by Wayward
What I’d do if it was rats? I placed the fire extinguisher close at hand and took my sample to sequence, maintaining close observation on the fruit.
The first results showed a massively complex DNA sequence, bigger than I anticipated, and certainly in part the result of splicework. There was a corporate identification sequence at several points along it – inert acid sets which coded exactly for the laboratory that had designed the previous sections of the molecule and also documented how much of the molecule was artificial. I found first one, then three of these, which was in itself peculiar, although not unheard of. Lately there had been a few discoveries of epigenetic passovers from engineered organisms to each other, causing similar fusions that proved to be hereditary in certain species. Hackers who had specialised in epigenetic sampling and bootlegging of officially licensed DNA objects were known for causing this issue, leaving their active biochemistry carelessly littered wherever they passed, which in turn allowed organisms to exchange information at a far greater rate than nature had originally allowed. So although this was unusual it wasn’t unprecedented. Saying exactly what it was all doing? That was a much harder task. I had designed a lot of processes to speed the identification up, but even so it would take hours.
On the gurney the specimen wobbled and twitched. I braced, watching, waiting, thinking of rats or giant beetles. My sensation of being alone up here, even though I was only a short dash and shout from one of the police officers, intensified to a nearly unbearable point. The smell of the fruit seemed to be released by the movement and filled the room with its heady odour, sicklier now than it had seemed before, as fruit just before it rots or ferments reaches a sugary peak of sweetness. I found myself frozen and staring at it long after the movement had ceased, waiting for another. When it came – a lurch and a wobble caused by the visible pressure of something pushing firmly at it from the inside and creating a distinctively shaped bulge I was off my seat without a second thought, out the shed, down the path and into the main building with the outer entry door closed behind me.
I told myself it was not a hand. Could not be a hand. No.
“You all right there?” the officer sitting in the plastic chair reading on his pad looked up at me.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking no. “I just had a thought, need to go to another lab for a little bit.”
I walked through the department, wondering what to do. Finally, having exhausted every excuse, I returned to my space, to my shed and to the thing I could not avoid. When I reached the room I saw no female goddess on the gurney, only a browning mass of whitish debris, much smaller than it had been. Long strings of sticky sap-like liquid spooled from the edge of the stretcher to the floor and trailed in unmistakable humanoid footprints out the door. I looked down. I was standing in it. Over it. They pointed out.
Out front of the shed, in the sun, on the grass, lay a pale green figure. I saw it through the window. It simply lay there, basking, still, like a mannequin waiting to be picked up and moved into a pose and clothed in the latest fashion. The only difference, aside from the green skin and lack of body hair, was that unlike an adult human woman, it did not breathe. A huge net of thick, green hair was spread out around its head like a fan and from my rigid vantage point at the window I thought that this sunk into the earth like roots.
The machine finished its first pass analysis of the fruitbody sample and I pulled up the report on my tablet without once taking my eyes from the prone body of the daughter. The flower, the fruit... was this the seed? What was it? The sheer unreality kept me in thrall. I glanced down.
The fruitbody was pure plant – there was a lot to it and it was clearly a product of splicing. Moving with extreme quietness I scraped up a sample of the thick gel from one of the footprints and placed it into the machine, hoping the whine and whirr of its centrifuge wouldn’t disturb the reclining thing outside. It didn’t. The sun shone at noonday intensity and the skin on the motionless green woman darkened noticeably as the next hour passed, though she never moved one bit.
There was enough DNA in the gel sample that was hers to make a reasonable analysis. When I saw it, still staring, my feet sore from standing so still myself, I called Paphides. She asked me to come to her lab urgently and hung up before I could tell her about what had happened. I called back but was put onto hold. Before I could do more than that the figure on the grass suddenly sat up.
The hair I had presumed to be rooted proved so, coming up from deep in the ground in shockingly long fibrils, pale on the tips, nearly black at her head, tinged with purple. She was so human and so inhuman at the same time that I could not move, transfixed with a horror that was not lessened though I had anticipated it. Her body movements were supple and easy, her skin glittered with tiny droplets of sap, plumped and well fed by the rich loam of the roof garden and its abundant water. Like the mother fruit she had no nipples although she had a navel. The worst part of it was that she seemed utterly confident and capable, purposeful, as she looked about her with large, wet dark eyes from a rounded, exaggerated face. If she reminded me of anything in that moment it was a manga cartoon; I saw only the eyes, almost no nose, a tiny mouth, composed in a perfectly full pout and coloured a rich shiny plum, but without expression; the features of a particular kind of masculine-oriented porn girl, a hentai apple, ripe and ready. But instead of girlish high voices and plaintive kitten expressions protesting innocence there was a total flatness to her, keenly alive, intelligent, but as detached as a machine.
Abomination was the word that came to mind, and died, silent, on the desert where all my knowledge and confidence had been.
She saw the shed. She saw me, but I was dismissed as soon as noticed, heart hammering as if I was about to die. She walked rapidly to the edge of the roof where the roots of the trees trailed over the side and began to climb down them.
They went all the way down five storeys to the ground.
Tracking her proved impossible. By the time I reached the street there was no sign of her – no footprints, nothing. All I could do was take my readouts and head over to Paphides at top speed. I texted her on the way, trying my best to relate the incident, attaching footage from the shed’s monitor. In my hand I clutched the paper scrap on which I had printed out the proof that the unclassified vine produced a... something... which contained an almost full complement of human DNA. I contacted the DI but he was also offline. His agent informed me that he was en route to another murder scene and would be out of live contact until he had conducted the initial survey.
By the time I got to Paphides’ lab it was clear that there was an information lockdown in place. No sooner had I reached the entrance than I was frisked and most of my gear and phone removed by non uniformed officers. They did let me through and they did give me receipts, but aside from the paper strip in my hand I ended up with nothing save my mask and clothing when I was let into the room.
The lab was full of whitesuits, bioshield masks in place, reflecting the glaring sunlamps overhead and hiding all identities. Paphides herself was standing at a dissection table, the unripened fruitbody opened up before her, a glistening sac of the contents laying inside, untouched, I thought. The white skin of the folded humanoid bodyform had already begun to green. It showed no sign of breathing. A wash of thick liquid pooled around it and spilled over in gelatinous strings – I recognised a form of the goo that had been printed all over my own floor. I was not permitted inside. They let me up to the observation glass. Their equipment was far superior to my own but the looks on their faces were the same as the one on mine. Seeing me through the glass the doctor motioned for another to take over and came through her airlocks, stripping off the mask and gloves she had been wearing.
“Is that... is that the seed, you think?”
“I’d have to cut it open,” she said. “It doesn’t look right for that. Did you profile it?”
I held out my wrinkled, sweat-marked paper.
She read it. We fed my results to the police computer age
nts and watched them search, match, connect, in silence, glancing sometimes to the vigil inside the dissection theatre in which nobody moved. The white figures stared down, every face reflecting the sleeping form of a girl, curled up, perfect in every way. She looked different to mine, I thought. Something about the shorter body, the broader structure.
Paphides spoke first, in a voice made rough by lack of rest. “This one here matches the DNA of the dead guy on the scene. Exactly. Only the chromosomal makeup is female, XX, not XY.” She pointed up the enormous, complex genome, the classic splicer breaks, the strangely non-classical repeats, fluctuations that we had learned marked wild seeding – elements of human engineering devices that had been absorbed by organisms they were once used on and which continued to operate ungoverned beyond any means of control.
“Someone made these,” I said, sure of it.
“Someone made the flowers, and the fruits, I think,” Paphides said. “I’m not so sure about the rest. That’s why we called you.”
“But you didn’t know what was inside these things?”
She shook her head. “No.”
I explained to her what had happened to mine.
“I have other things to show you. If you’re still awake enough you should visit this new murder scene with me... ” she didn’t bother changing out of her biosuit. Exhaustion told in every movement she made, but she beckoned. “I think I have an idea where it was going.”
It was not a long journey. There was a warehouse on the riverside with a boat dock for a cargo carrier. Inside there was just a mess – more of the same packaging and materials scattered everywhere, and the sickly smell of rotting lilies infesting every corner. Heaps of wilted flowers still lay on tables. The body was near the dock this time – a man in his forties, lying face up. He had also been shot, but the gun was in his own hand. Beside him lay a second figure, but not a human one. She had been shot too, many times, but apparently to little avail – her body was filled with punctures but what had killed her was the fact she had been hacked to bits with a Stanley knife and now lay in oddly bloodless pieces. Tough woody looking bones were splintered like bamboo. Her face was bruised but the eyes retained their blank stare, empty and accusing. Her long hair had burrowed through the concrete floor, pulling her head at a repulsive angle. The torso, unlike the rest of the body was already in the advanced stages of rot. From the composting mass new shoots of green were poking upwards, bladed, like bamboo. Questing root tendrils had formed and crept up to the man’s corpse where they were burrowing into the skin of his exposed forearm below his football shirt. There was something oddly tender about their reach and stretch. I felt sick.
“We’re going to let it grow,” Paphides said as I straightened from my close examination. “My guess is it will form the same kind of forest we were in earlier.”
I looked at the father, gun in hand. Half his head was missing. “Why would he do that?”
Paphides pointed to marks on his exposed skin, like fine welts. I’d missed them. “He’s full of psychedelics. Enough to trip a bear. My guess is that he knew what was coming. We’ve found six of these. He’s just the most recent. The daughters have always returned to the fathers and they’ve been found close to each other. The human corpse becomes mulch for the growing plant.”
“You’re growing them all?”
“Just a few,” she said. “Under supervision.”
“You think my... she’s after whoever... ”
“Whoever made her.”
“That’s just not possible. It’s not even reasonable. What’s the purpose? To kill him?”
“So far that does seem to be the case.” She looked at me and we shared a moment of defeat, every vision of how splicing, viruses, even genetics worked, failing us in terms of explanation. But here it was, the dead man, high and crazy, the daughter fruit growing avidly. Paphides held out her tablet and showed me the earliest ones they had recorded: speeded video of weeks and weeks of growth.
I could think only of Shakespeare line, “nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange.” The rotten slump of vegetation of the daughter, quickly organised and growing wherever the location – nearly always inside a building – using the human corpse to fuel its massive root search for alternative nutrients and water supplies. Once established, able to follow pipes for both water and wastewater outflows, burgeoning into a dense, boreal forest that looked very much like the growth of individual plants – well differentiated and diverse – smashing through whatever lay between it and the sun with prescient accuracy. Once matured groves and dells developed, the blooming white flowers nodded into being in their sheltered winds.
“You can’t smell it,” Paphides said, watching dully over my shoulder, “But there’s enough pheromones and nectar lures of various kinds to make it like the perfume department at Harrods. People are always coming to it. If they use the sap from the lower root systems as food, like it was one of the original Tapvines, then they get hooked to its particular cocktail of sugars, alcohol and uppers. Keeping them away from the higher forest is hard work.”
“But if these guys weren’t shot, did the seeds kill them, are they seeds?”
“I’m calling it that. Yes they are seeds, containing all the germ material required to grow what you’re seeing right there. And the ones that weren’t shot were poisoned with paralytic and psychedelic compounds. I just didn’t show you the part where they were still breathing. Took days for them to be used up enough to die.”
I looked at the tablet, then handed it back as the last film ended. There was no trace of any human body in the final shot, just some crushed whitish grey twigs, desiccated and forgotten under the shadows of gigantic leaves.
“They shipped them all over the world,” I said.
“Just the flowers... they didn’t take the plants as grown,” she corrected me. “The flowers have been known about for years. We’ve followed their exports. But how the growth of new factories was brought about – we never knew that... until now.”
“I don’t understand it. If the flowers are the selling point... ”
“That’s what you’re for,” she said. “We want to know if the seeding process was made or just a – lucky accident.”
She drove me back to my own office. “You’ve still got your non-uniforms. They know the score.”
I felt only exhaustion and nausea. I took the data she provided, accepted the return of my belongings, handed to me in a plastic sack, and returned to work.
I fell asleep poring over it, laid on the tiny pullout bed inside the shed. The analysis on my own Jane Doe had returned – her father had taken a plane to Miami. I wondered as I dozed how she would find him now, how much the imperative to do so mattered, if it could be considered in any way a natural process that spread the seed to the best locations, places dense in needy human population... Fitful dreams became nightmares. I woke at dawn, looked around. The shed stank with the reek of the rotting fruitbody and hummed where flies had already crept in through the eaves and begun to feast.
I thought I would go home, take a shower and change; I felt useless, slow, stupid. A few hours wouldn’t make any difference. Outside the fresh, drizzly air of a London morning, thick with humidity rising from the roofs and gardens, was delightful, clean. I put my face up to the overcast clouds and breathed the clear air.
After a good meal and a proper rest everything looked much more possible. I returned, paused to make my office chats, to socialise, to befriend the officers helping me. It was only when I walked back to the roof, prepared to observe the decomposition of the fruit as I pored over the gene analyses that I saw her.
Her dark green body was stretched out exactly where she’d been the day before. There was a strange lustre to it so that it looked like a painted sculpture of a woman lying on grass that was only half as green as she was. Her hair was not buried in the ground but lay in a brown, crinkled heap around her head, withered parts of it shivering in the
breeze, the rest made slick and flat with the rain.
Because of that I had less fear about approaching her, but it took me a good long while nonetheless. As I crouched beside her, sure she was dead, her eyes blinklessly open to the rain, they suddenly moved and she looked at me. I fell onto my arse and sat there, trousers soaking through, frozen.
She was weak however, and dying, that was for sure. All her movements were exhausted as she tried to lift her arm towards me. It took her many attempts. Finally she managed to reach me, her waxy viridian fingers heavy and cold as they brushed my face once, then fell heavily onto my breast and finally back into the grass. She lifted her hand and placed it on the mounded shape of her own breast. The corner of her mouth and the shape of her face altered for a second into the faintest of smiles. The black gaze slid away from mine. She didn’t move again.
The next day she was covered in brown discolouration and the black splotches of fungal decay. No roots, no shoots came from her. She simply died and rotted there until I worked up the courage and the gall to remove her and send her to Paphides along with my report.
The grass was yellow in the shape of her for several days. Every day when I looked at it I had to fight the urge to cry.
SIMON MORDEN
Shine
She was certain that the others didn’t even know she had a safe, let alone what was locked inside. She felt giddy – light-headed for certain, and possibly nauseous – as she opened her quarters’ door, her hand barely brushing the contact plate on the frame.