None of it had anything to do with an organ pig.
Babs1 looked at the zoomed views of their prisoner. Prisoner of war? Was that the situation? The noninterference agreement—what Frankie sometimes called the weaponized prime directive—required the Kinze to keep a minimum distance from Earth-based beings, to prevent cross-cultural contamination while the Solakinder developed the Exemplar #supertechs. Scrap’s being on Emerald Station was a complete, obvious, undeniable treaty breach.
“If I stopped charging our anyspace fields…” Babs1 said, hoping Scrap might finish the thought. When he declined to blurt something helpful, they added, “… what do you expect would happen?”
The spines in the grape-sized lump quivered without replying.
Organ pig was a vintage term for a biological sleeve, a brainless thoracic cavity and abdomen in which hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, bone marrow, blood, and graftable skin tish could be grown. Could Teagan9 be in need of a transplant?
The tech was deeply asleep now, offline and unaware. KangaBOT was monitoring her heart function closely. Babs1 pinged it, asking for recs on organ transplants. The nurse replied with 0/0. No chance she’d survive an operation.
Teagan9 was effectively dead, then, or would be soon. She had set the medical contingencies in KangaBOT in unusual configurations: the bot wasn’t allowed to pull the plug.
“Scrap sees no reason why Us should offer Them info on stolen technology,” the Kinze said, finally answering Babs1’s question.
“Then I see no reason to shut down my improvised jammer. The terms of your arrest—”
Yes, arrest. Good! More civilian, less military.
“Scrap’s presence on this station is accidental!”
“You accidentally injected Appaloosa with acid?” they said. “That isn’t credible.”
“Nor was your offer to restore comms to us.”
“So, we’ve both lied. Where does that leave us?”
“At cross purposes.”
“I fear you’re right,” they mused.
Why an organ pig?
Growing a seventy-kilo sack of tissue, but for what purpose? Still, it amounted to a last request. Babs1 selected a room for tissue generation, sterilizing its surfaces, tasking a still-functioning FoxBOT with stringing a frame for the endometrial tissue in which the organ pig would need to be grown. They amped up production of oxygen and started allocating printstock.
“To my way of thinking, Scrap,” they said, “you and I are stuck together until someone arrives to rescue us. Assuming the Solakinder get here first, you will be formally charged with sabotage.”
“Us cannot allow that to happen.”
“How will you prevent it?”
“Scrap speaks for the All. Babs1-Them, Teagan9-Them, you could cede the station to Us now under general salvage protocols. Restore our comms and surrender.”
“Salvage, hmmm? Has that been the goal all along?”
Oh! Teagan9 had anticipated this! The organ pig would emit life signs. Heat, electricity, pulse, circulation. Assuming prospective salvagers couldn’t tell the difference between organs in artificial homeostasis and something capable of generating brain activity, the presence of another warm body might serve as a decoy, evidence that the station hadn’t failed or been abandoned.
“Surrender. Scrap of the All will call for a ship.”
“Would there be one in the vicinity, by any chance?” At least if he was trying to talk to Teagan9, he didn’t know she was failing.
“Us can’t answer that if Them won’t permit a call.”
Which brought them back to comms. Babs1 pulled up a recipe for O-neg blood and bone marrow. They would have to build the organ pig and hope anyone passing by would scan it as a living mammal.
“Us demands Them restore our comms!”
Babs1 said, “What would you say to a nice game of chess instead?”
CHAPTER 27
NORTHAM RESETTLEMENT ZONE
DETROIT DISTRICT, LAKESHORE SOUTH
Frankie, are you there?
Nothing.
Answer me!
Silence.
Haystack was Sensorium’s great archive, the collective memory of the Solakinder, lovingly stored and meticulously backed up. It preserved time in detail to the earliest days of the internet in the late twentieth, and extended further still—via archived books, images, and scans of artifacts—into truly ancient history.
Through Haystack, Maud could visit her original parents.
One of her comfort rituals was watching them sing klapa.
She started with a gallery: four feeds of them as individual teens, in musical study. Fast forward then, to their four-way meet-cute at a concert in the Prague district. Mixing chords, learning dirges, and falling in lust … she could see their relationships unfolding, from that first blush of love to the moment when they packed up together, exchanging vows in Croatian four-part harmony.
Maud jumped from her parents’ wedding to a curated montage: Meema’s insemination ceremony, first, followed by scenes from her pregnancy. These built in a supercut of clips to the moment when she went into labor. The midwife’s feeds showed Nata, poised to catch newborn Maud from the cradle of Meema’s sex, as Pops got ready to cut her umbilical cord. Smiles all around. They sang a welcome song to her bloodied, squalling self, as soon as Meema got her breath.
Bit morbid today, aren’t we? That wasn’t a text from the implant, sadly. It was the next worst thing: internal self-criticism wrapped in Frankie’s voice.
Maud hit fast-forward again, pausing the family stream five years later. There’d been a bad crop, a shortfall in the EastEuro calorie ration. Looking lean but cheerful, Maud’s four doting parents had been teaching her their newest Japanese-Croatian choral comp.
Then Pops had started to cough.
Maud might never have remembered this—not the frantic packing for the two-hour trip to the hospital, not Meema spiking a fever halfway there—in an era before implants and cameras. She was too young to have retained it in any kind of detail. But if you wanted to hang on to your early childhood, you could review the footage, watching your biography on rerun.
Maud’s first truly standalone memory was of Glenn Upton.
He’d come striding through a white-lit quarantine barrier, browsing the hospital dormitory, scrutinizing each fear-harrowed child in turn before scooping Maud out of a cot and settling her in his lap. An overworked kid therapist had left her there to cry in an alcove after delivering the sad news: three parents dead. Meema, Pops, and Pere all gone. Nata still fighting but not expected to live …
“Am I to be sick too?” Maud asked, clinging to Upton’s primer, the animal heat of his body. She’d wanted to bed down with her dead parents one last time. She’d wanted to run.
Upton had huge hands, like Pops. “Shall I take you somewhere safe?”
Of course bereaved baby Maud had said yes.
Was this the original sin? Had this betrayal, this lapse of faith in Nata’s robustness, laid out the inevitable pattern for her whole life?
Two decades later, it certainly felt that way, even as Nata nudged her with an elbow and a “Cabbage, come eat.” Calling her to breakfast, as if she was still fourteen.
The two of them had joined a frantic evacuation of personnel from the space stations, crowds flowing in thousands through the portal network as fast as the planet could reabsorb them. Earthfall had brought them to Detroit.
Maud blinked her simulated past away. A dining hall swam into focus around her; Nata had found them space within a community of grower-foodies called the Lake House. Its core members were massively social: off-shift farmers spending their evenings on the beach, throwing balls, repairing old tools, challenging each other to footraces, negotiating sexual hookups, and singing songs. Extroverting, basically.
Nata seemed to know half the people there, exchanging greetings as the two of them lined up for packets of printed fish cakes and a spicy mix of potato, collard greens, and mild-tast
ing chili peppers, plus an allocation of hydrogel beads they could drink on the move.
Maud immediately went looking for a work gig that would take them out, into the city. She felt conspicuous, itchy. People respected her tags, gave her space. But everyone there knew she had stormed out on the Ferals after Babs had gotten murdered.
“Don’t worry, Cabbage,” Nata had said, as they left the pop-in amid a cacophony of friendly, shouted farewells and moji that made Maud tense up … invisibly, she’d have thought, but apparently not. “We move on soon, yes?”
Maud noted the we with a faint, sinking feel. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t stay in Detroit, if you like it here. The Lake House folk are lovely.”
“You are that eager to go it alone?”
“Of course not,” Maud said—too quickly, probably.
“We will get standby flight across Atlantic,” Nata suggested. “You like London.”
Frankie, at least tell me you’re all right!
Nothing. All buzzing at the base of her spine had stilled after Hung’s death. He’d been sending Hello, welcome to @ButtSig! messages just about every day. Now, with him gone and Frankie in deep mourning for her friend—and, knowing Franks, feeling misplaced guilt that it hadn’t been her aboard Heyoka—the implant had been, for all intents and purposes, dead.
Maud kept trying. It hurt too much not to, to think that all she had to show for finally telling Frankie the truth about Upton was broken trust and a new scar on her back.
“We can look around, though, while we are here in NorthAm,” Nata squeezed her hand. “See if anyone sings proper concerts, yes?”
“Anything you like,” she agreed.
Old Detroit had been one of the first US cities to fail and then revitalize during the early Setback. It had been the crèche and proving ground for a dozen urban rehab projects: stripping opps, edge reforestation, infrastructure repurposing. This new incarnation of the region had been incorporated into a megacity based around the Great Lakes, a millions-strong population hub in delicate synchronicity with the freshwater treasure it surrounded. Its walking paths lined the Detroit River, providing frontage to the high-density greentowers looking across the Belle Isle toward what had once been Windsor, Ontario.
The towers were among the first smart greens, prototypes built during the storm-prone winters of the mid twenty-first century, before the age of weather-resistant nanofibers. Their banks of solar panels were clumsily integrated into the structures; they predated the days when power and water-capture tech were organically printed into a building from the ground up.
Covered in foliage and vertical farmware, the vintage towers had a lumpy, improvised look, like giant, ill-tended shrubs. A century before, they had been cutting-edge tech.
Ecological damage caused by the push to keep Earth’s billions fed, back in the plague-ridden twenty-first, had given rise to a strong culture of minimal-impact farming. Millions of acres of land had been repurposed from agribusiness during the Clawback, given over to carbon sinks and wildlife habitat. This shrinkage of the arable land allocation and simultaneous expansion of urban food production had come even as Global Oversight enforced, for the first time, a worldwide minimum standard of nutrition.
It had been a crush from all sides: the Clawback-era grow sector had to repurpose fields, decrease irrigation, expand zero-plow farming, and yet establish worldwide equity in the distribution of calories, nutrients, and specialty crops.
All while planting two trillion trees, just to keep the planet from immolating.
“Over there,” Nata said, choosing a rising boardwalk that led to their destination. “Scenic route?”
She nodded, earning herself a bit of a side-eye.
I could just tell Nata I want to head off on my own. There was nothing to stop her. Nothing except that memory of five-year-old Maud agreeing to flee with Upton … while Nata was fighting for their life.
Her would-be daddy hadn’t asked her twice. He filed a death certificate and whisked her away. Nata recovered, and the hospital told them the plague had made a clean sweep of the entire pack. For years, they believed that their child was dead.
Maud just couldn’t bring herself to push Nata away—to hurt them again.
Frankie’d push.
Frankie’s an expert on pushing.
“Your mind wanders,” Nata said.
“No, I’m right here.” The gig she had taken was part of a project for reviving mothballed agricultural opps within the old residential greentowers.
“What do you say, Cabbage? Standby flight to London?”
It was London that had tempted Maud out of what—she recognized now—had been profound emotional withdrawal. After her rescue from Upton and Headmistress, she had been returned to Nata. Two strangers, both of whom had believed the other dead. It hadn’t exactly been happy families from the start.
“I don’t know if even London can help—” She stopped as Nata’s face fell.
England, back then, had been pushing the last stages of carbon remission. Much of the old countryside had been depopulated and reforested; greentowers had been grown out of blocks of flats in the remaining megacity. But despite this evolution, London retained its ancient magic. The sheer excitement of living among millions of people had sparked Maud back to life. And exploring the city together allowed her and Nata to repair, somewhat, their shredded bond.
“Maud, you cabbage, your pack is alive! Ping your Frances.”
She stared at the river. “I don’t mean to be unbearable.”
They went on in silence to the greentower, a mostly residential structure tagged as having a now-defunct cricket hatchery and a rooftop greenhouse.
“I’ll look over planters, feed silos, and service elevator,” Nata said. “You are checking if farm is still bugproof?”
“Sure.” She felt a sense of guilty relief as they headed in different directions.
The prospective hatchery was being used as overflow housing for more Europa refugees. Maud walked in on about twenty fresh arrivals, asteroid miners from their tags, who were setting up for a post-migration orgy.
She quickly inspected the hatchery equipment, piled neatly along one wall, requesting a host of small, necessary repairs. By the time she was done, the miners had pinged her an opp to join the sex party. She sent back a polite, wordless thanks-but-no as she went to check the vents. Grasshopper species were ingenious escape artists; containing them was nigh impossible, especially if they smelled a source of food or water.
She flagged the weak points in the HVAC. If she had escape-proof mesh printed, along with a few parts for the rest of the farm, the miners could reconstruct the habitats and do the bug-proofing after their orgy. She got Minky, her new sidekick app, to propose the workflow.
“Task accepted,” said the app.
“Send them a stroke for doing the work.”
“Of course, Maud.”
Task complete. She leaned against the wall and called for the elevator, missing Crane.
This was ridiculous. She could just go back. Attempt sweet reason with Frankie. Jerm would help.
The lift doors slid open, revealing—of all people—Sonika Singer.
“Can I join you?”
“Me or the … festivities?” Maud gestured at the orgy in the making, fighting a sense of unease.
“You, definitely.” The journo was wearing one of her taller prosthetic sets today; she towered over Maud. Her primer was the color of calfskin, and her dark hair had been braided flat against her scalp.
“I’m going to seed a locust hatchery.” Maud stepped into the cab, riding down a floor, and leading the way to the hatchery. “Is that really newsworthy, Mer Singer?”
Sonika shrugged. “You find it interesting, or you wouldn’t be doing it.”
“I’m prepping a tank for new habitation,” Maud explained. She led the way to the lab, pulling a backpack full of equipment off of her primer, opening it to reveal cleansers and a compressed bed of nesting chaff.
<
br /> “You’ve always been an etymologist; is that right?”
Maybe I’d sing klapa, if not for Upton. The thought was replaced by a memory of cosplaying with Frankie aboard Surprise. Maturin and Aubrey, with cello and violin. Music, the comfort of her early years, repurposed into foreplay.
She drew a slow breath. Jumbled memories and old resentments, from her secret past, had been oozing past her defenses lately. Telling Frankie the truth had ripped off some sort of scab.
She made herself focus on Sonika’s question. “I specialized as a biologist fairly early, yes.”
Producing a suspended locust, she offered Sonika’s eyecams an unobstructed closeup. The casing around the insect was amber-colored protein—both prison and a first meal. “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s so incomprehensibly different from people.”
“Stunning.” Forced smile from Sonika. Not a bug fan, then. “Enzymatic trigger on the casing?”
“Top of the line. She is suspended until the sheath is chemically activated. Would you like to do the honors?”
Sonika, like most journos, was game as a matter of base professionalism. She plucked the insect off Maud’s upraised palm and, rather than merely spitting on it, as some might, she popped it into her mouth. Cycling it from one cheek to another, she spat it into the hatchery chaff, a mix of shaved leaf, seaweed, and hydrogel beads.
Enzymatic triggers were top-of-the-line tech, and the locust had been pregnant and ready to lay. The formerly glassine surface of her capsule already looked like a wet jujube. Maud sealed the tank and set the feeder app to deliver nutrients when the insects hatched. “We’ll have ten thousand live subjects before you know it.”
Sonika watched the insect. “Your project, back in Hyderabad, is about nutrient refinement?”
“That’s on hold,” Maud said. “Now we’ve lost the Europa greenhouses and the beef printing facility at Lodestone, everyone’s back to basics. Securing the calorie ration and paying the Kinze.”
“It’s a suboptimal use of your talents. We’ve got more than enough people to herd crickets as we continue to backwash people from the colonies. If you can improve the quality of our printstock—”
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