"That's good to hear," Caleb replied. "It says here that you came to Vesta recently aboard a mining ship originally from Ceres. And you're a registered member of the dense metals miners' guild here. Why would you want to join the SPPS when you're already employed?"
Not good. I couldn't tell him why I needed more money; that would be the interview equivalent of suicide. "They don't give very many jobs to new chemical analysts. They didn't even allow me to do the purity control for my former crew's hauls." I contemplated whether I should tell him a bit about the high insurance rates I'd been subjected to.
"And I'll bet that the Marquez Guild has been extorting a lot of qcoin from you since you just showed up on Vesta, haven't they?"
I was instantly horrified at that statement. How much did he know? "Maybe, a little." I tried to sound calm but was finding it difficult.
"Well, don't worry about that." Caleb Burns shot me a wink and smiled. "Jakob Griggs and Jerome Marquez are old buddies. I'm sure if you sign on, he'll figure out a way to cut your rates down a bit."
Cut my rates? How much influence did the SPPS have? "I was under the impression that all insurances would be covered."
"Well…" Caleb shrugged and slicked the fur on his head back. I could guess that I had caught him in something. "Technically, it's deducted from your paycheck, but we can usually convince them to lower their rates significantly, and the pay we offer is considerable in and of itself."
"How much is 'considerable'?" I found myself asking.
He quoted me a rather respectable pay rate, not quite enough for me to live on with the increased Marquez fees. But if he was telling the truth about the Society's leader having the ability to lower the insurance paid by his employees, I might even be able to help cover my crewmates as well. I agreed to come over to their facilities and take a look around.
***
The SPPS's headquarters was a five-story building built into the cave wall of the cavern covered by the Marquez Guild. The front face of the structure was halfway covered with animated holograms similar to the one I had seen earlier, along with murals of DNA helixes and parahumans in biofabrication tanks and other stuff like that. I walked up to the front doors made of stained glass that showed a nude male savannah cat with his arms and legs spread out in a pattern that made it look like he had four arms and four legs. Wonder what that was supposed to mean?
Caleb Burns was standing by the front counter in the main lobby. My guess that he was a taur was correct, and he had somehow managed to tie his robe slash lab coat in such a way that it enclosed his hind legs without showing anything. He saw me and gave a slight bow in my direction. I returned the gesture.
"Hello, Argentum. Welcome to our humble cloning laboratory for the preservation of the parahuman clade. Are you ready to begin the tour?"
I told him so, and the wolverine turned to a sealed hatch next to the counter, marked "Decontamination Chamber." He swung it open and gestured for me to follow. We found ourselves in a room filled with light environment suits hung on racks in a variety of shapes and sizes. Caleb removed his robe and wriggled into a large taur-shaped suit. I did the same with my kilt and vest and a medium-sized bipedal suit with enough tail space.
"Through this door is our main production floor," he explained, speaking through an external speaker on the front of his suit. "We have a lot of delicate equipment and biological substances out there. The last thing we need is contamination from loose fur or someone breathing too hard."
I supposed I could understand that. Though I had to wonder about the state of my own experiments, seeing how I hadn't bothered with airtight seals on my safety equipment. "Will this be where I will be working?" I asked him.
"Part of the time. You'll probably be in quality control, making sure there's no unforeseen mutations in the cell cultures." He was speaking fairly quickly. "Most of your work will be done in the side labs."
He opened the other door and we walked out into a massive room that probably qualified as a cavern. There were at least three stories' worth of machinery, all chugging along and mixing some vat of cells or pumping some fluid into a tank like the one the clone at the end of the ad emerged from. One of the tanks had a bluish skeleton inside, which brought to mind the long-decayed corpse in the same ad, while another adjacent tank had a body that was almost complete, half covered in a layer of skin.
"You'll mostly be coming out here to take samples from the cell cultures." He pointed at a set of small vats hanging suspended above one of the biofabrication tanks. "It's almost completely automated. All we need to keep this running are a couple of technicians who perform maintenance and repairs every few weeks."
We came to a stairway leading upwards to a large room with a glass wall facing the production floor. I could see a half-dozen parahumans of various species in hazmat suits fussing over a variety of beakers, test tubes, petri dishes, and gene sequencers similar to the ones I had on our ship but obviously much more expensive. As we entered, a tall male who appeared to be a spotted cat of some sort, possibly a savannah cat like the one on the front door, approached us.
"This is Maximus Griggs, supervisor of this team." Caleb said. "Maximus, this is Argentum. Ze is interested in the open position here."
"Good to see you, Silver." He gave me a rather cat-like smile as he said this. I guessed that he knew enough ancient Latin to know what my name meant. "You have any prior experience with genetic testing and mutation screening?"
"I've performed some experiments on my own," I began to tell him, "trying to engineer nutrient algae that tasted like bacon. And performing DNA tests on myself to figure out why the parts shops can't make me a set of sexual organs."
"You're neuter then?" Max inquired quizzically. Not that I didn't blame him; even without this baggy suit, it was hard to tell my actual gender or lack thereof. I nodded. "Well, we do some organ replacement and augmentation on the side." My ears perked up, which I'm sure was noticeable even under that suit of mine. "We found that we can give neuters a cock or a vag, or even both, but unfortunately the gonads require genetic alterations that cause the immune system to reject them without a lot of drugs."
My ears flicked downwards in disappointment. What good would a pole or a hole be without the sex drive to use it? And I was still a bit in denial of the drive I had at that point. "Well, I hope I have the chance to contribute to something a bit more important here."
"You will. We're building the future for all the diverse parahuman species here." He waved back at the production floor we'd just left.
At that moment, something about his name clicked in my head. "Are you by any chance related to Jakob Griggs, the founder of the SPPS?"
Maximus snorted loudly at my inquiry. "Oh, I'm related, all right. I'm one of his clones." I was afraid of that. Would he act like two-thirds of the other clones I'd met? "But Dad wasn't the founder; that was his progenitor, who was simply named Griggs. He died in an accident a year before me and my brothers were decanted."
He was a clone of a clone? "Sounds like he's a bit young to be running something this important."
The second-generation clone smiled at me before speaking further. "Maybe but we learn fast you know. Look at me. I'm barely two years old and already I'm supervising an entire lab."
So the same nepotism I'd seen on Ceres and in the Marquez Guild existed here too. At least the one who would be my boss seemed agreeable enough. And the pay and benefits package were pretty good. "So, where do I sign?"
Chapter 9
I started work the next day. It wasn't particularly difficult work, mind you, but I was being entrusted with the well-being of the future people of Vesta. I started off with detecting mutations in previously tested samples. On one occasion, I found a deletion in the thirteenth chromosome that my instructor hadn't found; he claimed that I had made a mistake and started to go over the sequence again, only to notice one of the codons was missing an adenosine. He changed my assessment and mumbled something about how it must have happened
after his own analysis.
Regardless, I found myself making almost as much as my share of a decent haul of ore back before we moved to Vesta, and I was forced to leave the ship. The Society made good on their promise to arrange for my Protection rates to be lowered. I still paid more than I had my first couple weeks in the asteroid, but it was now affordable. Unfortunately, there were only a couple hundred qcoins left after expenses to help my friends pay their fees. I sincerely hoped that they found some more valuable minerals like the mascon we had found just before the incident.
My job wasn't simply to detect mutations; it was also to determine whether a mutation was worth fixing. Many mutations- a few extra letters in an intron here, an Alu element deleted there-were harmless and would have no effect on the parahuman being printed out. If something actually changed the phenotype, such as hemophilia, we then had to decide whether it would be more cost-effective to try to correct the defect with gene therapy or throw out that batch and grow another one. Both would add significantly to the customer's final bill for the clone, the relative expense of either option depending largely on what stage the mutation was caught at. Preferably the mutations were to be caught early on, before too many nutrients had been expended growing defective cells.
We had a database of several common genetic diseases, but sometimes we came across a deviation that we lacked a prior record for; in those cases, we had a simulator.
The simulator had access to several times the total combined processing power of every computer that existed on Planet Earth during the first couple decades of the twenty-first century. Now, of course, every major university on Earth had a far more powerful machine than ours, but it was still greater than most parahumans' entire guild's or corporation's combined computing strength. And our simulator used every microsecond of its immense CPU cycles predicting the results of the completely unheard-of mutations we fed into it.
The results we got out of it were often astonishingly bizarre. One time it predicted that the fur of any parahuman fabricated with the mutation in question would grow in fluorescent green. Another time, it predicted that the cells would undergo apoptosis in three to six hundred generations. We kept a sample from that one to confirm, and the cells did indeed liquefy after approximately four hundred and thirteen divisions.
Then one day, about two months after I had started working full time in the lab and discarded my miners guild membership entirely, I came across a deletion in the promoter region of a certain gene that changed everything.
"PROMOTER TO MOR10X-6 ENCODING GENE DISABLED," the readout from the simulator declared. "PROTEIN MOR10X-6 EXPRESSION MINIMAL TO NON-EXISTENT. POSSIBLE RESUMPTION OF MEIOTIC DIVISION."
Meiosis? As in the form of cellular division whereby cells divide into cells with half the minimum number of chromosomes in preparation for fusion with another cell that lacks a full complement of chromosomes? I opened the genetic database and attempted to look up MOR10X-6. What I got was a message stating, "CLEARANCE REQUIRED. PLEASE INPUT REGISTRATION NUMBER AND PASSWORD."
Confused, I showed it to Maximus. He took one look at it and shrugged. "A lot of our equipment and data comes from loot seized from the biogenesis corporations in the revolution. Occasionally you come across something that they tried to lock up, keep hidden from us peons and slaves."
He then did something completely in violation of safety regulations: He opened his containment suit and started fishing around for something. "Some hackers cracked the codes a while ago and sold them to the SPPS. I've got them written down here somewhere." He pulled out a folded square of flexible plastic. There were apparently a set of numbers and passwords printed on the inside fold of the plastic. He entered three different sets of codes into the tablet before access was granted to the restricted files. When it opened, he held the tablet up to his face, obscuring it from my view. As he read, his expression changed from confusion to surprise, then something I couldn't quite identify. He passed me the tablet.
I read the proffered entry. It was just as I suspected: MOR10X-6 was an artificial gene constructed by an agronomics corporation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century to protect genetic copyrights. It produced a protein that interfered in the process of meiotic division, making it all but impossible to proceed but allowing the gonads to otherwise function normally, apparently creating a healthy but infertile genetically modified organism that would not go around pirating their intellectual property all willy-nilly. In other words, it was the gene that made us reliant on cloning.
"This… is serious," was all I could think to say at that time. It was certainly true, if a bit of an understatement, perhaps the biggest of the century.
"I need to show this to my dad." Max grabbed the tablet back from me and held it tightly to his chest as he ran off to alert his progenitor. Sighing, I picked out another tablet and returned to my work.
***
Approximately an hour and a half later, I was called up to Jakob Griggs' office. I handed my current project off to a co-worker and walked to the elevator. The elevator car had seven buttons inside: one for each of the regular floors, one for a sublevel basement cut into the cavern floor, and one that was accessible only by biometric scan or remote operation. Before I could look up which floor the head of the Society's office was on the elevator started moving upwards. It went past the fifth floor to something marked with a "J" on the electronic readout. As I stood dumbfounded the door opened onto a wide open space overlooking the city below. It appeared that Jakob Griggs worked on the roof of the building.
In the middle of the expanse, there stood a large table covered with food items that I had only seen in images and video before: stuffed turkeys, carved T-bone steaks, lobster, ham with the bone still inside… How much had that whole thing cost? On a chair at the far side of the table sat a savannah cat, like Maximus, wearing a black robe embroidered with crystals forming the shapes of DNA helixes. He raised his head to glance at me as I slowly, nervously came forward.
"Ahh, Argentum. Good to finally meet you." He spoke to me in the same voice as my supervisor. "Please, get yourself into something more comfortable and join me for lunch."
He gestured to my right, and I followed his hand with my eyes.
I saw a coat rack with a white robe in the same patterns as the one Caleb Burns had been wearing when we first met, though fitted and sized more for a biped of my height and weight. I looked down at my own bulky, uncomfortable containment suit. "Oh, I guess this would be a bit awkward to eat in." But then I noticed a lack of enclosed spaces to change in.
Jakob saw me looking around puzzled and chortled loudly. "Don't worry." He made a show of covering his eyes with the sleeve of his own robe. "I won't look."
I supposed I could see where Maximus got his humor from. I unzipped myself from my hazmat suit as quickly as possible and threw the robe on. Hopefully he wouldn't mind my getting sweat all over it. It was surprisingly comfortable, as if it were made from soft plant fibers instead of the bacterial plastics we made most of our clothes from in the Belt. It must have been made from materials imported from Earth, like the feast before me.
I stepped awkwardly towards the chair on the opposite end of the table, presumably where I was meant to sit. At the sound of the chair legs scraping along the floor, Mr. Griggs put his arm back down and saw me cautiously sitting down.
"I take it you've never had real meat before Mx. Argentum?" he inquired, to which my only answer was a short nod. "Not surprising. It is quite expensive to import anything from Earth or Mars to begin with. Perishable items such as animal flesh even more so." He speared another piece of steak on his fork and raised it to his mouth before speaking again. "Please, try the chicken. It's unlikely you'll get another chance to try it soon."
Knowing he was right, and finding the fragrance too hard to resist I tore off a leg from the roasted bird in the center of the table. Discovering it difficult to keep my manners, I tore into it with a ferocity I found hidden deep within the few genes I had not
inherited from any human. I had eaten vat-grown poultry before, partially to see Cole's reaction to my consuming tissue from his own taxonomic class (not much, it turns out; apparently corvids are as close to fowl as foxes are to cows or something along those lines), but this bore little resemblance. This was juicy, tender, with a crisp skin that the tissue vats seemed to leave out. Within a matter of minutes, I had stripped the leg to the bone.
As I tossed the oddly white and flexible bone aside, Jakob Griggs spoke again. "That was actually the turkey, but whatever you prefer.” I made an effort to keep my embarrassment from showing, but apparently he could see it anyways. "Don't worry about it," he said with a wave of his hand. "I'm sure this is the first time you've been able to tell the difference between one meat and another."
But then his expression changed all of a sudden, becoming ice cold as he stared at me from across the table. "So, I hear you found out about one of the corporations' biggest secrets."
I think I felt my fur stand up at that simple statement. Something about the tone those ordinary words were issued in chilled me. "Well," I started, a bit nervous and taken off guard by the sudden shift in his demeanor, "it was completely by accident, but I believe I discovered a mutation that deactivates the gene that renders us, I mean, you and other parahumans with sex organs, infertile." I had to correct myself, as there was definitely more than one simple gene that prevented neuters like myself from making babies.
The Pride of Parahumans Page 7