Olga gave a sound that could have been a loud scoff; the Augmented Reality glasses couldn't make it out. "Please," she said sarcastically (the AR glasses highlighted the tone). "He babbled incomprehensibly for five minutes, insisting he was innocent until we pulled him into a holding cell. We discovered the camera while picking over his stuff for anything valuable." She snickered a little before continuing. "I managed to convince my mother that we could tick Marquez off royally if we kept him here."
"Right." Denal interjected. "Anyway, after I proved my innocence with the Wolfs, they put me to work maintaining their fleet of vehicles. The next day, Olga showed me the video she had made with my material and asked me if I was interested in helping her 'tear down this rotted foundation of a civilization' or something like that."
"So that's all?" I asked Olga. "You're just doing this"- referring to the whole trying to-get-him-to-knock-her-up thing- "to express your views on Vestan politics?"
"Well, he is pretty good in bed," the she-wolf admitted. Denal grinned. "But yes, the clone-entrenched administrators of justice with no accountability need to be brought down. Including my mother and sisters, I'm afraid."
I realized I had one more question to ask of them before I could go back to sleep and recover. "How did you find me anyways?"
"I have a backdoor into the Marquez network. We noticed when the cameras and IR sensors went dark along a certain path leading from your apartment to the mass driver loading bay." Olga parted the fur at the base of her neck to show me a capped brain-computer interface port-very difficult to learn how to use, but immensely useful for complex computer work. "Mom shouldn't have prepared me to do all the electronics stuff in the racketeering business."
Chapter 14
I spent most of the week it took to print out my new vital organs trying to learn how to use my new hand. I assure you it is not like the movies. By the end of that week, I was able to open and close it, but more complex gestures were still nearly impossible to perform. My nerves and brain simply couldn't rewire themselves any faster. The autodoc stapled the severed ends of the nerves in my wrist to the control circuits of the new hand, but it was still vastly different from my organic hand, and there was nothing they could do. Once the last chunk of liver was in place, surgical micro-bots stitched everything together at the cellular level, leaving nothing but a tender bald spot on my abdomen. It hurt to stand, up but Denal and Olga decided it was time for me to appear before the public regardless.
While I had been getting pieced back together, Jakob Griggs' memetic engineers had been hard at work spreading the idea that my treatment was a fake. Like he had said, they were capitalizing on the fact that I had disappeared without a trace to discredit the research I had presented. It was known that a few dozen people had synthesized and used the treatment after HoundOfGod's endorsement, but since it took a month for the effects to become apparent, many of them now doubted that it had done anything but make them feel ill for a few days. There was a slim chance that eventually some of them would become pregnant by sheer accident and the treatment would catch on, but for now, it looked like the very concept of parahuman fertility would be relegated to the waste basket of pseudo-science. There needed to be drastic action, now.
So the very day my surgeries were completed, Olga set up her recording gear in my infirmary to stream a very special installment of her blog. It would be streamed live that evening as they were recording, with questions from viewers that I would be able to answer. As the appointed time drew near I sat up on the bed, still wearing my patient's gown. They thought that emphasizing the abuse I had taken might stir sympathy.
As the seconds on the clock ticked down, Olga went through the last couple steps to start the stream. She'd start with her usual black screen accompanied by voiceover and subtitles explaining the video to come and then switch over to me. I would tell her viewers everything. "We are starting in three, two..." Olga's announced, then she switched on a distortion unit that would make her sound like the net revolutionary's distinctive gravelly tones.
"This is HoundOfGod. It has been over a week since our last broadcast and no doubt some of you are wondering why I haven't been covering the recent disturbances surrounding the revelation that parahuman sterility is easily fixed. You may have concluded that the complete disappearance of Argentum, known by the net aliases DarwinRevolution and GoldFoxie, the author of the paper detailing the gene the corporations used to prevent us from reproducing, had something to do with it. Or you may have concluded that when I failed to make a baby with my partner, I hid myself away in shame like many of others who tried the treatment did. To those who believe the latter, I recommend reading some basic information on how meiosis works and waiting a month like we're doing. The former is closer to the truth. You see, Argentum did not completely disappear."
A map of the Marquez cavern's sensors appeared in the field of view. A clearly defined path was utterly devoid of sensor sweep symbols. "For about twenty minutes on the day of the riots, a set of Marquez sensors went dark. As you can see, the specific sensors were too convenient to be coincidental, as one end of the path they form is at Argentum's apartment complex."
The image changed to an interior view of my apartment, the sheets disheveled and the appliances thrown around and broken. There were even a few splatters of blood. "Zir apartment was later reported by the landlord to be in a state of disarray. He found blood staining the floor and a 3D printed M1911 semiautomatic pistol, similar to the one Argentum was known to carry."
A pic of me at the time of the bounty hunter incident appeared alongside the apartment, with a circle and arrow around my holster. The apartment view zoomed in on the same gun lying on the floor. "There were also two bullets of the caliber used in the firearm embedded in one of the walls of the apartment, as well as three spent casings on the floor near the gun. This suggests that Argentum had been attacked and managed to pull off three shots before ze was captured, one of which hit one of the aggressors. The other end of the path was just as interesting, it turned out."
The still images changed views to a gaping metal hole in the side of the planetoid, going down into darkness. "The mass driver, a never-used project of the old corporations that would have saved them billions on shipping back to Earth. I drew the obvious conclusion and took a ship out along the trajectory the driver would have fired upon. What I found was no less than miraculous."
The view now changed to a still of open space, which zoomed in on a tiny spot until the screen was filled with my furry black and white ass. "The broken and bleeding body of our great unsung hero, Argentum. Imagine my shock to find zir all the way out there without so much as a spacesuit."
The view then changed to me being pulled into the cargo bay with the help of a suited Olga, conveniently cut off above the harpoon in my gut. "Imagine my relief to see that ze had held onto life for that long."
Now it showed me unconscious, lying on the medical bed with a gas mask over my face and the autodoc reaching into the assorted holes in me. "Regardless, ze was in critical condition and required extensive surgery and organ replacement before ze could return to Vesta. But now ze is ready to make zir first public appearance. I am transferring the feed now to zir hospital bed on board my ship so ze can tell zir story and later answer your questions."
The video changed to me, and I straightened up suddenly, which shot a surge of pain up my torso, causing me to reflexively clutch at my side with my right hand. Unfortunately, as that hand was now a barely functional prosthesis, that only made it worse. Self-conscious that I was being watched by possibly hundreds of parahumans, I slowly moved my hand back down onto the bed.
"All right," I began. "For those of you who didn't obsessively look me up and go over every little detail of my life I'll give you the basics." I retold the whole story, how we had fled Ceres, how we found difficulty paying the Marquez Guild's rates and I sought employment with the SPPS. How I'd discovered the mutation and how Jakob Griggs had convinced me to keep it secr
et. And then my friends had been killed or framed for murder.
As I began to wrap up my tale I turned back to pry open my new hand and held it up to the camera. "As for this, well, when I returned to work Jakob threatened to kill me, but I convinced him that killing me would help validate my claim that parahuman infertility was easy to fix. Then I suppose I did the stupid thing and uploaded the video of him threatening me. That got him angry enough to try to make me 'disappear' in the most painful possible way."
I shook my wrist waving my fake hand around. "My right hand was crushed in the process of cramming me into a giant railgun cylinder." I leaned forward and pointed a finger down my ear. "Both eardrums burst when the cylinder exploded in open space causing rapid decompression." I swept my gown to the side showing off the bald spot where the bulk of the organ transplants had taken place. "Liver, pancreas, gallbladder, and five centimeters of intestine; wrecked when HoundOfGod, a.k.a. Olga Wolf, the rebellious clone princess-"
"Now wait a second!" Olga cut in, not even bothering with the distortion this time.
"You expose me; I expose you. It's only fair," I told her, motioning to the right of the camera where she sat. "Now, as I was saying, my internal organs were destroyed when Olga was forced to reel me in with a harpoon through the gut. Now, I want to make it clear that I do not blame her; the ship didn't have any other methods of grabbing a small, fast-moving object such as myself. But still I was resigned to a slow death from anoxia followed by an impromptu cremation in Earth's atmosphere when I felt a massive stabbing, no, impaling pain."
I moved my gown back into place and lay back on the bed. "So that's my story. Any questions?"
Within seconds of the comment box going active, the feed was loaded with questions, as well as the usual troll comments that inevitably appear on any online discussion. I ignored the ones that didn't actually ask a question. Unfortunately, the first real question that I could answer happened to be "Why are you so obsessed with sex you neuter?"
"Obsessed with sex?" I replied incredulously. "Well, I can't say that I'm obsessed with sex. But I do believe that it will become necessary for us to survive as a species. Not only does reproduction by cloning give tyrants like Jakob a focal point to seize, but it reduces the ability of our kind to evolve."
I prepared for another long lecture, recalling what Maximus had told me. I explained the basics of sexual reproduction in relation to evolution. "In addition, cloning is expensive and therefore limited to a narrow percentage of the population. This means that within a few generations, the parahuman population would be limited to a few dozen genotypes rather than the hundreds of thousands we have now. Jakob Griggs actually told me that he took measures to make sure that only the extremely wealthy could continue their genelines."
As I glanced over the rest of the comments, one stuck out in particular. "Speaking of sex, why don't you share some of your nocturnal activities with that wolf-possum 'friend' of yours?"
I read that over and over again in disbelief. Who would know about that? I glanced at Denal who was fussing over a computer readout. He shook his head and showed me the circuitry diagram displayed on his tablet. Then I remembered someone else who knew.
"Nocturnal activities? Wait a minute. Is that you, Derrick Marquez?!" I yelled at the camera, my voice full of fury. "Why don't you share your own nocturnal activities with Aniya, like pumping her full of cellular poison and dumping her limp carcass into the back of your van?!"
Immediately, the other commenters turned on the "guest " who had brought up my and Aniya's proclivities- things like "Wait, she was zir lover?" and "You killed zir girlfriend, no wonder ze hates the Guild feudal system so much" and "Run an ISP trace on that bastard so we can beat him up!" The one I was positive was Derrick by now tried to deflect the net rage by going into detail on the things he was accusing me of, but that mostly served to attract more sympathy, especially once the video he had threatened to post was linked to and people saw me retreat into Aniya's pouch out of fright. Apparently, it gave many of them the impression that me and Aniya were a loving couple rather than just a pair of perverts.
Then, amongst the flame war, there appeared one question that I found myself having difficulty answering. "If you are neuter, than how can you benefit from reversing sterility? You have no reproductive organs to repair."
"Well, I might be able to find a way to print and graft fully functional reproductive organs to myself someday," was my immediate answer. "Failing that, I might make one last clone who has been modified to have a sex."
"You should clone Aniya," stated another comment.
Clone Aniya. I thought to myself. I do have samples of her DNA, but what would I do with a clone of her? Raise her as my daughter and slip into her pouch every other night? That sounds a bit creepy, don't you think?
There were many more questions, but I don't believe there was anywhere near that much drama at any other point during the rest of the video, and I didn't care to remember any of it.
Chapter 15
Derrick Marquez was jumped by a smart mob as he attempted to leave the apartment he had been using to access the network. He tried to slip past in a camosuit, but the mob was too large and he brushed against too many people. Before they swarmed him and tore the suit off, he managed to shoot a few mob members, fortunately with normal paralytics, but they did find several darts loaded with cyanide and nastier toxins such as sarin, which, rather than simply disabling them like the tetrodotoxin favored by Olga, destroyed nerve endings and condemned parahumans to a slow, lingering death from asphyxiation like the one I had faced in the vacuum of space, or at best a life of drastically limited mobility.
Regardless, many considered the mere possession of such toxins ample justification for the rather creative hanging they gave him, dropping him off the roof of a ceiling-scraper with some weights tied to his ankles and a rope just two meters short of the building's height around his neck. It would have been considered overkill anywhere with even one percent of Earth's gravity. Derrick's death was but one of many suffered by the Protectors' Guilds all over Vesta. Unfortunately, the Guilds responded in kind, enforcers brutally bashing in the skulls of protestors and filling them with neurotoxins, sometimes of the fatal variety.
Amidst all this chaos, Jakob Griggs had withdrawn the SPPS into their headquarters and fortified it with armed guards and auto-turrets. After the first few rioters were gunned down, they generally left the place alone, the king in his castle under siege.
Meanwhile, we ourselves hunkered down at the spaceport. Olga had apparently been planning to hide us in Wolf territory but now that her Clan knew that she was the notorious blogger HoundOfGod, they had made it quite clear that she was no longer welcome at home. Guess I'd screwed up a bit there. Olga had modified the ship to include a pair of retractable mini-turrets flanking the primary airlock to either side. They fended off the first attempt at invasion by a Marquez SWAT team quite adequately.
The turrets did not need to face a second invasion, though. Shortly after that first attempt, a group of supporters began to gather around the entrance to our ship, most of them heavily armed with a wide variety of different weapons, everything from improvised clubs made from pipes to automatic Gauss rifles. With the abundance of hardware and people between us and the Guilds we decided it was necessary to disable the auto-fire on our turrets. We kept the manual override in easy reach, but now we could get someone to remove the bodies from the first assault.
There were two more attempts by what appeared to be mostly Marquez troops to gain entrance to our sanctum, but the improvised militia before us drove them back both times. I'm sorry to say that there were losses incurred on our side, among them a ferret who caught a stray bullet in the neck and a bull who took a cosh straight through his lower jaw and into his brainpan. Still, this seemed to bolster their resolve. More and more flocked to our side, setting up fortifications and portable shelters in the cave that served as the main reception area of the port. It was starting to rese
mble a military encampment as the population of the spaceport reached the hundreds.
Every so often, I left the safety of the ship to walk among the followers I had never intended to gather. I'm sure they thought it was like the messiah himself had risen from the grave to see them. For my part, I did my best to smile and tried to remember not to shake hands with my right, though inevitably I forgot and cracked some fingers. I would apologize, they would say that it was no problem and that they understood that I still hadn't recovered fully from my injuries, and the next of my fans would come up to meet me.
After three days of this siege, I was sick and tired of it all. Appropriately, that was when the opposition decided that they wanted to negotiate.
I received a message from Jakob stating that he would be sending one of his clones, along with three of the Guildmasters under his domain, to speak with me and my followers. He wanted to meet on "neutral ground" in the primary airlock doors separating the spaceport from the Marquez cavern. I told him that there was no such thing as neutral ground on this asteroid, and he may as well come out here to the bay. He agreed, but only on the condition that each of the representatives he was sending be allowed to bring a bodyguard. I told him that we would match each of these bodyguards one to one and if they brought too many, the negotiations would be called off immediately. With that, the meeting time was set for the following day shortly after noon.
On the day of the negotiations, we set up a large table in the middle of the cave, far enough away from the camp that it would take time for our people to run up and grab the negotiators, but close enough to give everyone in the camp a clear shot at everyone else. Handling negotiations on our side were me, Olga; and a horse by the name of Harvey, who seemed to be one of the organizers of our little militia. Denal was acting as one of our bodyguards. Somehow he'd gotten hold of another sword like the one that had snapped off in Derrick Marquez's bodysuit, but he kept it sheathed and carried a Gauss rifle loaded with armor-piercing flechettes; clearly, he had learned something, though I admit it wasn't much. Half an hour before the representatives were due to arrive, we sat down and awaited their arrival.
The Pride of Parahumans Page 11