Текст книги "Accidental Creatures"

Автор книги: Anne Harris

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“But what difference does it make, if we only end up here again?”

“All the difference. All the difference in the world. We are a pattern, and the pattern continues. We return to the void, but our pattern is forever in the weave of the world.”

The void around them gradually returned to being the waters of the vat, and Helix realized she could open her eyes and lift her head. She and Lilith separated, and the sisters flowed in to buffer them from one another.

The consuming rage that had driven her into her mother’s arms was gone, and she allowed her sisters to guide her with numerous small hands, up onto the dive platform and down into the other vat. They had been designed to replace the vatdivers; trading cheap labor for in-house slavery. But it hadn't worked out the way GeneSys wanted. Instead of docile biological machines, it had gotten the Lilim, and now, they were here to stay.

Chapter 20 – Daughters of the Void

The first time she’d lucked out and gotten into the output system. The ducts were clean, the air was fresh and ready for breathing, and the only fellow travellers she had to contend with were some very passive algae caulking the duct’s seams, probably there to breathe extra oxygen into the mix. It was good air. This, on the other hand, was not good air. She’d taken a wrong turn back there somewhere and wound up in the exhaust system. This stuff had pretty much been breathed by everyone on the twenty-second floor, and smelled like it. Plus the walls of the duct were covered with a fine grit of dust mites. They crunched beneath her palms and got ground up under her fingernails as she crawled down the narrow shaft.

Chango squirmed around a corner to find an opening in the duct, but it was only a vent from another apartment. She crawled on until the duct ended in a vertical shaft, and she took it down, trying to slow her descent by bracing her arms and legs against the walls. Dust mites caked at her elbows and knees, and soon she was sliding in a streak of their crushed bodies. She passed several floors before the duct banked inward and halted her downward plunge.

Here the duct was joined by several others, and became considerably larger. She took the opportunity to sit upright and catch her breath. Looking around at the duct walls, now faintly luminescent with some sort of algae, she was glad for the dive-suit she wore. Hot and uncomfortable as it was, it was better than picking up goddess knows what from this ventilation system and its attendant organisms. She probably shouldn’t even be breathing in here, but she didn’t have air tanks; couldn’t have fit through the ducts if she had.

She crawled on through the darkness, her way lit only by the phosphorescent glow of the algae clinging to the walls. If anything, the air was worse than ever. It was warmer now and humid, and she was pretty sure the oxygen level was dropping off. Her head swam, and there was a faint ringing in her ears. She had to get out of here.

She took the next branch she could find, wending her way through several switchbacks lined with fine, feathery, growths that squished between her fingers and left a faint trail of slime where they brushed across her face.

She climbed over a lip into a larger chamber. At first she thought there were flecks of dirt blowing through here, but then she realized they were swarming and nipping microscopically at her exposed flesh. Dust mites, only these ones flew, and to them she was one motherfucking huge dust bunny; the challenge of their careers, their big opportunity to prove just what excellent flying dust mites they were. Chango suppressed a scream and squeezed her eyes shut as she dashed through the biting swarm, searching for a way out.

Her hands plunged through something thick and gelatinous, to mite-free air on the other side. She lunged through and found herself on the other side of a shimmering blue-green membrane which sealed itself back up behind her. Ahead of her was another one, only it was orange instead. They were filters, apparently. As Chango progressed through the prismatic slimefest, the air steadily improved. And the wind picked up.

She dove through a deep purple membrane to find herself in a howling indraft, surrounded by the hum of turbines. She was pulled along the duct at nearly twice her crawling speed and then the duct gave way to a larger chamber where it was joined by several others.

Chango careened off the lip of the duct, plummeting towards one of four big turbine fans in the opposite wall. A narrow crossbar spanned the fan’s ten foot diameter, and as she tumbled through empty air, Chango reached for the metal struts, desperately hoping to grab on before she was diced by the blades. Her left foot struck the center of the crossbar first, and she twisted forward, her hands spread wide, managing to grab a strut with her right hand. For perilous seconds she teetered there, flailing desperately with her other hand to keep balance, her face inches from the whirring blades. The wind sucked at her, and she was glad of the divesuit hood that prevented her from being pulled in by her hair. Finally she grabbed hold of another strut and got her other foot braced against the cross bar. Slowly, carefully, she crawled across the vortex of the fan and pulled herself up over the lip of the vent opening. She perched there on the casing for a few seconds, catching her breath and looking around. A narrow walkway ran beneath the fans. Of course. They’d need to get in here in case something big got jammed in the blades. Like her, for instance. To her right she spotted a small door. Chango wedged herself between the fan casing and the wall, and gradually lowered herself down to the walkway. Clinging to the iron rail she made her way around to the door. It opened with a crank handle, and she was outside, finally, in the welcome, mundane dust of empty narrow walkways and the outsides of ducts and machine casings.

Chango threaded her way along the service hall, wondering where she was. Somewhere deep in the innards, she thought, and she imagined the weight of the building pressing in on her. Here and there, service lights illuminated a knot of pipe work or a bundle of electrical cables. The rest was just shadows and the vague, humming sounds of hidden machinery.

She noticed that the electrical lines were converging like tributaries into a bundled cable that ran along the wall. She followed it, and saw it grow as more lines joined it. It was as thick as her leg by the time she reached what could only be the main conduit for the whole building; a massive rope of cables surrounded by a catwalk and bristling with bundles of electrical lines like the one she’d followed. Gaping, Chango walked out onto the catwalk, and looked down, and up. Like the spine of some mighty giant, the cable ran for as far as she could see in either direction, fed by a million lines connected to millions more multi-processor brains of all sizes in offices, light switches, and thermostats all over the building. She reached her hand over the edge of the catwalk, and she could have sworn she felt them thinking. oOo

Helix lolled against the side of the vat, her limbs buoyed by the waters. Three sisters, Jacinth, Nicar, and Coleanus, swam up to her and wrapped their arms around her, cuddling close. “GeneSys is our enemy. It is what put you in here, not Graham. Even though he thinks it was his idea, he did it for GeneSys,” their touch said. It was from Lilith. For the past hour or so, these three had been swimming back and forth between Helix and Lilith, bearing messages in their skin.

Helix didn’t have to say anything, but she felt... frustration, rage at Graham and Benny, hopelessness at ever finding her own vat. And something else. A familiarity with what she was doing; not how she was talking, but with whom.

Her sisters swam away, and for a little while there was only the vague speaking of the waters lapping against her skin. A touch she had not recognized as speech before, because all it really did was tell her who she was, and where.

“You can’t stay here. You have to have your own life, your own nest,” came Lilith’s answer. Night Hag, thought Helix, you were Night Hag, weren’t you? And she didn’t have to wait for her mother’s returning touch to know. Lilith had contacted her through the holoweb, had encouraged her to leave Hector and become a vat diver. She had, in fact, started it all, so that Helix might find her own vat. And it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps she had tried to keep Helix in her job, after the divesuit incident.

Jacinth curled her arms around Helix and nuzzled her neck. “Yes. It was ridiculous. Why should you have to wear one of those foolish suits?”

But how had she done it?

“The brains are our cousins, and they like us better than the people who think they control them. When I touch them, they do what I ask.”

Gently Helix dislodged her sisters from her body and dove down to the bottom of the vat. An agule floated by and she absently plucked it and bit into its pulpy softness. She would like to stay here forever, but this wasn’t her nest. It was Lilith’s. They had reached some temporary accord, but she could not fool herself into thinking it was a permanent arrangement. She was a queen. She needed her own nest. Through the green waters Helix saw several of her sisters swimming nonchalantly about four meters away. They were making sure she did not attempt to get into Lilith’s vat again. To reassure them Helix coasted along the wall, circling back before she was halfway to the diving platform that separated the two vats.

Of course it was the touch. Through her touch Lilith communicated more information to the brains more efficiently than any human being with a keypad ever could. She spoke their language. When she resurfaced, Helix was greeted by Orixeme, who apparently came not with a message but out of sheer curiosity. She gripped Helix and ran her nose and mouth across her skin, snuffling intently. As Helix relaxed, she loosened her grip and ran one hand across her belly. Her touch sent a bolt of recognition through Helix’s body. “Eggs,” Orixeme whispered needlessly, and swam away. Helix looked up, and saw someone in a divesuit and face mask come out of one of the offices and stand at the edge of the balcony. As she stared, he raised a hand and waved at her. None of the other Lilim seemed to pay him much mind. It couldn’t be Nathan Graham or Benny. “Dr. Martin is asking to speak with you,” he said through his suit’s radio.

Reluctantly, Helix drew herself out of the waters and padded around the balcony, flanked by a bevy of concerned Lilim who formed themselves into a barricade when she rounded the curve towards Lilith’s vat. “It’s okay,” she said, putting a hand on Magdar’s shoulder to drive her message home. “I’m going into the office.”

They trailed her curiously as she approached the suited figure. “I’m Colin Slatermeyer,” he said, “One of Dr. Martin’s assistants.”

Helix wrinkled her brow. “How did you get in here? The door doesn’t open.”

“I was here already.”

The Lilim stayed behind as she entered the office. Inside the air was horribly dry. Already she yearned to return to the waters, and Helix wondered what she would do when she had to leave here and face the waterless world again.

Hector’s face floated above the transceiver. “Helix,” he said as she came into camera range. “Are you all right? Is Lilith-Did you-”

“She’s fine, we’re both fine. But I can’t stay here. This is her nest, I need one of my own.”

“Graham probably thinks you’re both dead. It’s better if we let him.” Hector’s brow wrinkled in worry.

“Chango was here though. She’s on her way down to you, now. She can get you and Slatermeyer out.”

Helix bit back her impatience. “Out. Out but then what? Hector I need-I can’t go back to living as a human. Lilith and I have been talking. She says GeneSys is our enemy. She says we have to defeat it if we’re to continue as a species.” Helix’s stomach cramped with urgency. “You invented the brains. Lilith calls them cousins. She says they’ll help us.”

Hector shook his head. “You can’t just overthrow a whole company, Helix. Lilith doesn’t understand, but you’ve lived among humans. GeneSys is made up of thousands of people. You can’t just take it over.”

“I don’t see any other way.”

“Let me talk to Anna. She’s the CEO. I’ll just lay my cards on the table. She’s a pretty decent person. Maybe I can convince her to keep the project going, for its own sake.”

“No. We aren’t your project anymore, Hector. It’s time for us to be in the world. Tell me more about the brains. They’re all over the building, right?”

“Y-yeah. They’re in the processors the employees use for spreadsheets and analysis, and there are smaller ones in the lighting and environmental systems, and in the security cameras. Everything’s hooked up to a big brain in the attic that keeps tabs on all the systems. But-”

His objection was cut off by Slatermeyer, who had left, and now returned with someone else. A small and extremely grimy figure in a divesuit and face mask.

“Chango?” said Helix.

The figure reached up and took off the face mask. “I made it.” said Chango. “Christ, what a haul. Is there anyplace around here I can take a bath?” She ran a gloved finger over her suit and came up with a glob of slime and dust. “No telling what this stuff is.” Pointing at the door, she said, “Those women out there

– they look like you.”

Helix reached towards Chango to take her face in her hands and kiss her, but she stopped herself. The growth medium still drying on her naked skin would be more dangerous to Chango than anything she’d encountered on her way down here. She dropped her hands to her sides. “I’m glad to see you.”

“Yeah, same here. It was touch and go for awhile there, but then I found the main electrical conduit for the building. Near as I can tell, the thing runs straight up to the top of the tower.”

“To the brain,” Helix said, looking over her shoulder at Hector’s hologram.

“That would be correct,” he said, his voice thick with reluctance.

She looked back at Chango. “We have to go back up.”

Chango’s eyes bulged wide. “What?”

oOo

Slatermeyer ventured back out onto the balcony. Below him was the vat currently occupied by Lilith. Even from here he could see the pulpy blue polymer lining the walls and floor of the vat. It was a rich crop. His mind strayed to the research he’d been doing on the poly before his abduction. Its conductivity ratios and propensity for self-propagation pointed to something, some highly specific application that had continued to elude his grasp.

He looked up at the mounting where the transceiver had been, and then down again into the growth medium, where he could just barely make out a darker lump on the bottom of the vat. He walked around the balcony to the dive platform and stopped, expecting to see the tetras converging to herd him back into the office, but they didn’t seem to care anymore. Lilith and several of her brood swam around on their backs in the vat below, apparently unconcerned about his approach. Colin sat down on the dive platform, checked the seals on his suit, and carefully lowered himself into the vat. He dove down, skimming along the bottom towards the lump. It was the transceiver, alright, still attached to its armature, but it was beyond any hope of repair, coated as it was with blue polymer. Just the same, he took it with him.

In the lab Hector was still on the holo, and he and Helix and Chango were arguing.

“I almost got killed in the ventilation system, and now you want me to climb all the way back up again?”

said Chango, her hands in the air.

“If Graham catches on, he won’t hesitate to kill the other tetras,” noted Hector. Helix shook her head. “He can’t get in, he welded the door shut.”

Colin ignored them and took the transceiver over to a small area of counter space. He set it down and began methodically peeling the blue poly from its surface.

The camera itself was remarkably well preserved, but it wasn’t until he got the casing off that he discovered the real impact of the blue poly on the instrument. It had apparently leached into the transceiver’s inner works through the peripheral port. The poly coated the chips and wires. Slatermeyer took the camera to a magnifying stand and tried to peel off the poly with a tweezers, but he only succeeded in pulling a wire loose. He upped the magnification, and examined the severed wire. It was solid blue poly, all the way through its tiny diameter. He’d been wrong, the poly wasn’t coating the circuitry at all, not any more. It was the circuitry. Like a sea change, or a petrification, the blue poly had replaced the camera’s electrical components, while maintaining their structure. He pressed the ends of the severed wire back together and watched the seam disappear as the poly knitted itself together again. With trembling hands he replaced the transceiver’s casing and switched it on. The current episode of We Are the World leapt into the air before him in perfect holographic detail. Natasha was taking the witness stand, to testify in her own defense. Chango and Helix turned and stared. “I can’t believe you’re watching soaps at a time like this,” said Chango.

“She’s testifying?” said Helix, “No! I never would have let her do that. Damn.”

“What’s going on?” Hector asked.

“What’s going on,” said Slatermeyer, “is that we’ve been sitting on the biggest technological innovation since the brains, and we never even knew it. The poly-” Slatermeyer bundled the scraps from the casing into his gloved hands and rolled them into a ball. He approached the transceiver carrying Hector’s image, and held it up. “The blue poly, it-Do you realize what it would mean, if we could completely integrate the circuitry in every system, and eliminate the need for an interface between the brains and the electrical network? Processing speeds would hit the roof.”

“Well, a biological network has been discussed, Slatermeyer.” Hector shrugged. “But we rejected it because of the cost of uprooting the infrastructure.”

“That’s just it.” Slatermeyer bounced the ball of blue poly on the ground for emphasis. “We don’t have to uproot anything. We don’t have to do anything at all.”

“What are you talking about?” said Helix.

Slatermeyer faced her. “Your friend can get us out of here, can’t she?”

“Well yeah. She’s going to take me up to the top of the tower, where the main control system for the brain network is located.”

Chango sighed. “I never could talk you out of a damn thing.”

Slatermeyer squeezed the blue poly between his hands. “Fine. I’m going with you. Part way, anyway.”

He turned to face Hector again. “We’ll talk about this in person.”

oOo

“How did it go?” Graham asked Benny as soon as he stepped into the office. Benny dumped Ada’s tanks next to the desk and helped himself to a hearty portion of Graham’s liquor.

“Oh, I got Helix in there alright,” he said, sinking into a chair. “Soldered the door shut like you said, no problem.”

“Good. No one’s getting in or out of there now.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“What now? Graham leaned across the desk towards him. He looked haggard, thought Benny. He probably wasn’t used to such late nights.

“I ran into an old chum on the way back. Chango Chichelski. She had these with her.” He hefted the tanks up to show Graham. “They’re Ada’s. She must have been to my apartment.”

“You left them there?”

“Sure. I wasn’t planning on sticking around town. That was your idea, remember?”

“What happened?”

“I was bringing her back here, but she got away.”

“She got away.”

“Yeah. There was a scuffle in this office she ran into. There were people in there, still working, at this hour. I shot somebody, but it wasn’t her. By the time I got out of there, she’d slipped away, but I have an idea where she went.”

Graham gritted his teeth. “Can you share it with the rest of the class?”

“A grating was missing from the door to the maintenance stairway. It was too small for me but I kicked the door open. Two floors up an access panel had been removed from a ventilation duct.”

“She crawled inside?”

“Yeah. You don’t know Chango. She can get in and out of places no one else would even dream of going. She could be anywhere, now.”

“Does she know what happened to Helix?”

“No, but my guess is she was on her way to see Hector Martin when I found her. If she succeeds in finding him, he can tell her.”

“Christ. And you shot someone. Who?”

“I don’t know, some suit.”

“Lovely. Would she really try to get into the vat room through the ventilation system? More importantly, could she?”

“If anyone could, it would be her.”

Graham stood up and got himself a drink. “What would my mother say?” he muttered softly.

“Don’t you think, what with me shooting someone, with witnesses and everything, that it’s time I should be leaving?”

“We have to stop her.”

“Why? She has no evidence anymore.” He gestured to the tanks. “And so what if she does get into the vat room. They’ll be dead by then right?”

“The two queens, yes. There are others, but I don’t think they can do much without their – uh —

mother.”

“Then what are you worrying about? Just notify security and they can catch her when she comes out.”

“It isn’t good. Too many loose ends. She may already be in contact with Martin. Together the two of them, tanks or no tanks, can make considerable trouble for us.”

“For you. I’ll be long gone.”

“Not without money for a plane ticket.”

“Oh come on. You’ve got to let me go. I’m not going crawling around in any ventilation ducts, I’ll tell you that right now. If you’re so hot on the idea, you do it.”

“You won’t have to. I’ll call up a schema of the building’s systems. Then all we have to do is figure out where she has to go to get down there, and intercept her.”

Benny hissed through his teeth. “It’s not going to be that easy, and you know it. You’re just trying to snow me. Maybe I can’t get out of town without your money, but you need me too. Besides, Martin’s your real problem. As long as he’s around, you’ll never squeak out of this.”

“You’re right, of course. I had planned on a scandal for him, but that’ll take too long. We need to act now.”

“Well, we’ve already had one instance of a gunman breaking in and shooting someone, why not make it a spree?”

“Are you actually suggesting that you just break into his apartment and kill him?”

“Why not? Provided I have my plane ticket first, of course.”

Graham stared at him for a very long time. “That might actually work,” he said. oOo

It took Graham several hours to work up a schema of the building’s systems. Now it hung in the air over his desk, a glittering thing of lines and data points. “You’ll take the maintenance stairway down to Hector’s floor, and get into the ventilation duct here” he said to Benny, pointing at an enlarged section of the diagram detailing the ventilation system around Hector’s apartment. “Once you’re inside, go straight past six side vents, and take the seventh one in. When it branches, go left. It’ll take you right to Hector’s bathroom.”

Benny eyed the schema skeptically. “How am I going to get out of there? Security’s probably looking for me already.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got your escape route all mapped out. After you’ve killed him, call me, and I’ll tell you where to go.”

Benny laughed. “Sure you will. Why don’t you just tell me now?”

“Look, you’ve got your plane ticket. If you have a way out of here too, why not just use it right away?

That’s what I’d do, if I were you. The escape route is my insurance that you do what you say you’ll do.”

“Yeah? How do I know you’re not going to screw me again?”

“Oh please. I’m taking a huge risk keeping you around now. Believe me, the sooner you’re safely out of the country, the better off I’ll be.”

Benny thought about it a moment and nodded. “I guess that’s true, because if I get caught, you can believe I’ll be telling them everything.”

“Fine. We understand each other very well then.”

oOo

Slatermeyer struggled to keep up with Chango and Helix as they wound their way through the innards of the GeneSys Building. With Helix’s arms, and Chango’s dexterity, he didn’t stand a chance.

“Slatermeyer, are you with us?” Chango called from a utility ladder up above. They were in the conduit now, ropy masses of cable rose up through the shaft beside him. “I have to rest,” he called up. “Can’t we stop for a second?”

He heard her say something to Helix, and then, “Okay, for a few minutes. You climb up to us.”

They sat in a small utility closet on stacks of spare cable. “Where are we?” he asked, wiping his forehead.

“Oh, you’re almost through,” said Chango. “It’s only five floors up to Hector’s from here.”

“How can you tell?”

Chango nodded at the junction box on the wall above her head. In black marker it was labeled WW22.

“West wing floor twenty-two,” Chango translated. “Hector’s on the twenty-fifth.”

“We’re not stopping there,” said Helix, resting three arms on her knees and pointing up with the fourth.

“We’re going all the way to the top.”

“Well, we’ll have to show him to Hector’s apartment. He can’t find it on his own,” said Chango. Helix agreed reluctantly, rubbing a fang over her lower lip in chagrin. Slatermeyer fished the ball of blue poly from his divesuit pouch and rolled it between his gloved fingers.

“You were saying something about that stuff earlier,” said Helix. “What does it do again?”

Because it would prolong their rest break, Slatermeyer did his best to explain the properties of the blue poly as he understood them. “The camera was still working, so the stuff must be transmitting the electrical signals, or converting them into something analogous. If I’m right, there would no longer be any need for an interface between the brains and the electrical systems that they run. It’s a huge breakthrough in efficiency and speed of processing.”

Helix nodded her head at the ball in is hands. “Can I see it?”

He handed it to her. She turned it around in her hand, sniffed it, licked it, and then looked at him. “Can I use some of this?”

Slatermeyer frowned. “What are you going to do, eat it?”

With a pained expression, Helix shook her head. “If this stuff does what you say it does... Then I think we need to use it.”

“What do you mean, ‘use it’?”

“I mean try it out. We’ve got plenty of electrical cable around here. Let’s seed some of it with this stuff.”

“You better be careful, some of these cables are carrying a lot of juice,” said Chango.

“What are you talking about?” Slatermeyer stood up. “This stuff hasn’t been tested yet. I’m just making educated guesses here. There’s no way to be sure exactly what it does without testing it first.”

Helix shrugged, and stood up herself. She opened the door to the junction box above Chango, and looked back at Slatermeyer over her shoulder. “Here’s the first test.”

He tried to grab her arm, to stop her, but she had other arms to shove him away as she slammed the blue poly into the junction box. The wires inside were spliced together, their raw ends twisted around each other and held fast with plastic caps. It wouldn’t take the blue poly long to get past those. Soon it would be leaching into the wires themselves, and it would spread.

Clenching his jaw, Slatermeyer tried to push past her, to pull the blue poly off the wires before it was too late, but she slammed the door to the box shut and repelled him again. He stumbled back against a pile of cabling.

“Excuse me,” said Chango, standing up. “I think I’ll sit over here.”

“Don’t bother,” said Helix. “It’s time to go.”

“But-“ Slatermeyer pulled absently at his hair. “You can’t just-At least let me take some for experiments.”

Helix snorted. “Don’t you have some in the lab?”

“Oh, well, yes...”

“Then use that. Let’s go.”

oOo

Hector paced the carpeting, doggedly pressing redial on his transceiver. No one was answering. Helix and Chango must have left already, presumably Slatermeyer as well. Any one of them might have picked up the transceiver, but now only Lilith and her brood were down there, and he knew what he could expect from them.

He gave up the transceiver in frustration and went to the kitchen cupboard for the bottle. He was pouring scotch into a water glass when he heard a noise from the bathroom. He moved into the hallway in time to see Slatermeyer in a divesuit, stepping out of the john.

“I see you made it,” he said, and returned to the kitchen for another glass.

“Do you have anything I can wear?” asked Slatermeyer, peeling the divesuit from his body where he stood. “I can’t stay in this thing one moment longer. How can they stand it? All your sweat is trapped inside with you. It’s like being marinated.”

Hector set the glass on the counter. “I’ll get you something,” he said and went to fetch a robe.

“So where are Helix and Chango? Are they going through with that business about the brain?” asked Hector, handing Slatermeyer a generous glass of whiskey.

“Tsss,” Slatermeyer hissed, leaning back on the couch. “More than that. They took the blue poly I’d collected. They’ve already introduced it to the building’s electrical system.” He raised his glass up.

“Cheers.” And drank deeply. “Aaugh, that feels good. You don’t know what it’s been like. I know I’ve been exposed to the growth medium. How could I not be? It was in the air in that place. Hey, I should take a shower, right away.” Slatermeyer jumped up, nearly spilling his whiskey, and headed for the bathroom.

“What you were saying about the blue poly before,” said Hector, trailing behind him, “it didn’t make much sense.”

“The stuff bonds with electrical circuitry – becomes it actually,” said Slatermeyer, twisting the knobs of the shower. The rushing water nearly drowning him out. “It must be the bonding and propagation qualities. The camera worked just like it should, but all of its wiring had been replaced by the blue poly,”

shouted Slatermeyer over the hissing spray.

Hector leaned against the frame of the doorway, his mind reeling. “How does it handle the current?

Electrical signals in biological systems are minuscule compared to those in electronics.”