Company Town (28 page)

Silence.

She'd overstepped. Said the wrong thing. Or maybe just said too much. Made too sharp an observation. Pointed out one of those things that was so obvious that nobody ever mentioned it, because they didn't really want to.

“Sorry,” she started to say. “I took a pill, and it's kicking in, and—”

“I'll call you before you go to sleep,”
he said.
“I can see it, when your heart slows down. That's how I know when to call. I keep your heart—the icon of your heart—in one corner of my vision. All the time.”

Her stomach flipped over and tried to exit through her fingertips. Adrenaline jangled down her arms like music. Her mouth went dry and all she could taste was the burn of the drug in her throat.

“See, there? It skipped.”

*   *   *

Hwa slept through the ping. The pill and the wine and the food were too much for her, and she passed out halfway through a film named, ironically enough,
The Big Sleep
. Rusty insisted she hadn't really missed anything—the story was secondary to the flirting.

“And the fashion,” Séverine said, over breakfast. “Speaking of which. You mentioned Homecoming?”

“Oh, fuck.” Hwa covered her face with her hands. “Sorry. Yeah. Yes. I have to go.”

“Do you have anything to wear?”

Hwa shook her head.

“I thought as much. But! I have just the thing. Nail, please fetch me my pearls.”

This conversation was uncomfortably similar to the one she'd had with Layne, the night she died. It didn't bode well for Séverine. Hwa was about to tell her so, when she got a ping from Joel.

“We have lunchtime appointments set up with those two Krebs developers,”
he said.
“They're back to back this afternoon, before my science club meeting. I still have to make it to that, because Mr. Branch has this movie he wants to show us. It's supposed to help us with our ship design. So Diane scheduled our other meetings during school hours, but that's okay because Daniel said we weren't going in today, anyway.”

Technically, she could have gone. Her uniform was right where she'd left it, in her locker. She could go and get it at any time. But Síofra probably didn't know that. “Okay.”

“Daniel said your place got broken into. He's very angry about that.”

“Well, I'm not too pleased about it, either.”

“No, I mean, he's furious,”
Joel said.
“Dad and I were having breakfast, and Daniel walked right in and told me we weren't going to school because of what happened to your place, and then he asked to see Dad in his office right away. He wouldn't even take any coffee.”

Well. That was saying something. “And then what happened?”

“He shut the door, and Daniel started yelling, and my dad told him to calm down, and then things got really quiet, and Daniel said something about Silas.”

“Silas. He told your dad about Silas.”

“Yeah. I know they don't like each other, but … do you know what's going on?”

Hwa wondered how much to tell him. It seemed wrong to share her suspicions of Silas and his goons without any proof. Sure, Silas was an asshole, but he was also Joel's brother, and their father was dying. The kid would need his whole family around him, soon enough. Best not to alienate him from them any further.

“Yeah,” she said. “I have a pretty good idea what's going on. Stay where you're at, and I'll come to where you're to. I'm in Three, but I can be at Five soon.”

“Hwa, are you and Daniel in trouble?”

“Me and Daniel? No. No more so than usual. I guess.”

“You slipped. You called him by his first name.”

Hwa rolled her eyes. “Just wait for me. I'll be there soon.”

*   *   *

The meetings meant going all the way out to the reactor lab. It floated above the Old Rig. That was part of what made it such an ideal location, Joel explained as they made their way across the waves. There were already multiple concrete slugs that could contain a leak. If the reactor overloaded, the town would still need to evacuate, but there would be time. This way, they could sink the tritium into the reactor and draw seawater in directly from below, all in a contained space purpose-built by machines. It was because of the Old Rig that they had purchased New Arcadia. If it had not blown, they would never have come.

“I'm sorry,” Joel said, when Hwa said nothing. “I forgot.”

“It was three years ago,” Hwa said. “It's okay.”

“I saw some of his matches, when I looked you up. He was really great.”

Hwa smiled. “Thanks.”

The first interview was with Smith, the man with the redacted profile who'd worked on all the projects. He was big, and bald, and he seemed genuinely interested in helping Joel with his project. He offered them coffee, then took them on a tour of the lab. It was what one might expect: basically a lot of displays for watching the Old Rig and the progress of the machines, and a lab for repairing the larger robots tasked with doing excavation and major building.

“But the really interesting part is the control room,” Smith said. “It's going to completely change how we do energy security. Every time I walk in there, it just blows my mind.”

Joel gave his best
I'm thrilled to discuss my company's many assets
face. “Can we see?”

Smith led them past several cubicles to a special room unlocked by a hand wave. The door was marked
EMERGENCY CONTROL PROTOTYPE
, and past it was nothing but white.

“I've been here, before,” Hwa said. “This is like the NAPS holding cells.”

Smith and Joel both laughed. The laughter trailed off when Hwa gave them a look that said she wasn't joking. Smith cleared his throat and summoned three chairs out of the matter in the floor.

“It's completely customizable, as long as you have the right implants, and the implants have high-enough authorization,” he said. “Even down to the interfaces. I imagine an interface, and boom—there it is.” He closed his eyes, and a slender wooden table spiralled up out of the floor. It trembled, and out of its surface bloomed an old-fashioned rotary telephone. “It requires an implant, of course, but … it's all ready to go.”

“And there's one of these down in the reactor?” Joel asked.

“There will be. Once the Krebs dig out enough space, we'll pressurize this room and move it down there. The straw's big enough to handle the transport—this room isn't actually that big. It just looks that way.”

“So…” Hwa frowned. “So how is this a security measure?”

“It's highly personalized,” Smith said. “There's no system to learn but your system. So if, say, I'm down there watching the reactor, and some guys burst in and put a gun to my head, they won't know how to work the system. The room locks in on the design from the highest clearance in the room, and it bakes in for the length of that day's shift.”

“Doesn't that mean that if somebody passes out at the switch, their system is still live?”

“Nope. The room also watches for change in the beta/theta ratio. It sees you when you're sleeping. It knows when you're awake.”

“Could you fake up one of the implants?” Hwa asked, thinking of Sandro. “You know, implant a knock-off, or something?”

Smith shook his head. “The system relies on self-replicating implants. They're not even implants, really. Implantation is really invasive. These are more like the Krebs devices: living machines that go where they're needed and talk to the ambient technology. But they can only live in a really specific growth medium. If you wanted to steal mine, you'd have to steal my blood.”

He smiled. “Speaking of which, you wanted to talk about the Krebs machines?”

“Yes,” Joel said. “I know that the Krebs are used for primarily industrial work, but have you ever considered biological or medical applications?”

Smith grinned. “Sure! But that's not my division. I'm an engineer. I'm a doctor, but not that kind of doctor.”

Hwa leaned forward in her seat. The seat shifted subtly underneath her to bring her that much closer to Smith. “But it is possible?”

“In theory, yes. They can work at the nano-scale doing just about anything. Ours are down there sealing pipes and helping the bots, but we've had them do things that are like working in biological systems.”

“Such as?”

Smith shrugged. “Well, one example is the filtration web. It's an easier way to preserve ions in water, and so we tell the Krebs to weave a web. And that web looks an awful lot like an old dialysis membrane, which is to say that it can do the same job as a kidney. And, basically, we could extend that to multiple systems in the body.”

Hwa thought of Síofra's broken nose. “Like programmable tissues? Like this room, but in the body?”

“Well, yeah. But it would still require a subscription model. These machines have really short telomeres. They're, uh, two-pump chumps. They do one job and then they die. Like mayflies.”

Joel frowned. “Is that why we didn't develop it?”

Smith held his hands up. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's something you'd have to ask your father. I know they had the opportunity, but they decided to go full industrial instead.”

Joel shook his head. “I've never heard that. When was this?”

“It might have been before you were born, I guess. But the people you should really be talking to, if you're interested in the bio applications, are the people from Project Changeling.”

Hwa felt herself go very still. “Changeling?”

Smith nodded. “Yeah. Lynch has a whole charitable division that does work all over the world. Changeling was part of it. It was sort of like an incubator for medical technologies to benefit people from, well … you know.”

“The places where the oil used to come from,” Joel said.

Smith turned a shade of red that Hwa had previously only seen on men whose dates ran late. “Well, you didn't hear it from me, but from a PR perspective … it didn't hurt. The students got to keep their tech, as long as they kept it open source, and Lynch got to fund some new ideas while being friendly with the natives. That was the idea.”

“What was the focus of the research?”

Both Joel and Smith frowned at her. Smith leaned back and crossed a leg. “I told you. Medical.”

“That's a pretty broad description, from someone who used to work on it.” When Smith's mouth fell open and he held up his hands as though to argue, Hwa leaned forward. “Don't bother. I've seen your file. Now tell us about the project.”

Smith winced. “It's company policy—”

“Dr. Smith, I
am
this company,” Joel said. “Now please tell this woman everything she wants to know.”

Smith drew breath to speak, then let it out in a rush. “Fine. Okay. You win.” He turned his seat a little to face Joel. “Now, keep in mind, I never saw this as a stated goal. It wasn't in the abstracts, or any of the grant applications, or the official literature. It was just what some of us thought might be going on, based on the work that was coming out of the labs in Russia and South Sudan.”

Joel wrinkled his nose. He pointed at Hwa. “Shouldn't you be talking to her? She's the one who asked you the question.”

Smith shook his head. “No. You see, the answer concerns you.” He edged forward in his seat. He spoke in a whisper. “It's life-extension technology, for the creation of human bodies. You know. Sleeving. Avatars. Body-jumping. That's why your father was so interested. He's been interested since he received his polio diagnosis.”

Joel looked profoundly impatient with the man in front of him. Hwa had never really seen this side to him before. “Sleeving is a myth, Dr. Smith. The science has been settled on that for years. Machines? Yes. Flesh? No. The nervous system is too complex to just copy and paste. It requires years of learned response to be any good. There is no such thing as immortality. There is only good medicine.”

“I agree with you,” Smith said. “But the rest of the business world hasn't quite gotten that particular memo. Especially those who believe in life after a Singularity, or a life in deep space. Your father and his associates—”

Hwa's watch pinged her. They all jumped. In the small room, it sounded extra loud and absurdly chirpy. “Sorry about that.” She pulled back her sleeve to look at her wrist, and Sabrina's face was there.

HELP ME
, it read.

*   *   *

“You should wait until the NAPS get there,” Joel said. “I just called them. They'll be at Tower Three soon. That's where she called from, isn't it? You can wait until then.”

Hwa shook her head. She hopped into the boat. “No. I can't.”

Joel sighed. He jumped into the boat beside her. “Okay. Then I'm going with you.”

“What?”

“Think about it, Hwa.” Joel started cinching on a life vest. “First your apartment gets ransacked, and the next day your friend calls for help with a single text? This is a trap. And I'm not letting you walk into it alone.” He fired up the boat. It was his own, a gift from his father, and he'd adhered a bronzed mecha toy to the prow where angels and mermaids and logos usually went. “Now, you can stand there arguing with me, or we can go check it out. But I'd rather go with you than think about my dad trying to upload himself into a custom-made
übermensch
.”

Hwa snorted and began untying the boat from its mooring. She joined him at the controls. “You know, you're really getting into this whole crime-fighting thing. You sure you still want to take over the family business, when you grow up?”

Joel smiled at her. He gunned the engine. “You know, Hwa, I think you're the first person in my life who's ever seriously asked me that question.”