“The Mouth makes us use these mouth pitching drones,” Dash said over her shoulder, a tinge of disgust in her voice. “I miss when we had metal ones. I don’t need my drones to look like orifices.”
“Do you know what JJ was on? Were they giving him new drugs?”
Dash turned around, frowning. “Surely you know the players’ regimens are private. All I can tell you is mine hasn’t changed.” She shrugged. “Although, you know something did happen with Zunz about a couple weeks before he died. He’d been a bit out of it all day and then collapsed out in the field. I remember when the medics carried him past me, he had blood leaking out of his ears.”
“What? When was this?” I’d watched all of Zunz’s games that season and hadn’t seen any injuries except the shattered hand from the broken bat.
“It was at practice. Soon after he’d come back from that nasty hand injury. The docs told us it was just an issue with blood thinners and the high altitude from our game against GenSlice up in their mountain stadium. Anyway, he was back to normal a few days later.”
If my timeline was right, that game would have been about a week before they hired Arocha. That timing didn’t feel like a coincidence. Maybe they’d realized the problem then, but hadn’t stopped it in time. I needed to find her next, see if there was a connection.
“What about Jung Kang? Did he ever mention him to you?”
Dash got back into position. Tapped the imaginary home plate three times with the bat. “The Pyramid benchwarmer? Can’t help you there. He wasn’t even in the lineup last game.”
“He’s dead.”
Dash looked back at me as the pitch spat out of the mouth drone. It flew past us and rolled into one of the recuperation tanks with a dull thud.
“Christ. It’s not safe being an FLB player anymore, is it?”
The stray pitch had caught the attention of the coaches. One trotted our way, waving their arms, and I figured it was time to head out. I asked her if there was anything else she could tell me, but she said no and anyway she’d been grilled a dozen times already. “I’m sure my interviews are all on file.”
Walking back across the field, past all the players stretching, tossing, and swinging, I felt a great longing for when I’d been one of those players. When my arm was new, oiled up, and ready to pitch. Then I got angry. Angry thinking of how easily the game had spit me out. And angry thinking what the Mets might have done to Zunz.
As I was heading back to the tunnel, Gail O’Shea, the second base coach, stepped in front of me. “I don’t think you’re part of the staff. How’d you get in here?”
“Ask Natasha,” I said, pushing past.
“I will!” she shouted after me.
I had one more person to see. Someone the Mets had needed so desperately they kidnapped her in the middle of the playoffs.
I found Julia Arocha in one of the practice labs, cursing. She was standing before a transparent plastic tube that was connected by spokes to a clump of folded gray matter covered in red veins. Inside the tube was a curved spine. Blue fluid ran through the tube and spokes. The whole thing was connected to an oxygenator.
Arocha had a blue visor on and was dabbing the mushy hunk with a beeping tool. It sizzled with each poke. She still had the touch, I could tell. My scouting hadn’t been wrong.
The fist-shaped clump of brain wasn’t taking it well. The surface was turning black, cracking as it charred. Arocha cursed again, loud and long.
I knocked on the doorframe.
Arocha turned around, startled. She flipped up the visor.
“Tell him I need more samples. Another half dozen at least.”
“More samples of what?”
Arocha stopped. Collected herself. Then she asked me who I was.
I told her the truth. About Zunz and my relation to him. While I spoke, she tugged on the metal security collar around her neck.
“Do you know anything about what happened to him?”
She looked past me while shaking her head. “I was brought in here after he died. Traded if you want to call it that.”
“Did you analyze the remains?”
Her mouth stretched into a taut line. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that or anything else. I’m really pretty busy here.” She gestured toward the door.
“Have you heard anything? Any of the other coats talk at the mess hall?”
“I don’t get to talk to too many other people. And believe it or not, baseball players aren’t what we spend our free time discussing. Goodbye.”
As I left, I saw her pull out her screen to make a call.
26
THE PRACTICE SWINGS
I walked around the Monsanto grounds for a while, watching the strange zootech and disguised drones. It was getting harder and harder to tell the difference between the living creatures and the machines. Although only the drones were carrying ads for Mets products. A parrot-shaped drone with a red light in its forehead flew up to me and squawked. “Dash like Lex Dash with Monsanto Dash Dots. They make your hemoglobin hemo-go-go-go!”
Seeing Dash bat around had gotten me hungry for some swings myself, and I remembered the batting cages in the subbasement that the players didn’t use anymore. “They got those old-timey robot pitchers you can program to mimic players,” Zunz had told me. “The exact same models they had when we were in school.” He took me there a few times in the off-season, and we batted around balls for hours. Maybe it was time to test my new metal arm on some old leather balls.
I found a free cage. The pitching machine was slumped over, head scraping the floor. When I tapped the plate three times, the machine sprang to life. Unfolded into a blue robot whose parts were dotted with squishy orange protrusions. They hadn’t bothered to make the robot look overly human, but it did have a smiling face painted on the front and a red baseball cap on top.
“Lefty, righty, ambi, or player simulation?” the pitching machine asked.
“Player sim. Jaiden Schwipper,” I said, naming the White Mice pitcher who’d been facing Zunz when he died. In the replays, Schwipper starts out seeming annoyed when Zunz gets sick. Like he thought Zunz was icing his throw. Then as Zunz bleeds, Schwipper steps backward. He walks off the mound and keeps moving back, shaking his head in denial of his eyes.
I got into a batting stance. Pretended to be Zunz. It wasn’t hard since I’d been doing it my whole life. I imagined my cyborg parts were pure muscle and the rustle of the ventilation system was the roar of a distant crowd.
“Batter up,” the machine said. A blue strike zone box lit up in front of me. Then the robot reshaped itself into the approximate height and size of Schwipper. Tucked the hat low over its imitation eyes. Lifted its right leg. Pulled back. Flung.
I missed by a mile. In fact, it took me five swings to even foul a pitch.
“Dial down to seventy percent velocity,” I said. The robot threw a nice slow one over the plate. I smashed it dead center. Smiled at the clink against the mesh wall.
I kept smashing the balls without thinking about anything else. Putting metal to leather, feeling the reverberations down my arms when I fouled a ball and the beautiful crack when I hit it dead-on.
Then I was smashing them and thinking about Zunz. What must have been going through his head when he faced down the real Schwipper as he was starting to die. How scared he must have been. All alone with a million eyes on him.
And then I thought of the girl. His apparent daughter. My alleged niece. Living life in hiding with unupgraded fanatics. Abandoned by my brother.
I let a curveball swerve past me. Sat on the bench. Checked the time.
As I was heading toward the mag lift, someone whistled at me. A tall woman peeking out of a dark room. It was Julia Arocha.
“In here,” she said.
I joined her, and she locked the door. It was a storage closet filled with replacement parts for the pitching machines. Arms, legs, torsos, and heads. They were piled up in different mesh crates. In the one closest to me, f
ifty chrome faces smiled in different directions.
“I couldn’t talk in the lab. You know they record everything, right?” She’d disabled the camera above the door; it hung unblinking from its stand. She kept looking around at the walls and corners as if there might be others.
Arocha leaned against a crate of chrome legs. She relaxed a little. “You’re Zunz’s brother, right? I looked into you. If you find out what happened to Zunz, will you get the word out? To the press?”
“I’d do anything to find the killer.”
“What if there was no killer?” she said.
“Is this a riddle?”
“Monsanto had been making overtures to me about a week before Zunz died. Said they were having a nervous system issue they thought I could fix. I rebuffed them. Not that it changed things. Anyway, I’m not the only one they brought in. Monsanto has been buying up experts left and right. Nerve systems, tissue stabilization, cell growth. Two others were brought in this week. And from the drugged look of their eyes, I don’t think it was voluntarily. My comms to my family are heavily monitored. They don’t want me to leak any info.”
“You think there’s a leak I can spring?”
“I hope so. Monsanto has big things in the works. Things bankrolled by Newman’s government. There are Department of Human Limits agents all over our labs.”
I was feeling uncomfortable with the way the conversation was heading. That is, directly into my line of work. In the tiny storage room, I felt claustrophobic. There was a reason I never talked to prospects after the teams signed them. I didn’t want to know how much I’d fucked up their lives.
“What are you saying? Monsanto’s drugs killed Zunz?”
“I’m only telling you what I know. They were putting more growth hormones and brain stimulators into him than a human body can stand. You need to look into why.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So you’ll do something. Get some revenge for me. The assholes here forced me into this contract and I don’t get out for five years. Can you believe that’s legal?”
“I can’t,” I said, lying. I knew who wrote the laws.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Monsanto had killed him by accident. But why hire his brother to investigate if you did? I dug out my Mets eraser pack. Inhaled some numbing smoke.
I offered one to Arocha.
“Those things take years off your life.”
“I hear they can add those back on these days.”
She shook her head, waved away the smoke when I exhaled. “The human body is meant to feel itself. It needs to respond to pain. Send white blood cells, grow new skin, regulate functions. It needs to feel to do its job. You dull it with smoke and it doesn’t know what to do. Just shuts down.”
I didn’t tell her a shutdown is what I was hoping for.
“Listen, I can’t do anything with vague rumors from one disgruntled employee.” I finished the eraser, lit another. We were crammed in so tight among the robot parts, she could have leaned over and kissed me. “Do you have anything else I can go on?”
She frowned, checked her watch. “I have to go. But I can tell you they’re promising us new stem cells to work with. From some child.”
That woke me up. “A girl? What kind of child?”
“I don’t know.”
“An Edenist?”
“Could be. We were told the samples would be pure. Most of the players have been so juiced, tweaked, and edited that the strands are frayed.”
Whether Coppelius was still on my tail or not, I needed to pay this Edenist center a visit.
I wondered if Arocha had a little girl of her own out there. I must have read her personal history when I scouted her, but I couldn’t remember the person. Only the stats.
“If you weren’t here, what would you be doing?” I asked.
“I wanted to work on zootech,” she said, smiling sadly. “You know how most zootech die in a few weeks? We create these creatures, these living creatures, and we treat them like trash. Program cell death right into their genes. We have animal rights laws for ‘organic’ animals, but no laws protecting our own creations. They’re just products. Same as sneakers or protein powder.”
“You wanted to save them?”
“I wanted to help them live actual lives. Created or not, they’re still living creatures.”
For some reason, that dark room seemed to be shrinking. The walls looked like they could topple on me at any moment. I wasn’t sure if it was claustrophobia or guilt.
“Listen, I have to tell you something. I know who you are. Julia Arocha. Formerly at Columbia. Twenty-eight years old. Undergrad work on cephalopod nervous systems.” I looked away. “Before the Mets scooped you up, I’d been scouting you for the Yankees.”
“Yes,” she said, speaking slowly and looking me dead in the eye. There was something hard in her pupils. “Like I said, I looked you up.”
“If I’d gotten my way, you’d be in the same situation. Just in another borough.”
She shrugged, strapped her visor back on her head. Powered it back on. “You make allies wherever you can find them. Believe me, I’ve made some strange ones.”
She asked me to wait fifteen minutes before leaving. She closed the door and clicked off the light.
I sat in the darkness for ten, tapping my fingers on a robot’s pitching hand. Thinking. Then I headed out to find the girl before someone else did.
27
THE GOLDEN FROWN
What are you, a garbage rat? This place is garbage! You live here like a disgusting rat.”
“Yeah, you live in garbage. Ha ha.”
Wanda and Brenda Sassafras were in my apartment, livestreaming its destruction to my screen. I was in the mag lift of the Mets stadium, moving up to the ground floor.
Wanda Sassafras dropped my meal printer onto the living room table. Brenda had a baseball bat, one signed by Zunz, and was whacking dents in the walls. They must have been at it for a while. Everything in my apartment looked smashed, crushed, shattered, or burnt.
“Are you watching this, Kobo?”
“Look,” Brenda said, pointing the bat. “Those snail things. The ones he tricked us with.”
Wanda walked over to my aquarium of shock slugs. She pressed her face into the glass, gazing at the two remaining slugs. She leaned her head back. Screamed. Threw the tank against the wall. It shattered. The creatures fell on the ground with little sparks. They tried to squirm away, but Wanda and Brenda stomped around the ground in a brutal ballet.
Wanda came up close to the camera, her broad half-silver face filling the frame. “Should we call the trashman to throw this whole apartment in the garbage or will you give us the money?”
“Wanda.” Brenda was squatting, urinating on my kitchen tiles. She stood up.
“Should we ring him up, you deadbeat? Get him to toss your whole life away?”
“But Wanda.”
Wanda snapped her head back. “What?”
“Can a trashman lift up an apartment?”
“Huh?”
“How can a trashman lift a room? Isn’t it connected to other rooms and the whole building?”
“Shut the fuck up, Brenda! I’m making a point! This isn’t about realism!”
I slid the screen into my pocket as I reached the ground floor. Just because my life was being crushed piece by piece didn’t mean I had to watch it happen. I wondered if Okafor would let me crash at their place. I started to message them as the lift opened. When I looked up, I froze. Natasha was waiting for me, thick arms crossed and smile wide.
The shock must have shown on my face, because she frowned. “Mr. Kobo, are you unwell?”
“Just got off an unpleasant call.”
Natasha was wearing a blue dress woven with magnetic threads. When she put her screen away, it stuck directly to her side. She ambled toward me.
“I heard you were enjoying our facilities.”
The words made my guts twist into knots. If Natasha h
ad seen me talking to Arocha, then either she or I or both of us were about to have a very bad day.
“I was cracking the old bat, trying to get my head in the game.”
“You seem a bit perplexed. I hope that is the right emotion. We Neanderthals use slightly different facial expressions than you sapiens. Something about your tiny eyebrows changes everything. You wouldn’t think such a small variation in bone structure could change so much. But it does.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to straighten my face. My screen was still on in my pocket, and I could hear the miniature screams of the Sassafras sisters. I reached in and clicked it off.
“One of our coaches mentioned you were, well, I won’t say interrogating. Speaking with some of the players. So I thought I’d come find you. The Mouth would like a word.”
“I don’t have anything to report yet,” I said.
“All the same, the Mouth will see you. He wants to know if there’s anything he can throw in Elmer Tuscan’s face before game three.”
Tuscan was the CEO of Pyramid Pharmaceuticals. A playboy executive who spent more time hosting orgies on low-orbit space flights than running the company. Or at least that’s what the tabloids said.
“Maybe you’ll think of something on the way.” Natasha smiled and slipped her arm into mine, led us toward the door. She guided me down the hall with quick tugs to the joint. “How are you finding our facilities?”
We were walking down a large hallway lined with gold columns carved to look like Mets stars of decades past. Aquariums of blue and orange fish were built into the walls, and a large hologram of the Mouth waved at passersby when motion was detected.
“It’s quite something. Let’s say elegant.”
“The Mouth’s taste is garish. But we don’t work for who we work for because of their interior decorating skills, do we, Mr. Kobo?”
“Why do you work for him?”
“We aren’t close enough friends for that conversation. Not yet.”
The stadium sloped upward like an enormous coiled snake. The white marble floors looped around, with rows of flowering plants sandwiched between the tiers. A throwback style. At the top of the stadium, the golden dome glowed in the sky. When you were sitting down inside, looking up, the dome appeared as a gigantic grinning mouth.
The Body Scout: A Novel Page 15
