Текст книги "Accidental Creatures"

Автор книги: Anne Harris

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“We’re going, we’re going.”

Helix rode in the back seat of the convertible, while Chango drove and Mavi glared at her over the front seat. A sudden wave of uncontrollable shivering overcame her. She thought at first it was because of the wind, but the shaking only got worse, until her muscles were spasming in rapid, jerky motions, and she couldn’t stop it, and she couldn’t get a decent breath because her lungs weren’t working right and the wind kept snatching her breath away, but it wasn’t the wind. She could have gotten her breath back if she could have followed it, but something was holding her back by the throat, choking her.

“Holy fuck, she’s going into convulsions,” she heard someone, Mavi, say, “Haul ass.”

Big patches of fog hazed their way across her field of vision, blocking out sight, replacing it with blooms of pattern, moving, changing, a funny grey color that held within it not the hues, but the mathematical understanding of every other color, rendered in shifting moire. And in between those patches, in spaces getting smaller now, she saw Mavi’s face, looking at her as if from far away. She was floating in a sea of green.

oOo

Chango stepped on the gas and tore off down Riopelle, the car jouncing across potholes, sending up sprays of loose asphalt in its wake. She glanced behind her to see Mavi forcing her vathide wallet between Helix’s teeth. She was shaking violently, her hair stiff and streaked white, her face crusted with white flakes of biocide. Quickly Chango looked back at the road. The sunshine and the buildings and the strangled tufts of grass beside the road looked unreal, like they were nothing more than a painted screen, a holographic overlay, masking the horror of life. But the horror of life was seeping through. Over the rush of wind in her ears she heard a hoarse, hacking kind of moan from the back seat, and Mavi swearing as she rummaged through her bag for epidermals. How could there still be sunshine, while this was happening? Eyes wide, she stared down the road, and drove.

A great bubble of grief seemed to rise up into her heart, and break. Clenching her teeth, she laid on the horn, and took the left at Caniff without stopping.

She pulled sloppily up to the curb in front of Mavi’s house and jumped out of the car. “Help me carry her,” said Mavi, “she’s big.”

With difficulty they maneuvered Helix, still quaking, up the front steps and in the door. “Put her on the couch,” said Mavi, “Hugo’s in the pink room.” They deposited her on the faded green couch. Mavi knelt over her and peeled back one of her eyelids, shook her head and stood up.

“What is it? Is she dying?”

Mavi looked at her gravely, “She may be dying, but not of vatsickness.”

“What?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in an onset before.”

“But her exposure...”

“The indications are all wrong. Patients always run a low grade fever by the time they start displaying other symptoms. Her temperature is dropping, rapidly. And those convulsions, I’ve never seen anyone do that before, not with vatsickness. It’s more like a straightforward, severe toxic reaction.”

“To the growth medium?”

Mavi shrugged and looked at her with flat, bleak eyes, “What else? I gave her a clonazepam epidermal, that seems to be keeping the convulsions down a bit, but her system’s in shock. I don’t know what else to do.”

From the couch, Helix let out one of those moans again. Chango shivered. “God, what is that noise she makes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Get it off me,” Helix groaned.

“What?” Chango knelt by her side. “What did you say?”

“The biocide, get it off me,” she croaked hoarsely, “It’s killing me.”

Chango stared at Mavi, who stared back at her. “But the biocide is supposed to help kill the growth medium, Helix.”

Helix closed her eyes in exhaustion. “That’s the problem.” she whispered. “Please, it hurts. If you don’t help me, I’ll die.”

Chango and Mavi looked at each other again, hesitating. “It’s not vatsickness...” said Mavi, “it could be a reaction to the biocide, but—”

“You know I’m not human,” said Helix, staring at Mavi with half lidded eyes, “or at least you should.”

“Let’s get her to the shower,” said Chango.

oOo

Water white with biocide ran down the drain of the tub. Helix rested her head in Chango’s lap, half conscious, comforted by Chango’s fingers on her scalp, scrubbing away the crusted powder. “I can see why you wanted this stuff off,” she said, “it’s nasty.”

Helix didn’t answer her. She was dreaming that she was swimming in a great green vat of growth medium, moving with the currents, and feasting on agules. Mavi had been right. She would die, but not from vatsickness, she would die because she had found what she’d never known she wanted, what she’d always wanted, and as soon as she did, it had been taken away from her. She couldn’t go back, to her pathetic existence as a sport. She wasn’t that, now she knew she wasn’t that. She’d been born to swim in the vats, harvest agules, and eat them. But she couldn’t do that either. After today, they’d fire her for sure.

Helix felt the last of the biocide rinse away, but still her skin burned, still the tremors washed over her.

“Fill the tub,” she said to Chango, “and get some salt from the kitchen and put it in.”

Chango did as she asked, and then sat on the edge of the tub, holding one of her hands. “Is it better?”

She nodded. It was better, better than being coated with poison, but it was a far cry from the velvet caress of the growth medium. She longed for it in her cells. She wondered if she would ever feel it again.

“It wasn’t an accident, was it?” said Chango. “You did it on purpose.”

“Yeah. I had to find out what it felt like.”

“So what did you find out?”

“It’s what I’m meant to do, and if I can’t, I’ll die.”

Chapter 12 – Creation Story

In the beginning was the dream, and in the dream Hector was in the laboratory, alone. It was late at night, he was in his pajama bottoms. Goose flesh stood out on the exposed skin of his arms and chest. Light came faintly from a single row of phosphorescents at the back of the room. He padded up and down the aisles on cold bare feet, walking past incubators and microscopes, biophages and growing trays. A multi-processor was awake, spilling holographic equations into the air with incomprehensible speed. Hector stopped, and watched the numbers and symbols stream past. He couldn't make anything out; they were moving too fast. As he stood and stared the equations flew at him, tumbling into him through his eyes, his ears, his mouth. His head was filled with them, he felt them working their calculations through his blood stream. He danced and jerked, an arithmetic robot, trying to rid himself of these numbers, these symbols. But it was too late now. They were in him. They were a part of him. He left the emptied screen of the multi-processor and moved towards the back of the room, where a large, rectangular tank lay beneath the round saucers of the phosphorescent lights. Inside the tank, like a corpse laid out in a coffin, lay a body, submerged in the faint opalescent sheen of growth medium. As he approached the tank, she stood up. She was tall and strong, with a long mane of black hair, generous breasts, four arms and gleaming white fangs. And as he stood there, staring, she began to dance. She danced like the Indian women he'd seen on a PBS special once; all rocking back and fourth, angular gestures, stamping of feet and bending of knees. She whirled around him, and he turned, trying to keep her in sight. She was a blur all around him now, and he was inside of her, being born by her dance. The equations that had infected him earlier were coming out again now. He spoke them into the whirlwind, and she stopped.

She stood before him, silent, motionless. She was beautiful. He would have liked to touch her, hold her, make love to her. She smiled slowly and nodded her head, once, and then walked towards him. But as she approached she got smaller. Smaller and smaller until she was no bigger than a gum ball, and she hung in the middle of the air, in front of his face. Hector opened his mouth, she climbed inside, and he swallowed her.

When he awoke the next morning, he knew what to do.

It took months of splicing and selective genetic engineering. For processing and control of the organism, he cloned and modified a multi-processor brain. Following standard animal physiology, he tied autonomic functions like breathing and heart reflex to the brainstem and put the hypothalamus in charge of instinctual drives such as sex and hunger.

For reasons he did not examine at the time, he grew the cerebral cortex beyond the demands of plucking agules from growth medium, leaving space for behaviors to evolve with the demands of the creature’s environment, leaving space for intelligence to grow on its own.

At first the double arms and fangs had been stubborn artifacts of the gene splicing, a side effect of manipulating homeobox genes, but he soon recognized their advantages, and gave up on trying to erase them.

Finally, in a rectangular tank beneath the phosphorescent lights of the laboratory, Lilith, the first tetra, was born. He had been lauded for his work on the brains, but he had never really considered them a work of genius. Everything was there, just waiting for him to come along and put it together. But this, this was something else again. A genetically engineered species with human cognitive ability. He hadn’t needed to make them that smart, but once he’d figured out the basic neural network of NMDA, glutaminergic, and GABA synapses and the balance between excitory and inhibitory neurons, it was only a matter of making space for the network to grow.

Following the sacred design that came to him in the dream, Hector directed the formation of synaptic connections with neural adhesion factors, chemoattractants and neurotrophins. But he designed the tetras with synaptic plasticity, taking advantage of Hebb’s rule of coordinated synaptic activity to reinforce useful connections and inactivate inappropriate ones. Rather than hardwire their behavior, he allowed their environment to mold and nudge them towards their intended function, leaving specific behaviors open-ended.

Despite the problems caused by his approach – the tetras’ insular social system, their uncooperativeness – he had never really regretted giving them choice, independence, intelligence. The concept of a creature of such complexity without those characteristics was an anathema to him, and he knew what GeneSys intended to do with them if they were successful. They wanted to get rid of the vatdivers because they were causing trouble; organizing, calling strikes, demanding rights. In fact, he realized now, the block he’d had on the project was not mental in nature, but moral. Until he saw Lilith in his dream and knew that she would be a person, not a machine, he could not allow himself to solve the puzzle of her creation. He remembered his mother, an inobservant Jew but one instilled nevertheless with the Reformed Jewish version of the golden rule, “that which is abhorrent to you, do not do.” It was a rule she’d taught to him as well.

He need not have worried with Lilith, she was her own being right from the start. For weeks he ate and slept in the lab, observing her, talking to her. Within weeks she mastered language, and started asking him for a nest.

Hector pulled some strings and transferred the experiment to the test facility in the basement. It had once been the proving grounds for the first living polymers. Now it was home to a new prototype, one of his own making.

Months passed, and Lilith swam around in her vat eating agules, and nothing else happened. He had designed the tetras to be parthenogenic, but she had yet to reproduce. Hector started limiting the number of people in the vat room, but that only seemed to make her more restless. Then one night, when he was working there alone, she came to him. He was shocked to see her out of the vat, and even more shocked to realize, as she raised one hand to cup the side of his face, that she was dry. She detested being dry, but he had told her how dangerous growth medium was to humans, and she must have realized it was necessary – she spread her hands across his chest – for this. To his eternal shame, he made love to her that night. He tried to reason with himself that it was necessary. Ring tail lizards, he kept telling himself, were parthenogenic but only reproduced if another ringtail lizard went through the motions of mating with it. They were all females, but one would act the male, mounting the other and stimulating her to ovulate. Male or female, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the act of love. He had not passed his genetic material on to Lilith’s offspring, yet he had caused them to be born, just the same.

And he was glad, because he was a scientist and his creation flourished, and because he was a scientist and Lilith was his creation, he was ashamed.

She laid a clutch of twelve eggs which nestled at the bottom of the vat for six months before they hatched. But these tetras were smaller than Lilith, and tests showed that they were sterile. Lilith began to turn away from Hector and his assistants, devoting herself to her daughters; grooming them, cuddling them, and ordering them around. She laid a single egg, without his or any other human’s assistance.

That egg sat at the bottom of the vat like a time bomb, a bomb that went off, six months later, when Hector went down to the vat room late one night, and found a lone tetra curled up against the outer door

– naked, like they all were.

Her lower arms were wrapped around her knees, her upper arms sheltering her bent head. She looked exactly like Lilith, but when he touched her she gazed up at him with the eyes of an infant, unguarded and unwise.

She'd had a harsh introduction to the world, that was sure. She was covered with bruises and bites. A gash on her left thigh and another just below her right collarbone looked serious. He hesitated before the crouching thing. She was too big for him to carry, but he didn't know if she could walk yet. The others had all started out swimming.

It was chilly in the hallway, and she shivered, looking up at him with wide eyes that looked dark and wet in the cold shine of the halogen lighting. Hector Martin took off his raincoat and drew it over her shoulders. With a tentative hand on an arm, he guided her to a standing position. She leaned on him and nestled her head against his shoulder. He got his arm around her waist. She responded by clinging to him with three arms. When Hector took a step, she followed suit. Good, she could walk.

"This way," he said pointlessly, steering her towards the elevator. If she was anything like her mother and sisters, it would be weeks before she learned human speech.

Fortunately they didn’t have to wait long for the elevator to arrive. On the ride up to his apartment she slumped against him, fairly pinning him to the wall of the elevator. When the doors opened, she didn’t budge. She liked the elevator. She did not want to leave the elevator. And she was at least as strong as he was, though less coordinated just now.

By the time he managed to propel them both towards the door, it had shut again. He reached over and hit the open door button and when he looked back he found that his raincoat had slipped from her shoulders, and in the struggle to put it back on her he missed the door opening and had to hit the button again. Finally, in desperation he just got out, and she followed him. Thank God it was so late, he thought as he walked down the hall supporting a four-armed woman half-clad in his raincoat, guiding her groggy way to his apartment. He got her inside and deposited her on the couch in his living room.

It wasn't until that moment that he realized what he'd done. He'd made a decision without ever thinking about it. He could have put her back in the vat room, but her wounds had been inflicted by the other tetras, and something told him that if he put her back in there they’d kill her. Still he could have taken her to the lab. That was the right place for her, surely. But he hadn't even considered it. Without thinking, he'd brought her here. Maybe it was just as well. If she was discovered, it could lead to the destruction of her and all her kind.

The fledgling tetra squirmed on his couch and whimpered. Blood from her cuts was soaking into the cream colored cellweave upholstery. The stains faded even as he watched, absorbed and metabolized by the living fabric.

Hector bit his lip, hesitating to leave her alone for even an instant, but there was no help for it. He rushed to the bathroom, got adhesive bandages, cellular tape, peroxide and a clean cloth, and came back. It took about five seconds. She was still there. He sat her up and cleaned out her cuts, sealing the two big ones closed with cellular tape. He didn't know how to give stitches, and taking her to someone who did was out of the question.

After having her wounds tended, the tetra wanted to cling to him some more. Hector sat on his couch, an infant with the body of a twenty-five year old woman clinging to him with four very strong arms. "I guess she thinks I'm her mother," he thought, and laughed, long into the night, at the absurdity his life had become.

He woke late the next morning, still on the couch, still with the tetra wrapped around him. Well, everyone knew he'd been working late last night, but he still needed to make an appearance some time today. He couldn't afford to attract any attention, not now. With effort he pried himself free from his sleeping child, and went into the bathroom for a shower. After he'd dressed again, he ran the tub, and went into the kitchen, rummaging around in the cupboards until he found an old box of kosher salt. All the other tetras had spent their first days floating in growth medium. He dumped half the box of salt into the tub. This was nothing like growth medium, of course, but it was the closest he could get, right now. He didn't like the idea of leaving her alone here for several hours, but he had to do it. Maybe being in a tub of warm, salty water would make her feel at home, and keep her quiet. She settled into the water with a blissful smile that bared her fangs, and looked at him with eyes of bright, sky blue. Dark brown hair sprang in clumps from her skull, but just the same, he thought she was beautiful.

She sighed, and her throat convulsed as she uttered an inarticulate, guttural noise. "Hgcklx," she said. It was the first sound she'd made that was identifiable as a syllable.

"Helix," Hector Martin said back to her. "Your name will be Helix." oOo

Lilith dreamed she floated in the warm, void waters of the womb. Her womb, the womb of her mother. A pattern emerging from the whorl of nonbeing, coalescing in the darkness. Until the dream. The dream she dreamt of the dreamer's face. He opened his eyes, and he saw her, and through his eyes, and his dreaming vision, she was born.

She told her daughters that she dreamed herself into Hector Martin's mind in order to be born, but in truth she couldn't be certain whose dream she was. Before he saw her, did she exist? Perhaps, but not as she was now, and not here.

What she knew of the world she had learned from the multiprocessor brains, cousins to her through Hector’s imagination. They told her of the numbers and structures that formed the basis of life for the people she was born among. But she and her daughters could not live on such things. They needed agules and the waters that grew them. They needed warmth, and each other’s touch. Coleanus swam up to her and tucked her head into the crook of Lilith's neck, one hand absently reaching for a breast. She and her sisters had long since given up feeding from her, and now, like Lilith, subsisted on the fruits of the waters. But still they sought her out nearly every day, to rest comfortably in her arms; sharing in that contact the knowledge of their minds and hearts.

Lilith laid her cheek against drowsy Coleanus' damp hair and felt her sigh, felt with her a wave of deep contentment, the joy of being alive.

After a time marked only by the currents of the waters, Coleanus dislodged herself, drifting softly away on her back, then turning and diving beneath the waters. She returned with an agule, plump and purple, its tendrils tapering away to slender succulence. She raised it above the waters with her upper hands, offering it to Lilith, who took it, bit into the body and twined her fingers among the tendrils. She pulled them taut and severed several with her teeth. Swallowing, she handed the agule back to her daughter. They shared it, its sweet salty taste, its chewy texture, the slickness of it sliding down their throats. After the meal Lilith swam around the vat on her back, drifting past her daughters, staring up at the girders of the ceiling, now strung with ferns and vines. The air shimmered with warm mist. Since they’d driven the humans out, they’d made this place theirs, coaxing the vat system’s brain to raise the temperature and humidity. Even the waters were warmer now. Humans kept the vats too cold. The fruits grew better now, and the blue biopoly Hector and his staff were so taken with. The lights had been harsh white halogens when she got here, now they’d been replaced with bio-spectrum capsules which gave off a warm glow.

Amoritas came up onto the platform and slipped into the waters beside her. She wrapped her upper arms around Lilith’s neck, the lower ones encircling her waist. Through her touch Lilith knew that the second vat was thick with ripe agules.

She had made this place a home for herself and her daughters – her nest – but what of her other daughter, the new queen? Lilith had cooperated with Hector Martin’s plan regarding Helix, hoping that in believing she was human, her daughter would find a place for the next generation among them. But after talking to her last night, she knew that was wrong. Helix needed to know what she was. She thought she was insane, she didn’t understand her attraction to the vats.

When she suggested Helix get a job as a vatdiver, Lilith had never imagined her diving in one of those ghastly rubber skins, but of course she would have to. They thought she was human, and humans needed the suits. But Helix would be a prisoner inside one, one fourth of an inch away from her home. And how could she use her arms? It was only a matter of time before she took that stupid suit off, and given GeneSys’ predilection for policies, she would probably get in trouble for it. Maybe even lose the job Lilith had so carefully arranged for her.

She’d been about to tell her the truth, but Helix hung up. And Lilith couldn’t call her back. The number she had was for the transceiver Helix had left behind in Hector’s apartment. She’d tried it anyway, and left a message, but she had little hope she would check her messages and call her back. Regretfully she dislodged Amoritas and swam to the ladder. She no longer shivered when she left the waters, but was greeted by air as warm and moist as her own breath. She took the catwalk to the second floor balcony, and entered the tiny office which they kept sealed from the rest of the vat room's environment.

Inside it was dry, though still hot. The little room was crowded with multi-processors, transceivers and other equipment left behind by Hector and his researchers. It was an unfortunate but necessary compromise. Try as she might, Lilith was unable to keep the electronics from dying in the steamy climate surrounding the vats.

She sat before the case which housed the multi-processor brain, lifting the top panel off so she had access to it. She found the keyboard clumsy compared to communicating directly with the brain, through touch, the way she spoke with her daughters. Lilith plunged her upper hands into the growth medium surrounding the brain. Gently she cradled it, silently saying hello with her hands.

“Sisterlilith,” the brain acknowledged her.

“Brain, remember when we approved an employment application and sequestered the applicant’s lab test results? I want you to go back to that section of personnel records. Give me everything that’s appeared in Helix Martin’s file since she was hired,” Lilith thought to it.

As she’d feared, there was an application for Helix’s dismissal, filed just this afternoon. The reason cited was negligence on the job. An incident report described how she’d taken her divesuit off in the vat and then fought with her “rescuers.” So it hadn’t taken long at all, for her daughter’s true nature to come forth.

Helix’s inevitable break from bondage had won her dismissal from the only nest she’d ever known. It was intolerable. Now that she’d felt the waters of the vat on her skin, she would die without their touch. Lilith checked the dismissal application’s status and discovered that it had yet to be processed. “Brain, list security codes for personnel with jurisdiction over dismissal applications,” she thought. A stream of codes poured into her mind, each accompanied by the name and title of the person that held it. She scanned up the list, to the topmost echelons of the GeneSys hierarchy, searching for someone whose unorthodox decision would go unquestioned. She selected Anna Luria, corporate CEO, but Lilith’s momentary concentration on her code was enough to awaken the GeneSys security system and send it grumbling after her with access checks.

She withdrew to the labyrinthine calculations of the payroll system and waited. She was okay as long as she dealt with individual brains, the one in the office or others in the network, but collectively they supported the consciousness of the thing called GeneSys, her mortal enemy. It did not like her, and she did not like it. A company, Hector called it, implying that it was simply an organization of human beings, but she knew it was more than that. It was a thing unto itself, and just as she had to drive Helix from her nest, because there can only be one queen in a nest, she would someday have to defeat GeneSys, because it controlled the vats her species needed to survive.

Lilith returned to the list her brain had given her, crawling up it carefully, watching for access checks. She stopped at the security code of one Nathan Graham. She had used this code before, when she wanted to make sure Helix got hired. It had been good enough to get Helix her job, it would have to be good enough to let her keep it.

Chapter 13 – True Nature

Helix lifted an arm to scratch at her forehead, then took her hand away. That spot was starting to get raw. Her arms were already pocked with raw patches from her scratching. She even had one on her cheek. Chango insisted that the itching was an after affect from the biocide, but she knew better. She knew it was an itch to get back into a vat of growth medium, and go back to being what she was, and she knew it would not go away until she did.

She sat with Chango on Mavi’s couch. “When I go back to work, I’m not wearing the suit anymore,”

she said.

“What? Are you crazy? You’re not going back there. What you did was grounds for dismissal. The only reason you haven’t been fired is that they thought you’d be dead by now.”

Helix stared at her in sudden silent rage. Stared until Chango’s face swirled and dissolved from the tears in her eyes. She turned her back to her, reached out her hands to claw at the air and screamed. Her voice echoed back at her from the walls, from the world. “I have to go back,” she shouted, turning around again to see Chango staring, her eyes two mismatched dinner plates. “Either that or...”

“Or what?” Chango muttered, her hands fretting with the hem of her t-shirt. Helix nodded, gazing at her. “It’s not like I’m really alive now, anyway. Not anymore.”

There was silence in the room. From down the hall Helix heard Mavi’s voice, muffled, speaking to Hugo in the pink room. Chango wrapped her thin arms around Helix and held her – held her and rocked her while their salt tears formed a poor approximation of growth medium between them. After a while Helix pulled back, and wiped her face. “Jesus Christ, Chango, what am I?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “But we can go see Hyper. Maybe-maybe he knows something.”

Helix wrinkled her brow but got up from the couch. They were about to leave when Mavi came in from the hallway. Her face was ashen. “Chango, go fetch Benny. It’s starting. He said he wanted to be here when the changes came.”

Chango looked from her to Helix. “Go get him,” nodded Helix. “I can wait.”

By afternoon Hugo’s remains were carried out by the coroner in a body bag. Helix stood in the living room with Chango, Mavi, and Benny, and watched the hearse pull away.

“At least his suffering is over,” said Benny, his hands stuck in his pockets, his back bowed and his chest curving inward, as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

“Do you want some valerian?” asked Mavi, giving him a worried look.

“No, no thanks. I’d better get down to the mortuary. Hugo had a little money left, about enough to cover his funeral. I might as well get it over with.”

“Are you sure? There’s time, you know. You could stand to relax.”

He shook his head, “I don’t want to relax. He’s dead, Mavi. How can I relax? Maybe once he’s buried, maybe then it will seem alright, but it doesn’t now, that’s for sure.” He glanced at Helix. He didn’t say anything, but she knew what he was thinking. It should have been her that went out of here today in a body bag, but she was fine. Hugo had slight exposure, and it killed him, she swam naked in growth medium, and lived.

“Come on Helix,” said Chango, “let’s go see Hyper.”

oOo

When they got to Hyper’s house, he was on his way out the door, a plaid cellweave wind breaker under his arm. “The vatdivers are standing on the tables down at Josa’s,” he said as they came up the steps to meet him.

“Standing on the tables,” said Chango, “they haven’t done that since-”

“Not since the strike, I know.”