I shouted to Kaigo, "Get me out! I can’t tell what’s real anymore!" I waited, but he didn’t respond.
I touched the bump on my head and wondered at my predicament. My hand came away with a smear of blood on it, and as an experiment I touched the blood with my tongue to see if I could taste it. The computer had never simulated taste before. It tasted salty, and had the consistency of real blood.
Perhaps this is a test. Perhaps they want to see how I’d fight if I felt my life to be in jeopardy, I wondered, realizing that if I couldn’t penetrate this illusion, I had no option but to win this battle. My life could well be at stake. But I didn’t care. I’d suffered death so many times in simulation that I felt death would only result in an end to suffering.
In the denser brush, beyond a screen of trees on the far side of the marsh, something cracked a branch. I sat up and peered in that direction: a large black creature moved through the brush. It stopped in a partial clearing and then withdrew from sight. It was hairy and wet, as if it had just risen from the water.
Another predator thrown into the simulator, I reasoned.
I crouched and aimed my laser rifle, taking a guess as to where it might step out.
The creature snorted, releasing a great exhalation. It had caught my scent. It lurched forward, and its feet hit the ground like thunder. It crashed through the brush and charged into the clearing, then stood, panting at me—a huge bull, black as onyx, with broad horns.
Astride the bull sat a thin woman with black hair. She wore a white dress that revealed more than it covered. She smiled wanly.
"Bravo ... don Angelo." She paused between words, as if to catch her breath. "You ... came to ... save ... me from this beast ... again?" She kicked the bull’s ribs, and it strode closer.
"Tamara?" This woman was not the emaciated creature I’d known. She was beautiful in a way that Tamara had never been. Her hair was dark and silky. Her teeth as white as crystal water cascading down a mountain stream. Yet her small bones spoke of a delicateness, a frailness, that even Tamara had never matched.
"You look ... much as I ... remember," Tamara said. She studied me closely. Her lips tightened. Her expression was not severe or disapproving. Rather, she appeared tired and sad.
The fact that she stammered even in a simulator suggested brain damage. I wondered how much was really left of the Tamara I had known. I felt inside myself and tried to convince myself that I didn’t really care about her anymore. The fact that she’d finally sought me out, had finally made contact, seemed a minor curiosity.
But her eyes were alive in spite of her frailty. Bright. Fierce.
The bull stopped in front of me and Tamara daintily slipped from its back.
I pointed to her mount, "That bull was dead in your dreams before," I said. "Rotted. Like a zombie. "
Tamara wrinkled her brow in concern. "Was it?" she asked wearily. "I forget. That’s why I ... came to you. I wanted to fill holes. To fill in ... the holes."
I shrugged. "How deep are the holes? How wide?"
"Who knows?" she said. "Garzón ... tells me ... I’ve got forty percent loss. I remember some things very well. Repetitive things. Things I knew well. Individual. Incidents. Are gone."
Forty percent memory loss was a lot. She’d be on neural growth stimulator till the brain regenerated. Even after two weeks the damage was really only beginning to repair on a cellular level. The neurons that regenerated in her brain would not mature for years. The actual connections between them would be sparse. Her motor skills would be shot. She’d have to stay hooked up to life-support for months.
"Is that why you came to see me-to learn about your past?"
She nodded. "To learn ... what I told you. To see what ... you remember."
I shrugged. I told her the story from the beginning, leaving out nothing. When I got to the part about Flaco’s death I was surprised that I felt empty. It seemed as if it had happened long ago to someone else.
I told her of Flaco’s death and how I had avenged him. I told her how I had brought her onto the ship.
When I finished, she said, "It’s ... funny: ... when ... we first met, I. practiced. Dying ... in the ... simulator. Now ... you practice ... dying."
I began to object. I was not practicing how to die. I was trying to learn how to stay alive. But I remembered advice I’d heard so often from Kaigo: "Learn to live as one already dead."
She was right. We were practicing how to die for Motoki Corporation. And what disturbed me even more was that I felt incapable of feeling any emotion at all.
"Sí. I’m dead inside now. The rest of me just waits for my body to catch up."
She looked at me strangely, turning her head slightly. She seemed alarmed.
I shouted, "Go to hell, you bitch! I don’t need your concern, your sympathy and sad faces. What do you do, practice that sad expression in the mirror?"
"You don’t ... have a ... senses of. Humor. Anymore."
"Nothing is funny anymore," I said, "except Mavro’s jokes." She continued staring at me with those eyes filled with compassion. I became enraged. "What good do your sad faces do? One of my compadres had a pipe rammed through his belly this morning. Why don’t you make sad faces for him? What good does your sympathy do? I’d rather see shit on your face than that sad frown! You bitch. This place is full of dead men, walking dead men! They practice dying for Motoki Corporation! And do you know why? You and your fucking Idealist Socialist friends drove them to it! They throw their lives away because you took everything they have. And now you feign sympathy.
"Don’t give us your sympathy, bitch! I wish I could make a gift to you of all the ugliness I’ve witnessed in the past two weeks. I wish I could spit it into your hand!" I found that I was shouting, and I stopped. I was shaking violently, and wished to strike her.
She’d listened patiently. Her expression of concern didn’t falter, but her eyes began to gleam with tears.
"You’ve changed. You did not ask ... me how ... I am. The old you would. Have. Asked."
"You’re right," I said. "I would have." I didn’t ask. She was silent for a moment, uncomfortable.
"Buds itch," she said. The buds on her hand itched where it was regenerating. It was a common problem.
Someone should have rubbed the growths with cortisone. "Garzón ... treats me good. We ... made ... a bargain: I tell him what he ... wants to know. And ... he lets ... me live." She smiled a beautiful smile at the joke, all her white teeth gleamed.
"I can ... not walk. Or move. Or breathe ... by myself. But Garzón ... wants me. To. Practice. My skills. With. The. Computer. And boost. Your simulations."
I tried to calm myself, to move to a. safer subject. I responded, "Your dreamwork on my little monitor at home was excellent. I’m sure you’ll do a fine job."
The truth was that she did more than a fine job. With the help of the ship’s artificial intelligence she’d created an illusion I couldn’t pierce, and she’d done it while terribly disadvantaged.
"Redundant thoughts stay," she said. She meant that she’d practiced a lot, and had therefore not lost the ability to create dreamworlds when she was injured. Those acts we do repeatedly, those concerns we care about often, are least likely to be lost when the brain is damaged.
"When you worked for Alliance Intelligence, what did you do?" I asked. "Were you some kind of dream assassin? Did you kill people in their sleep?"
She shook her head. "No. Something ... Someday I will tell ... you. Angelo—I’m sorry ... I hurt you. You’ve been kinder to me ... than I deserve. And you served me ... better than ... I could have ... imagined."
She began to cry. I didn’t care to see it. I shrugged. "De nada."
"I know you still care. I can ... not ... pay you back. I wish to pay ... you something. I don’t ... speak well, uh ...”
I felt a thrill as if a strong wind were about to lift me. The wind whipped the trees overhead until the noise became a dull roar. Monkeys began to scream and howl from their se
cret places all around and above me, creating a great clamor. I remembered the howling wind from Tamara’s previous dream, the one where she’d attacked me, and I pointed my rifle barrel toward her chest, wondering if she’d be forced to jack out if I pulled the trigger, or if she was immune to the effects of the simulator.
Amid all this noise Tamara stood before me. Her dress, whipped by the wind, became as white as lightning, and her face was pale and beautiful. She reached down into her dress between her breasts and pulled out a small ornate wooden box.
She opened the box and held it up for me to see.
Inside was a tiny heart, like that of a dog; it was beating furiously as if just cut from a living body. Beneath the din and the turmoil I could hear the it.
"Listen. Listen." She moved the box closer to my face. The beating became louder. The howls and the yammers of the monkeys and the roaring wind faded into the background. The sound of the beating heart was soft and insistent. "Become fluent ... in ... the gentle language ... of the heart."
I looked up at Tamara’s face. Tears streamed from her fierce eyes. "This is what I feel like now. This is ... what it feels ... like to live!"
She grasped the tiny heart between two fingers and shoved it into my chest. It was like breathing the wind that blows over a mint field and basking in sunlight—my nerves danced along the whole length of my body. I seemed to move upward and out, to pass through an insubstantial wall where lethargy, pain, fatigue, and fear were left behind, and I was standing in a warm pleasant place, at the center of myself, where there was only joy.
I felt Tamara’s emotions—her peace, the gratitude she held toward me for helping her escape Earth, and a compassion so strong, so alive, it seemed unconquerable. She viewed me as a broken doll, some small thing she desperately wished to mend.
I wanted to laugh at her view of me. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t broken. But my own body seemed far away and I couldn’t touch it.
She withdrew her fingers, yanking the tiny heart from my chest, and I collapsed onto the ground. The warmth, the compassion, the energy—all drained from me. I tried to feel something, to rejoice in the air pumping through my lungs, to touch the ground with my fingertips and relish the sensation of loam. But I felt nothing. My fingers were dead, and the air seemed stale and empty. I was empty. Desolate.
I tried to call up the sensation I’d just felt, to remember what it was like to love. But when had I ever loved? I hadn’t let myself be touched inside for thirty years, not since my wife had died. On those rare occasions when I felt something stir within my breast, I hadn’t reacted to it. I’d shut myself off, retreated. For all these years I’d pretended to serve society, feigned compassion, because I’d believed in it on an intellectual level. I did it because it sounded good in theory. But for one moment, did I ever feel the pain of another?
If I had, I couldn’t recall the emotion, dredge it up, or bring it to life again.
I listened in my chest for the sound of my own heart.
There was nothing inside. I was truly a broken doll, empty and lifeless, and perhaps beyond repair.
I began laughing, a hollow laugh that turned into great, wracking sobs. I fell at Tamara’s feet, groveled at her ankles, and cried in self-pity. She reached down and smoothed her hands through my hair until I quieted.
I jacked out.
I was last to jack out of the simulator. Kaigo replayed the battle, and the tiny holo showed us scuttling about on the floor. It showed us skim through the salt marsh, retreat from the Yabajin into the woods. I was knocked from the back of the hovercraft, removed my broken helmet, stood and walked to the edge of the marsh—just in time to meet the Yabajin.
They shot me down and chased my compadres. It took a long while for me to die in the simulation.
Tamara had removed all evidence of her conversation with me.
Kaigo rehearsed the run with us, pointing out our errors.
He missed several obvious ones that he’d have normally caught, and seemed inattentive. He jacked us into a second simulation and we found ourselves gliding over the sea. We were only in the simulation for a few minutes when Kaigo jacked me out.
The others sat slumped in their chairs, still trapped in their illusion—dragonfly pupae.
Master Kaigo stood by the hovercraft. He appeared distracted. Cultural Envoy Sakura stood behind him. Master Kaigo said, "Take off your armor and follow Envoy Sakura immediately."
I wondered what I’d done wrong, and began stripping from my armor. Sakura helped undress me—an unusual act. The Japanese had scrupulously avoided touching me on all occasions, and I’d wondered if they felt they’d become defiled by the act.
Sakura spoke quickly as he worked. "You are a morphogenic pharmacologist, no? You know how to run a gene splicer? You are knowledgeable about viruses?"
"Of course," I said.
"Do you know about military viruses? The kinds used in biological warfare?"
I hesitated. No one spoke about those viruses. They were far too dangerous. The hair raised on the back of my neck. I didn’t like this conversation.
They want me to make a virus, I thought. They’ve heard bad news from Baker, and they want to wipe out everything. Start over.
"I know something of viral weapons. I don’t know how to create them," I lied. I had a basic idea of how to create them.
"Ah. We don’t want you to create them, we want you to destroy them. We have a viral outbreak on Module B. It is very bad."
My heart began pounding. I couldn’t imagine someone turning us into a plague ship. Most of the time, I knew, we were sealed off from that module. But I’d seen a worker moving between the airlock only the day before.
"How much of the ship is contaminated?" I asked.
"We don’t know. Workers on module B report several fatalities, all in the past three hours, and the disease has spread quickly. They don’t believe they can last more than a day. No one here shows any symptoms."
I finished stripping my armor and Sakura led me down the halls to the ladder. We reached level eight and Sakura thumbed a transmitter and opened the lower airlock; we went below. This section of the ship was larger than I’d anticipated. There were rooms to handle large machinery for cooking, cleaning, laundry, water purification, air recycling. We went to a small room crammed with three other Latin Americans sitting at computer terminals with their feet up, watching the computers work. They wore worried expressions, yet they seemed to be in no hurry. This relieved some of my tension.
The room was supplied with two x-ray microscopes and a couple of DNA synthesizers. It was obviously an ancillary medical facility meant to be used in conjunction with the infirmary upstairs. A communications channel on the computer was open, piping in sounds from the infirmary in module B. I could hear people coughing and crying in delirium while others spoke urgently in the foreground.
Sakura headed back upstairs.
"I’m Fidel, from immunology. That’s José—" a small man said from the nearest terminal. He nodded toward a chimera with silver eyes, very much like Abriara’s. "He’s done some work engineering his younger brothers in Chile. And our friend Juan Pedro over there is in food services."
I looked at Juan Pedro, a tall thin man with kinky hair.
His job on ship would be to engineer various proteins to flavor the algae mixes we ate, a tedious job requiring little knowledge of genetic engineering, since all the proteins he made were on file and the DNA synthesizers could handle the job, but he would still be familiar with the equipment. "So you are the one who makes our food?" I joked. "Remind me to kill you later."
Juan Pedro lowered his head. "Everybody always says that."
Fidel waved me over to his keyboard and punched in some commands. "This is what we’re dealing with."
A virus came up on· screen, typical in appearance—a tiny clear oval about 24 microns in diameter—except that it had a tail, the kind usually reserved for viruses that attack bacteria. Inside was a simple circle of genetic mate
rial that twisted in upon itself, something in the order of 40,000 amino acids long.
"A chimera?" I asked. The term chimera refers to any creature engineered so that it carries the traits of the member of another species—whether it is a bacteria engineered to produce insulin or something as complex as Perfecto or Abriara.
"It looks that way," Fidel said. "It doesn’t invade its host by ejecting its DNA through the tail, though, so it’s not a complex chimera. The host cell absorbs the virus. Its tail is used only to speed movement."
A virus reproduces by injecting its own DNA into the cell of its host. In viruses that attack animals, the virus often releases chemicals that cut up sections of the host’s DNA, which the virus then uses in creating its offspring. When the viruses are ready to leave the host cell, they can either "bud" off, or simply burst the cell wall completely. In either case, the host cell often dies. Since this particular virus was a biological weapon, it was a good bet the host cell would burst, releasing several hundred or thousands of copies of the virus.
One window in the corner of the computer screen showed a dozen different antibodies, explaining how they’d attach to the virus to mark it for destruction by lymphocytes. The information on the computer seemed to explain why everyone was resting. It looked as if they were simply waiting for the DNA synthesizer to create the antibodies.
"It looks as if I got here too late," I said. "All the work is done already."
"Sí," Fidel said. "The geneticists in module B have been working on this all night. The work is done already. "He punched a button and the computer screen called up the DNA sequences on the virus that gave directions for the capsid, the outer membrane of protein of the virion, the virus cell.
Next to it was a comparison chart showing the outer membrane of a neuron, a human nerve cell. They were nearly the same. The viral capsid marvelously counterfeited the nerve cell. The implications were obvious—anything that we did to attack the virus would also attack the patient’s nervous system.
On My Way to Paradise Page 27