The Pride of Parahumans

by Joel Kreissman

  "What?" The camera view shifted to the left, just barely showing Aniya expressing disbelief at this statement. "Argen's not paying?"

  "We have a bit of an agreement with zir employers." The camera shifted back to Derrick.

  "That does not mean that we have to pay for zir." It shifted to the right this time, showing Cole gripping the table tightly in all four sets of talons.

  "I say it does." Derrick stood up and popped the strap holding his sidearm in place.

  "He's going to shoot! Get him!" It was hard to tell, but it looked like Denal was scrambling across the table, sword drawn, and pouncing on Derrick. It was moving fast, but I could just barely make out several sounds of darts flying before the jaguar was thrown down to the ground with the sword embedded in his bodysuit.

  "Argh, you idiot." Derrick shoved Denal loudly off himself; there was a snap of metal breaking as he did so. When Denal landed, he saw Aniya and Cole lying prone on the floor, their bodies twitching and their mouths filling with foam. There was a sharp intake of breath as Denal noted the darts in their necks, the glazed lifeless look on their faces. Then he ran, deeper into the bowels of the ship, no doubt hoping that he could lose the presumably relentless pursuer just standing up behind him.

  I stopped the video at that point. First Denal was not only a lecher but a murderer; then he was an innocent framed for the deaths of our closest friends by a corrupt Guildmaster's progeny? What was truth and what were lies? How could I decide?

  Chapter 11

  I tried to return to life as usual in the lab the next day, but my mind kept wandering back to Aniya and Cole. I mixed a couple of reactions improperly, and the resulting readings were impossible to decipher, wasting hours of effort. After the third ruined experiment, Maximus spoke to me.

  "Are you all right?" he asked, knowing full well that I was not all right but still asking to be polite regardless.

  "No," I told him, not wanting to elaborate further.

  "I heard about your friends."

  At that comment, I ripped off my headgear and snarled at him. "What did you hear?!"

  "Well," Maximus started, "I heard two different accounts: one stating that one of the parahumans you came to Vesta with shot your other two companions and stabbed a Marquez." I think I felt my claws start to penetrate my glove as I clenched my fist in fury "and the other stating that Marquez shot two of your friends and the third one stabbed him in retaliation." I relaxed slightly at this statement; he'd apparently seen more than one version of the night's events. "Do you know what really happened?" he asked.

  I shook my head. "The second version sounds more like what I know of Denal, but who knows what happened?" I wasn't too sure I wanted to tell him about the plan to violently persuade Derrick Marquez to lower our coverage rates.

  Maximus glanced at the piece of my environment suit that was in my hands instead of covering my head, then back at my face. "Maybe we shouldn't talk in here, if you insist on not wearing that while we're doing so." He gestured to a door leading to a maintenance corridor meant for the custodians. I found myself following him out.

  Once we were outside the lab, Maximus started to get out of his hazard suit as well. I could see that he, too, had a preference for "going commando." The corridor was dark, with only a string of small lights along the ceiling to light up the bare stone walls. He shoved his suit in a pocket in the wall opposite the door and indicated that I should do the same.

  "Uh, why?"

  "It gets hot in here. Even less ventilation than in the lab." That made sense. Only with the fans were the suits bearable at all. I threw off my suit, figuring that I had even less to hide than he did, and if he was flaunting it like that, I could too. Max picked up my discarded containment suit, folded it up, and put it in the same cavity as his own suit. Then he shoved a rock over the hole and covered our suits completely. He turned to me abruptly. "Okay, that should cover up the audio sensors in our suits. So what didn't you want to tell me before?"

  I was more than a bit surprised there; I hadn't known that there were audio sensors in the clothes. I had expected that Maximus would simply tell his progenitor anything I told him. "Why would you do that?" I asked. "I assume it would be more convenient for your father to simply listen in on our conversation rather than wait for you to repeat it to him."

  He looked at me aghast. "Not everything I do is for my progenitor. I have a life apart from him, you know." Maximus sat down on the stony floor and gestured for me to join him, which I did. "I've actually been finding reasons to disagree with him. I don't think that Jakob Griggs really has the best interest of parahumanity in mind."

  This intrigued me. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that his efforts to 'preserve' us will make us stagnant and vulnerable."

  Stagnant and vulnerable? "I still don't know what you mean."

  "Have you heard that humans weren't created by anyone?"

  "I heard that many humans think their ancestors were created by someone, but they can't agree who did it, and many scientists think none of the hypothesized creators of humanity ever existed and humanity arose through a natural process. What would that have to do with Jakob making us stagnant and vulnerable?"

  He took a very deep breath before explaining. "While I was training for this job, I decided to look up several human books on biology. Many of them referred to a process called evolution, whereby species adapt to their environments, generation by generation. When they reproduce, mutations are common. Some mutations grant advantages over others of the same species and enable the carrier to reproduce more and spread the gene throughout the population. For this reason, I started the policy of leaving harmless mutations in our cloning process alone; previously, any mutation was corrected. However many species, such as humans, do not generally reproduce by cloning. They reproduce sexually, blending half their genes at random with those of another individual. This introduces an additional form of variation into the population and adds another form of competition as individuals compete to mate with individuals of the opposite gender." He drew in another deep breath before continuing. "Humans still prefer to reproduce sexually. Therefore, they have the potential to evolve much more quickly than we do and gain an advantage over us."

  I thought that I could almost understand now. "You think that Jakob was wrong to hide the results of my findings."

  He nodded.

  "But what about the reasons he gave for doing that? Keeping the Protectors' Clans in line and preventing overpopulation?"

  Maximus uttered a sound half like a snort and half like a laugh. "After he told me about that, I looked up the actual human population growth rates. It appears that just a few generations after the mortality rate of a human population drops, enabling rapid growth, the birth rate tapers off. It's like they make lots of babies when they think many of them won't survive to adulthood, but after things change so that all their young can expect to grow up, they voluntarily sterilize themselves, temporarily or permanently, to limit the number of children they have to raise." He let that sink in before addressing my former point. "As for 'keeping the Clans in line,' can you honestly say they are under control after what just happened to your friends?"

  I thought about it. "No, they're not." At that point, I decided that I could trust Maximus Griggs with the secret I so badly needed to keep from Jakob Griggs and the entire Marquez Clan. "Almost a week before I started working for the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species, I was attacked by a bounty hunter. Marquez drones stopped him, but afterwards, a commander, Derrick Marquez, spoke to me. He told me that my group would now be paying three times the rate we were already paying and that if I refused or attempted to get insurance with another Clan, he would release videos portraying us performing certain acts that might impair our ability to earn a living." I was not yet inclined to elaborate on me and Aniya's activities to this person. "I agreed, and shortly after, I took a job with the SPPS because I'd heard they could convince the Clans to lower my rates and I could
even make some extra to help out my friends. However, the night before the incident, they told me that ever since I joined the SPPS, their already exorbitant rates had been increasing by leaps and bounds. Even with me contributing my income, it was reaching levels that they couldn't afford. So they decided to have a chat with Derrick Marquez about their rates and, if necessary, persuade him violently." I ducked my head between my legs and covered my face so that Maximus wouldn't see my expression of grief. "Then the negotiations apparently went wrong, and either Denal snapped and killed Aniya and Cole, or Marquez didn't like their terms and killed Aniya and Cole for it. I want to believe that my only surviving friend isn't an insane murderer, but I'm so inclined to doubt everything that I wouldn't be too surprised if he was."

  I looked up long enough to see Max's jaw hanging wide open in shock. "By the makers," he said, "I didn't realize it ran that deep." He straightened up and asked me another question that would shake me like nothing in my short life had before: "Was the rate hike after you started working here, or after you found a mutation that would enable us to breed?"

  I tensed up. "Cole actually said that the big increase was a few days before, and it was less than a week after I discovered the MOR10X-6 promoter inhibition."

  It was then that he dropped the bombshell that would shape the remainder of my years to come. "I think my father ordered your friends killed."

  I collapsed, falling backwards and hitting my head on the rocky ground I had been sitting on. This was too much. I was shocked back to reality by Maximus pinching my toes between his claws. "What makes you say that?!" I demanded.

  "Well," he began, stroking his chin in thought, "a few hours after your meeting with him my progenitor invited Jerome Marquez and all eight of his clones to dinner with him." Good to know he didn't put all that food to waste, then. "And I suspect that when you asked the Marquez officers about what had happened, the only reason you weren't taken in for questioning was that you worked for the SPPS."

  I thought of how that tiger had grabbed me and demanded I tell him where Denal had scurried off to, and how he let me go after Derrick had told him that I was "with Griggs." I sat up and said, "Yes, that's accurate."

  The savannah cat grabbed my hand and pulled me the rest of the way forward. "I think he was trying to demonstrate how powerful he was. Even if you didn't catch on that he was responsible for the extreme actions of the Marquez, you would realize that he had some measure of control over the Protectors' Guilds when you were exempt from questioning during a murder investigation involving your closest companions."

  I considered his words carefully. Yes, it did seem odd that a few words were able to dissuade such an aggressive enforcer from strangling me. But I hadn't even considered the possibility that Jakob Griggs had orchestrated the murders and framing for murders of my friends. I could believe that he had convinced the Marqueze's to raise my friends' premiums in order to give himself more leverage over me and convince me to keep the mutation a secret, but killing them seemed a bit much. And I told Maximus such.

  "Maybe he didn't mean to kill them," the clone told me, "but that would still make him responsible in part for your friends' deaths. There has to be justice for what he did."

  Justice? "How would you bring about this justice?"

  At this, he grinned. The same toothy grin that had so intimidated me when sported by his father. "We strip him of his power and help parahumanity evolve; that's how." I looked at him incredulously, still unable to figure out what he was talking about. Then he added, "I kept a backup of the genetic data you showed me. We can make it open-source."

  I finally got it. "And then every biochemist in the solar system will be able to grant parahumans the ability to make babies, and he'll have no influence over the cloneclans." And then I recalled what else he had said about his influence. "But then the Clans will be unrestrained. What will keep them from abusing the people like Marquez did to us before I even joined this whole mess with the SPPS?"

  Maximus looked like he hadn't a clue; apparently he hadn't thought that far ahead. "Well, I'm sure there are better systems of governance than the feudalism we've apparently developed into. Maybe I could read some human works on government, and if the Guilds are cruel to enough people we can convince them to start a revolution to put in place something better."

  "I don't recommend corporatocracy," I added with a bit of snark. I'd left Ceres for a reason, damn it.

  "Look, I'll leave it up to you whether to release it." He pushed the rock covering our containment suits aside and retrieved them. As he handed me my suit, he said, "I'd suggest you take the rest of the work week off. You're no good to us if you're still grieving over your friends. You'll be paid as if you were still here at work."

  I started to throw on the suit (no point to walking all the way to the lockers naked) when a data card fell out. I picked it up. There was no label, but I could guess what was stored on it.

  ***

  The chip was indeed what I had suspected: all the information on MOR10X-6 I had found, the sequence, the phenotype, the mutation that disabled it, everything. I spent the next day researching what it would cost to produce a mutagen that would induce the mutation. It was only a few qcoins, and a CRISPr enzyme to remove the gene entirely didn't cost much more. I found several different biotechnology blogs and open-source libraries where I could upload the data and distribute it to anyone who cared enough to read it.

  I thought about how the Belt would handle this information. The cloneclans and wealthy oligarchs who had families already would benefit the most, as they had more copies of their genes to spread already. But now that I thought about it, if we still could reproduce only by cloning, such people would be the entirety of parahumanity in about a century. If I sent out the formula their genelines would be a minority of the total population. And no doubt the powerful could lose power when they had millions of potential competitors.

  And I thought of my friends, dead or on the run, thanks to one man who would lose everything with just a few taps of a button.

  One by one, I sent my findings to a dozen different sites. Tab by tab, key by key, I signed the death warrant for a civilization and hopefully the birth certificate of a new species.

  Chapter 12

  The effects of the upload were drastic. Within days, the blogosphere was erupting with opinions on the revelation. Most believed that it was fake. I couldn't really blame them, as it was a rather immense change and posted by someone virtually unknown. The fact that my only notable claim to fame was arriving on Vesta with a price on my head and being the only member of my group who wasn't currently dead or on the run from the Protectors' Guilds, I decided, wouldn't help me much, so I uploaded the data under a pseudonym. The following comes from one of the more notable forum threads on the subject, where I wrote under another pseudonym, "GoldFoxie":

  Genotypist: This has to be fake, you'd think that if it were this easy the asteroids would be crawling with mutant cubs by now.

  BioStick: Not to mention that we're all blends of DNA from multiple species, it would have to be almost impossible for us to breed.

  GoldFoxie: @Genotypist: Not if the information was locked up by the corps, I work at the SPPS and you'd be surprised how often we run into "clearance required" when running sequences through the old corporate databanks. @BioStick: You do know that anthropomorphic parahumans are over 99% human while uplifted parahumans have nearly all of their genes from a single species, right?

  RedBull: @GoldFoxie: If you're so sure that the mutagen works why don't you take it yourself and get pregnant or get someone else pregnant?

  GoldFoxie: @RedBull: Once I get some testes or ovaries I will. Why don't you try it out?

  Private message from admin@GeneHack.net: GoldFoxie, we have traced your ISP and determined it to be the same one that the data on the fertility restoration originated from. Under board rules, you are required to write about your findings under the same tag that you posted them under. This rule helps to ensure
our rule of transparency. While we do not object to the use of pseudonyms to publish data, we encourage researchers to take responsibility for their works instead of hiding behind other names to influence public reactions to their achievements.

  Seriously? They didn't mind false names so long as you used the same fake name everywhere? How hypocritical was that? I did not dare post on that forum again, but I returned a few hours later to see what had sprung up. Sure enough, the worst:

  admin@GeneHack.net: ISP trace has identified user GoldFoxie as user DarwinRevolution, author of the fertility genehack project.

  Genotypist: That figures.

  RedBull: Of course ze was trying to further their practical joke. And what other reason would a neuter have for publishing a means to reproduce by sex?

  HoundOfGod: @RedBull: Isn't it obvious? What other genderless foxes are there that work for the SPPS and are named after a "precious" metal who have appeared in the news recently? I'll give you a hint. (He Hlinked to video about my friends' deaths.) Clearly ze has a grudge against the Cloneclans and wants to break their exclusive access to genetic perpetuation, even if ze can't benefit from the treatment personally. Me and my partner are having the CRISPr protein synthesized as I type this, if it works I will chronicle the progress.

  I dropped the tablet in shock. This HoundOfGod character, whoever they were, had just exposed me. What gave them the right to do that?

  But on the other hand, (1) it lent me a bit of credibility, (2) they were trying out the more hazardous version of the treatment, and (3) clearly they did not like the Cloneclans. Perhaps they could be an ally in the coming revolution that Maximus was talking about. I would have to ask Max about them the next time I saw him.

  ***

  The following Monday, I came back to work. Cautious that someone might recognize me from the Internet, I took the less traveled paths to the building and wore a concealing trench coat with a hologram that replaced my face with that of a red fox. As I was preparing to don my containment suit, a familiar-looking savannah cat wearing a black robe followed into the decontamination chamber.