth and suppurating wounds over the floral-scented scrubbugs that the politicorp pumps into the air through the potted umbrella palms.
Sick people lie on makeshift bubble-wrap pads that have been set up on one street. Those who aren’t sick peer out of doorways or windows, holed up in their hovels against the epidemic. A close-up of one victim zeroes in on an emaciated face. The cheeks, forehead, and balding scalp are covered with a pox of blue dots. The eye sockets are red circles ringed in yellow. The next person is covered with tumors, vestigial growths that appear to be the same lips she saw on the patient Xophia was caring for.
She looks for relief workers, a contingent of Jesuettes, but doesn’t see any. They should be arriving soon. Despite the nausea lurking in the back of her throat, part of her wants to be there with them.
Five, six, seven, eight,
Meet you at the Pearly Gate.
Fola shifts her gaze from the newsfeed to Pheidoh. “What’s so important about Lejandra?” The IA is focused on her for a reason. Why, when there are so many others who are just as bad off or worse?
The datahound removes its glasses, takes a moment to massage its eyes, and then replaces the wire frames. “She is patient zero. The first person to be exposed on earth.”
“Are you sure?”
“Her symptoms are the first on record.”
Fola gnaws her lip. “So if we find out what made her sick, how she was exposed, it could help isolate the problem. Explain what happened here . . . what’s happening to Xophia.”
“Yes.”
Fola takes a deep breath, steeling herself. “Am I infected?”
“You were exposed.”
“Then how come I’m not dead?” Like Liam and Ingrid. She shouldn’t be here—shouldn’t be . . .
“The quanticles didn’t replicate,” Pheidoh says.
“Why not?”
The IA shrugs. Uncertain, evasive, dismissive? Fola can’t tell. The IA seems to know more than it’s willing to share. She lets out the breath. “You said I could help. How?” Maybe there’s something inside her, different about her, that can help others. That can protect Xophia.”
“Are you sure?” Pheidoh says. “There are no guarantees. You might not be able to do anything. No one might.”
11
TIC TALK
You’re pressurized/cleared to depod,” Ida Claire says.
Rexx eases out of his g-mesh, doses himself with the temporary reclade pherion for Mymercia, and depods into a geodomed air lock overgrown with bananopy leaves. He’s met by a burly man with a stiletto goatee and intense eyes the color of dirty ice. Najib Kerusa. The Mymercia project manager’s nose wrinkles as he sizes up Rexx, taking in the voluminous folds of skin pooched around his neck and bunched on his fingers.
“I can’t say as I’m glad to see you.” The project manager extends a gruff hand. “If it was up to me, you wouldn’t be here.”
“That makes two of us.”
Kerusa looks past him to the shuttle pod. “You bring any luggage? Equipment we need to unload?”
“Naw. I’m packin’ everything I need.” Rexx pats the detachable, snap-button pockets on the bottoms of his Texas-style blue denim kurta.
“No sense dickin’ around, then.” Kerusa shifts his orientation relative to the air lock’s magnetic flux lines and glides toward the access tube. In the unfamiliar ecotecture, Rexx is slow to follow. It takes him a moment to adjust and catch up. The magtube is rigid, a smooth-walled cylinder with alternating bands of light and dark—yellow biolum panels separated by black diamond windows. Insulating, sound-absorbent moss grows in the expansion joints between the biolums. Through the windows, the station looks like a prairie thistle. The surface is pocked with concave lightdomes and bristling with hexcell towers. From this vantage point, Rexx can’t see Mymercia. The asteroid is hidden from view behind the station.
“You ask me,” Kerusa is saying, “your visit is a complete waste of time. You’re putting yourself at risk for no reason.”
They enter the central sphere of the station, passing through a circular colonnade of fluted saguaro cacti, freckled with tiny yellow flowers, that store water and thermal energy.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t collect whatever sample you need and send it to you,” Kerusa goes on. “No reason for you to get it yourself.”
Rexx opens his mouth. Closes it. Simply by coming here, he’s stepping on the project manager’s toes and undermining his authority. Under those circumstances, how much cooperation can he expect?
“So”—Kerusa slows to a stop in the tube, then rotates to face him, blocking the magtube—“what I’d like to know is what you’re not telling us.”
“Come again?”
Kerusa thrusts out his jaw. “There something you don’t want us manual labor types to know? Something you’re hiding from us?”
Rexx shakes his head. Feels the wattle of flesh under his chin sway from side to side. “Whoa, partner. You’re way off base.”
“Cut the bullshit.” Kerusa flexes his meaty hands. “What the hell are you doing here? The real reason.”
“Look”—Rexx spreads wrinkled palms in a calming gesture—“you know as much as I do. Probably more.”
Kerusa’s pupils constrict, anus tight. “Who are you protecting? Yourself? Us, for our own good?” A sneer, there. “Or someone else?”
“I’m not—”
“Someone fucked up, didn’t they? A design flaw or bug. And now you’re trying to cover it up. Damage control.”
Rexx lowers his hands, keeps his gaze fixed on Kerusa’s belligerent glare. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”
“Bullshit!” Flecks of spittle spray from his lips, hard as buckshot. “There’s no reason for you to be here in-vivo except to get in our way. Make sure no one finds out what really happened so we shoulder the blame.”
“I’m not interested in laying blame,” Rexx says. “I’m interested in answers. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Someone has to be responsible,” Kerusa growls. “I know how these things work.” His focus loses its grip and slips past Rexx, staring at nothing. “There’s always a scapegoat. Someone who takes the fall.”
Rexx bites his tongue. It’s pointless to argue. No amount of reasoning will placate the project manager. The more Rexx defends himself, the worse he sounds. He’s guilty, no matter what. Kerusa has the look of a wounded animal that’s been backed into a corner, lashing out at everyone as an enemy, real or imagined.
“Well?” the project manager demands.
“When can I pod down to the surface?” Rexx says. “The sooner I get what I came for, the sooner I’ll be outta your hair.”
Kerusa scowls but relents. “I have a meeting in a few minutes with my group operations managers”—he backs away—“to go over the latest developments. You can squirt them everything you know. I’m sure they’ll be interested to hear what you got to say.”
The conference room is located close to the outside shell of the construction station. A doughnut-shaped table takes up much of the room. The table has been set up around a lightshaft that connects one of the main lightdomes to the station’s central sphere. A quadrille of biolum panels float above the table. The floor is beige onyx inlaid with moss tiles. Through the block-diamond walls he can make out the mist-blurred shadows of warm-blooded plants in greenhouse vats. Bananopy leaves, spongewood, the topiary weavings of tapestree branches.
The outer two levels of the station are devoted to the care and feeding of the warm-blooded vegetation that comprises the Mymercia ecotecture. Before the plants were introduced to the asteroid they were first cultivated on the station. Only after they reached maturity in orbit were seedlings transplanted to the surface. Now with the softwire link between the station and the asteroid down, there’s no way to support the new growth remotely, to help sustain it or the workers.
Aided by magnetic flux lines, Rexx clips himself into one of two dozen chairs around the table. In addition to Kerusa and himself, there are three other people at the table. Phuong Yalçin, lead biologist. Loic Bagnas, in charge of technical support. And Jakala Nderi, head of information systems. Absent are the project’s structural and mechanical engineers. They’re on the asteroid, working to install emergency systems to replace the ones that failed after the accident. That might explain why he never received a sensor report.
One thing Rexx can’t figure out is why the ops managers have gathered in-vivo for the meeting. It could just as easily take place in-virtu. He suspects it’s a quirk of Kerusa, a control issue that hints at some fundamental insecurity or distrust. He’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of a sow’s teat.
Following the introductions, Kerusa says, “Well, we might as well start off on a cheerful note.” He turns to Rexx. “You got anything useful to report from the autopsy on Liam Vitt?”
; Rexx leans forward. He signs open a datawindow, conferences in the others, and displays the garbled architext for the anomalous particle. “As you can see, the structure is unintelligible. Gibberish.”
“You weren’t able to locate another occurrence of it in the remains?” Yalçin says.
“No.”
“Which explains why you need to obtain another sample.”
“But not why you’re here,” Nderi remarks, apparently siding with Kerusa when it comes to the purpose of Rexx’s visit. “I’m still not clear what you hope to accomplish here that we can’t. Even if you find what you’re looking for, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be garbage as well.”
“It’s possible the particle, molecule, junk DNA, or whatever, was a fragment. If I can find a complete sample it might be readable.”
“Any idea at all what the particle is? Or where it could have come from?” Bagnas says.
“No.”
“So we don’t know if it’s internal or external.”
“Right.”
“Any preliminary guesses?” Yalçin says. “Possibilities that seem more likely than any others?”
“Well, nine times out of ten a problem like this is the result of a random mutation. That doesn’t mean you can bank on it. But if I was a bettin’ man that’s where I’d lay my money.”
“Are you a betting man?” Nderi asks.
“Naw. I ain’t that lucky.”
“In other words,” Yalçin says, “odds are it’s an accident.”
He seems to have an ally in the biologist. If not an ally, then someone who’s at least willing to keep an open mind.
“If it is a mutation,” Bagnas says, “wouldn’t the problem have shown up earlier? Before we migrated the plants to the asteroid?”
Rexx shakes his head. “Not necessarily. There could be an environmental factor on the asteroid that was overlooked. Something that wasn’t taken into account and then incorporated into the design specifications. It could also be a design error that failed to show up until now.”