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 7 — The Death of Ada Chichelski

Chango had been at Josa’s when her sister had the accident. She’d been playing up to Pele by putting Otimache Mints on the jukebox, and buying her beer.

“Wanna dance?” she asked, swinging her hips and shaking her shoulders. Josa’s was nearly empty, it was just her and Pele, a few out-of-work vatdivers lingering in the shadows, and Josa, behind the bar.

“Not until you tell me what you did last night,” Pele said, pouting.

“I told you, sweetheart, I got drunk at Vonda’s, and Hyper was there, and since he lives right next door, he let me crash at his place.”

“Uh-huh.” In the dim light, Pele seemed to be there only in patches. “You didn’t sleep with him?”

Chango bit her lips and said nothing. It wouldn’t matter if she protested her innocence, Pele would know she was lying. She was a lousy liar, and she hated to do it.

Pele shook her head in shock and exasperation. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you! Did we or did we not have a conversation last week in which you said, ‘I’m ready for monogamy.’? That was you, wasn’t it?”

Chango climbed onto the bar stool next to her and put her head in her hands. “I know, but Hyper, he- I-”

“Oh don’t tell me it’s because you were drunk!”

“No. I mean, it kind of was, but, we-”

“Are you in love with him?”

“Not in love, I don’t think, but- We’ve known each other for forever.”

“We’ve known each other for forever too, and I’ve known Hyper for forever. We all grew up here, we all went to school together. None of us have ever known more than the same thirty people our whole fucking lives! What has that got to do with anything? Do you love him?”

Chango shrugged. “Yes.”

“Fine.” Pele slammed her beer down on the counter. “I hope you’ll be very happy together.”

“But I love you too.” said Chango, grabbing Pele’s arm as she slid from her stool.

“You can’t. You can love Hyper or you can love me, but you can’t love both of us.” Pele wrested her arm from Chango’s grip, and headed for the door.

“Yes I can.” Chango said to her retreating back. Pele did this every time Chango slept with someone else. Theirs was a relationship of punctuated monogamy. Usually after a couple of weeks, she’d let her back in the house. In the meantime, Chango would have to stay with friends, maybe Hyper.

Chango felt bad though, about telling her she wouldn’t sleep around anymore. At the time, she’d really meant it. But then last night at Vonda’s, Hyper had been so...

“Chango?” It was April, her broad form silhouetted against the bright light from the open doorway. Chango blinked at her, her eyes accustomed to the dimness of Josa’s bar.

“April? What are you doing here, it’s the middle of your shift.”

“Chango.” April shut the door behind her and approached her with more eagerness than she would ordinarily express, but not more pleasure. As she came closer, Chango saw the deep lines of worry that creased her forehead. “It’s Ada,” she said, when she got close enough to speak in a normal tone of voice. “Will you come?”

“Of course,” said Chango, sliding from her barstool, feeling suddenly cold, “but what is it?”

April looked at her, and even in this dim light, Chango could see the tears in her eyes. “She got doused.”

“No! Oh my gods, no!”

April put a strong arm around Chango’s shoulders and gently propelled her towards the door. “She’s still at the vat house. I’ve already found Mavi, she’s on her way over there now.”

When she got there, April showed her to a small tiled room with a single narrow bench along the far wall. Mavi was there, standing over Ada who crouched on the bench in a flimsy paper gown, shaking. She’d always been bigger than Chango, but she looked small now — small and pale even under the dusting of biocidal powder that whitened her skin and hair.

“What happened?” she said as she walked slowly towards them.

Mavi looked up, her face as white as Ada’s, and tight with grief and fury. “Seals came loose,” she said through gritted teeth.

Chango breathed in sharply, the air was acrid with the lingering fumes of the chemicals that had been used to wash Ada. “Faulty equipment?”

Mavi shrugged once in sharp dismissal, “They’re checking. What difference does it make?”

Ada shuddered and bent over to vomit between her feet. The sweet smell of stomach acid joined the other odors in the room. Mavi cradled her in her arms and wiped her mouth with a tissue.

Tentatively Chango reached out to lay her fingertips on her sister’s arm. Her skin was grainy and dry with biocide powder, and cool. Ada’s eyes were slits, glimmering with a shifting blue as she looked at her. Her crusted lips parted, “Get me out of here.”

They all got a ride in the company ambulance, Coral, Benny, Val and Hugo carrying Ada out on a stretcher, their faces drawn and blank like pall bearers. They might as well have been. She’d received contact on roughly forty percent of her skin. By vatsickness standards, it would be quick.

Chango remembered the sting in the soles of her feet when she leapt from the back of the ambulance onto the black brilliantine road, to run to the house and open the door, holding it wide as they carried her in. After they’d maneuvered Ada safely abed, Chango and the vatdivers, in silent mutuality, left her alone with Mavi and shut the door.

Coral, Val and Hugo stood around the kitchen table, like misplaced trees. Benny made coffee while Chango slumped in the doorway. No one said anything. There was only the hiss of the coffee maker and the faint, soft sound of weeping from the other room, like the lapping of waves on a distant shore.

They were out of reach of that ocean, there in the grim golden glow of the little kitchen, bound and barricaded by a single, overriding thought. “It didn’t happen to me.” That was the silent conversation they had before the final gurgle of the coffee maker.

Benny brought mugs to the table with wooden solemnity, his long face still and quiet, his eyes blank as if he was not really there, as if he was thinking very hard of something else.

“How long did she soak?” asked Chango.

Val and Coral shrugged. Benny continued to stare at his hands. “About five minutes,” said Hugo.

“Five minutes?” Chango put her mug down. “How is that possible?”

Hugo and Coral and Val exchanged uncomfortable glances. “Apparently she wasn’t immediately aware of the leakage,” said Coral guardedly.

“Not aware? How could she not be aware.”

“Because she was blasted,” said Benny, finally looking up to fix her with a cold hard stare.

“Blasted? At work?”

“I know,” Coral said, “I can’t believe it either. They must have made a mistake.”

“I saw the blood tests. She must have gassed just before her shift,” said Benny

Chango shook her head. “No way.”

“Chango, I saw the lab results. I also saw her last night with Orielle.” Benny leaned over the table, his hands clenched in fists in front of him. “I hate to say it, but she’s been using a lot lately.”

“She got blasted the other night at Josa’s,” said Val, “Thursday.”

“Oh and you don’t get blasted there every weekend and most week nights,” said Chango.

Val shrugged. He didn’t say anything, but Chango could see him thinking it. “At least I don’t take it on the job.”

oOo

“This completely discredits our movement.” said April. “GeneSys will just chalk it up as another example of diver recklessness, another excuse not to take our complaints seriously. If Ada didn’t care about her life, why should they? She was supposed to be an example to counter the vatdiver stereotype. She was the spearhead of our movement, and now she’s sabotaged us.”

Chango shifted on her cushion in the living room of Vonda’s apartment and looked at the faces around her, expecting someone to defend her sister, but they were all silent either in complicity or secretiveness, and no one would return her gaze.

Mavi wasn’t there. Mavi was at home taking care of Ada, who they spoke of as if she were already dead. Somebody here had to speak for her, and Chango was the only one who would. “How can you say that, after all she’s done? If it weren’t for Ada, there wouldn’t be a movement. And you wouldn’t have the improvements in safety standards that the movement has won.”

“She made a mockery of those, didn’t she?” said Vonda, to a round of grim snickering.

Chango glared at her. “She got you the job of technical analyst, Vonda. So the divers would have one of their own to administer tests and analyze their results. She paid for you to take the classes from her own pocket, have you forgotten?” Vonda didn’t answer her. She wouldn’t even look at her.

“Chango’s right,” said Benny, “Whatever she’s done now, we can’t turn our back on everything she — we accomplished. We have to preserve what credibility we can.”

“How are we going to do that?” asked Jewel.

“By proving that her accident was a company plot,” said Chango.

“Oh come on,” said April. “Six of us in this room saw her buying blast from Orielle the night before.”

“So? That doesn’t mean she used it before her dive.”

“The medical reports say she did,” said Jewell.

“Maybe they were doctored.”

“By who? Me?” said Vonda, her fists pounding the couch. “I prepared it, I took her blood and her skin samples and I carried them to the lab and I did the analysis. There was no one else. If her report was doctored, then I’m the one who did it. Is that what you believe?”

Chango looked away, her eyes burning. She didn’t believe that, not really. But to say otherwise would be to admit that Ada was dying of her own negligence, and she couldn’t do that. Not when she had to go back to the house tonight and see her, or what was left of her, and the rest, transformed into something else. No, whether it was true or not, she would not accept that Ada had brought this on herself.

There was an awkward silence while everyone waited for her to say no, and preserve the fragile cohesion of the group. But Chango didn’t say anything.

“I think the best way to move forward is to alter our strategy,” said Leo, finally, “make a clean break with the past. Let GeneSys know who the leadership of this movement is and what we stand for.”

“And who is the leadership, now?” asked Chango.

“Benny, obviously,” said April, “He was Ada’s right hand.”

“Maybe we should have a leadership committee, instead of a president.” said Leo. “Genesys might take us more seriously if we don’t appear to be an, um, charismatic movement.”

“Or we could have anyone who’s interested write an anonymous proposal for why they should be president, and then we could vote on them,” said Jewell.

“We could form a committee to evaluate the president’s performance.”

“Why don’t you just form a committee to decide how to vote for the members of the committee that decides which fingers the leadership committee should stick up their asses?” said Chango, and she got up and left. No one noticed her go; they were all offering suggestions and agreeing with one another. Except for Vonda, who watched her go with baleful, injured eyes.

oOo

So amid shame and scandal, Mavi and Chango nursed Ada to her death. She was bedridden from the start. Ada, who’d always been the strong one, the pure one, untainted by the waters of the vats, suddenly needed her sister’s help to get to the bathroom. It was as if some secret contract between her and the universe was suddenly withdrawn, she no longer received its protection, and the sun stopped shining on her. She became sallow and gaunt, her body wasting away under the unsustainable demands of her renegade cells.

Her skin became dry and papery, crumbling at the base of tumors which thrust from the deep tissues of her arms and legs, reshaping her with their shiny pink masses, like mountains erupting to transfigure the face of the earth.

Ada always had a spare sort of beauty, the kind that let you fill in the spaces, but now every plane, every angle, every jut of bone and curve of flesh was being reworked with blotches and moles and cysts, transforming her from Bauhaus beauty to medieval gargoyle.

Of course the worst of the changes were on the inside, twisting her intestinal and respiratory tracts so they could barely function, and her heart - she said her heart was thickening, and they believed her. All she consumed now was water and morphine.

Sitting by her side in the pink bedroom, Chango realized that for the first time in her life she didn’t envy her sister. She’d always been jealous of Ada, she was beautiful, strong, and a normal person. People liked her. She won them over effortlessly.

Everything with Ada seemed effortless, except for this; dying, losing herself to cells driven mad by growth, alone except for Chango and Mavi. Alone because all those people she’d won over, those vatdivers, people she risked her life for — they never came. Except for Benny. Benny came, standing in the doorway of the room as if coming any closer might put him at risk of catching it.

Chango knew why they stayed away. It wasn’t because of the scandal. They didn’t want to see her. They were afraid of seeing themselves, five or ten or fifteen years from now.

She was in the kitchen when the changes came. She heard Mavi’s call from the bedroom and nearly dropped the dish she was washing. She let it slide into the warm, murky water and turned, her hands still dripping as she walked down the hall with a feeling of dread and expectancy knotted in her heart like a fist.

Ada lay on the bed, muttering on and off in a strange, moaning, singsong voice. Her skin bubbled everywhere with new growths, blurring her features into a seething mass of changing tissue. Chango sat beside Mavi, and watched as moles and tumors formed and then disappeared beneath new growth, as if her sister were boiling away from inside. There was a pattern to it, she thought. If she could only bear to watch long enough she might see it.

But in the end there was no pattern, no rhyme or reason, just a lifeless, shapeless mass of flesh, no longer identifiable as a human being or anything else. Pure matter, anonymous and silent as a lump of dirt.

oOo

Benny opened the door of the apartment he shared with Hugo and stood listening. No sound came from the bedroom. He took off his diving harness and set it beside the door. He walked about the untidy living room picking up empty beer bottles and spent blast cartridges. The olive green carpeting badly needed vacuuming, and the furniture was covered with a film of dust. Hugo was the clean one.

Benny took the empties to the kitchen, set them on the counter amid dirty plates and pans, and got himself a fresh beer from the refrigerator.

He walked softly to the bedroom and peered inside. Hugo was in the bed, but not asleep. His eyes glittered faintly in the dim light as he looked at Benny. His brown skin was tinged with grey, and the bulge of a new tumor ruined the fine symmetry of his forehead.

“How you doing?” asked Benny, sitting on the bed beside him.

“Alright,” croaked Hugo, his lips parting in the ghost of a smile. “How was your day?”

“Long,” said Benny, taking a pull from his beer. “We decanted a thousand and fifty cubic meters of fiber today, and there’s another two thousand to do tomorrow.”

“I guess they miss me down there.”

“Yeah, you bet they do. You always were the best decanter. We lost about forty cubic meters to breakage. That never would have happened when you were on the team.”

“They get you a replacement yet?”

“Nope.”

Hugo closed his eyes and shook his head. “I’ve been gone for months now. How can they expect you to keep up with production? And you said the quotas are going up.”

“Don’t worry about work, Hugo.” Benny touched his shoulder — and felt beneath the sheet not skin but... scales? There was always something new. He never knew what he’d find when he came home or when he woke up in the morning. It fascinated him, sometimes, when he wasn’t just plain scared.

“You have something better for me to worry about?” said Hugo.

“No, I guess not. Hey,” he stood up and pulled the memory cube from his jeans pocket. “Chango gave me this for you. Toys.”

“Cool,” Hugo took it from him with hands pitted with tiny, vestigial fingernails. Vatsickness caused random cell division, mostly tumors of mixed tissue but every once while a cell would get itself together to divide into something specific. Hugo had a tooth on the back of his left heel. Benny dreamed of waking up to find himself sliced and half eaten by his lover’s voracious body.

“How’s Chango doing, anyway?”

“She’s got a new girlfriend,” said Benny.

“You mean there’s actually someone left in Vattown for Chango to be new with?”

“She’s new in town. A sport but she grew up in the GeneSys building.”

Hugo tried to whistle and failed. “What’s she doing down here then?” he asked.

“Good question, my dear. Good question.”

“You think she’s spying for them?”

Benny shrugged, “Probably not. Why would they need to spy on us now? Nothing’s going on; the movement’s been dead for years.”

“Maybe they know something we don’t.”

Benny nodded his head. “Maybe. Probably.”

“I hope not, for Chango’s sake. She should settle down already. Speaking of which, don’t you think it’s about time you found a new lover?”

“What?”

“C’mon man, you’ve been really cool to stick around this long.”

“Someone has to take care of you, Hugo. I want it to be me.”

Hugo’s gaze wandered across the ceiling. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I think it’s time I moved into Mavi’s pink room.”

“You can’t. It’s occupied right now.”

His eyes snapped back to Benny. “By who?”

“Helix, Chango’s girlfriend. She got mugged down in Greektown.”

“You met her today?”

“Yeah.” Benny nodded. “At the Eclectic.”

“Then she must be recovering, if she’s going out.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think she has any place to stay.”

“So what?” Hugo shrugged. “If she’s better, she can crash anywhere, and if she’s with Chango, there’ll be plenty of places for her. I’m sick. I need the room. And you — you need to get this monstrosity out of your bed.”

“Stop it!” Benny stood up, turning his back to Hugo.

“Aw come on, you’ve got to be relieved. Let Mavi help me now. She knows what to do.”

“I told you in the beginning. I want to see this thing through with you.”

“No you don’t Benny. Really, you don’t. And more importantly, I don’t want you to.”

“You don’t?” He turned around again. “Why? What did I do?”

Hugo shrugged and coughed. “Nothing, it’s just that... You’re too interested in it — my illness I mean. You don’t say anything, but you watch each new development with this fascinated horror. I just don’t want any spectators while I do this.”

“So you want to go to Mavi’s.”

“Yeah. I mean you can visit me and stuff, but that way you won’t be involved with the changes on a day-to-day basis. Maybe that’ll help.” Hugo started coughing again.

Benny went into the kitchen and got him a glass of water. He hated to admit it even to himself, but he was relieved. Because he hadn’t been there for Ada, he’d been determined to stick by Hugo until the end. But if Hugo really wanted to go to Mavi’s, then there was nothing he could do about it.

Back in the bedroom he watched Hugo drink in long, painful swallows. His coughing subsided, and he managed a smile. ”Do you remember that summer after we graduated, Benny?”

“Yeah, sure I do.” They’d just shut down I-75, and it kept flooding. Hugo, Ada, April and he had gone swimming there all summer.

“We’d just gotten sterilized, and we were all fucking each other. Except for Ada. She always was a strict dyke. We used to call her the Vagitarian, remember?”

“Those were good times, Hugo.” Benny remembered diving into the cool water, surfacing and rolling over onto his back to see Hugo, Val and Coral standing on the overpass; his friends and lovers, all young and healthy, innocent of all that was to come. And Ada, poised to dive off the guardrail; a figure of pure potential, so bold and brave. Too brave for the world, but he hadn’t known that then, then she’d still been the golden girl, bright and untouchable as the sun.