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 17 — Corporate Animal

Hyper twirled the data card between his fingers as his eyes flickered across a directory of GeneSys’ information systems. Dr. Martin had a very high security clearance. Even better than would be expected for a top researcher. Why would he need access to the security records, for instance, or personnel?

Hyper got up from his maglev seat and lit a reefer, and smoking it, paced the floor. He hadn’t seen Chango or Helix since the riot this morning, and neither had anyone else he’d talked to. From his vantage point on the Humbolt water tower, he’d seen Vonda and Helix running through the mob, but as he focused his machines on the divers ahead of them he lost track of where they were. He watched while the police made arrests, waiting until the street was clear to gather the torn remains of his robots. By the time he got back here Chango was gone.

It was her disappearance that alarmed him the most. For Vonda and Helix it would be prudent to lay low for a while, preferably some place outside of Vattown. But Chango didn’t even go to the picket line.

She had called the police, though. That much he knew from the call log of his transceiver headset, which she’d left very neatly in the middle of his worktable. Perhaps she’d gone in search of Helix, in which case she might be incommunicado as well, but there was something wrong. For one thing, he hadn’t been able to get hold of Benny all day, and it wasn’t because he was in jail. Hyper had called the police station and learned that neither Helix, Vonda, Chango or Benny had been arrested.

The whole thing bothered him. He was worried and he wanted someone to talk to. Sinking back into his maglev seat, he opened the employee directory and scanned the M’s. Maybe Dr. Martin would be home.

His listed number turned out to be a message dump, but because he had Martin’s security code, he was able to access his file, and get his live number.

It rang twice and a worried voice answered. “Hello?” It was just voice, blackout on visuals. At least he had that much sense, but Martin had to have sender id on a system like this, and he was answering unknown callers on the second ring.

“Hi,” said Hyper, and smiled for the transceiver picking up his image and beaming it to Dr. Martin.

“Who is this?”

“I’m Hyper. You don’t know me.”

“You must have the wrong number.”

“Don’t hang up,” Hyper anticipated the invisible movement. “I’m a friend of Helix’s.”

There was silence in suite 1567 of the GeneSys building, and then, “How is she?”

Hyper shrugged, “I don’t know. I don’t know where she is.”

“How did you get this number?”

“From your data card. Helix gave it to me for safekeeping,” he lied. It wouldn’t help matters any for Martin to know he and Chango had stolen the card.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“This morning, before the riot,” said Hyper.

“The riot. But I heard she got away.”

“Apparently she did, but I haven’t seen her since this morning. There’s someone else, a woman named Chango. She’s a friend of Helix’s too. I think they might be together, and I’m afraid something’s happened to them. Do you know where they might be?”

“No. I wish I did.” There was a pause. “You got this number using my data card. Presumably you’ve had a look around in there, then.”

“Yes. Yes I have.”

“Then you know about her. What she is.”

“Yes. You’ve outdone yourself, Dr. Martin. The brains were impressive, but this-”

“Does she know?”

Hyper shrugged. “She knows she’s not human. But she wouldn’t look at your notes. She said she didn’t need to. Once she started diving, it didn’t take long for her true nature to surface. What did you hope to accomplish, keeping her there? You should have cut your losses and brought her back home after the divesuit incident.”

“You misunderstand. I never intended for her to get that job in the first place. I intended for her to get far away from here, much farther than Vattown.”

“Well if you didn’t diddle with her files, who did? I can’t believe management made this decision. They’re evil, not stupid.”

Hector Martin laughed. “I suppose it was her mother,” he said.

“Her mother?”

“Helix is not the first of her kind.”

“Oh. I just assumed, with the kind of security clearance you’re sporting-”

“That was a gift from her mother as well. A sort of back handed gift, since she arranged it for her own use. But she used someone else’s code to manipulate the personnel files. She wouldn’t want that traced to me...” Hector’s voice trailed off momentarily. “Are you a vatdiver?” he asked suddenly.

“No. I’m a sport. Look, I know you don’t know me, but I’ve let you have a good look at me. And you know that with the kind of information I have at my disposal, I could have screwed you over ages ago. But I didn’t. Now, could you bring that screen down please, so we can both talk face to face?”

There was a pause, and then the pale, drawn face of a man in his middle forties glowed into view in the air before him. “Better?”

“Thanks.”

Martin’s brows knitted. “You say you’re not a diver but- Do you know of a man named Nathan Graham?”

“Nathan Graham... Wait, yeah. He used to be the production controller several years back. A real heavy. Everyone around here hated him.”

“Yeah, well, he’s in research now. He’s the reason I wanted Helix to get far away from here. He wants the project terminated, and in this case that’s a pretty strong term to be using. He told me himself he arranged the riot in order to get her killed. If something has happened to her, it’ll be because of him.”

Hyper stared at him. Martin had grayish blond hair, thinning a bit at the temples and crown. “What are we going to do?”

“Graham has somebody working for him, in Vattown I’m guessing. I don’t know who it is,” said Martin.

Hyper thought of Chango — how she’d always insisted that there’d been foul play in Ada’s death. Maybe she was right, maybe Graham was still working with someone on the inside. It wouldn’t have taken much, to turn the strike into a riot, discrediting the vatdivers and taking care of Helix at the same time.

“Do you have any idea who it might be?”

“No, not really,” said Hyper, “and following up all the possible leads would take time we don’t have. It’s been hours since the riot. Graham and whoever he’s working with probably have them by now.”

“Yeah. We can hope that Helix and your friend skipped town, but I wouldn’t bet on it. You have access to GeneSys security systems through my clearance. Use it. See if they’ve brought anyone in the last few hours. I’m going to try to put Graham under wraps. Call me back as soon as you check the files.”

“You’re pretty comfortable with other people using your code, aren’t you?”

“Not really.” Hector shrugged. “But there can be advantages to being in two places at once.”

oOo

When Helix came to she was tied to a chair in a laboratory. A large polyglass tub stood about ten feet in front of her. It was filled with growth medium. She could smell it, and the pores of her skin cried out for its touch.

A door on the other side of the room, past the tub and a number of benches, opened with a soft click and a man came in. He was of medium height, with heavy rather than muscular shoulders and a flat belly that must have cost him plenty. He wore a dark grey sylk suit, immaculately tailored, and his reddish brown hair was neatly combed back from his forehead. He had quick, cool grey eyes. He smiled, and his face crinkled in small lines around his eyes and nose which she felt were quite deliberate, probably surgically devised.

“So you’re Helix,” he said, pulling a chair up to sit across from her, between her and the growth medium.

“So who are you?” she said.

“I’m Nathan Graham, chief administrator of research and development.” He said it like it was supposed to mean something.

“Untie me,” she said.

“Not just yet, Helix. Soon, but not yet. You see I’ve been wondering just how much you know about what you are. How much Hector told you.”

Helix’s hands tightened around the arms of the chair. “He- he said I was adopted.”

“Ah, but by now you know that can’t be true.”

Helix didn’t say anything. She was thinking about the playground at the orphanage, the children taunting her, laughing. But how much did she really remember? A few incidents, the smell of chalk in Ms. Walker’s classroom, but not her room — she would have had a room, and roommates, but she couldn’t recall them, and when she thought of herself, she visualized herself exactly the same size as she was now. With a start, she realized she always had.

“Well let me be the one to tell you, then.” Graham stood and paced behind his chair. “You are a GeneSys research project. Its chief scientist, your Hector Martin, created you. Or at least he created the thing that gave birth to you.”

“What?”

“Your mother. She hatched out of an egg, right in this tank behind me. But you hatched in a full sized vat in the basement of this building. Just think, little Helix, all those months you fancied yourself an orphan girl, rescued by the kindness of Hector Martin, and all along, your real mother was right beneath your feet.”

Helix stared at him wide eyed. “You’re lying.”

“Oh no.” Graham shook his head. “It is not I who have lied to you. Don’t you remember? When you were born your mother and your siblings attacked you and drove you out of their hive. And then, for reasons perhaps not completely comprehensible even to him, Hector secluded you in his apartment, hiding you from the rest of the world.

“I suppose he wanted you to believe you were human, but the memory of your expulsion from the hive was too powerful, so he made up a story to account for your feelings, a story about a poor little orphan girl and the kindly man who made her his daughter.”

Helix felt ill, a sick twisted knotting in her stomach. She held on to it, feeling that if it unraveled, it would unravel everything else with it, and she, and everything she’d ever known, would disappear in a puff of lies. She closed her eyes, and in her mind’s eye she saw those jeering faces, the faces of children contorted with malicious glee, melt away to reveal other faces, faces not gleeful, not malicious, but more terrible still, faces like her own, and purely determined to get rid of her at any cost. A savage rage as hot and sweet as anything she had ever felt rose inside her, a lust to attack someone who was herself. “My mother-” she said. “You said my mother.”

“Yes, your mother. He calls her Lilith, for some reason. You and your kind were designed to clean vats and harvest biopolymers. All the things the vatdivers do. That riot today wasn’t the first time they’ve caused problems for us. We need a more efficient way of producing biopolymer. Unfortunately, you’re not it, either.”

“But I dove without a suit, and I was fine.”

“Yes, yes,” Graham said, waving a hand dismissively. “Your physiology is perfect for the vat environment, but there are other problems, things you don’t understand. I’m afraid it just won’t work out. I never should have allowed Hector Martin such a free hand. Out of deference for his professional stature, I let him do it his way. It’s been a disaster — a costly one. But I wouldn’t have this job if I weren’t able to turn even a catastrophe like this to my advantage.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m reassigning your project. There’s no hope of utilizing you or your kind for industrial purposes, but at least we can learn something from Martin’s mistakes. There are any number of features to you physiology and brain chemistry that may yield fruitful benefits to other lines of inquiry. Of course Martin would never consent to it. He’s too attached to you. He erroneously thinks of you as a person. But there are other researchers on staff here at GeneSys who have no such handicap.”

“You’re going to make me a test subject.”

“That’s about it, yes.”

She tensed with fear. “You can’t do that. I have to — I need -” Words failed her. She strained forward towards the growth medium, her nostrils flared to drink in the smell of it.. “Let me go,” she gritted.

“I’m afraid you have very little say in the matter. You keep forgetting. You’re not human. You have no right to control your own destiny. You are property of the GeneSys corporation, and as such, you will serve its purposes.”

Graham turned to look at the tank behind him. “You want to get in there, don’t you? Worse than you’ve ever wanted to do anything in your brief little life. Well, to show you I’m not such a bad guy, I’m going to let you. And you’ll never have to leave it. Well, almost never. Some tests probably can’t be conducted in there, but most will be.”

Helix shook her head. She wanted to be in growth medium, yes, but not like this. “What do you plan to do to me?”

“Ah,” Graham bent over her, shaking a finger in her face. “Now that would be telling.”

As he straightened up again, four security guards entered the laboratory. Graham turned to face them. “What are you doing here? I didn’t call for you.”

The guards glanced at one another and flanked Graham. “We’re here for you, Mr. Graham,” one of them said. “We have a warrant for your arrest.”

oOo

Chango paced the narrow confines of her holding cell on the first subfloor of the GeneSys building. The walls and door were clear polyglass with strips of yellow and green adhesive running along them at waist height to prevent you from walking into them. One side of the ten by six room had a formiculate bench built into it which formed itself to her body when she sat on it. There was no toilet. These cells were not designed for long term use. That was a relief. Even with the clear walls, she had trouble keeping calm. She’d never been in a jail before.

Soon they’d take her over to the county precinct, book her and set bail, and then she could call Hyper, and have him come and get her out. She’d probably be back in Vattown by morning.

But what about Helix? Chango had been alone in the car with the two guards, and judging from the sea of empty cubicles which surrounded her, she was alone here as well. There was no chance she’d escaped the guards, she’d been surrounded. What did they do with her?

And then there was Benny. He failed to warn them of the approach of security, and obviously it wasn’t because he’d been arrested. And for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out how security had learned they were there. They hadn’t tripped any alarm systems, she was sure of it.

After a few hours a pair of women in green and yellow jumpsuits came and unlocked the door to her cell. They were both quit a bit taller than she was.

“Am I going to county?” asked Chango.

The one on the left shook her head silently. She had blond hair bobbed at her chin. The other guard stared at Chango with impartial brown eyes and stepped into the cell, taking her by the arm. They walked her down a long corridor with cells on one side and yellow and green painted cinder block on the other. They were pretty relentless with the color scheme down here. Even the bathroom, when they came to it, was painted green and yellow.

They showed her to a stall and allowed her to shut the door, “Keep your feet on the floor at all times,” warned Blondie.

They took her back to a cell. She couldn’t be sure it was the same one as before. They all looked exactly alike and she hadn’t counted them on the way out. “When will I be going to county?” she asked them.

Brown eyes smiled and shook her head, and Blondie laughed, but neither of them answered her question, they just left her sitting there, and locked the door behind them.

She had a long time to think about things. About Ada and Vonda and Benny and Helix. About Orielle and Hyper and Mavi. And about herself and the many ways in which she’d been blind.