The Seven Markets (22 page)

Patience. It always came down to patience. Even four hundred years later, she was still learning patience.

The UI flashed red three more times. Ellie brought up the request and Bo’s profile popped up. Hadn’t the doctor wanted to talk about something earlier? Not the raid, certainly not. Ellie knew Bo was appalled by her and Hart’s hunger for revenge against the Prince. What, then? Had she had some kind of breakthrough in her own projects?

“Come on in,” Ellie said, gathering the extant parts of herself from the system. A Bo-shaped space appeared, then filled up with Bo-colors and Bo-details.

“Ellie, I saw the feeds go down, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. It’s just the Market snubbing its nose at us.”

Bo looked surprised. Ellie had to remind herself that not everyone knew the extent of her access. “Knowing you, Doctor, that’s not why you’ve come calling. What’s going on?”

Again, surprise. She’d probably come expecting Ellie’s not-inconsiderable wrath, and here she was practically being offered tea and crumpets. Bo was brilliant, there was no denying it, but sometimes she was a little slow on the uptake.

Ellie gave her time to sort herself out. It wasn’t long before Bo got to the point of her visit.

“It’s your Mister Rossi, Ellie.”

“Rossi?”

“Yes, he’s . . . well, it’s working.”

One of Doctor Beauregard’s conditions upon agreeing to take Ellie’s case was that her laboratory and operating theater would remain, for the duration of her employment, unmonitored. That meant no cameras, no spy-eyes, and a field that disabled the implants Commander Hart and his men wore should they cross over into her workspace. Before today, Ellie hadn’t cared; she could access Bo’s data as easily as anything else in the system. Now, however, she wished she’d insisted on tucking away a couple hidden eyes somewhere Bo wouldn’t have noticed.

“I hate that thing,” she said, unable to ignore the smile on Bo’s face.

“Then we’re even. Come on, be a big girl and put on your hologram. I’ll get you an ice cream cone.”

Ellie scowled. She doubted if Bo had ever tasted real ice cream.

“Fine. But this had better be good.”

Bo vanished again from the nothing, leaving Ellie no choice but to follow. She brought up the hologram actualization controls and gave a nudge to the one marked SCALE. If she and Bo had ever met in real life, the doctor would have towered over her; the median height had risen by a hefty margin since the early seventeen-hundreds. Ellie would wear the hologram, but she’d be damned if she’d let Bo see how short she was.

The world fizzled. Ellie’s mind collapsed down into the cramped space of the holo-control module. She maintained her connection to the system but could no longer access her advanced controls. It was as close as she came, these days, to feeling human.

Bo was waiting when she blinked into existence. She must have needled in right from her lab.

Ellie stretched her arms as if she could feel them. The solid-light projections could interact with the world in real time, but sight and sound were the only senses available. Taste, touch and smell, considered trickier for some reason, were still in beta. The manufacturer had told them those final three senses were not recommended for users running a hardline, as Ellie was. The potential feedback was too dangerous. It couldn’t be lethal in her case, but she didn’t like to imagine what the Prince’s gem would do with, say, the heat from a burning match looped over and over again approaching infinity.

So: eyes and ears and a dumb body she couldn’t feel. Not as bad as being back on the slab, but nothing compared to her private universe within the system.

“Where is he?”

“He’s right here,” Bo said, stepping around a large, expensive-looking piece of equipment Ellie did not recognize. “But listen, I don’t want you to get too excited. He’s not much to look at.”

“You said it was working.”

“It is. But working to me and working to you might mean two different things. I just don’t want you expecting miracles.”

“Miracles are what I pay you for.”

“Ellie.”

“Fine. No miracles today. Let me see him.”

Bo keyed a quick sequence onto the screen and stood back to let the top of the machine open up. Within, Ellie saw a fist-size bean filled with pink liquid. The skin of the bean pulsed as feeder tubes cycled the pink liquid in and out.

“He’s a bean?”

Bo chuckled and lowered a screen over the incubator. The view magnified until they could see a pinprick of dark matter floating within the sea of pink.

“Hello there, Mister Rossi,” Bo said, beaming with pleasure. “How are you today?”

“Okay, explain. How excited am I supposed to get about a microscopic dot?”

“You should get very excited. And he’s not microscopic, just hard to spot if you don’t know where to look. Ellie, this is further than we’ve ever been before.”

“A dot. Bo, if you’re trying to, I don’t know, distract me from the fact that we’ve lost contact with Hart and his men, you’re going to have to do better than this.”

Bo closed the cover of the incubator and guided Ellie to a large screen suspended nearby. The screen was filled with incomprehensible data, graphs and charts. Bo cleared it with a single keystroke.

“We tried cloning, but that same shine you’ve got on your DNA keeps us from growing him a viable host body. Not that he has a consciousness to transfer, but it was a good first step.

“Next up was renewal. That’s only good for an organ or three. Brain cells are iffy at best. Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, etcetera, no problem, but most bodies can’t stand doing everything from scratch. Bottom line: that wasn’t doing the trick either.

“Still, it gave us something to go on. We had hair and a couple fingernails from your, what was that thing called?”

“A jeroboam,” Ellie said. She accessed the memory and a golden locket appeared in her hard-light hand.

“Right. We had enough to clone from, but obviously, not enough to grow from. And our clones looked less like human beings and more like raw hamburger. Even if we could get you out of your body, we don’t have anywhere good to put you.”

She tapped keys on her virtual keyboard and the screen filled with pink light. At the center was the dark blot Bo insisted was Rossi. “You can’t see it, but this pink gloop is actually filled with Mister Rossi’s cells. What we’re doing, in essence, is running a full-body renewal on a body that’s not there. We’re growing a new Rossi from within the existing one.”

Ellie couldn’t manipulate the screen with her stupid hologram hands. She could touch things—she could have knocked Bo’s coffee mug onto the floor—but she bore only the appearance of flesh. The screens were capacitive, requiring actual, conductive flesh to move things around.

But she could interface directly with the software. She ordered the screen to zoom to its maximum magnification.

“Why is it pink? You didn’t grind up a clone, did you? Ick.”

“One of my techs suggested it, actually. Wouldn’t work. Running the renewal in a matrix of failed flesh would only give us more failed flesh.”

“If you can’t clone him—us—how would you get good flesh?”

The smile that spread across Bo’s face was priceless. Ellie knew she’d asked the question Bo had been waiting for.

“The pink isn’t a clone. Or it is, but it’s a clone we didn’t bring to term. We created it and we’re replicating the cells, but we’re not quickening them. It’s a clone at the very first stage of development and that’s as far as we’re letting it go. Second one of creation, before anything can go wrong.”

“And it’s working?”

“See for yourself.” Bo cleared the screen and brought up a new display. A DNA helix spun on the left side of the screen while numbers flowed past on the right. Ellie ordered the stream to stop and studied it. She didn’t know enough about DNA or biology to gauge whether what she was looking at was good or bad, but she knew that when Bo’s team found faulty cells or damaged DNA strands, they were highlighted in red. Scrolling through the text, all Ellie saw was white.

“It’s working.”

“So far. We’re cooking him slowly, taking our time. Right now he’s nothing but a few thousand undifferentiated cells. It’ll be another week or two before we have anything resembling a human fetus.”

“And then what?”

“Assuming no genetic abnormalities appear, we’ll continue bringing him up slowly. Don’t get me wrong; this is just a first step. Apart from your DNA, I’ve never seen anything like your Mister Rossi in my entire life.”

“He always was one of a kind. If this works—if—what then? How do we use this for me?”

“This won’t work for you.”

“Then why—”

Bo cut her off. “Your necklace keeps anyone from harming you. We can’t draw your consciousness out because—this is the theory at least—it thinks you’re dying, so it stops you leaving. In a strange way, your Mister Rossi’s being dead has made things easier on us.”

“Be sure and thank him when you see him.”

Bo chuckled. “So we can’t get you out of there. And anything we do which might threaten to harm you gets thrown back at us. I’m sure you remember how well our attempt at a heart transplant went?”

Ellie nodded. She’d been anesthetized but had watched the recording. The theory had been that a series of transplants might pull her together enough to have a go at renewing her. They knocked her out well enough, but when Doctor Knox—Bo’s old boss—made his first incision the Prince’s gem flooded the room with its white, killing light. She hadn’t allowed further transplant attempts after that.

“So what then?”

“So we don’t do anything to hurt you. But that damned ugly thing doesn’t seem to mind if you hurt yourself, does it?”

Bo brought up an image of Ellie’s ruined body on the screen. On all the laboratory’s screens. The empty eye sockets stared in mock surprise from every direction. The mouth gaped in eternal, agonizing pain.

“Bo, that’s enough.”

“No, wait. Don’t you see? If we can grow a new, viable body for Rossi from within a sea of his own cells, we can apply that same procedure to you. If anything, it’s easier with you than it is with him. We can’t clone you—the clones all fail within days—but we’re not trying to clone you. If anything, your necklace will help the process along.”

“You’ve lost me. And get that off the screens.”

Bo killed the screens. To Ellie, it seemed a soundless wail had been suddenly silenced.

“One more time, Doctor, if you please.”

“We grow a new you from inside the old you. There’s no one doing it to you, so there’s no one to get upset with. It’s literally your own body doing the work. We can immerse you in a vat of your own cells to help the process along, but all we’re really doing is turning back the clock.”

“And you think this will work?”

Bo clapped her hands together. “It should. We’ll see how our Rossi develops over the next few months. But even if he fails, I know we’re on the right track. Ellie, I just know we’ve cracked your problem at last!”

“Turning back the clock, huh? If it doesn’t work, well, I’m no worse off than I was before, is that the thinking?”

“Yes,” Bo said, her voice hushed. “And to answer your next question, Ellie, it’s probably not going to be a . . . pleasant experience. And no, you can’t hide away in the system. We’re afraid it could be dangerous if your port healed over while you weren’t home.”

It seemed a good opportunity for pacing. Ellie cued the pacing subroutine on the hologram while she thought.

After the Prince’s gift had cracked in New York, after Rossi and who knows how many others had died, she’d begun aging. Slowly at first but in less than a decade her hair had turned first gray and then white. She’d used Rossi’s ring and the glamour it provided to make her way through the world, hoping she could last to the next Market and force the Prince to release her. When that tree failed to yield fruit, her degeneration had grown even faster. It wasn’t long before she’d been unable to stand or move. Just breathing had been an agony. Her organs failed one by one; she’d died a hundred times a week, the flash of light pushing against the approaching darkness.

She hadn’t thought much about that time since her hardline had been installed. It was always in the back of her mind, however, a whispered voice that could never be silenced.

“Ellie, I’m sorry. We are working on other things, too. Maybe one of them will be . . .” She trailed off, then spoke again as if remembering some bit of good news. “There is something else, though.”

“What?”

“See, this you’re going to like, I think. And best of all, you get to ditch the hologram.”

“Thank God.”

“Help me needle back in and I’ll show you.”

Bo climbed into her chair, put her feet up, and waited for Ellie to slide the interface needle into place. Such fine motor skills were beyond her dumb holographic hands, so she let the system take control. The needle slid unerringly into place, and with a loud
click
, Bo was gone from the world of man.

“Awful damned thing,” Ellie said, shutting the circuit in her mind. She fizzled again and felt the warm, comforting flow of data envelop her as she returned to her familiar world of nothing.

Bo was waiting, as Ellie’d known she would be. She had someone with her.

“Ellie, I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine.”

“Hello,” he said, extending his hand. “My name is Rossi.”

She fell into his arms without thinking about it. He was Rossi, sure as anything. He was shorter than she remembered. Then Ellie realized it wasn’t him; she’d left herself “tall” from her visit to the real world. She dialed back her height and settled into the old, familiar physicality of being held by him.

“Boy,” he said, his voice at once familiar and new. “You weren’t kidding, were you?”

“I told you, Clay, she’s very happy to see you.”

“Clay?” Ellie said, looking up but unwilling to let go.

Bo shrugged. “Everyone needs a first name. Clayton was my grandfather’s name. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Ellie would have said tears were impossible within the system, a “ghosted process” it wouldn’t allow. Either they’d updated the specs without her noticing or she’d grown beyond its parameters. She rubbed her damp cheeks on his shirt as she’d done so many times during their time together.