by Anne Harris

In a near-future Detroit, the living polymer industry has the city in its grip. While vat-divers struggle to organize, the GeneSys Corporation works on making human workers obsolete. An escaped mutant, a con-artist and a techno-geek team up to unravel corporate blackmail, deceit and murder. One thing is certain: the city and the world will never be the same once the latest R&D development is unleashed.

Chapter 15 — Riot!

“I really wish you’d reconsider this,” Chango said to Helix for the umpteenth time. It was morning, and they’d been up half the night before, arguing. Well, she’d done all the arguing, Helix just sat there and scratched herself, shaking her head.

Helix looked at her with tired eyes. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said, standing up.

Chango followed her into the work room, where Hyper was running his robots through scales of isometric motion. Robo-mime’s head rotated back and forth, Close Enough for Jazz raised the sax to its carburetor lips again and again, the Augmented Hoomdorm flexed its legs and Attack of the Sneetches scattered across the worktable like a bunch of neon mice with perms. Hyper himself was bent over an array of radio controls. He’d removed himself from the debate around one in the morning, and had been out here ever since.

“Nothing I can say is going to influence you the least little bit, is it?” Chango said as Helix wove around the robots to the shower stall under the stairs. “It never has.”

Helix turned and looked at her. “That’s because I can’t let it. Believe me, if I were a human being, I’d follow your advice, but that’s not what’s going on here, and you should know that by now.”

“Why don’t you look at the data card? Maybe it can tell you something. Something about yourself that can help you now. Maybe there’s a better way than this. They won’t let you in there.”

“I know.” Helix nodded, her eyes staring blankly into the future. “But I have to fight them anyway.”

“Why? There are other vats.”

“Where? Where are there vats that are not vats for humans, whether they’re being used or not? Sooner or later, what’s going to happen today will happen. I’d just as soon do it now, before-”

“Before?”

Helix shook her head. “I don’t know, before I have time to get comfortable, or something.”

“Don’t you think your father could help you?”

She shook her head. “I think if he could, he would have.”

Chango bit her lip. “Helix he- He’s a scientist.”

Helix stared at her. “I know. And I know what you were about to say. That’s why I’m not reading the card. I can’t, not now. I can’t waste time on why I am what I am. I have to be it.” She turned and went into the shower. A moment later her clothes flew out through the curtained doorway.

Chango leaned over the table where Hyper was working. “What are you doing?”

Hyper looked up at her, his face grimy with oil and fatigue. “Trying to even the odds a bit,” he said.

Chango stared at him a moment, realizing what he meant, and then she reached forward and plucked the transceiver from where it rested forgotten on his head. “Then I’m keeping this. Lets not just increase those odds, lets spread ‘em around.”

Hyper started forward, in reflex it seemed, and stopped. “Fine, whatever,” he said.

He was sick of her, she could see. Everyone was sick of her, including Chango herself. All she seemed to do these days was argue with people. And she’d always been such a carefree person, or thought she was. “Don’t worry,“ she said, “I’ll leave it here when I’m done.”

She sat and watched holo dramas until they left; Helix empty handed, Hyper accompanied by the rattle and lurch of his robots. When they were gone, she called the police.

oOo

Helix’s heart pounded in time with her steps. All was silent under the sun except for the faint cries of a few birds wheeling high in the sky above. On some nearby rooftop, Hyper waited with the radio controls for his robots. He and the birds were her only witnesses as she walked down the middle of the street towards the quiet throng of vatdivers gathered at the gate to the vat yard.

The vatdivers, to a one, were suited. Some even wore their harnesses with breathing tanks in them. They were massed in front of the main gate, five rows thick. As she drew near their collective stare bored into her, pushing back against the hand that pushed her forward.

She came to a stop roughly ten feet in front of them, and directly across from Vonda, who stood in the middle of the throng.

Helix stared at her because it was easier than staring at all of them. Vonda stared back. Presumably they all did, though she was beginning to wonder how the ones in the back row were getting their view. Probably risers. Finally she got tired of waiting for somebody to blink. “Last one in’s a rotten egg,” she said, and dodged forward, aiming her shoulder between Vonda’s and the diver next to her.

Vonda caught her neatly, and shoved her back into the street. Behind her and to the side stood April, her arms folded across her broad chest. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the hell out of town, and stay there,” she said, almost gently.

Helix shook her head. “Nope,” she nodded at the vat houses beyond the gate, “this is what I call home.”

The crowd was grumbling now. “Why don’t you go jerk off? You got plenty of hands for it!” somebody shouted to general laughter.

“What are you so afraid of?” she cried out, “I’m not going to hurt anybody.”

“No shit you’re not. You’re not getting in there, that’s why,” said Val, “We can’t let GeneSys make all our decisions for us. We’ve made our own decision about you.”

“Yeah, you’re fired, freak, so fuck off!” screamed someone in the back.

“You just don’t want me here because you’re afraid of me. You don’t know what I am!” Helix shouted.

“What are you?” answered several people at once, and then the words were taken up by the rest of the crowd. “What are you? What are you? What are you?” they chanted as they advanced on her, circling around until she was surrounded by them; their faces, their taunting voices.

“I don’t know!” she screamed back at them, raising her arms around her to ward them off, “I don’t know!” Her mouth open wide, she flashed her teeth, and her fingers stiffened to claws. “You want a freak? You’ve got a freak!”

Someone darted in to make a grab at one of her arms and she leapt on him, wrapping her arms around him and biting him on the shoulder. Her teeth slid against the rubber of his vat suit and he shoved her into the arms of three vatdivers. They grabbed her arms and she kicked wildly, twisting around until she could reach somebody’s hand, and she sank her teeth into it, feeling the flesh break. She tasted blood and heard a scream above the general clamoring. There were still five hands on her. “Fucking bitch,” someone said, and slugged her in the side of the head. Her head snapped to the side and the scene swam before her eyes. People were advancing, closing the very small gap that had existed in the center of the crowd. Someone kicked her in the stomach and she would have fallen forward except for the hands, eight of them now, holding her by her arms. She got her feet under her again and kicked backwards indiscriminately. Her captors retaliated by pulling her arms back farther against the joints and kicking the backs of her knees until she sank to the ground. She looked up, blinking.

In the distance she could hear the clank and roar of Hyper’s machines moving down the street. The cavalry was coming, but not soon enough. Someone loomed in front of her, a tall, heavyset man with a round face and hard eyes. She didn’t know him; she’d never even met him. He held an air tank cradled in his arms, “You’re going to wish you’d left while you still could,” he said, and he lifted the air tank up above his head. She saw it silhouetted against the sun, and then there was a sudden blur of motion from her right, and Vonda was there, somehow, with the tank in her hands. “That’s enough!” she screamed, “This is a strike, not a lynching!”

“Says who?” The man advanced on her. Vonda twisted the nozzle on the tank and released a blast of frozen air in his face. He backed up, his hands over his eyes, and she turned around and threw the heavy tank directly over Helix’s head. The people holding her had to make a decision, let go or get hit with it. They let go. Helix dove forward and Vonda grabbed her hand, using the momentary confusion to plunge through the crowd.

By now Hyper’s machines had made it to the gate. The Augmented Hoomdorm jumped spasmodically on its pneumatic legs, scattering vatdivers in its path. As Vonda dragged her through the confused mob, Helix caught a glimpse of Robo-Mime, tenaciously circling a vatdiver wielding an air tank, confronting him with his own angry image. He swung the tank, and the video tube exploded, showering glass on himself and surrounding vatdivers.

Helix and Vonda dodged around a group of divers busy battling with Close Enough for Jazz. One of them had wrested the saxophone from its grip and was jamming it in the tractor treads. “Hey, there they are!” someone shouted, and the group abandoned the robot to head off Helix and Vonda just as they were about to break free from the rioting mob. “Traitor!” screamed a woman, rushing towards them with a decanting pole in her hands. But before she could reach them she was intercepted by Attack of the Sneetches. She tripped on the round little automatons, her pole clattering to the ground as she fell.

“This way,” hissed Vonda, veering around the stumbling divers and away from the thick of the mob. They ran full tilt down the street as police sirens wailed and three squad cars swerved around the corner ahead of them. Vonda ducked down an alley between a row of storage tanks and a warehouse, and Helix followed her. Behind her she heard the popping of gas grenade launchers, and up ahead there was a car horn honking. It was Chango in her beat-up Chevy. They put on an extra burst of speed and leapt into the car, Helix in front, Vonda in the back seat.

Vonda slapped the front seat with her hand. “Let’s get the hell out of Vattown for now, okay?”

Chango looked at Helix, “What’s she doing here? Why isn’t she back with her mob?”

Helix shook her head. “She saved my life for some reason, and she’s right, we have to get out of here.”

Chango frowned and pulled away down the street. As they drove, the sounds of the rioting died down behind them.

“Where will we go?” asked Helix.

“To Orielle’s,” said Vonda.

“What? Are you crazy?” said Chango.

“No. She likes Helix, she’ll protect her, and she’s got the firepower to do it should that mob back there reassemble itself and come looking for her.”

Chango swallowed and nodded her head, turning the car towards the Eastern Market.

oOo

Benny was in the middle of a crushing mob of vatdivers, surging towards the line of police up the street. “Fan out!” he screamed, “Fan out onto the side streets! We can still catch her!” He spotted Val only three feet away, “Val!” he shouted, trying in vain to press through the mob towards him. “Val! Go down Denton!” But he didn’t hear him, and then the crowd surged again, and Benny lost sight of him.

He worked his way out of the riot and down an alley behind Compau Street. Vonda and Helix could have gone down any of the side streets around the vat yard. He really needed a team of ten or twenty to follow all their possible escape routes, but this was strictly a solo gig, now.

He ran down Faber to Lumpkin and past a row of warehouses. At the far corner he saw a red and yellow chevy crossing Lumpkin, going down Holbrook. Chango’s car. He was too far away to see who was in it, but it was the only lead he had. He raced down Evaline now, heading for Conant. Hopefully she’d turn down Conant. As he passed a crumbling and vacant parking lot he bent down to scoop a rock up off the ground. Still running, he scraped it hard across his forehead over his right eye, and clenching it in his fist, struck himself on the cheek, hard enough, he hoped, to raise a bruise.

But his cosmetic alterations were in vain. By the time he got to Conant he could just see the Chevy in the distance, heading south and east, towards the Market and Orielle’s.

He sat on the curb and leaned back on his hands, staring up at the sun blazing away in a cloudless sky. In the distance he could still hear the police sirens and angry screaming. This was the riot he’d tried to prevent back when Ada was organizing the vatdivers. Now it had happened. She was long dead, and it happened anyway.

If he had known, way back when Graham first contacted him, that it would all end up the same, no matter what, would he have turned him down? Probably not, and for the same reason that he was still here, all these years later. He should have left Vattown long ago, but the thought of leaving all his friends behind stopped him. Hugo, Val, Coral... it was because of them that he’d done what he did. And because of them he’d stayed here, huddling around the memories of what he now realized was the best time of his life; that summer before they started diving, when they had all seemed immortal and infallible, touched by the sun like gods.

But now Hugo was dead too, and Benny wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. When this was over he’d shake the dust of Vattown from his shoes, and take himself someplace that was not ripe with memories of corpses.

He sat up, took a long look up and down the empty street, and fished his holotransceiver from his pocket.

oOo

Hector clenched and unclenched his fists as he entered Graham’s office and took a seat before the vast grey cellite desk. Graham kept his desk empty of clutter, and the translucent smokey grey surface reflected the downtown skyline from the windows behind it. Outside the sun was shining, but in Graham’s desk, it was always a cloudy day. Hector’s eyes wandered to the multi-processor perched on one corner of the desk, a bobbing brain encased in clear cellite. He jumped as a side door opened and Graham entered the room.

He didn’t waste any time on niceties this time around. No offers of drinks or inquiries into his health. He just glared at Hector, and then stood looking out the window with his back to him. “They’re striking down there,” he pointed in the general direction of Vattown and turned to face Hector again, “and do you have any idea why?”

Hector shook his head, “Not really, no. Better wages?”

Graham bared his teeth and laughed savagely, “You really are a piece of work, Martin. How could I let myself be so thoroughly bamboozled by you? I bought your whole mild-mannered absent-minded genius shtick, retail. I was so busy feeling contempt for you that I never began to imagine how subversive you really are.”

Hector felt unexpected pride at being described as subversive. He’d never thought of himself that way, but considering the tetras and how far he’d gone to protect them, he supposed it was true. This knowledge gave him courage. “What’s this about, Graham?” he said.

“You know goddamn well what this is about! That little creature of yours has stirred up a hornet’s nest in production! Seems she went vatdiving without a suit, and somebody used my clearance code to make sure she didn’t get fired for it. But of course, you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Fear gripped Hector’s intestines and squeezed. Graham could only be referring to Helix. When she left, Hector had hoped she’d get as far away from GeneSys as possible, but apparently that wasn’t the case. She’d gone only as far as Vattown and then taken the first opportunity available to gain access to the vats — as a diver. “Actually no, I don’t know anything about it,” he said.

“Oh come on, she’s going by the name Helix Martin, and you’re telling me you don’t know anything? Lilith kicked you out of the vat room because of her, didn’t she?”

Hector sighed. “Yes, she did.”

“Why? And don’t tell me you don’t know.”

“I - I found Helix outside the vat room. As near as I can tell the other tetras ganged up on her and drove her out. It has to do with their social structure. There can only be one queen to a hive.”

“So you helped her. Helped her get that job down in Vattown, but I have it on good authority that she’s only been working there for a few weeks. You had to do something with her in the meantime. Slatermeyer insists that he doesn’t know what happened to the egg. Yes, I know about the egg. You couldn’t have taken her to the lab. You had her living with you didn’t you? In your apartment. That’s sick Martin, really sick.”

Hector glared at him. “We weren’t lovers, Mr. Graham, if that’s what you’re implying. I couldn’t send her back to the vat room, they would have killed her.”

“But you could have housed her in the lab, only you didn’t because you knew it would attract attention and you couldn’t afford that.” Graham stepped around his desk and leaned towards Hector. “You see, Martin, I’ve been to see the queen.”

“What? You went there?”

“Yes. Your assistant Colin Slatermeyer took me. Pity about him.”

“What did you do to him?”

Graham shook his head. “Nothing. They took him away and I didn’t see him again after that.”

“Shit, Colin. Why did you make him take you there?”

“I wanted to see for myself, and I’m glad I did. Lilith calls herself the enemy of GeneSys. The tetras have no intention of cooperating with the goals of the project. Even before they drove you out of the vat room, you had to know that. Why did you continue? Why did you harbor that little queen? Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

Hector glared at him and gripped the arms of his chair. “I didn’t tell you because you would have canceled the project. Do you have any idea what an accomplishment the tetras are? Higher intelligence functions, language ability, even social organization. And they’re self propagating. It’s a new species, one with features that I haven’t even discovered yet.

“I know what you think of me. That my peak is behind me, with the brains, but you’re wrong. This is it. This is what my life and my career have been for.”

“You’re mad. Take a look outside your tower, Doctor.” Graham gestured towards the window. “We don’t need more people. We don’t have work for the ones already out there. Those creatures of yours can talk and think and fondle each other till the day is night, but it doesn’t give them rights. It doesn’t make them anything but what they are; inconvenient.

“You made them too much like people, Martin. In order to make a place for themselves, they’ll have to displace human beings, and no one’s going to step aside voluntarily. Ever heard of the twentieth century? Genocide is a very common human strategy. Some say it started all the way back with the sudden demise of the Neanderthals. Given that kind of track record, do you really think a new species with human traits has a chance?”

Hector smiled thinly and raised his shoulders. “Maybe they’re like weeds and not so easily wiped out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Come here.” Graham gripped Hector by the shoulder and propelled him towards the windows. “Looky there,” he pointed towards Vattown. Hector could just make out the distant strobing of police flashers. “There’s your proof. That little queen of yours is down there, and they’re beating her to death.”

Hector shook. He pulled away from Graham’s grip and turned to face him. “How do you know that?”

Graham eyed him blandly. “Because I arranged it.”

“What? You can’t do that!”

Graham laughed. “You have no idea what I can do. They were going to strike anyway. It doesn’t take much to turn that crowd into a mob.”

“You’ve got to stop them.” Hector lunged forward, grabbed the transceiver from Graham’s belt loop and shoved it at him. “Now! Call them! Call it off!”

Graham’s response was preempted by the insistent bleeping of the transceiver signal. Without thinking Hector switched it to receive. “Yes?” he said, in his best imitation of Graham’s rough tenor.

There was no holo. Only a voice. “It’s me. We lost her,” it said.

Hector stared at Graham with glee. “Forget it. There’s a change in plans.” he said.

“Give me that!” yelled Graham, body checking Hector and grabbing for the transceiver. They fell to the floor, Hector grunting as Graham rolled over him. The transceiver was wrested from his grasp and Graham stood up, brushing his suit. “I’ll call you back,” he muttered tersely at the transceiver and switched it off.

Hector stood and backed towards the door. Graham approached him with his right hand balled in a fist. Before he could close the distance and sock him, Hector turned and ran out the door.

Breathing heavily, Hector made his way to the elevators. He had a rug burn on his cheek from wrestling with Graham. All to the good, he thought, as he entered the elevator and pressed the button for floor 29 — Anna’s office.