Accidental Creatures (36 page)

They would have been as surprised as she was to discover that their lessons took. By the time she was out of school she had parlayed her small inheritance into a thriving brokerage, and she rode on the rising crest of her wealth, swinging from her presidency of that company into the board rooms of others, all the while accumulating shares in an up and coming biopoly company. In many ways she had made GeneSys what it was today, and in as many ways, it had made her.

Anna got up from the paper, took a banana from the basket on the counter and peeled it. Today she had a worry that even the Journal couldn’t dissolve. That was how she sorted the real problems from the fifteen million little internally generated “faux crises” she faced every day. And that was what was so strange about this one. It had about it every mark of a vicious political squabble. The kind of petty conflict that was always best ignored. Paying attention only made them grow. But Martin and Graham’s visit the previous afternoon had the quality of an iceberg about it. There was more going on than she could see.

She knew about Graham, his reputation for heavy dealing. It was precisely the believability of Martin’s assertions that made his sudden lapse into docility so alarming.

Hector Martin was widely considered one of the best values available in the global corporate brain bank. Merely having him under individual contract was like owning a fifty share in intellectual stock for genetic materials research. The inventor of the brains, for christ’s sake. It was like having Thomas Edison quietly puttering away in the basement. Too quietly, though. He was beginning to lose value simply because people were starting to forget about him. Incredible as it might seem, just because he was responsible for the main appliance they used every day was insufficient to forestall obsolescence. In the fast paced world of corporate research, you had to keep developing to stay on top. His position was still very high, but it wouldn’t remain so much longer for the simple reason that he did nothing to keep it there. Hiring him away from Minds Unlimited after he developed the brains for them had been one of those bold, successful moves with which she’d propelled herself to this position. But now, after some unique but minor innovations in connectivity, nothing. For three years, nothing. In the world of corporate research it was one of two things; an extended drumroll to a spectacular achievement, or the gonging of extinction.

She could understand why Martin was so anxious over his project. He would live or die, professionally, with it, and clearly things weren’t going well. From what she knew of Martin he would much rather sequester himself in his lab and hammer away at the problem — whatever it was — until he had it licked. But instead he had come to her, bawling like a second-grade child, pointing his finger at Graham. Her teacher in second grade had a custom of pinning a paper donkey tail on any of the children who tattled on the others. The tattle-tail, she called it, for further humiliation. Anna smiled at the mental picture of Hector with a paper tail pinned to the back of his lab coat.

His sudden subsidence was a red herring, she realized. The real key was that he had come to her at all. It gave a pretty vivid indication of just how backed against the wall he was, and not just by Graham, but by some other necessity as well.

His career, possibly, but she doubted it. She couldn’t quite picture Martin going to such histrionic extremes to save his own neck. There was something else driving him. Something Graham had learned about and was using against him. Something neither of them wanted her to know. It felt like trouble, and trouble from that quarter could be very big, strange trouble indeed. She finished her banana, threw the peel in the composter, and went to her bedroom to get dressed. While she brushed her hair she scanned her morning messages. There’d been a riot in Vattown the day before. The police had come in and quelled it, and today the morning shift reported to work as usual. The senior production manager was looking into it, trying to find out who the instigators were. She doubted he’d have much success. Those vatdivers were a tight lipped bunch. Whatever their beef was, they wouldn’t discuss it with anyone wearing the thorny crown of management. She gave the senior manager the go ahead to recruit a spy, left word with her secretary to cancel her morning meetings, and left her apartment. First things first, she thought. She needed to talk to Hector Martin. She was hoping to find him still at home. She could have called ahead, of course, but she thought the shock of a surprise visit, in person, might jar him into cooperation. When she got to his apartment, she found the door standing open. She stepped inside and gasped. Martin’s coffee table was smashed. A transceiver lay on the dining table, a multi-colored, web-like schema floating above it. “Martin?” she called, but the apartment was silent. She wandered down the hallway, opening doors experimentally. Two bedrooms showed signs of use, interestingly enough. As far as she knew, Martin lived alone. Anna tried the third door. It was the bathroom. The grating over the ventilation duct on one wall was off, and the shower curtain was pulled partly to one side, but not enough to hide the ragged hole in it. Anna peered around the curtain and stepped back abruptly. There was a body in there, a young man, thin, with sandy brown hair and eyes that stared back at her, mirroring her own surprise. Blood crusted his ear and matted down the hair on the side of his head. That explained the hole in the shower curtain, but what could explain this? Was this Martin’s secret lover? Had he shot him?

She didn’t think so. Martin’s shy, gentle nature was not a ruse, her instincts insisted. Maybe Graham had something to do with this. Whoever had shot this young man had done it without pulling back the shower curtain to see who was in there. They probably thought they were shooting Martin, a reasonable assumption, it was his bathroom, after all. Suddenly she remembered the security report in her morning messages. Ray Wockner had been shot by an unidentified intruder during a crash analysis session late last night. Maybe Graham wasn’t involved after all, maybe it was some nut with a gun running around the building shooting people randomly.

Or maybe that was what Graham wanted her to think. Besides there was nothing random about this. Whoever had done this had purposely gained entrance to Hector’s apartment, either through the door or the open ventilation duct. Anna turned from the body, and returned to Martin’s living room. She called security on her transmitter and got a busy signal. That was impossible. Her clearance level gave her automatic override on all lines in the building. She dialed again, and again got a busy signal. Something was wrong, very, very wrong.

She left Hector’s apartment and got into an elevator, pushing the button for the security level. The elevator started down smoothly, but just past the twelfth floor it came to an abrupt halt. She was just about to press the emergency button when the lights went out.

oOo

Nathan Graham smiled with satisfaction leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was tired, but it had been a good night’s work. Martin was dead, and the man who shot him had by now been chopped, strained and filtered by the GeneSys building’s ventilation system. Life was good. He took a deep breath, wondering if there were any microscopic Benny particles floating in the air around him. But he’d never been one to rest on his laurels. It was a new day, and time to get back to his real job. He leaned forward and switched on his multi-processor. The multi-brain sat in a clear box on one corner of his desk. He always liked to watch it jiggle when he turned it on, but this time he hardly noticed because as soon as the connection was made, the speakers boomed with harsh laughter. “Get it off me! Get it off me!” screamed an odd, multi-tonal voice, and then the room went dark. Graham stood up. Near as he could tell, all the lights were out, on this floor at least. No light came in from underneath the door to the hall. An odd, atonal singing superseded the screaming voice, and there was another voice too, murmuring “We are the Lilim,” whatever that was supposed to mean. He fiddled with the mulitprocessor’s controls, but there was no response.

Dread blossomed in Graham’s belly like a fetid, night-blooming flower. He could hear the gabbling voices coming from other multi-processors down the hall, and somewhere, far away, a scream that did not come from the network.

He didn’t know how he knew it, it seemed to come on him with the voices, which he covered his ears try to keep from hearing. He knew the way an ant knows that its queen has been killed. He knew by the tenor of the human screams now floating up around him from the depths of the building. But most of all he knew because he knew that voice, that first voice they’d all heard over their multi-processors. It was the voice of the one he’d served all these years, the voice of the company GeneSys. oOo

Chango ducked to the side and ran around a vent fan. Benny sidestepped and caught her wrists, bending them back against the joint. She twisted so that her back was to him. His arms came around to pin her, but she sank and squirmed out of his grasp, kicking away from him to an iron railing. She leapt from it onto the ladder, and started climbing up, not down.

She perched on the top rung, wedging herself between the ladder and the roof of GeneSys, and watched as Benny climbed towards her. As soon as his face was in range she kicked out with one foot, catching him on the chin and sending him reeling backwards, still holding on to the ladder with one hand. She hammered his knuckles with her heels, her breath shuddering as sobs collected in her throat. Past Benny’s flailing form, she could see the tank, and Helix inside, her body bucking as she gripped the brain.

oOo

GeneSys laughed and swiped at Helix, a stinging palm of stock quotes that nearly sent her spinning back to her body, but she clamped down on the thought of what she was, where she was, what she was doing, and she grabbed that hand as it fell away and twisted it. A million other hands battered at her, bouncing her like a ball on a tether, but she wasn’t alone. She could feel her mother and her sisters with her, touching her because they were touching the little brain in the basement. Having them with her made her big too, as big as GeneSys, and Helix clung to that hand and stomped on the feet of the giant. oOo

Nathan Graham ran down flight after flight of maintenance stairways. The elevators were not working, all the lights were out, as he passed the floors he heard varying kinds of noises, people calling out, some laughing, some screaming, once a great crashing noise and the sound of something dragging across the floor.

When he got to the bottom of the staircase he found that the door to level B was locked. He ran up to level A but that one was locked too. He had to climb five more flights until he found an unlocked door. This let him out onto the second floor gallery. Here the sconces in the walls cast flickering shadows over the nightmare landscape of GeneSys’ dreaming.

On the floor below, people were running, some towards the doors to the outside, others towards the elevators, where already a throng had gathered, waiting for an elevator that would not come. They carried things, these refugees; some of it to be expected, potted plants and stacks of data cards, even an office chair and a multi-processor unit — its cables trailing redundantly behind it. But others were in thrall to a more nonsensical panic. One man balanced the tank to a ten gallon water cooler on his shoulder, swaying in his ten piece sylk suit like a balletic cornstalk. Another, a woman he recognized from payroll, steadfastly shoved her desk towards the revolving doors with the same matronly assurance he always remembered her for.

He did not want to go down there, though there might be access to the security levels from there. It seemed to him a liquid pit of madness, the wellspring of the nightmare. To go down there was to be subsumed, so he edged closer to the pillar, and looking up, found that he could read the inscription inlaid on the archway which soared above the lobby and its mania. “To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, to raise the genius and to mend the heart.”

He stood spellbound, his eyes riveted on those words — words of reason. The words of a world where something could be accomplished, where all was not beyond control. And then the crushing realization hit him and drove him to his knees. Those words and the reality they expressed were already beyond him, soaring ever farther out of reach, and he, he was already left behind, in the pit. He reached his hands up towards them, felt that he could just brush their burning golden surface as they slipped away. He pulled his fingers back as if burned, touched them to his lips and screamed, his voice calling the nightmare up around him, the living walls, the breathing air, and his mother’s voice, “Everything is an animal. It can’t be controlled.”

oOo

Benny backed off the ladder and aimed his gun at her. “Fine, we’ll do it this way instead,” he said. As Chango jumped from the ladder she heard the bullet whine past and ricochet off the metal roof of the tower. In front of her she saw a window and she leapt, gripping the upper lip of the pane and swinging her feet outwards and through the glass. The wind whipped and tore at her open divesuit and she cartwheeled her arms, nearly falling before she sagged against the peaked brass roof. Benny came through the window and she scrambled away from him along the debris choked gutter between the roof and the coping wall. It was a shame, she thought distractedly, that she couldn’t stop and appreciate a view like this. Risking a glance behind her she saw Benny raising his gun again. She threw herself down on the ribbed brass roof just as he pulled the trigger. She grasped the raised ribs and braced her feet against them, and crawled along on her belly towards the out thrust gable of another window. She waited long enough for him to see her and then slid to cover on the far side. He had to come around the gable in order to get at her, but would he come along the gutter or climb across the roof? She was hoping for the low road. She got herself as close to the front of the gable as she dared, curled her knees into her chest and waited.

“I know where you are, Chango,” came Benny’s voice, from below. She could hear him scraping along the gutter, and then he rounded the gable and stood there, one hand steadying himself against the gable’s face, the other holding his gun, pointed at her. “Found you,” he said. “Tired of playing hide and seek?”