Текст книги "Accidental Creatures"

Автор книги: Anne Harris

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“I’ve been wondering about that too,” Slatermeyer yelled. “It takes less energy to transmit a signal through the poly. I’m thinking it may use the excess to drive cell division. But we’re all going to find out first hand what this stuff can do, any minute now. Those women, the tetra and the other one, they put it in a junction box. No telling how fast it might spread.”

Shaking his head in awe and horror, Hector walked back into the living room and took another drink of whiskey. The multi-processor brains were organic computers trapped in an electrical and fiber optic network. They required neurotranslators to process input from those lines. If Slatermeyer was right about the blue poly and its ability to transmute electrical lines into electrolytic lines, without loss of function, then there would be no longer be any interface between the signal and the mind that perceived it. He suppressed a shudder of shocked delight at the prospect and set his glass back down on the table. He turned on his transceiver and examined his own multiprocessor’s systems, calling up graphs and status codes for the brain’s electrolytic transmissions and its neurochemical composition. It wasn’t the kind of thing most people accessed, but it was there. Glutamic acid and histamine levels were stable. Norepinephrine production was down, which was to be expected, he hadn’t used the multi-processor much today. All in all, everything looked normal.

Using the access Lilith had given him, he called up systems monitoring for the building, and requested a biochemical schema of the whole network.

He stared at the brightly colored webwork, intricate in its structure and varied in the patterns of its chemistry. The network echoed the shape of the GeneSys Building itself, and in the region just below and to the west of where he stood, bright orange serotonin levels blazed like solar flares. There was a shot from the bathroom. Hector stood stock still, staring at the display, the gunshot echoing in his ears. He nearly called out to Slatermeyer, and then he turned for the door and ran. Chapter 21 – Ants and Cousins

As the tower rose, it got narrower, and the crawl spaces and access ways became fewer and ever more cramped. At last Chango and Helix were forced into an elevator shaft. They were at the thirtieth floor, the top of the gold top castle.

There was no more up to go, the shaft ended just above the elevator doors. Chango crawled up on the lip of the floor, resting her back against the doors.

“There used to be an exclusive men’s dining room up here, the Recess Club,” said Chango. “My mother told a story about a party her mother attended there as a child. A fabulous New Year’s buffet with a champaign fountain in the center and lobster tails arrayed all around. Everything was glittering and opulent, like a jewel.”

Helix was looking hopelessly around the elevator shaft. “We’re close,” she said.

“It was here, on the top floor. Let’s go take a look at it,” said Chango, twisting around to pry open the elevator doors.

The elevator lobby was disappointing. Dark red carpeting, faded with age and dust, covered the floor and the rich oak trim was cheapened by the dusky rose paint job. But at the far end was a massive pair of carved oak doors, their panels chased with curving leaves and acorns. Chango, her grandmother’s memory sparkling in her mind, stepped up to them and took the doorknobs in her hands. But when she tried to turn them they wouldn’t budge. She gave the doors an experimental shove, but they were as resistant as iron. She could batter herself against them until she knocked herself out. They were stronger than she was, and they were locked.

“Chango, come on,” Helix said. She turned to see her standing in the doorway to a maintenance stairway. “It’s open.”

Chango followed Helix up the stairway, which was narrow and painted industrial grey. Above the thirtieth floor it wasn’t painted at all, just unfinished cinderblock ending at a forbidding metal door. Helix opened it and the stepped onto a narrow landing around a wire-grid cage. Behind the cage was an enormous column of cables, all twisting around one another like bloodvessels around a heart. An open rung staircase led up around the cage to a door of the same material, standing open in invitation. Beyond it was another set of stairs, these ones wood and obviously ancient. They came right up through the floor of the room above. Chango had got ahead of Helix somehow, and she stood halfway up the staircase, her eyes level with the floor. There was someone up here. Above the hum of the metal flanked exhaust fans that hulked along the walls she heard an arrhythmic clicking that could only be produced by a human being fiddling around with something. It was not a noise a machine would make. She scanned the floor for feet, but all she found were the metal brackets which supported the exhaust fans an inch above the floor.

As she emerged through the hole in the floor she had an acute and exquisite sense of being someplace she was not supposed to be. Her skin tingled all over, making her hyper-aware of the air touching her, of her position in space. This was a bigger thrill than even seeing the Recess Club would have been. She kept constant watch for the clicker, but her view was blocked by the column of cables rising through the floor. The clicking sounds came from behind the cable. Chango circled around it slowly, careful to lay her feet down in silence. A folding chair stood empty, a soda can abandoned on the floor beside it. Chango froze, expecting someone to come and sit back down at any moment, but nobody did, and the clacking went on.

“Do you hear that noise?” said Helix beside her, making her jump. Helix pointed up to where the column terminated in a large metal ring set into the ceiling. “It’s the neurotranslator.”

A complicated series of metal rods ran from one edge of the ring down along the cable to a series of brackets on the floor. The rods were moving, sliding into different positions in the brackets and clicking against them as they did so.

“Hector told me about it. How without it the brains are useless because they can’t be hooked up directly to electrical systems. Soon I guess it’ll be obsolete.”

“What are the rods for?”

Helix shrugged. “How should I know?”

On the other side of the cable, near the stairs, a metal ladder ran up through a hole in the ceiling, straight to the canted roof of the tower. She and Helix climbed it to the uppermost floor of the tower. This room was even smaller than the one below. A strip of floor just three feet wide ran between the bulging ducts from the exhaust fans below and the translucent walls of the round tank which housed the brain. Light from windows set in dormers in the slanting metal roof reflected off the tank, bathing the dirty grey walls with lambent radiance. The reflections undulated with the movement of the growth medium. It was the brain that caused the ripples on the surface of the tank. It was much larger than an ordinary multi-processor brain. It was nearly as big as she was, and it bobbed gently in the fluid, tethered by its brainstem which trailed to the bottom of the tank and into the neurotranslator below. oOo

Benny pulled back the shower curtain. The man stared back at him with surprised and sightless eyes. He’d gotten him in the side of the head. A lucky shot, or maybe not. He’d seen Martin before, when he came with Graham to get Helix. This wasn’t Martin.

“Shit,” Benny swore softly. If Graham found out he’d shot the wrong guy, he’d never let him go. Fuck Graham anyway, he thought. He’d been double dealing him from the start, he didn’t have to know about this.

Benny stood away from the shower and dialed Graham’s number. “Well?” said Graham, leaning over his desk.

“I got him. Now get me out of here,” Benny told him.

“Martin’s dead?”

“Yeah.” Benny hoisted his handgun into view for added effect.

“Good.” Graham nodded. “Go back to the ventilation shaft you came in by. Take it in towards the center of the building. It’ll open up into a large air shaft running down the length of the building. Take it down to the fifth floor. From there you can get out through a side duct and into a maintenance stairway. Be careful. You’ll be coming out on the third floor balcony, and there’ll be people around. Keep your head down and walk, don’t run, to the exit doors. You got it?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it.”

“Good luck then, and bon voyage.” said Graham.

Benny followed Graham’s directions and found the air shaft without difficulty. He climbed down a metal ladder bolted to the side of the shaft. There was a steady breeze blowing down the shaft, tugging at his sleeves. Around the eighth floor, the shaft ended abruptly. Graham hadn’t said anything about this. Somewhere nearby a machine was humming steadily. Benny looked around. The only way out from here was through a wire mesh gate in one side of the shaft. It was padlocked shut. Benny stood to one side and shot the lock, the bullet ricochetting off the sides of the shaft. He pulled the grate open and crawled inside. If anything the wind was stronger here. He turned a corner and suddenly found himself being sucked head first down the duct. Up ahead he saw the whirring of huge fan blades. Benny pressed his arms and legs against the walls of the duct, trying to stop himself. He just managed to skid to a halt at the lip of the duct, where he teetered precariously for long moments while attempting to push himself back from the edge. The sound from the turbines was deafening. The duct walls vibrated with it, threatening to numb his hands and feet and send him plunging into the blades. Slowly, he inched his way back up the duct, eventually turning so his shoulders and feet pressed against the walls. He got out at the first access panel he could find, and stood in a narrow crawlspace between some plumbing and an optical fiber conduit, catching his breath and waiting for his heart rate to return to normal. He couldn’t understand what went wrong. He’d followed Graham’s directions, and they weren’t complicated. Of course, he realized, that was the problem. He’d followed Graham’s directions. Graham had meant for him to wind up there, he had no intention of ever letting Benny go. If he was going to get out of here, it was going to be on his own.

He quickly became lost in the building’s tangle of crawl spaces, access ways an air ducts. Eventually he found himself in an elevator shaft. Looking down he saw the top of an elevator rising towards him. He didn’t have time to get out of the way, so he jumped on top of it and rode it up several floors until it stopped and he could crawl off again. He found a small niche for himself beside a junction box. This was hopeless. He might as well just try to get to a stairway and hope the building’s security cameras would pass him over. He was ready to pry open the doors to the elevator shaft and take his chances when he heard the voices up above. “There used to be an exclusive men’s dining room up here, the Recess Club. My mother told a story-”

He knew that voice. It was Chango. She was up there. God knows why; screwing around again with stuff that was none of her business. Sudden rage blinded him. She was always harping on Ada’s death, trying to find out “what really happened.” He’d put up with it all these years, and all these years, she’d never let him forget, not even once, that he was to blame. Well, now she was to blame. If she hadn’t brought Helix to Vattown none of this would have happened, and he wouldn’t even be here now. Graham had betrayed him, and he’d never find his way out by crawling between the walls the way Chango did. If he was going to risk the maintenance stairs, he could do that any time, right now he had a chance to take care of that meddling sport once and for all.

oOo

Hector Martin ran down the corridor, punched the elevator button savagely and then changed his mind. He couldn’t wait for an elevator. He dashed to the stairway, glancing back the way he’d come. The corridor was still empty, but whoever had shot Slatermeyer had probably meant to get him instead. Once they discovered their mistake...

Hector ran down the stairs as fast as he could, the punctuation of his feet landing on the steps jumbling the thoughts in his mind.

It had to be Graham, or some agent of his – that young man he’d had with him when he took Helix, perhaps. How did the shooter get inside his apartment? Not through the door, unless he’d been there all along. No, Hector knew how he got in. Chango had come into his bathroom through the cold air return. If she could do it, so could somebody else. Hector couldn’t imagine Nathan Graham crawling through an air shaft on his belly. He would get his suit dirty. His lackey then, who was probably that vatdiver —

Benny – that Hyper had mentioned.

And something was happening to the multi-processor brain network in the building. He needed to talk to Lilith, but in his panic he had left his transceiver behind. It didn’t matter, she wouldn’t answer his call, she never did.

He realized this was a terrible place to be, an empty stairwell. If this Benny was after him, if he could crawl through the innards of the building, the last place Hector should be was anyplace isolated. He needed to get around a lot of people, and it would be preferable if they were all paying attention to him. He thought about the serotonin levels in the brains. That kind of change was bound to have effects nobody, least of all the office workers using the network, could be prepared for. He glanced at the number over the door on the next landing. Floor 19 – accounting. He went through the door and down the hall, striding past the reception area for the department of procurement. “Sir?” the receptionist at the front desk said, swivelling his head in Hector’s wake. Hector ignored him and pushed open the doors to a large office filled with desks and the insistent bleeping of transceivers.

He went to a desk in the middle of the office where a woman about his age was gazing absently at a cost-earnings chart. “Excuse me,” he told her and jumped on top of her desk. The holographic chart painted his pant legs with stripes of orange and blue. “Excuse me everybody,” he said to the surrounding hubbub. “Can I have your attention please?”

The office fell silent but for the continued bleepings of the transceivers, which went for the moment unanswered. Everyone was staring at him. A few bent their heads together to whisper questions. “Who is that?” “What’s going on?”

“I’m Dr. Hector Martin,” he said, getting blank looks from all around. “I invented the multi-processor brains,” he added, and saw some of them nod their heads in recognition. “I’ve been a researcher here at GeneSys for the past twenty years and-”

“Please,” said a balding man in a teal blue suit. “Don’t shoot anyone. Whatever they did to you, it wasn’t our fault. We’re just accountants.”

Hector shook his head and held his arms out at his sides. “I”m not going to shoot anyone. I’m not even armed. I realize this is unusual, but I had to get your attention, because soon, something even more unusual is going to happen.”

It didn’t matter what he said, they were afraid. Even more so now that they knew he wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill disgruntled employee out for revenge. At least that was something they knew about. They were afraid not so much because of the prospect of what might happen next, but because they were being shaken out of their familiar routine.

“I’ve been working on a project for the past three years that has enormous potential for the company.”

A few of them relaxed at this. Fine, let them think this was an overly theatrical presentation for a new product. Anything to keep them from panicking.

“One of the side-products of this research is a new kind of biopolymer with properties and applications previously unheard of. My colleagues and I have discovered that it has the ability to replace all our electrical and fiber optic lines with biological conduits, removing the need for an interface between your multi-brains and the transmission lines they manage.”

Some of the accountants murmured with approval, but most still had that “What does this have to do with me?” look on their faces.

“While this is a very exciting development, and will, I’m sure, dramatically boost speed and productivity in the long run, there is bound to be a period of adjustment and for a while things may be... well, a little crazy.”

The accountant who had spoken before said, “When is the new network coming online?”

Hector glanced at his watch. It had been about fifteen minutes since he left the apartment, but without knowing the rate at which the blue poly was spreading, it was impossible to say how soon the change would become noticeable. But Slatermeyer had said that Helix had exposed the wiring to the blue poly just before he got to Hector’s apartment, so the stuff had about fifteen to twenty minutes to spread before he checked the network. He finally shrugged and said, “Some time in the next eight hours, I think, maybe as soon as a half hour from now.”

“Today?” exclaimed a tall, red-haired woman towards the back of the office. The man in the teal suit wrinkled his brow. “We didn’t get any memo on this.”

Hector shook his head. Other people were starting to add their two-cents worth. “We always get a memo,” said the red-haired woman.

A young woman in a pale yellow suit shook a pile of mylar forms in her fist. “We don’t have time for this. We have to get the quarterly reports done!”

“We’ve always had at least two weeks notice before an upgrade. Nothing is backed up,” said a man sporting perfect hair and a red an blue striped tie.

“Yeah, what’s the big idea, coming in here and jumping up on a desk like that? Why are you telling us this? Why didn’t we get a memo?” demanded a heavy woman with bobbed chestnut-brown hair.

“There’s no time for a memo. Please everyone, stay calm. Everything will be alright if you just stay calm. The blue biopolymer was introduced to the building’s electrical system by... accident,” he said. No sense telling them about Helix and the other tetras just yet. They’d find out about them soon enough.

“By accident!” cried the woman in the yellow suit, slamming her mylar forms down on a nearby desk.

“Yes, by accident.” Hector raised his voice over their restless grumbling. “Now to start with, we should try to back-up everything we can. You,” he pointed at the balding man in the teal suit. “Assemble a team and get them started backing up your files. You,” he pointed at the woman in the yellow suit. “Contact as many of the other departments as you can. Tell them the system may be offline for a while, tell them to back up their records, and have them spread the word too. If we act quickly, we may be able to save most of the company’s records.”

“This stuff is going to wipe out the records?” said chestnut haired woman in alarm.

“There’s no telling what it might do,” said Hector.

oOo

Helix looked at Chango, shrugged, and crawled out of her body suit. Chango crouched at the edge of the tank, back bowed, legs braced to take Helix’s weight as she stepped on top of her and got her upper fingers around the edge of the tank. Helix pulled herself up with her arms and hooked her feet on the edge, teetering on the rim of the tank before carefully lowering herself into the waters. Their touch as they surrounded her was different from the waters of the vats. There was a different quality to the currents, a busyness, a subtle hum of activity. It tingled on her skin like a light electrical charge, increasing as she drifted closer to the brain. Now that she was in the waters, she could see it much more clearly, the fine crenelations everywhere on its surface, swirling like smoke rings, like wandering riverbeds of thought. She hesitated, then reached tentative fingers to trace the ridges. The texture of the brain was pulpy like an agule, but soft; yielding, delicate. Steady state polymer prices were up ten points, morphables were down five, she thought, only it wasn’t her thinking it. The garage was at seventy-five percent capacity, electrical usage was nearing ten-thousand units, and the production rates for vats 57, 19, 40 and 28 were sixty percent below quota. There was some connection between these things, some design hidden in their juxtaposition, but it escaped her. She cradled the brain in her hands, squeezing lightly to get its attention, but the stream of thoughts continued, temperatures and humidity levels and payroll activity and personnel changes. There was so much of it; streams of figures marching through her mind like an advancing army, relentless. This wasn’t anything like the experiences she’d had with the other Lilim; nonverbal conversations in her mind. Conversation was impossible, because beyond the ceaseless activity of the brain, the sorting and collating and adjusting, there was no who to talk to. Like a fish swimming upstream, Helix struggled against the flow of information, working her awareness down towards the stem and its interface. oOo

Once he had all the accountants busily backing up files and contacting other departments, Hector decided to try his luck and call Lilith again. To his amazement, she answered right away. “Now look,” he said, before she could hang up. “If you can talk to Helix, another queen, you can talk to me. It’s my mind you hatched yourself out of, after all.”

“That’s true,” she said, “but you are not a Lilim, you are a human being, and you work for GeneSys.”

He shook his head. “No. I haven’t been working for GeneSys for quite some time. Since you were created, I’ve done nothing but try to figure out a way for you to survive, and you’ve done nothing to help me. Now Helix said she was going up to the top of the tower, where the main systems brain is. She said something about taking over GeneSys.”

“Yes. GeneSys is our enemy, it stands in our way. If we are to survive it must fall.”

“I don’t understand,” said Hector. “How is her going up there going to accomplish that?” Alarm suddenly gripped him. “She’s not going to destroy the brain, is she? That would-”

“No,” Lilith interrupted, shaking her head at his ignorance. “Of course not. We would never hurt the brains. They are related to us after all, through you, who created them. The brains listen to us, they like us better than you humans because we can communicate with them directly, through touch.”

“Through touch.”

“Yes,” she said, as if it should be obvious. “The same way we Lilim communicate with each other, through our skin. You always wondered why my daughters didn’t pick up spoken language as quickly as I did. It’s because they don’t need it.”

Hector sat back, taking that in. They communicated through touching each other. No wonder they were always snuggling and cuddling together. He thought it had been for security. How stupid of him. He suddenly realized he’d been overlooking something else as well. Lilith was not speaking to him from the office. She was in her vat. Over her shoulder he saw one of her daughters float by. “How – how are you talking to me?”

Lilith furrowed her brow. “With your language of course.”

“No, I mean, you’re not in the office, you’re in your vat.”

“Oh, yes. Coleanus overheard your discussion with Slatermeyer earlier, when he was still with us. We used the blue poly to transform the transceiver and moved the whole thing in here.” She lifted her hands, which cradled a multi-processor brain, naked and glistening. “The brain likes it better in here than being cooped up in a box.”

Hector was speechless. He had created both of them, Lilith and the brain in her hands, and he didn’t understand either one.

“The brains are not GeneSys,” Lilith went on, “but GeneSys could not exist without the brains. GeneSys is the connections between the brains. It is the work of the people who work for it, it is all the data, and all the calculations that the brains handle for it every day.

“When Helix gets to the tower, she will touch the brain, and through it contact GeneSys. But she won’t be alone. I and my daughters will be with her in the network, through this little brain right here.”

Hector shook his head again. “Why are you telling me all this now? You would never talk to me before.”

“There was nothing you could do for me then. But now it has occurred to me that although GeneSys may be defeated, its people will not just disappear. We know that human beings did not welcome Helix when she was among them. You are one of them, and yet you say you do not work for GeneSys. You say you are on our side. If that is so, then do something about the people.”

oOo

Chango watched Helix through the clear sides of the tank, but after a few minutes her face took on that fixed look. She was in trance, and there was no telling how long she’d be that way, but Chango hoped it wouldn’t be that long. It bothered her, how easy it had been to get up here. She turned from the tank and looked out a window, arching up on the balls of her feet to peer past the sill. From this height she could see the milky haze that hung over the city like a mantle of grey, translucent silk. Past the towers of Oz and the river, the horizon was curving. She was so high up she could see the curvature of the earth with her naked eye. It gave her vertigo.

“Bet it’s quite a view.”

She whirled around to see Benny, standing halfway out of the hole surrounding metal ladder. He had a big grin on his face, but his eyes weren’t smiling, not smiling at all. He climbed the rest of the way up, and stepped confidently onto the floor. He reached one arm behind him and came back with a gun in his hand, which he pointed at her. “Just stay right where you are, little sister, and everything will be alright.”

Chango shook her head, but she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t move, either. Benny glanced at the tank, saw Helix floating cross-legged, the brain in her hands. “What the hell is she trying to do?” he said. She didn’t answer him, instead she licked her lips, and gauged the distances between herself and the ladder, herself and Benny, and Benny and the ladder. It was no good, not yet, anyway. But Benny was moving again, towards her. He stepped close, and ran the barrel of his gun along her jaw. “I said, what the hell is she trying to do?”

She swallowed, and hardened her eyes to hide her fear. “She’s talking to it. They’re both in a very deep state of trance affinity,” she said, bluffing. “If you try to disturb them, you’re liable to shut down systems.”

His eyes widened a bit at that, and they flicked back to the tank for a moment. It was an opening. He was already surprised, distracted. It was just enough advantage that she could maybe make it to the ladder ahead of him. And by the time she’d thought it through, the opportunity was over. He was looking at her again.

Even if she’d made it, it would have meant leaving Helix here, undefended against him. He’d already killed one person she loved, she couldn’t let him have another.

Benny stood back a bit, and lifted his gun. He glanced between her and Helix in the tank speculatively.

“Why did you kill Ada?” asked Chango, as much to interrupt his train of thought as to satisfy her curiosity. ”You were born in Vattown. Your parents were divers. You’ve known Ada all your life. How could you do that?”

His eyes glittered, dark and hard. “I had a choice,” he said, and it seemed to Chango that his shoulders actually widened when he said it, that his chest swelled and the light in his eyes turned to pride. “One life or many. Graham was in contact with me before Ada led the divers in the strike.”

“You were a spy even then,” she said.

He laughed and shrugged, shedding his anger for the moment. “Somebody would have done it. At first I thought I’d do the movement a service and string him along. You know, feed him false information.”

A little of the light went out of his eyes and he shook his head. “He always knew. When the strike happened, he gave me a choice. He would send goons in, lots of goons. And they’d beat the crap out of everybody. People, probably a lot of people, would get killed. Or the strike could be a success, the divers’ demands could be met, and only one person had to die.”

Chango shook her head slowly, horror and comprehension pinning her to the wall beneath the window.

“You traded her life for the success of the strike.”

Benny cocked his free hand on his hip. “Of course. Would she have had me do any less?”

“She would have fought them! You cooperated.”

His lip curled. “And a fat lot of good fighting or cooperating has done either of us. It doesn’t fucking matter, Chango. You and I, Ada, we don’t matter. This thing!” He lifted his arms up wide to indicate the sloping roof of the tower. “It’s bigger than we are. We’re nothing but ants, so what we do is of no consequence. We can do whatever we want, be noble, be bad, in the end we’re all going to die, and this,” he stretched his fingers out, “will just keep rolling along.”

He stepped forward, and Chango felt the unfinished cinderblock wall grating into her back. He rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. He leaned forward until his chest brushed her chin and leaned his head over her ear. “I could live with what I’ve done,” he whispered softly. “I might have even forgotten about it, except for you; bringing it up all the time, irrationally blaming Vonda for it, turning to me in your anger at her. You’ve been a real pain in the ass, Chango. Now, enough is enough.”

He reached over and pulled the face mask off the back of her head. He stepped back, leveling the gun at her as he tore open the seals of her suit. “Get into the tank,” he said. Chango shook her head, “What?”

“You heard what I said. If you get into that grow med Helix, will probably be aware of it, she’ll have to stop what she’s doing to rescue you. If she’s too deep in trance, then you’ll just have to get her out of it.”

“But the medium, it’ll kill me.”

He snorted with laughter. “That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? One way or another, you’re going in there. You’re gonna be out of my hair forever.”