by Rebecca Ore
Henry sighed as though he’d preferred to have heard about another man. Dorcas felt both naked and in terrific control. He couldn’t carry her secret too long without it eating him hollow. Metaphorically. She’d infected him with a meme. But she wouldn’t tell him everything. Unless he turned her in soon, he’d have to shelter her without knowing all the details. He’d have to turn her in or conspire to keep her insects secret.
Gotcha, Henry. I’ll either be busted or I won’t be alone in this. In ten minutes, they were in the University basement parking garage. Dorcas looked at Henry and pulled her knees together.
“We’ve got to get ready for the auditors,” he said, taking her hand to help her out of the car.
They walked in together, Dorcas behind Henry. She wondered if she’d gone insane to tell him, then seconds later, felt elated, then anxious, anxiously elated then knew the emotional fibrillations were a sign of something out of whack, but the fact of recognizing her whackiness was a promising symptom. Dorcas needed someone to know she’d done interesting work.
Dorcas went into Lab 43, put on her virtual reality goggles, and began to interact with Desi and Lucy on a reconstruct from old video shows. Give the auditors something to catch.
A wire-frame figure stepped out of the video apartment wall. It moved like Henry, but then another figure stepped out behind him, also wire-frame. “Wasting government time, Dr. Rae?”
“I needed to take a little break.”
“Actually, we’d like you to stay right here. We’re coming in your office to do inventory on your sequences.”
Dorcas saw Lucy shrug. Lucy said, “Why don’t we go down and watch Desi give birth to little Ricardo?” The wireframe figures nodded at her and went back into the wall.
Dorcas said, “Could they do that in your day?”
Lucy said, “I think it will be funny.”
Desi couldn’t believe this was happening to him, but little Rickie popped out of his mouth when Lucy pressed hard on his stomach.
Dorcas felt a finger rub around her nipple as the bodies outside the goggles put polygraph equipment on her body. “Hi, Henry,” she said, pissed that he’d assert his rights to her in front of a Fed, but then treating her so familiarly would make her seem more like Henry’s creature. Henry had to inform on her now, or he’d be blamed for what she did. A woman whose lover tweaked her nipple in front of a Fed had to be his tool.
“Who’s Henry?” Lucy asked.
“He’s one of those wire-framed guys who interrupted us,” Dorcas said.
“If it wasn’t funny,” Lucy said, “it’s not part of my program.”
Letters ran across the bottom of Dorcas’s visual field.
How often do you use entertainment programs while on the job?
“This is the first time in years,” Dorcas said.
Are we going to find anything unusual in your DNA inventory?
Dorcas was about to answer yes when she realized the polygraph would have read her already.
Are you protecting anyone?
“Why would I protect anyone?”
Are you having an affair with your supervisor?
“I don’t believe that’s any of your business,” Dorcas said. “Lucy, I’ve got more serious things to deal with now.”
“Maybe you should take me home,” Lucy said. “I play better when I’m not being interrupted.”
The visual field went black. The two wire-frame men materialized. Henry seemed exasperated.
Dorcas said, “I waive employee rights against sexual harrassment.”
The investigator wire-frame seemed quite pleased. “Are you protecting Henry?” Dorcas knew the investigator was another man and felt quite safe.
“Well, you’re reading me. What do you think?”
“You’re excited by this.”
Well, of course. Dorcas moved her hands to the goggles and uncoupled the feeds, then pulled the goggles off her eyes. Henry and the investigator sat on either side of the polygraphy machine. The investigator looked just like his wire-frame image. Dorcas said, “Do you expect scientists, creative types, to obey the rules like drode heads?”
The investigator said, “It’s the law.”
The audit so exclusively concentrated on molar weights of DNA that only Henry noticed how many queen wasps were missing.
Henry took Dorcas home that night. “I think everything is okay.” The danger seemed to have excited him, too. Dorcas wasn’t blackmailing him into continuing with her, just giving him fresh adventures.
“We were missing three micrograms of DNA.”
“Destroyed in an L-4 lab. My research assistant took care of the records.”
When they checked the ark tanks, Dorcas smelled something foul in one of the Virginia Fringed Mountain Snail tanks. Something had died in the terrarium, probably a third of fifteen percent of the known population. “Oh, shit, Henry,” Dorcas said. “You’ve got two binocular scopes, don’t you? I’ll help.” For three hours, they looked through the limestone gravel and soil for live snails, sorting with plastic tweezers. Dorcas wished she and Henry were in bed. She found one live snail, then the dead mouse that polluted the tank. It had probably been poisoned by rodent-control bait that induced quick rotting, then wandered into the tank to die.
“I’ve got a live one.” Henry said.
“Well, at least we tried.” Dorcas said.
“What happened to the wasp?” Henry asked.
“She’s flying over Central Park, looking for a mate.”
“How did you tweak her?”
“I didn’t tweak her. I felt sorry for her.”
“Dorcas.”
“Really.”
“They were so concerned with molar weights of DNA,” Henry said. “I didn’t think I used as much as that, though.”
“The mantis lungs were hard to coordinate with the existing growth factors,” Dorcas said. “You’re sure they’re not listening to us?”
“I heard we’re going to be under investigation for a while, but, and I know this is sexist, they feel you’re my creature.”
“From the lips down,” Dorcas said. She felt safe. Next year, before Henry got bored with her again, she’d redesign either humans or the bald-faced hornet.
No more live snails. Henry said, “How did the mouse get in?”
“I didn’t put the cover glass completely over the tank. Virginia Fringed Mountain Snails don’t travel above ground.” Technology wasn’t the enemy. The human genome with its capacity for excuses and self-delusion was. “So you’re looking for a way to make people immortal?”
“Yes,” Henry said.
“I think that’s a very tempting idea,” Dorcas said, her back and neck aching from tension. She’d been bent over way too long.
FOUR
INSECTICIDE
If the mantis hadn’t soothed me, I don’t know how I could have lived through the first week after surgery. Perhaps it was slaved to respond to my underlying agitation, because it played its wing music all day long, even as it chewed with sideways jaw motions on its kibble.
Down to no one again. Why me? Why couldn’t I have been born into a family that kept me, raised me as just another person? I could have been a techie, running scanning people.
Thumm, and I wasn’t worried so much. After a week, my head was covered with stubble. I wondered what color my hair would be now. I’d heard about people going grey overnight, but Miriam told me that was a myth. Hospitals had too much to do to redye hair. I felt I looked hideous, bloated under the prison strong dress, face looking vacant or haunted, wrinkles drawing skin down. More of them for sure, my fingers told me.
Now, the insect nibbled my skin as I lay drugged by its chemicals on the padded floor. When the guards, wearing the same ear and nose filters that Kearney wore, brought my plate, the mantis crept up and waved its arms over the food.
Days passed in total light. Cameras behind heavy transparent barriers watched me. I expected that computers compared my moves against a progr
am for expected inmate behavior. I gauged time’s passing by my hair.
One time, when the guard brought my food and a box of kibble for the mantis, I touched her wrist. Timidly, I asked, “Please tell me how long I’ve been here. And where’s Jim from Amnesty?” I hated hearing how weak I sounded.
“He’s not at this unit now,” the guard said, voice muffled behind a breathing mask.
The mantis was to be my only friend. I began to dream about it when I slept, a lesbian mantis chewing at a nipple, jaws squeezing sideways. Then it turned and bit through my skull bones, eating both my nightmares and my good memories. I had no family, no orphanage, no lover named Jergen.
I woke up. While the mantis slept on, I could look at it without the fog of its enchanting sounds and smells.
An insect. A bug. They wanted me to bond with a damn bug. I hated all of them, Martin Fox, Kearney, the parents who kicked me out on a roadside in Ohio, the soothing orphanage personnel easing me into some human dumpster. Was I born to be confused with tranquilizers?
It began playing its wings, but my own blood pounded in my ears, and I tore its wings off and stomped it, rocking back and forth on the padding covered with bug juices. Dying, it grabbed for me with its chitinous mouth, got my foot in the instep. Its head came off, fastened to my foot.
I grabbed the head and threw it at the cameras.
Kearney came in then, protected against whatever magic the bug might have left in the air. He went up to where I’d thrown the head and pulled out tweezers to pick it up.
“I hate being tranquilized,” I said, feeling chilly insect mush and hot blood under my right foot. I stepped away from the wetness, but the blood followed me. My blood. I hadn’t realized the mantis bit that hard.
“So, you can resist the insect,” Kearney said. “Good. Jergen told us you’re really tough. He said you can resist anything.”
I didn’t know if I believe Jergen told them anything. I said, “I’d feel better about helping you if someone human was half-assed nice to me.”
“We’ll send in someone like Jim,” Kearney said.
“But not that sweet,” I said. I’d work for them. I preferred running around on the outside to being in prison. And these insects were nasty. “When I’m more myself, I’d resent a control that reminds me of a social worker or hospital aide.”
Kearney manipulated the tweezers, turning the mantis’s head, not answering for a second. I wondered if I jolted his expectations and made him change his plans. Now, he seemed to be reviewing the people available to him. “Jergen said if you give us your loyalty, you’d be completely honest with us. Not that you’d always be compliant. But he said you’d need someone who was loyal to you in return.”
So did he think he had me with Jergen? I said, “I guess you’re too high ranked to work with me directly.”
He said, “We need someone you can live with.”
“Who can live with me,” I said. They didn’t trust me not to disappear if they used me as an agent. Why should anyone trust me?
“A half-sweet control, I think that would suit you,” Kearney said. He handed me the tweezers holding the mantis, then pulled out his nose plugs and ear muffs.
I said, “The last commitment I made to help you was half-hearted compared to now. I hate whoever it was who made the mantis. I’m afraid of how… how I look back on what I cared about and it seems like it happened to someone else. But why would you trust me?”
“We need someone who speaks the jargon,” Kearney said. “We’ve also got a good profile on you.”
“But if anyone recognizes me?”
“You won’t look like you do now. We promised you a prettier body and face, remember?”
I remembered myself naked in a wrinkled body under spotlights. Would Jergen have picked up a forty-three-year-old woman running from the police? “No one I used to know would recognize me?”
“No.”
“When does this happen?”
“We’re building your nanos now.”
“I’m not sure I want to go that way.” Every once in a while, nanomachines liquified the body they were supposed to rebuild. Occasionally, they did less lethal damage, fairly frequently ate out the egg cells in ovaries or sperm because those cells had half the chromosomes proper to the human body. Men could grow new sperm. Women, well, we’re born with the lifetime supply of eggs. Our group discussed the possibility of sterilizing Manhattan with an ovary-attacking nanobug. Martin Fox had been for it. I remembered the arguments about the risk that our black-market nanobugs might sterilize all the female animals in Manhattan, not just the guilty species.
“Have we done anything to hurt you?” Kearney asked. He smiled and added, “Lately?”
“Will you test them in vitro?”
“You’ll be okay.”
“Maybe you’ll give me a nanobug that will liquify me if I get away from you?”
“That’s an eco-babble myth. Even if it were true, you’re lucky We assume whoever is making these insects will know to check for nanos. We’ll clean them out of you after the change. We wouldn’t want anyone to know you’ve been artificially changed. It wouldn’t suit your cover status.”
“My cover status?”
“You’re going to be labware.”
“You’re not going to fit me…” I thought of drode holes through the skull, infected dura mater; mastitus, the short and frequently blanked life of a loser, rendered for fat after the brainworks went back to the state.
“Experimental unit, probe contacts unnecessary. We’ve already fitted you.”
All that running and I still end up a drode head.
“That’s worse than being rebuilt by nanos?”
“I could have stayed in the orphanage if I wanted to grow up to be a drode head.” This man had cored my brain already. He’s seen me naked on masturbation machines. He could be lying to me about nano-traps and leashes. If I refused to cooperate, prison was an option. I was on the Amnesty rolls. “If I won’t, I can go to prison, can’t I?”
“We’d put you in a cyberia,” Kearney said. “We’ll exercise you, feed you, and let you think you’re committing eco-terrorism twenty-four hours a day.”
“Isn’t there sleep in cyberspace?” I asked, moving my head quickly to see if this reality streaked.
Kearney said, “The program affects dreams, too. By the way, in the new cyberias, the head servos keep prisoner motions in synch with programming capacity.”
What with all the things done to my head, could I ever be free again? I said, “I met a woman who’d been released from a cyberia. She’d seemed permanently confused, telling me that what we called reality came at us at only 80 million polygons per second.” I didn’t tell Kearney she claimed her cyberspace experiences in the penal program were more real than reality because she’d been purely herself interacting with an accommodating program. In the outer world, other people forced her to be other than herself, but the prison program gave her her very own reality.
This must be reality. Nobody had been particularly accommodating. “Mr. Inquisitor, when do you start with the rebuilding?”
Kearney said, “Your bio-monitors say you’re frightened.” I realized then they had me by the memory-reading net. While I’d been worrying about nano-leashes, they’d got me by the brain, like I was a dangerous animal nose-ringed and held at just the right distance with a pole. So much for winning my loyalty. “I bet the net would make the cyberia experience even more real.”
“We wouldn’t even have to put you in goggles.”
Perhaps if I cooperated with them, I’d find a surgeon willing to take a Federal net out of a woman’s brain, could escape. I wondered if Kearney knew what I was thinking.
“We know that you are thinking intensely, but the transmitter doesn’t have enough bandwidth to read as well as the memory scanning device we had you under.”
I suspected Kearney didn’t need to read my mind to know what might get me to cooperate. “ Whoever’s making the insects
is our enemy, too.”
“Right.”
“Martin Fox might order me killed if any eco people recognized me.”
“Martin Fox died,” Kearney said.
“So he wasn’t really an agent provocateur,” I said. Kearney seemed fierce for an instant, his jaw muscles flicking, brows pulled together, then he looked away and said, “No. He was your people.”
“We’re not all like that,” I said.
“Prove it.” Kearney said. He smiled as if that would take the sting out of his tone. Probably he’d have preferred to have strangled me in the plane when the nuke went off. We looked at each other a moment, then I huddled up on the padded floor, my back to the padded wall, like a room built of futons, wrapped my arms around my knees and leaned my head down, brow to patellas. Don’t forget, I told myself, you’re busted and brain-drained. “I have to have some self-respect.” That sounded so lame. “Some power.”
Kearney sat down beside me and punched me lightly in the bicep. “We’re not the country we used to be,” he said. “We need to be competitive in this world with other economies, not tearing ourselves into factions.”
I lifted my head and said, “How can I not cooperate.”
Later that day, a nurse cored my thigh with a large needle and said, “For in vitro tests.”
“How wonderful you care,” I said, but I was quite relieved.
Kearney and a technical sort of guy came in with a small beaker holding millions of nanobugs, each unit so tiny the entire mass quivered like corroded mercury. Kearney said, “They’ll do their work, then return to the attractor.”
“Do you inject them or am I supposed to drink them?” About 10 cubic centimeters of nanobugs, I estimated.
“Take some in your mouth. They’ll go through the skin there.”
“Are they all necessary?” I asked. I remembered some old man who took nitro for his heart this way.
“You don’t have to lick the beaker,” the tech said. “Just sip a bit of them. It doesn’t really matter if you swallow, only it’s better not to breach the stomach mucosa. And they’ll get to your face quicker.”