"I see." Jakob reached for a small box on the table with a set of holes in the lid. "And just what do you intend to do with that mutation?"
"Me?" I asked incredulously. "Well, I doubt I would do much with it, but I suppose one could use a targeted mutagen to damage the gene and enable their testes or ovaries to undergo spermatogenesis or oogenesis, respectively. Possibly even use a CRISPr technique to knock out the entire gene." The equipment to do either was fairly plentiful; it was far safer than gene therapy to simply create a compound that would bond to a specific gene sequence and destroy it in the rare instance of a harmful mutation that involved an addition rather than a deletion or transposition.
"Yes." He then shot me a look that made me shrink back into my seat in primal fear. "And what do you think would happen to the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species if parahumans began to use that mutagen you're suggesting and started replicating themselves on their own?"
I paused as I thought about it for a minute. "Most people wouldn't need clones; they'd just find a friend of the opposite gender and produce new parahumans like most natural animals and humans do." I realized at that moment that my job could be at stake. "But there would still be neuters like myself who would still need clones to continue their genelines. And some people who simply prefer clones for some reason." I thought of one more thing. "And besides, wouldn't your goal of preserving parahumanity be accomplished?"
Jakob let out a low growl. My ears flattened, and I felt my head slipping down beneath my robe, attempting to hide from the large and angry predator before me. He addressed me once more. "Our goal doesn't just encompass creating the next generation so that our species can outlive our individual selves. There are other factors that we don't generally discuss with the public."
He shook the box he had picked up a minute earlier, and I could hear a faint squeaking sound from within. "Are you familiar at all with the net series 'Crowns of Furtopia'?" he asked me. I nodded faintly and he continued. "Feudalism is the default state of any large group of animals. Individuals work to preserve their own genelines and band together with their kin to compete with other kin groups. The smart ones get the weaker groups to produce resources for them in exchange for protection from more short-sighted opportunists. Human history has proven time and time again that in the absence of any other form of government, feudalism re-emerges. And I am sure that you are starting to see that to be true here on Vesta as well."
I thought back to the pop culture references to the Protectors' Guilds as clans and houses, how every high-ranking official in the Guilds that I'd met had been clones of the Guild leaders, and what they were getting away with because of their relationship. "But… your progenitor was the one who enabled them to form kinship groups in the first place?" I asked nervously.
"Yes, and that is how I continue to keep them in line." Jakob Griggs made another toothy grin that somehow intimidated me more than his growl had. "If I weren't able to threaten them with the revocation of their access to my cloning tanks, they would be constantly fighting one another over territory like the animals they are. As it is, the balance of power between the Protection Guilds is as unstable as a barrel of nitroglycerin."
I believed that I understood now. "And you think if they were able to perpetuate their genelines on their own they would turn Vesta into a twenty-second century version of Furtopia?"
"I know they will." Jakob opened the box he was holding, he reached inside, and withdrew a live mouse. I was amazed. That was the first time I had ever seen a non-sapient animal. My unspoken question of what he intended to do with the mouse was answered when he slung his head back, opened his mouth, and dropped the mouse in. There was a sickening snap and crunch of bones breaking and he swallowed loudly. Licking the remaining blood from his lips he started to explain. "Live mice, expensive even by my standards. Do you want to know why they're so expensive?"
"Because the freighters need extra life support to keep them alive all the way out to the Belt?" I feebly suggested.
"That is the bulk of it, yes." Jakob nodded. "But another expense is the sterilization procedures they have to perform on every one of the mice before they leave earth orbit." I gave a confused expression, prompting him to continue. "If so many as one male and one female mouse are fertile in the same cargo module, they will inevitably find a way to mate and produce dozens of baby mice every few weeks. And each of those babies will be able to make more babies within a month of birth. By the time they get all the way out here, the life support system of their module is overtaxed, and you get a load of decaying mouse carcasses. Do you see my point?"
I was afraid I didn't, but I wasn't sure I wanted to tell that to the very self-assured cat who essentially owned all the law enforcement organizations on the asteroid, so I stayed silent.
Apparently, my silence was answer enough, as he spoke again. "Sapient beings are no different. Humans almost depleted their own ecosystem on Earth; it's the whole reason they sent us out into space to obtain more resources for them to consume. By controlling the price of cloning, we prevent Vesta from becoming overpopulated and overstraining the flimsy life support systems we have in place."
"Surely people are smart enough to stop reproducing before they reach the carrying capacity of their environment," I objected. I could not imagine anyone being so stupid.
"And are you willing to bet the lives of everyone on this asteroid, possibly the entire Belt, on that statement?" I could not. That was too big a decision for me to make. I slumped my head forward and shook it lightly. "So you will not tell anyone else about your discovery?"
"Yes," I told him, defeat plain on my face.
"Excellent," Jakob Griggs said before popping another mouse into his mouth. After swallowing he asked me another question. "Did you tell anyone else before coming here?"
"Just your clone, Maximus."
"Good. I've already told him why he should keep his mouth shut." Jakob looked back into the box of mice one last time and turned back to me. "It appears that I have no more appetite for mice today, but there is still one left here. Would you care to try it?"
At that point, I was afraid to refuse anything he asked of me. I walked up to his side of the table and glanced down at the box. There was one white mouse remaining, among the stains left by its siblings in the container, still trying in vain to scurry up the slick walls of the box. I reached in and tried to grab it but it ran away to try and vault the opposite wall. I reached in with my other hand and herded it between the two. I managed to take hold of its thin tail and pull it out. Screeching in terror, it tried to wriggle out of my hand or curl back on my fingers and claw at them, but to no avail. Looking into its beady black eyes, I steeled myself for what would come next. I opened my mouth and tried to lead the rodent inside. Still clinging to a faint hope of survival, it gripped onto my tongue with its sharp toes. The pain instead prompted me to bite down hard. I heard the ribs crack, felt the squishy organs spill out of the holes in its torso, the hot blood streaming down my chin. Not knowing exactly what to do next, I flicked the corpse to the back of my mouth with my tongue and, with a great deal of effort, swallowed.
"You have a bit of something there." Jakob Griggs, the shadowy director of the anarchy of Vesta, gestured to his left cheek. I picked up a napkin and dabbed it at the approximate area he had indicated, it came back stained dark red. If I had been superstitious, I might have taken it as an omen of things to come.
Chapter 10
A few days after my encounter with my all-powerful employer, I was eating dinner with my former crewmates. Nothing anywhere near the quality of that veritable feast Jakob Griggs had, just some flavored lichen-based foodstuffs that grew in some of the smaller caves set aside for food production. To be honest, I hadn't had much of an appetite after that eventful luncheon. I was cutting up a greenish loaf when Cole spoke.
"It's funny," he said to no one in particular. "Just a couple days ago, all our rates went up ten percent. Wonder what changed this ti
me?"
"No idea," I said. I really did have no idea what he was talking about. My own rates hadn't changed since I started working for the SPPS. Why would everyone else's rise?
Denal offered his own thoughts. "Well, I asked some of the boys and girls I know by the docks. They said that Marquez hadn't upped their own bills by any significant amount."
"So it's just us?" said Aniya, who was tearing off chunks of two whole loaves of lichen bread as we talked. "You think it's because of the whole bounty hunter thing?"
"Doubt it; it's been weeks," Cole said. "Unless something else happened with Argen over in the genetics labs."
I paused for a second. I couldn't tell them anything about MOR10X-6; I had promised Jakob I wouldn't tell anyone. "No, nothing like that." Which was true in the vaguest sense. I had not encountered any bounty hunters or anything like that.
"Here's an idea," Denal began, which probably meant it was doomed to fail. "That Derrick Marquez guy is just a big bully, like that VP's kid we splattered out by Ceres. He's not used to people standing up to him, so how about we miss a payment or two, and when he comes over looking for money, we firmly, and with our weapons well at hand, tell him we're not paying the increased rate?"
I could tell from the start that it was a bad idea. "Look," I told him, "I still have some money left over after the insurance deductions. I could give it all to you guys and just live off the algal dole."
"And what about when the premiums get too high for even that to help?" Aniya asked.
I honestly hadn't thought of that possibility, though I doubted my income could make much of a difference as it was. "Look," I said, "you do not want to fight this guy. You just don't."
"Maybe you don't, Argen, but the rest of us do." Even Cole was in on this idiotic plan. What was going on here? "You don't have to participate but we are going to convince him to stop charging us such exorbitant prices one way or another."
"Fine then!" I threw down my utensils and got up to storm out. "Just don't come running to me when you need to pay your medical bills after this fiasco goes down."
***
The next day, I headed down to the ship after work, thinking that maybe I'd reacted a bit too harshly to their plan and should have offered some more coherent arguments as to why it would be a bad idea to try to intimidate Derrick Marquez into lowering our payments. All day I had been thinking of new arguments that I hoped would persuade them more effectively. But all those ideas were dashed from my mind as I came around the bend and saw Marquez enforcers setting up a perimeter of yellow tape around the docking tunnel to our vessel.
"What's going on here?" I asked the nearest officer, an almost two-meter-tall tiger.
His response was to hold a camera up to my face and run my image through a tablet app. When he read the results, he glared down at me and instead of answering my question, issued a question (or rather a demand) of his own. "Where is the red panda known as 'Denal'?"
What? They wanted Denal? Had he tried something stupid already? The only response I could think to give was a short "I… don't know."
"You liar." The tiger grabbed the front of my shirt and drew me close. "You two were on the same policy as the victims; you must have some idea of where he ran off to."
"Leave zir." A disturbingly familiar voice came from a gurney set up by the Guild vehicle parked next to the tunnel entrance. On the propped up stretcher was the one cat I least wanted to see at that time. "Ze's with Griggs," said Derrick Marquez, the corrupt clone of the Marquez clan's leader.
The enforcer dropped me and stalked off, back to whatever it was he had been assigned to do. Cautiously, I approached the commander. I saw that his stomach was bandaged and he was essentially confined to his impromptu bed by a set of intravenous tubes and straps to his legs.
"What…" I stuttered, afraid of what the answer might be. "What was he talking about?"
Derrick snorted; even such a simple act appeared to take a great deal of effort in his condition. "What do you think happened?" He lifted a hand to point towards the interior of the ground car next to him. "Your raccoon buddy went nuts and shot your other two friends. Then when I tried to stop him, he attempted to run me through with a sword."
I looked in the direction he was pointing. There sitting on the bed of the transport lay several items in plastic bags tagged with numbers for reference. One bag had Denal's longsword, the thin blade snapped in half. Aniya and Cole's dart guns were in another pair of bags, next to them a couple of darts that had apparently been fired. But the interior of the vehicle was dominated by a pair of very large opaque bags that were zipped shut; one was just a little over one meter long, the other well over three.
"Are they…" I started to ask, but I couldn't bring myself to complete the sentence. "They can't be. I was just having dinner with them last night. It's not possible."
"Afraid so, Silver." The Marquez scion's voice was calm and controlled, as if this kind of thing were routine. "The darts Denal shot them with where loaded with massive doses of hydrogen cyanide. They were dead within minutes."
"But those are Aniya and Cole's guns," I objected, still unable to grasp the reality laid out before me. "They would never put something so lethal in their darts; they hated killing."
"Then I guess you didn't know your crewmates as well as you thought you did." Derrick Marquez started to lift himself up off his stretcher to turn towards me. "I suggest you go home and go to bed early. This is a lot to deal with." Then his eyes lit up in a moment of sadistic glee. "Unless… this was your home, wasn't it? Well, too bad, because it's now evidence in a murder investigation. You might be able to retrieve some of your things in two to six weeks, depending on how long the paperwork takes to process."
"Hope you can handle the mortgage payments," I said in a weak attempt at a witty comeback as I slowly walked away in the direction of the apartment I had called home for five nights out of each of the last five weeks.
Once I made it there, I found myself taking Derrick Marquez's advice, I piled every blanket and pillow in the apartment on top of the bed and burrowed underneath them. It was no substitute for Aniya's pouch. That would never again offer me the comfortable safety I had felt inside it. By the time I crawled out to inform Maximus that I wouldn't be coming in to work the following morning, the sheets were stained with sweat and tears.
***
I spent the day following the deaths of two of my closest and only friends and the disappearance of the third sitting in my bedroom wrapped in a blanket and watching video streams. Having fully realized that I was living in a feudal nightmare, I lost my taste for "Crowns of Furtopia" and began watching comedy shows. There were hundreds of antique human comedies on the net (watching our great creators whacking each other on the heads with hammers never got old) as well as original parahuman works, often commenting on current events in one asteroid or another. But then one of the not-so-serious news feeds I was watching led me to one that was serious, and a bit personal.
This was a video titled "Newcomer to Vesta Stabs Marquez Clone, why?" and was uploaded by someone who went by the moniker of "HoundOfGod." The last thing I needed was a reminder of what had just happened, but curiosity led me onwards.
The video started with a still image of Derrick Marquez staggering with a bloody broken blade sticking out of his kevlar body armor, the hilt of Denal's sword in his hand and an expression of pure fury on his face. The voiceover began in digitally distorted harsh and gravelly tones; it sounded male, but for all I knew, the narrator was actually female and using software to hide her identity. "Yesterday, Derrick Marquez, a commander in the Marquez Protectors Guild, was stabbed by an individual known simply as Denal." The image changed to a street camera view of Denal, from one of our first days in Vesta. "Denal arrived on Vesta over a month ago with three companions: Aniya"-a picture of Aniya in her spacesuit was shown-"Cole"-the raven's portrait-"and Argentum,"-me, obviously. "The four of them had slain a pirate in self-defense near Ceres a couple weeks prior
to their arrival at Vesta, who just happened to be a clone of a prominent VP in the Directorate hierarchy. How ironic that they chose Vesta to escape reprisal for slaying a clone." If only we'd known, Aniya and Cole might have been doing hard labor instead of lying in some morgue waiting to be recycled into raw nutrients. "The official report by House Marquez is that during negotiations with the commander over insurance premiums, Denal suddenly slew Aniya and Cole with pressure darts loaded with cyanide, then charged Derrick with a Jiàn sword. The blade then broke in his attempt to penetrate the commander's bodysuit, and Denal fled." I did not need to be reminded; as the video stated this I pulled the sheets closer together over my eyes.
"However, there is one major problem with this account. After fleeing the scene Denal ran straight to territory covered by House Wolf and pled for asylum. What's more, he had a video recording of the encounter taken via a mini-camera in one of his vest buttons." So that answered where Denal was, hiding behind his lupine girlfriend's camouflage and gun. "The following video has been determined to be the original footage with no editing, for the simple reason that he had no time to edit while running for his life."
The video suddenly shifted to a scene of Derrick Marquez sitting at the far end of a table from the camera. To either side of the camera, one could barely see some black feathered wings or furred paws resting on the table. "Now," said Derrick, "I'm sure you can understand why we had to increase your rates so drastically, considering your present safety concerns."
"Yeah, right." The person wearing the camera had spoken, given how the image jostled, and I instantly recognized the voice as Denal's. "You just want to suck every spare qcoin we own out of us."
"There are additional expenses racked up by fending off bounty hunters after your hide," Derrick continued. "And your foxy friend is no longer paying zir share of the extra costs, so you three have to take up the slack."
The Pride of Parahumans Page 8