Mind Over Ship (45 page)

“Looks that way,” said the second sim. “I’m a composite of all batches of the russ germline.”

“I’m an eclectic mix from outside the russ bell curve,” said the first.

“Our loving Lunatic Fringe,” said the second.

“Yep, that’s me.” They both looked at Fred.

“Uh, Batch 2B.”

“An old-timer,” said All-Batches. “Don’t tell me this is another investigation into clone fatigue.”

“There’s no such thing as clone fatigue,” said Lunatic. “We just become more individualistic—and wiser—as we age.”

“Yeah, well, you would say that,” said All-Batches. He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop and looked for a waiter. “I wonder what the chances are for getting a beer around here.”

No waiter appeared, but after a moment, a musical fanfare began to play, and a spotlight hit the curtain. The curtain opened to reveal a bare stage. Then a procession of people walked from the wings, crossed the stage, and
paused in the spotlight for a moment before exiting. They represented a broad spectrum of humanity, young and old, male and female, cloned and free-range. They came from all races. Some were ugly and some attractive, some richly attired, some in rags.

“I guess we’re doing a lineup,” said All-Batches, who pulled his chair around for a better view.

It didn’t take long for the universal demographic to narrow incrementally to all female, young, and beautiful. They included both iterants and hinks.

“Guess it’s not hard to tell what’s on our minds, is it?” said All-Batches, who seemed to be enjoying the show. Little by little, the young women began to look more luluesque until the parade was made up entirely of lulus. Not any that Fred knew personally, but generic members of that lusty, fun-loving line. Now the only diversity was in their hair and skin color and their clothing. They beamed high-wattage smiles at the table of russes as they took turns posing in the spotlight, like contestants in a beauty pageant. Each successive costume became skimpier until the procession ended with a final lulu who bowed and remained in the spotlight. Her reddish hair was cut in a severe style, her green eyes were laughing, and her coffee-colored skin glowed from within. She wore a loose, open blouse, a skirt too short to completely hide her pan ties, and shiny shoes. Then the curtain closed, and the spotlight went out.

“Is that all?” Lunatic said, clapping his hands.

“Can’t be,” All-Batches replied.

Sure enough, an unseen orchestra struck up an overture to a classical composition, and the curtain opened again to reveal the final lulu dancing in a flowing, balletlike style. Her shiny shoes gave way to ballet slippers and then disappeared completely, leaving her legs and feet bare. She tromped and twirled and leaped across the stage. She was as appealing as any woman Fred had ever seen.

The lulu’s hair grew out in all directions and became entwined with a garland of wildflowers, and her blouse and skirt joined together into a flowing white toga that left one breast bare.

“Hello,” said All-Batches. “That’s what I’m talking about.” He glanced at his brothers with a guilty leer. Lunatic, meanwhile, was waving his hands to the music like a conductor. And Fred was recalling how good lulus felt in his arms or sitting on his lap.

The music increased in pace and intensity, and the lulu morphed again, growing slighter and shorter. Her inviting hips narrowed, and her abundant
breasts deflated somewhat. Her skin remained luminescent, while her hair turned brunette, and her eyes turned brown. She became an evangeline.

Not Mary, not any evangeline Fred knew, but a fine example of all of them. She danced well, though perhaps not as deliciously as the lulu. Fred’s companions didn’t seem to mind, and they hummed along and tapped their feet to the music which had become more contemporary.

The dancer morphed again, growing even smaller and thinner until she resembled a little girl. Her open toga exposed a mostly flat chest. All-Batches said, “What the hell?”

The girl left the stage and began to dance at their table. She batted eyes at them, smiling seductively and striking provocative poses with a coltish lack of grace. All-Batches crossed his arms and turned away. But Lunatic followed her every move. For his part, Fred continued to watch, but only with what he assured himself was a clinical interest. He was determined to see where this was going.

The girl stopped next to Fred’s chair and danced for him, and as she did so, she morphed again into a little boy. Not a generic boy this time but one who Fred recognized, the retroboy from the
Dauntless.
His glances became bolder, his slender arms seemed to draw Fred forward, he wriggled his little bottom shamelessly.

All-Batches said, “This is going too far. I won’t sit for this another minute.” But Lunatic, completely engrossed in the performance, grinned at Fred and gave him a big conspiratorial wink.

WELL, FRED THOUGHT when the method ended and his POV returned to his stateroom. His heart was pounding, and his mouth was dry. What in the fecking feck was that?

When the comatose evangeline was pronounced retrievably dead, Uncle Homer, too, seemed to die. Zoranna Alblaitor stepped through the dog several times on her way to and from her home office without apparently seeing it lying there. That is, until Nicholas quietly deleted it, and then Zoranna complained, “You think you can just make the problem disappear?”

“Not at all,” Nicholas said. “I thought that the model was no longer helpful. However, if you insist . . .” The dead dog reappeared on the carpet.

Zoranna stood over it and said, “It’s more helpful now than ever to know how our employees are feeling. We must reach out to them somehow and assure them that we’re doing everything we can.”

“Speaking of must,” Nicholas said, “there’s more bad news. The Anti-Transubstantiation League, backed by the ACLU, has just filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing us to divulge the evangeline germline’s alleged must and candy.”

“Let them. They won’t find anything.” She seemed to reconsider and asked, “Will they?”

Nicholas replied, “It has always been Applied People’s policy to prohibit the incorporation of any so-called shackles in its germlines.” As he spoke, he cast his gaze at the ceiling, a warning that this was a topic best broached in the privacy of a null room.

Zoranna slouched across the office and collapsed gratefully into her chair. Wearily, she propped her legs on her desk. When she was settled, she shut her eyes and said, “Now tell me what’s hurting our evangelines.”

The mentar, dressed in a sober but flattering suit, strolled to a chair opposite hers. His carefully crafted face wore a haggard expression, as well as a three-day-old beard. “Best guess?” he said. “An unfriendly party has combed through the evangeline genome for the genes that regulate their enormous capacity for empathy in order to execute a two-stage attack against them.”

“Explain.”

“Stage One: Cause the evangelines to become hypersensitive to autosuggestion. There is evidence that Stage One was accomplished with the help of a designer pseudomimivirus.”

“A virus?” Zoranna said and opened her eyes. “Isn’t that supposed to be impossible? Isn’t that why we comply with NFAP guidelines?”

“Not impossible–improbable,” Nicholas replied. “The Non-Fixed Allele Protocol can protect us only so much against monoculture pandemics. Remember, we’re not talking about skin and eye color here. Our enemy used the germline’s core traits, the pay-dirt genes that make them commercially valuable and that are identical across the germline. If you do manage to defeat NFAP and infect one evangeline, you can pretty much infect them all.

“In our case, our unknown adversary overwhelmed the NFAP with a non-virulent but very contagious virus that infected everyone, evangelines and non-evangelines alike, and spread around the globe very quickly.”

A row of dataframes opened on Zoranna’s desk that graphed and charted a recent pandemic and included medical and public health briefs, a contagion map, and media stories. Zoranna skimmed the gloss page and said, “Oh,
that
virus. What an odd disease that was, don’t you agree? At least from a bioterror perspective; why inflict free-floating grief on a population? What’s the point? Fortunately, I managed to dodge that one.”

Nicholas said, “In this assessment, the nonspecific grief symptom you mention was probably an unintended side effect. It was suffered only by non-evangelines, that is, the general public. The evangelines, the intended targets of the virus, suffered an entirely different effect; they were made hypersensitive to autosuggestion, as I’ve said, and were thus primed for Stage Two.”

“Go on.”

“Stage Two: Deliver a self-destructive autosuggestion along the lines of I GIVE UP AND WANT TO DIE. I believe this death wish was delivered by this agent.” The dataframe directly in front of Zoranna changed to display a Breezeway Channel holo of sims in hospital beds.

“The Leena sims?”

“Yes. Our own research has shown that most evangelines consider the sims that Hollywood created in their honor to be embarrassing or creepy. Nevertheless, they identify with them on a very deep level, and when the Leenas began to suffer, which occurred at the height of the nonspecific flu pandemic, they infected our evangelines with a seductive meme of despair and self-annihilation.”

Zoranna waved away the dataframes. “That’s quite the theory, Nick.”

“Thank you.”

“How soon before we have a cure?”

Nicholas frowned. “Let’s firm up the etiology first, shall we, before we talk about cures. We have all of our labs working on it, plus as many outside firms as we could hire on short notice.

“In the meantime, I suggest we encourage all our evangelines to have themselves placed in protective biostasis until a cure is found.”

“Do it,” Zoranna said. “How many are we talking about?”

“All of them.”

“The entire batch? Ten thousand?”

“Yes, all of them around the globe.”

Zoranna glanced at the dog on the carpet. “Our people blame us for this, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Can you issue a company-wide letter of compassion and promise that we’ll get to the bottom of it?”

Nicholas said, “Already taken care of.”

“This is it, isn’t it?”

“This is what?”

“The attack Starke warned us to expect.”

“I believe so.”

“And Starke was involved? She may have been the architect?”

“Excuse me?”

“Ellen Starke owns the Leena franchise through her production company, right?”

“Yes, Burning Daylight.”

“A coincidence?”

“Perhaps.”

“The hollyholo Leenas were based on three actual evangelines who just so happen to be Ellen’s full-time companions.”

“It does make one wonder.”

ELLEN SAID, “DO they know? How are they taking it?” The toddler hurried as fast as her little legs could carry her to Mary’s suite at the north end of the main floor. Cabinet was at her side, and the dog, giraffe, and a nurse trailed behind.

“They know,” Cabinet replied, “but their reaction is rather flat.”

“Shock?”

“Perhaps.”

Ellen banged her tiny fists on Mary’s door. She was just able to reach the handle but could not turn it, and she glared at the nurse behind her. The nurse scrambled to open the door, and Ellen went in unannounced. She found all three of her companions in the living room. They were seated around the coffee table. A holocube was open on the table depicting the dead evangeline lying in a bed in the death artist’s breezeway. The dead woman’s upper body was enclosed in a trauma trolley, and a medical team of people and machines was frantically working on her.

“What are they doing?” Ellen asked Cabinet.

“Trying to retrieve her.”

“Trying? Trying?”

“They have her on life support, but she’s not responding.”

Ellen went to Mary and clung to her robe, but the evangeline didn’t seem to notice. She had a faraway look in her eyes, as did Georgine and Cyndee. “Mary,” the girl pleaded, tugging at her sleeve, “look at me.”

She beat her fists on Mary’s leg until Mary turned and said, “It’s pointless, you know. They can retrieve her heart. They can retrieve her lungs. But the flame has gone out.” With that, Mary turned away again.

“If they can’t revive that woman,” Ellen said to Cabinet, “then they must immediately put her into biostasis.”

Lyra appeared in the room and said, “I agree, but that would go contrary to Myr Oakland’s wishes.”

Ellen turned to her former mentar and said, “Oh, Lyra, thank you for coming. You must tell them to biostase that poor woman immediately.”

The mentar replied, “Shelley Oakland has a living will that clearly refuses all life support and retrieval measures, including biostasis.” She gestured to the holocube, where the doctors and jennys labored. “Therefore, this effort is disallowed, and we are suing to have it stopped.”

Ellen was stunned. “Lyra, how can you say that? I gave you to the Sisterhood to assist the germline, not destroy it.”