Finally he had another half dozen or so messages, neatly stacked below those from the day before. The first appeared to be a direct response to the explanation Wycliffe had sent.
1703114AS
TO: Jonah Wycliffe
FR: Zara Klist
RE: Rv1: Phoenix Project – UPDATE – CONFIDENTIAL
Reports appreciated but fail to address primary concern: what are these people up to NOW? Regardless of one’s opinion of JK’s instructions, the fact remains: they should have been followed to the letter, they were not, and enormous funds have been spent instead on – WHAT? Nguyen has advised that sequences acquired from Phoenix, while generating high value output, were probably inexpensive to develop. Meanwhile cryptic references to breakthrough modifications and extreme tolerance levels (with which I am becoming progressively less amused) suggest in vivo experimentation, for which neither they nor we are registered. Are they growing live prototypes down there? If so how many, what’s the cost-value, and what are the legal implications? If they don’t want to be shut down immediately they had better start explaining what it is they’ve got that’s so special.
The tone of that felt both familiar and passé; like something her younger relative would once have said. Eli shook his head as he tapped up the reply. The more of her he read, the more Zara reminded him of the Zavcka he had met four years ago. It made him wonder again about the transformation, about whether it was really possible for someone so entrenched in a particular way of thinking to change so much.
1803114AS
TO: Zara Klist
FR: Jonah Wycliffe
RE: Rv2: Rv1: Phoenix Project – UPDATE – CONFIDENTIAL
I have finally extracted a bit more from Dr Panborn, who reacted with much indignation when informed that without specifics we are not inclined to treat her claims as anything more than hyperbole; and with horror at the realisation that, unless they give us reasons to think otherwise, she and her colleagues are at this point entirely dispensable. Reasons have been duly advanced.
She confirms that in vivo experiments have indeed taken place, though somewhat irregularly. This has been alongside the in vitro work which we knew about. They have been attempting to develop marketable applications of what she insists truly is a breakthrough. It began with an initial test batch back in 100, which was (as is generally the case) largely disastrous; the lead researcher at the time used an interspecies splicing technique as a rather flamboyant method of assessing the degree of anatomic plasticity which the Phoenix sequences could render tolerable. The resulting dysmorphia was as extreme as could be hoped, but the integrity of core organ systems was nevertheless largely preserved. One of the subjects in particular displayed none of the typical indicators of cognitive or physical deficit, despite a vastly altered physique, and indeed has appeared to develop more or less normally. Attempts to replicate her have failed, though Panborn insists this is beside the point. In her own words:
‘The prototype is a female juvenile who has a functional pair of additional limbs. Furthermore, her overall anatomy, metabolism, hormonal and neural function appear perfectly adapted to what is an unprecedented modification. This systemic cascade of complementary mutations has been a scientific treasure trove, and has informed our understanding and further refinement of the relevant sequences and switches – several of which KAG has already had the opportunity to work with. The extra limbs, though functional, are not in our view inherently useful (there are some in the team who consider them to have aesthetic value, though that is a matter of opinion). However, their core architecture should be amenable to the design of a platform with significant industrial and combat applications, and we are actively developing the relevant modifications to test this. As a parallel development, we have had significant success recently combining a variety of metabolic, sensory and neural enhancements within a standard physique package, and are within a decade of bringing the results to market.’
So there you have it. Cybernetics is a fashionable field at the moment, and one in which we have only a peripheral stake – if Panborn is not being overly optimistic then there really could be some ‘significant’ value in their current research. I gather there remain about a dozen live specimens from a total of 4 batches (50% survival rate, not bad), mostly late infancy to early pre-adolescent. The exemplar prototype is of course already adolescent. The resident expert on her is a Dr Owen, who was part of the original batch design team and has carried primary responsibility for its results ever since. They seem to consider the lack of registration an irrelevance, given the current low levels of enforcement.
Panborn continues to insist that Phoenix should and must be left alone, though I sense with somewhat less conviction. How do you wish to proceed?
Eli read the quotation from Dr Panborn again. Premonition settled over him like a cloak, like the charcoal-grey shroud a diminutive gem with sky-blue eyes and a face as delicate as porcelain had once worn. He reached to tap the next file open, slowly, like a man in a dream. His finger shook.
1803114AS
TO: Jonah Wycliffe
FR: Zara Klist
RE: Phoenix – Site visit – CONFIDENTIAL
Advise Panborn, Owen etc to expect us at 17:00 on the 20th. Non-negotiable. Industrial and combat? Based on that am inclined to arrive with hazmat and full security detail. They have 24hrs to convince me to make it you and me on the XJet instead.
Supplementary limb pairs have been attempted before. Spectacular failures. If they’ve managed a neuromuscular infrastructure compatible with combat implants it would be well worth developing, though I am not inclined to alter our own registration status in order to do so in-house; there are reputational issues to consider, and I am not convinced that the public’s newfound interest in gem welfare will dissipate soon. But in any event, such a breakthrough is not compatible with Panborn’s refusal to provide images or a more detailed description. Suspect we may be going to visit the circus. Does this prototype of theirs have a second pair of working arms, or does she gallop on four legs like a horse?
Anger now, at the contempt, the callousness, the gratuitous nastiness of it all. Whoever she was, whatever she was, no fourteen-year-old girl deserved this. And shame, because none of it was ancient, none of it was beyond responsibility, he was already a young man in university when these words were thought and said and sent. He had read and heard such things before, many, many times, and shame took hold of him and shook him like a dog shakes a rat, every single time. Shame, and anger, and disbelief.
It can’t be, he thought. Not her. No one could ever have spoken so of her.
He had almost convinced himself as he opened the reply from Wycliffe. It was uncharacteristically short.
1903114AS
TO: Zara Klist
FR: Jonah Wycliffe
RE: Rv1: Phoenix – Site visit – CONFIDENTIAL
They are expecting us, and are pretending to be pleased about it.
When asked for details on the prototype, Panborn shunted me to Owen. Owen refused to respond and shunted me back to Panborn. I was finally able to get them both on a voice conference, which has just ended. They attempted to explain their reluctance by claiming that sending any visual or audible record offsite would prove too great a security risk; but said they were worried that if they simply described her I wouldn’t believe them. This went on for some time. I finally extracted a verbal description, though they were not wrong – I can hardly credit what they have told me.
They say she has wings.
*
Callan glanced out at Eli, hunched over his tablet in the sound-dampened seating area, and turned back into the lab. There was a spring in the step of the researchers today, and Sevi wore a broad smile, though the circles under her eyes told of a sleepless night.
‘You understand it now? Seriously?’
‘I think so. There’s a lot more to do, but that went exactly the way I hoped it would.’ She was beaming as she stood beside Herran, half-reclined in the chair w
ith the sensor net on his head. ‘Was that okay for you, Herran? I know it was a little different from what we’ve done before …’
‘Okay.’
‘Do you mind if we run a few more tests like that?’
‘Not mind.’
‘If we get the results I expect we can refine the parameters pretty quickly, but we’ll have to stop in between to recalibrate. It might get a little boring for you.’
‘Not boring. I work.’ He raised his tablet, clutched as always in his small fist, and waggled it slightly.
Callan lifted an eyebrow in response. These last few days of disruption, filled with the things Herran normally disliked – being tested and endlessly talked to, being taken away from home – appeared to have had the unexpected effect of making him more expressive. They had been greeted this morning by Sevi’s bubbly conviction that the neural translation team had finally made a breakthrough in their attempt to decode the binary structure of his mind, and Herran had reacted with more than his usual remote equanimity: he had engaged in the conversation, he was interested. For the first time Callan found himself questioning whether he really understood how Herran’s compromised psyche functioned at all.
Now the little gem did his half-body turn towards the doorway, though from his seat he was unable to see through it. But he looked pointedly in that direction, before turning back towards Callan.
‘Eli okay?’
‘Yeah, just busy.’
‘Working.’
‘Mm-hmm. Something came up yesterday, I think. But he’s fine.’
Herran gazed at him steadily for a long moment, then blinked hugely and solemnly. As the long lashes fluttered down and up again Callan realised with a start that it had become a gesture, an element of body language, like another person’s shrugged shoulder or his own raised eyebrow.
Where did he learn that? From Mikal?
‘Eli fine. Rhys not fine.’
‘What did you hear? He’s okay, he hasn’t become ill.’
‘Could get ill very bad. I know.’
‘I … he might, Herran, but he hasn’t yet. There’s still time.’
‘Need find genetype. Quick quick.’
‘Yes …’ Callan wondered if Herran had been hacking Rhys’ medical files. He wouldn’t put it past him.
A shadow fell across the door, and Eli poked his head in. ‘How’s everything going?’
‘Really well today. Sevi,’ nodding in her direction, ‘thinks she’s cracked it.’
‘Have you? Oh. That’s good.’ He looked dazed, distant, a little sick and not really interested in what Sevi might or might not have cracked. Herran looked at him, unspeaking, and blinked. Callan looked from one to the other and thought, Something is going on here. I’m missing something. But Sevi was too elated to notice.
‘Looks like it.’ She grinned at Eli. ‘We were thinking about it wrong, layering our own assumptions over Herran’s reality. We thought he must be like a person with primary and secondary languages, and that binary would be the secondary one. But it’s not, it’s as native for him as human-speak. More so, maybe, because more of his brain is dedicated to it. Now that we understand how he organises the information we should be able to move a lot more quickly.’
‘That’s good. Eh, Herran?’
‘Good.’
‘Do you think—?’ Eli looked from Herran to Callan to Sevi, as though searching for something. He seemed lost, disoriented. ‘If everything’s okay here, do you mind if I step out for a bit? I – I have to see Aryel.’ Again that stricken look. ‘Something’s come up that I really need to talk to her about.’
Callan found himself suddenly afraid, for no reason he could name. He nodded dumbly, unable to formulate even a basic question. Sevi chirped, ‘Fine by me!’ and turned away to set up for the next test.
Herran blinked. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Aryel explain.’
LEGACY
She is a cousin this time. She resolves to be a daughter in the next incarnation – it makes things so much easier – but the maternal link had begun to feel dangerously overused. So she made herself distant, thrice removed, and wonders now how much else has escaped her notice while in exile.
He hid his gift to her, from her, and he hid it in plain sight. A strategy not unlike her own, and she is as aware of that irony as she is of the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the other uses to which he has had it put. So she was this to him too, and she swallows down the knowledge, and tries not to mind.
There are more immediate concerns. His covert enterprise was never intended to stay hidden so long, and she must take steps, quickly, to ensure that the discovery of one secret does not reveal the other. That irony would not entertain. Especially not now, when she is long accustomed to her isolation, long reconciled to the fact that what had mattered most to him matters not at all to her. She is content with fictional procreation.
How strange, she sometimes muses, that one possessed of such vision could not think of legacy other than in the old, tribal terms: ancestral blood in the veins, familiar features on bright young faces, wisdom whispered through the lengthening night. She has no need of such distractions. She is her own birthright. Even if his wayward disciples had remained true to the task he set them, even if they had found the solution he so longed for, she is far from sure she would have availed herself of it.
But they succeeded at something. They have fashioned a different prize, it seems, unsanctioned and unexpected, but no less valuable for that. The mystery of it excites her, and in this at least she has no doubt that her father would be of the same mind as herself: it is his gift to her, and she wants it.
24
‘Here’s the thing,’ Sharon was saying. ‘I don’t believe he didn’t know who hired him. Even if he never dealt with them directly, which is what he’s claiming, it does not make sense to me that he’d take those kinds of risks unless he knew who was behind it and he was confident they were going to hold up their end of the bargain. Not to mention that, as a hardline Reversionist, he’d want to know he was getting it for people who weren’t far apart from him in terms of ideology. But he will not name names.’
She gazed up at Rhys out of the screen of his tablet, her brow still creased in annoyance. Her voice came directly into his earset, and he had activated its damper field so he could not be overheard either. Not that they were likely to be; he was in his bedroom with the door closed, and a strangely pensive Aryel had gone up to the roof garden. But Gwen could come back at any moment from whatever recording session or publicity opportunity had been scheduled that morning, and he knew too well how sharp her hearing was.
‘Why is he refusing to talk, if he’s got no reason to be loyal to them any more?’
‘I don’t think it’s loyalty, Rhys. He’s scared. He’s so scared he’s not even constructing good lies any more. He tried to convince me that it was all done onstream and for the final phase he was sent a list of the stock they wanted, but then he got caught out trying to explain how he knew about the hacks.’
‘Do you think he was also the hacker?’
‘He may have been, although we don’t have any direct evidence for that. But he definitely knows his way around gemtech datastream security – seems he developed a good chunk of it. And considering that the whole point of turning anonymous informant was to show off what a bunch of mugs we are compared to what a talented little criminal he is, it’s possible he only included the hacks because he was responsible for them too.’
‘That part, the whistleblower thing, that was because of Gwen? Seriously?’
‘Believe it or not. Small world.’
‘It just seems really stupid.’
‘People do stupid things when family is involved. He got so angry about his brother, he lost the plot.’ He could see her frown deepen and her eyes slide away before she set her jaw and looked straight at him again. It was a cue Rhys recognised from their work together, the thing she did when she was uncertain but about to plunge in anyway. ‘I wonder
ed … I know I should be leaving you alone, Rhys, and if you’d rather just step away from this now I’ll understand. Gwen’s involvement was a complete fluke, but I thought I should tell you … and you said having something else to concentrate on was helpful …’
‘It is.’ Actually he wanted to be focusing on the problem of disinterring his genetype from the bowels of the deleted Bel’Natur archive, but he had learned more about what he was looking for from working the case than in all the previous years of searching. Instinct told him to keep that avenue open; and besides, he had grown too fond of Sharon simply to tell her no. ‘Is it his Reversionist links you want me to look into?’
‘No need, Achebe has that covered. And anyway it’s not illegal, just – indicative.’ She grimaced slightly. ‘It’s trying to uncover who he was working for and what happened to the dead drop that has me stumped. It feels like it’s all right there, you know, but I can’t pull the pieces together. I thought maybe you could spot whatever it is I’m missing.’
‘I’ll do my best. What was the dead drop?’
‘A disused postbox set into the wall of an alley in the financial district.’
‘A what-box? What’s that?’
‘It was a pre-Syndrome message distribution system, back when everything had to be printed and sent to geographic addresses. They’d get pushed through a slot and fall into a chamber behind, and then an official would come along with a special tool to open the chamber. They were made of metal, waterproof, fireproof …’
‘So it would hold temperature.’
‘Yep, I thought that when we opened it up. Very cold, even though it’s a blazing day.’
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