by John Shirley
Garraty was ignoring Mr. Than. He was stationing the satellite dish on the peak of the roof, turning it just exactly so. It didn’t point at the sky, but across the rooftops.
Then Mrs. Garraty, safely down on the ground, stepped around the side of the house into the front yard and looked first at Adair and then at Mr. Than. “Why, I’m just fine, thank you.”
Adair looked at Mrs. Garraty’s feet. Grass was stuck to the tops of her little white tennis shoes. Adair had the irrational suspicion that Mrs. Garraty had jumped down from the roof and landed on her feet in the backyard, sinking in the dirt to the tops of her shoes. That wasn’t possible, of course.
Mr. Garraty was focused on screwing the plate at the base of the support for the homemade satellite dish onto the rooftop with vigorous motions of his wrist.
“Now, if you’ll excuse us,” Mrs. Garraty said, “I don’t want my husband distracted up there. He might—”
“—might fall,” her husband said at the same time she did. Exactly the same time.
As he spoke, barely audible, he was looking at the screws he was turning to fasten the satellite plate into the roof.
“My goodness, awfully heck of good ginseng,” Mr. Than said, shaking his head in admiration as he went into his garage.
Adair nodded and said, “ ’Kay, you guys have fun. Bye,” and turned away, began walking home. Walking quickly.
She glanced back to see Mr. Garraty—having finished screwing the plate down in a remarkably short time—taking the wire from the homemade satellite dish in his hand and directing it through his fingers along the down-sloping rear side of the roof as he walked out of sight toward the backyard. Then there was another thump sound. A few moments later, the yowl of a cat. A furious yowl.
Adair stared at the Garratys’ house for a long moment. But in her mind’s eye she was seeing her mom and her dad. There was some kind of continuity between her parents and the Garratys, as if an icy stream had overflowed first through her own house and then through theirs. There was a wrongness, badly disguised but not something she could challenge without seeming like she was all bipolar or something.
Mom and Dad. The Garratys.
Adair turned shivering away from the Garratys’ house and went home as quick as she could.
But getting there, seeing her mom go into the garage—and lock the garage door from the inside . . .
She didn’t feel much better at home. She turned up the heat. It just seemed so cold all of a sudden.
December 6, night
Henri Stanner felt a strange kind of relief, being here, away from Quiebra, and a strange kind of vulnerability, too. He always felt watched, anytime he came to the Biointerface division. Even after they’d run his cornea print and let him in. He wasn’t sure they watched everyone, or not closely. But he was sure they watched him. Because of his ties to the Facility. A camera partway down the corridor tracked him whirringly as he strode by.
This wing of the Stanford Research Institute’s B.I. division was quite ordinary looking. An ordinary institutional corridor—white walls, strips of white lights, locked white-painted metal doors that masked startling experimentation. The click of his heels echoed as he reached the intersection of two corridors. Here were more cameras. He paused to watch as a young, pale, narrow-shouldered technician in a white coat walked by, muttering to himself, glancing at an electronic clipboard, looking up ahead, back at the clipboard, muttering some more. The technician walked by the camera; it didn’t turn to follow him.
Stanner waited a few moments, then walked by the camera.
It swiveled to keep him in view.
He nodded to himself, and just kept going till he found room 2323. He pressed the button in the intercom fixture, spoke his name. The door buzzed.
Inside was a plain blond-wood desk, behind which stood a pearly-white metal column about six feet high and two in diameter. Its camera lens swiveled and took him in.
“State your name again, please,” the computer-generated voice said from the column.
“Major Henri Stanner.”
“That name checks with appointments and voice-print records.”
Interesting that I never gave a voice print knowingly, Stanner thought. But it seems one was taken anyway.
The door to one side of the desk clicked and swung inward, and Stanner walked through to find Bentwaters and Jim Gaitland sitting at a conference table.
Captain Gaitland was a stocky man with an easy, sleepy-eyed look to his face, ears that stuck out like a cartoon making fun of listening too hard; he wore his Marine Corps uniform.
“Look there, Gaitland’s in uniform,” Stanner said. “Is that supposed to be a message? Add some kind of official glamor to this meeting? I’ve seen you in uniform maybe one other time in fifteen years.”
“No reason to go undercover today, Major,” Gaitland said, with his easy Tennessee drawl. “Have a seat.” He tapped a digital tape recorder built into the tabletop. “You want to give a report, I’ll have it transcribed later.”
“I don’t know as I should give a report to a guy I outrank,” Stanner said, sitting. “What, no refreshments?”
Bentwaters, wearing lab white, nodded abstractedly. “We’ll have three coffees with cream and sugar on the side,” he said—to the air, which meant someone or something was listening from outside the room.
“Rank isn’t really of the essence here, it’s more about seniority,” Gaitland said, adding, “Sir.”
Bentwaters looked at Stanner speculatively. “I do sense some hostility here, Stanner.”
A young black woman came in carrying a tray; she wore a tight green dress, nothing lablike about it. As she bent over to put the tray of coffee mugs, creamer, and sugar on the table, Stanner couldn’t help admiring the taut expression of her figure through the fabric.
I’ve been way too long without getting laid, he thought. She smiled at him and left without a word.
He took a deep breath, took a cup of coffee, and turned to Gaitland. “I’ll tell you what, Captain. I keep getting this funny feeling in Quiebra—that probably the Facility knows as well as I do how far it’s gone. And it bothers me. That town should be subjected to a quarantine, to evacuation pending individual evaluation of each person there. I don’t care what cover story the Pentagon uses. Hell, any number of terrorist scenarios will do. But—” He took a sip of the coffee, which tasted burnt, and put the cup down. “—but don’t wait. Tell them to do it now. Now.”
Bentwaters hunched back in his chair and then looked fixedly into his coffee; he wasn’t as good as Gaitland in hiding his feelings. And clearly Bentwaters was scared.
Gaitland’s body language was the opposite of Bentwaters’s. He leaned back, as if relaxing on his porch, and his eyes went hooded. “Well,” he said musingly, “I don’t think they’re going to go for that without some kind of physical evidence of real contamination. Serious contamination.”
Stanner stared at him. “You weren’t there at Lab 23, Gaitland. But you had to see the videotape before we burned the place out. Any contamination that leads to that—”
Gaitland used a pen from his inside coat pocket to stir sugar into his coffee. “You don’t know there’s any contamination, not for sure.”
“I saw breakouts on a fucking grotesque level of biointerface, there in the woods around that town.”
“Where’s your proof ? Where are your samples?”
“I’m not going near them without some sort of contaminationproofing. But I know what I saw, Gaitland.”
“In broad daylight?”
“It was at night. And there are two missing marines out there. What the hell you think happened to those boys, Gaitland?”
“I heard something about that. When a couple of enlisted men don’t show up for roll call, it’s something called AWOL.”
Stanner grunted. “Both of them? From that site? Then there’s equipment stolen all over town. Some of it I don’t know what they’d use it for. But some of the parts are perfect
for biointerface backup. Micromodify the silicon and—”
“Now hold on there, Major,” Bentwaters said, “you’re jumping the gun. We don’t know they can modify components to that extent.”
“Their whole imperative is to experiment and find new ways to proliferate,” Stanner replied sharply, struggling to keep his temper. “You got any sources tell you about a bank robbery?”
Bentwaters seemed shaken at that. “Bank robbery?”
“The Bank of Quiebra was looted top to bottom and there’s been no FBI in there. Which says to me that someone stopped them from investigating. I mean, a robbery that big and it’s only local cops? So I figure that the Facility has a handle on this thing already.”
“You’re presuming a hell of a lot, there, Major,” Gaitland said coolly.
Stanner pushed on relentlessly. “I heard a story that a whole crew of local people were involved in the robbery.”
“They’re capable of Internet savvy,” Bentwaters said, “so why wouldn’t they steal funds that way, if they could? Electronically, digital robbery.”
“Because there are firewalls, and that might get five or six other agencies involved, if they’re detected. It could bring the whole damn country down on them. They must know the Feds are holding off on them—a little matter of bureaucratic paralysis.” He looked at Gaitland when he said that. “They’re playing their cards close to their vest. If they show up stealing money in the system, digitally, they force our hand. And we’d be watching for it, too. Instead, they steal actual, physical cash, and use it to buy the equipment they need. And that’s high camouflage —exactly how they’re supposed to be.”
“You’re hypothesizing,” Gaitland said. “Guessing. You don’t know. It could be just an ordinary gang of thieves stole that money.”
“All the parts you’d expect they’d want have been bought up for twenty miles around Quiebra,” Stanner said. “I spent most of the day yesterday checking.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Bentwaters muttered.
Gaitland shot him a look of warning. To Stanner he said, “And you think they’re using this stuff for proliferation? They can’t have everything they need to accomplish that.”
“You know damn well they can manufacture whatever else they need themselves,” Stanner retorted, leaning forward. “What they’re buying is transmission equipment, communication infrastructure, prosthetics, and components for ‘the cradle,’ the makings of imprints for further proliferation—for one thing, all the etching chemicals—”
“Etching chemicals,” Bentwaters muttered. “Doesn’t sound good, Gaitland.”
Stanner sat back and took a pull at his coffee. “Not quite as bad as Quiebra PD coffee but almost.”
“I wasn’t aware that you spoke to Quiebra PD,” Gaitland said, watching him.
“I asked them questions. I stuck to a moderately believable cover story. They gave me some leads. Now, look, the breakouts can’t convert just anyone, anytime. They haven’t adapted the conversion principles yet for everyone. They’re doing it selectively, at first, I figure. So it’s not completely out of hand. Not yet. But they’re going to get faster and better at it—and soon. We’ve got to act, Gaitland, right now.”
“Come on,” Bentwaters said, frowning, “conversion has to take a while in itself even when they’ve got what they need.”
Stanner shook his head. “They were getting better and better at it, even before Lab 23. They’re doing it a molecule at a time—but that can be faster, rather than slower. I believe it can be done in maybe a minute, in some cases.”
Gaitland leaned back, looked at the ceiling, and spun his chair slightly. He made an uh-hmmm sound deep in his chest, just loud enough to be heard. At last he said, “I’ll make that recommendation. But they may want to send in their own teams for confirmation.”
Stanner had been in intelligence a long time. Gaitland was a fair-to-middling liar. Not bad, really. But just another liar and Stanner knew, by now, when someone was improvising to keep him on a string.
“Gaitland, you guys are watching this already. There are people who want to learn just how fast it’ll spread.”
Bentwaters squirmed in his seat. “You’re saying we’re using the people in this town as lab rats? That’s pretty insulting.” He cast a doubtful glance at Gaitland.
“I doubt it was the original intent,” Stanner amended. “But maybe they figure since it’s gone this far, it’s too late—and they’ll just see how far it’ll go. Maybe they’ve decided that the town is fucked either way, so they might as well gather some useful data.”
Gaitland’s eyes flicked at him and away—making Stanner think he’d guessed rightly. He went on, “But people go in and out of that town. And so do they, Gaitland.”
“Actually,” Gaitland said, “I don’t think they go very far—if they’re there at all, I mean. They have to protect their cluster. They still have a main organizing cluster, wherever they are. The brain. Have you found it?”
“You dropping your cover story, Gaitland?”
“I’m not confirming anything. This is all hypothetical. Have you found a central organizing cluster?”
“You mean—” Stanner allowed himself a thin smile. “—the ‘hypothetical’ cluster?”
“That’s what I mean. Yes.”
Stanner shrugged. “No. I’m not so sure there is one. They might’ve innovated beyond that. They’re constantly experimenting. The animal-redesign models I’ve seen in the woods around there prove that. They’re trying out new modes all the time.”
Bentwaters frowned. “Gaitland’s right—if there’s a cluster, and there probably is, they won’t go far from it, at least not till they’ve established other clusters elsewhere.”
Stanner felt a chill go through him then.
Other clusters elsewhere.
He stood abruptly. “I’m going to get proof that this thing is out of control, Gaitland. If that’s what I have to do. But I’ll tell you something—I think it was out of control days ago.”
Gaitland shook his head. “I don’t think you should make another move out there without orders.”
“You’re telling me to stand down?”
“I don’t outrank you—I know that. But I am conveying an order from upstairs.”
“I want it in writing.”
“You’ll have to wait for that.”
“Then,” Stanner said, “it doesn’t apply. I’m going back into the field.”
“I don’t think the brass is going to be thrilled about loose cannons booming away in that town, Stanner,” Gaitland said coldly.
“That’s Major Stanner to you, asshole,” Stanner said.
He saluted Gaitland and walked out. The cameras turned whirringly to watch him, until he left the building.
13
December 7, late afternoon
Adair was lying on her back in bed, limp, still, her knees drawn up; her head was tilted, so she could look at her computer. Now and then one of her knees would sway back and forth a few times, metronomically, but mostly she just lay there unmoving. Inside herself, though, she was all jumpy, kinetic.
She wanted to get out of the house. No homework—two of her teachers were out sick or something—and she didn’t want to stay home tonight. She didn’t have any money; Dad and Mom said there was no money for allowances, all of a sudden, and lately they wouldn’t even pay Adair and Cal for extra chores. So no money, she couldn’t go anywhere.
Siseela had had her computer stolen, and she was, like, the only one Adair talked to on-line lately, except for Waylon, now that Cleo was playing Princess Bitch. A lot of people had just sort of disappeared from on-line. Most of the regulars, gone. There was a school chat room, and some people would be there.
But now, after everything else, Adair was unable to get her computer to work. The monitor was just a blank blue-white glow.
At last she sat up, then got to her feet, feeling a little dizzy. She kicked through her junk to the hall and looked in the door of Cal�
�s room. He was stuck here, too, because the car wasn’t working. Someone had trashed the engine, torn all sorts of shit out of it, and Dad had taken the truck. Dad was gone a lot without explaining where, and the bus that used to come through their neighborhood had stopped running, and where would you go with no money? Mason wasn’t answering his phone, either, and Cal’s friends had gone off to college.
“Hey, Lump,” she said, which is what she called him when he sagged in his room playing his Game Boy Advance. She looked vaguely around the small room. The rectangle of the single bed against the wall, the desk and the laptop that sat on it were the only oases of order in the layered chaos of Cal’s domain. Paperback books and random diving gear and a pizza box and a couple of old McDonald’s bags and some Electronic Gaming Monthly magazines half-torn, lying like dead birds in the mix, and peeling Tony Hawk and Limp Bizkit and Moby posters on the wall. Cal’s cheap red Gibson-knockoff guitar was leaning on a boom box, and some sound equipment and clothes were spilling from the closet. Mom and Dad had made them clean up a lot more, before.
Then she thought, Before what?
Aloud she asked, “Can I use your computer, Lump?”
“Lumps don’t have computers.” He didn’t look up from the game.
“My darling cool handsome smart big brother, can I use your computer, please? Or can you fix mine?”
“What’s wrong with it?” Still not looking up, his thumbs clickety-clacking on the Game Boy like insect mandibles.
“It’s not booting, nothing. Power’s going in. It was fine yesterday. I want to go on-line.”
“I don’t want you to go on-line on my computer. You download hella MP3s and you leave them on instead of erasing them and you’re gonna get me a virus—”
“Cal, I won’t. I just want to talk to someone. I’m going crazy here.”
“It’s totally fucked up here. That’s for fucking sure. But, no, you can’t use my computer. Go away.”
“You suck. Where’s Dad?”
“You suck. I don’t know.”
“You suck. What’s Mom doing?”