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.

Prologue — A New and Cloudy Sky

The sky over Vattown was a dull, flat, grey, and Ada Chichelski walked beneath it. She wrapped the scarf her girlfriend Mavi had made her around her neck and headed through the dingy, yeast-redolent streets to the vat yard, to work.

On a day like this — damp, low cloud cover — even those like herself who’d grown up in Vattown noticed the distinctive funk of growth medium in the air. It made her wonder if the improvements in worker safety she and her fellow vat divers had secured would make much difference. They were safer in the vats now, but how much growth medium were they all exposed to, just breathing every day?

That would be the next fight, she thought as she walked past age-faded houses and store fronts. Getting the company to use better seals on the growth medium storage tanks. Now that the vatdivers had secured better wages and had their own technicians monitoring safety measures, it would be time soon, to press for more.

With their first strike settled successfully just two months ago, a lot of her sisters and brothers in the vats thought the movement had accomplished what it set out to do. Everyone was amazed at how quickly GeneSys management came around. After stonewalling the strikers for just two weeks, they agreed to three out of five of their demands. It was a better offer than the vatdivers had expected. In fact, they’d all expected much worse.

For years Ada had been saying that they had to do something. That too many of them were dying of vatsickness and they never made enough money to stop working. It was obvious. Most of their parents who’d dived were dead. Her younger sister, Chango, was a sport. She was one of the lucky ones, still alive and healthy despite her mutation. Ada knew a dozen other divers with younger sport siblings, and everyone remembered the still births, the miscarriages, and the ones who only lived long enough to know misery.

Finally, at Hargis’ wake, it all came together. Hargis was Ada’s age. She’d only been diving for five years, but the company’s shoddy equipment inspection had passed over a perforation in her dive suit. She was exposed to growth medium, and died within three months.

They were all gathered at Josa’s Bar after the funeral, and Ada got up on a table to give a toast, but instead she found herself saying that they would all die just like Hargis, and soon, unless they surrounded the vat yard and demanded better treatment from GeneSys. That they had nothing to loose, not even their lives.

The divers’ fear of vatsickness and the deadly deformities it brought overcame their fear of GeneSys’ retaliation, and they followed her out of the bar and to the vat yard.

They all expected goons, and they had their air tanks with them. They were heavy, and you wouldn’t want to get hit with one. But nothing happened. For two weeks, the vatdivers maintained a barrier of bodies around the vat yard. No biopoly was produced, and no goons arrived.

Finally they were approached by a management representative with a contract securing the divers an across the board raise, their own safety technicians, and a moratorium on the hiring of sports, who were genetically predisposed to vatsickness.

Now a lot of the divers thought they could relax, enjoy their gains and forget about organizing further. But she wouldn’t forget, and she knew that GeneSys wouldn’t either. They had won too easily, and she knew the war was far from over. If they didn’t take advantage of their recent success, and press for more, they would gradually lose what they’d gained.

Up ahead Vonda and Benny were waiting for her on the corner. She’d known them both all her life. She and Benny had been in kindergarten together. Vonda was a little younger, her sister’s age. She was their crew’s new safety technician. They were all the children of first generation vatdivers.

After the sports were born, GeneSys had instituted a sterilization policy, and in a few short years, Vattown changed from a town of working class families to a community of single adults. There were no more children in Vattown, and with most of their parents already dead, the only family the divers had now was each other.

As she approached, Benny jiggled his lunch box in greeting. “Stuffed cabbage,” he said. “I made it last night.”

“Cool. If you share, I’ll cut you in on Mavi’s next batch of moussaka.”

“You’ve got a deal,” he said. “Besides, I have a ton of this stuff. It’s my grandmother’s recipe. It makes enough to feed the Polish army.”

“Well sign me up and get me a uniform,” said Vonda, making a grab for Benny’s lunch box. He skittered out of her way and the three of them walked on until they came to the gates of the vat yard, where they joined a thickening stream of divers arriving for the second shift.

“Hey Ada,” shouted her friend April, behind her. “How blasted were you at Josa’s last night?”

Ada laughed, turning, allowing the crowd to guide her backwards. “Not as much as you were,” she said, cocking her thumb and index finger at April.

They passed through the gate, and the crowd spread out as everyone went to their various stations. She and April, Benny and Vonda headed for the far right corner of the yard, to vat house nine. Up ahead Val and Hugo, the remaining members of her dive crew, were walking with their heads bent in conversation.

The round grey flanks of the vat houses soon surrounded them, along with an intensified reek of growth medium. It was like smelling your death, she thought. The overheated, predatory breath of a beast about to eat you.

They entered vat house nine to the din of compressor dryers and the shouts of a dive leader to his crew. Sheets of biopolymer lay drying in the racks which bristled along the wall behind the twenty foot-tall iron vat.

The divers — Oli and his crew — were just decanting their last sheet for the day. They stood evenly spaced around the platform surrounding the vat, and at Oli’s word they began pulling on the cables which hung from a pulley system in the translucent domed ceiling. They lifted out the last grow tray, and its biopoly load hung suspended over them like a new and cloudy sky.

Ada stopped at the door to the locker room and read the production schedule. Hendricks, the vat supervisor, had her crew scheduled for 1000 cubic meters of A-grade biopolymer insulation sheeting today. Oli and his crew had just decanted 800 cubic meters of C-grade consumer fabric.

“We’re going to have to add a lot of dodecagon cell matrix to that mix,” said Benny, looking over her shoulder. “At least fifty liters if we’re going to get that sheeting today.

“And the grow med better be good and clean,” said Ada. “Any coagulants left over from that consumer fabric will ruin the whole batch.”

“Look at this,” said Vonda, pointing at the projected activity chart. “They’ve got this vat scheduled for more C-grade fabric tomorrow. Why do they do that? If they know they need more consumer fabric, why not make it all at once? We wouldn’t need to clean the vat between batches. Now when we get the insulation out, we’re going to have to clean it all over again.”

Ada nodded. We’ll get the insulation done first, and see how much time we have left. We may have to leave the second cleaning for the next shift.”

“Why don’t they listen to us and consolidate their batches? It would save time,” said Vonda.

“And money,” noted Benny.

“And it would save us from having to dive so much, but what do they care? They’re not the ones who’ll get sick,” said Ada. “That’s why, in another couple of months, we should make more demands. Strike again if necessary. Something needs to be done about the seals on the grow med storage tanks, and we should have a say in what’s produced, and when.”

Vonda wrinkled her forehead. “Two months? So soon? Maybe we should lie low for awhile, let them relax. We were lucky the first time.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” said Benny. “We had them by the short hairs. Vattown is their main production plant. Without us, they have no product.”

“But they’ll never let us have a say in the production schedule,” Vonda protested. “Don’t get me wrong. It was a great thing we did. I’m just not sure we should push things so fast, that’s all.”

Still arguing, the three made their way to their lockers. “How long did it take you to check our equipment last night?” Ada asked Vonda.

She shrugged, opening her locker with a bang. “A couple of hours.”

Ada shook her head. “We should have held out for overtime for the safety technicians.”

“Hey, you got them to let us do it. And you paid for my training.” She put her hands on Ada’s shoulders. “It won’t all happen at once. We have to be patient.”

Ada snorted. Patience. While every day the growth medium leeched into their bodies, while they waited for the next diver to die. She put on the thick polypropylene suit that covered her from head to toe and protected her from the grow med. When she was done she paused to stare at the safety diagram on one wall of the locker room. In bold lettering it spelled out the steps a diver must take to ensure that their equipment was working properly. That was GeneSys’ idea of safety measures, that and a monthly equipment inspection. She felt better now, knowing that every week Vonda went over all their equipment with a fine toothed comb.

By the time she got to the tank room, the others were already there. Benny helped her on with her tanks after she checked the valve to make sure they were full. Bending beneath their weight, she made her way to the dive platform with the rest of her crew.

On the platform, they put flippers on their polypropylene covered feet, donned their face masks and eased themselves into the growth medium. The six of them fanned out across the vat, searching its murky waters for the coagulants that formed like cellular pearls around any scraps of biopoly left behind in the growth medium.

Almost immediately, she knew something was wrong. There was a tingling in her fingers and toes, and it rapidly spread across her whole body. April was right, she’d used Blast last night, and she’d gotten pretty high. But she’d felt fine this morning. As drugs went, Blast had few long-range side effects, and she’d never heard of anyone having a Blast flashback.

Until now. She tried to surface, to make her way back to the platform, but she lost her orientation and found herself diving deeper into the growth medium.

She didn’t have any trouble finding agules. To her blast heightened senses they appeared as bright blue sparks in the electric green of the grow med all around. The fluid rang against her body, a high vibration matched by the trembling of her limbs. And then she felt it; the silvery, sleek touch of grow med against the skin of her belly. She reached down, and tried to reclose the seal on her suit, but she only succeeded in opening it further, and the fluid rushed in, wrapping her in a velvet embrace.

She tried again to reach the surface, focusing on the lightening of the waters. Her fluid logged suit weighed her down, and she almost shed it, reflexively — like a snake loosing its skin or a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. But those images did not apply to her, for the transformation she would make would end in death, not rebirth. Even as she broke the surface of the grow med and waved her arms for help, she knew she was beginning to die.