by Mark Budz
“He’s fine,” Pheidoh says.
Then why can’t she feel him? “Where?”
“Here on the station. He wasn’t involved in the accident.”
Fola draws a relieved breath, remembers that he was working in another section of the arcology.
She twists her head to the side. One of the hexcell’s walls is a window that looks out into an atrium. The atrium is the node for a hexapod. Five other cells identical to hers grouped around it. Bananopy fronds and tapestree limbs, woven together in an intricate macramé of Celtic knot designs, etch shadows onto the glass. A tight flock of scuttleaves dislodge from a limb to school like tropical fish in an aquarium.
“What about the others?” she asks. “What about Ingrid?”
“They didn’t make it,” another voice says over her cochlear implant. “You were the only survivor.”
The news is accompanied by a grainy bitcam image of a man projected onto the wallscreen in front of her. The man is older, an octogenarian at least, and wears a benevolent smile as pink as his crepe hospital sprayons.
She wills her hands to unfold, her jaw to unclench. “Who are you?”
“My name is Gilles Villaz. I’m the doctor in charge of your case.” His bushy bottlebrush eyebrows remind her of a species of hairy caterpillar, believed to be extinct, that has suddenly resurfaced in some backwater ecological niche. He has toffee-colored cough lozenges for eyes, a bulbous nose, and a hairless scalp populated with a menagerie of turtle, fish, and spider-shaped liver spots.
“How long since—” Bile froths up in her throat. She can hear Liam joking with her. Nun of that, now. She swallows. “How long have I been here?”
“A little over four hours.”
Hours. Fola was certain it had been longer. Days, maybe, or weeks. Some of the tension in her loosens, calves off like ice from a glacier. If she were seriously injured, it would have taken her longer to regain consciousness. They would have kept her sedated for any viral surgery, kept her under for as long as it took to heal. So she can’t have been hurt too badly. “How soon can I leave?” Except for the atrium, the sterile atmosphere in the hexcell gives her the chills. She wants to reconnect with Ephraim and the rest of her tuplet—Alphonse, Yulong, Lalya—as well as the warm-blooded plants. Especially the plants. She misses the calming effect they have, their slow circadian thrum.
“I’m not sure.” Dr. Villaz itches his nose. “Soon, I hope.” His smile is reserved but optimistic. “You’ve been placed in isolation until you receive a clean bill of health.”
No wonder she can’t feel the softwire connection to the warm-blooded plants, the autonomic stream of biochemicals. “I feel fine.”
“A period of observation is standard. Nothing more than a precaution.”
“How come I’m not allowed to get up or move around?” It occurs to her that this might be for her own good. That she might have a few broken bones that she’s not aware of.
“When you first arrived you suffered a number of grand mal seizures. We thought it best to immobilize you, for your own protection.”
That doesn’t explain why she’s been disconnected from the plants and her tuplet.
“We should know more soon,” the doctor says, “when your latest biomed scan is complete.”
“What happened down there?”
But the doctor is gone.
“There was a temporary instability in the ecotecture,” Pheidoh says. “A transient mutation.”
“What kind of mutation?” She was under the impression that mutations were permanent. But maybe not.
The IA hesitates. “It appears that a small portion of the architext is corrupt.”
The architext is the equivalent of the Bible for an ecotectural system. It contains the lines of molecular code that define all of the pherions, genes, and clade-profiles that make up the asteroid’s artificial ecology. “How was it corrupted?” she says.
“A mistake.”
“By who?” Ingrid? she wonders. Liam? Or one of the ICLU refugees Ephraim smuggled onto the asteroid. Could one of them have accidentally done something to trigger—
“It was an IA,” Pheidoh says.
Fola blinks. “You’re kidding?” IAs almost never make a mistake. “Has it been fixed?”
“I think so.”
Pheidoh doesn’t seem too sure. More hopeful than certain. Like the jury might still be out.
“Which IA was it?” she says.
There’s a pause. “I can’t say. It’s confidential.”
The information agent sounds embarrassed—upset the way some people get when they find out that someone close to them, a family member or friend, has done something terrible—as if it were personally responsible.
“What did it feel like?” Pheidoh says.
The question catches her by surprise. “What?”
“The accident.”
Fola grimaces. Tilts her head forward to inspect her arm. It looks okay. Normal. She rubs her fingers together. They don’t feel out of the ordinary—nothing like clay or papier-mâché. “It hurt,” she finally says.
When Pheidoh doesn’t answer immediately the doctor says, “You should try to get some rest.”
Fatigue weights her lids. “No,” she protests. “Wait . . .”
The next time she wakes, the sleepsac is gone. So is the tangle of tubes connecting her to the ICM. She’s free to move around. The interior decor has changed, too. The wallscreens are dotted with Art Frisco flowers, a cheerful assortment of hot pink, lemon yellow, and lime green daisies. The ceiling panels are stained glass. But instead of saints there are delicate flower stems and long-waisted women.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Pheidoh says over her cochlear implant. “I thought a change of scenery might make you feel a little more comfortable.”
It does. She feels calmer. “Who’s the artist?”
“Mucha.”
“You have visitors,” Dr. Villaz informs her. He sounds pleased, about this or something else, she’s not sure. Either way, it’s encouraging.
The pink daisies on one of the wall panels fade to reveal the hexapod outside her cell. Her tuplet has gathered in front of the honeycomb window, anxious but smiling, trying to put on a good face. Without the softwire link between them, that’s all she has to go on. Fola doesn’t know firsthand what they’re feeling. She can guess. But it’s impossible to know for certain.
Fola shifts the position of her arms and legs, then pushes away from the ICM. She gyrates clumsily as she reorients herself, snares a magnetic flux line and drifts over to the window. Executes an unsteady pirouette so she doesn’t splat against the glass like a bug on a windshield.
“How are you?” Alphonse asks, concerned. “They refuse to tell us anything about your condition.”
“I feel fine,” she says. “Except that I miss you all.” She rubs her arms, chafing at the absence.
“We were worried sick,” Lalya says.
The rest of them nod in unison.
“What about you?” Fola says. “Is everyone okay?”
“We’re fine,” Ephraim says. He looks less confident than he sounds. His lips are crimped tight.
All of them are nervous, apprehensive. The tension is contagious. She can feel it even without a shared nervous system. “What’s going on?” she says. “Do you have any idea what happened yet?”
“Are you kidding?” Yulong snorts, gruff as usual. “They haven’t told us shit.” A former vat rat who worked for a major engineering politicorp, she has the least respect of any of them for authority.
“We’re cut off from the asteroid,” Lalya says, matter-of-fact. “That’s what. They shut down the softwire link to the ecotecture so it can’t contaminate us.”
“From the mutation?”
“If that’s what it is,” Ephraim says.
Which explains why she’s in isolation, under observation. If Mymercia was affected, then the orbiting station is vulnerable. The ecotecture is identical. Since she was brought to
the station after the accident, that makes her a risk, a potential carrier.
Fola adjusts the orientation of her arms and legs, stabilizing herself. “Is the station in any danger?”
“Not if we’re disconnected,” Ephraim says. She knows him well enough to know that he’s trying to convince himself as much as her and the others.
“That doesn’t mean we haven’t already been compromised,” Yulong snips. “It just might not have shown up yet, that’s all.”
“If the softwire link is down,” Lalya says, “then whatever infected the ecotecture down there can’t be transmitted to us.”
“We hope,” Yulong says. “If it has, we’ll be the last to know.”
“Construction’s been put on hold,” Alphonse says. “Right now, that’s all we know.”
They seem to be in the middle of an ongoing argument, one that doesn’t include her.
“So what have you been doing in the meantime?” Fola says, anxious to change the subject. Not only does she feel left out but she finds the discord irritating. She doesn’t have the energy or the patience right now to deal with their bickering. It seems pointless. How did she ever put up with it?
Ephraim grinds his teeth in frustration. “Not much we can do.” He’s worse than the rest of them put together when it comes to sitting around.
“We’ve been analyzing sensor data,” Alphonse says. “The last datasquirt from the solcatchers. With luck the sensor readings will be able to tell us something about the system failure.”
“Unless the sensors are wacked,” Yulong says. “They could’ve been looping bad data.”
“True,” Alphonse allows.
Looping, Fola thinks. She remembers standing in a circle. Pudgy Imanol Ealo on one side of her. Snooty Tatjana Soffel on the other. Her fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Udman, leaning over to whisper in her ear. A phrase.
“Your turn,” Ms. Udman told her. “Remember to speak clearly.”
Fola turned to Imanol, whose breath smelled of peppered soytein, and whispered the phrase into his ear. She formed each word carefully, the way she did her letters. Imanol giggled and whispered the phrase to the next person, who whispered it to the next person, and so forth. The phrase was “cystic fibrosis,” and by the time it got all the way around the circle it came out as “sixty-five roses.”
Bad data. Even if the input was good, all it took was a tiny misinterpretation here, a slight mistranslation there. She had spoken clearly, yet the phrase had come out wrong.
Garbage out didn’t always mean garbage in.
“Are you all right?” Pheidoh asks when everyone has left.
She nods. “Just tired.” Instead of energizing her, the visit had the opposite effect. She’s exhausted.
“According to your biomed readings your blood pressure is elevated. So is your heart rate.”
“It’s just that . . .” She shakes her head. Bad sinnergy. That’s what the Jesuettes called it whenever people weren’t in group-hug mode.
“Maybe you should rest—”
“No.” She’s too amped to sleep.
“—or eat.”
No way she can eat. Her stomach is cramped, ulcerous.
“You have a message,” Pheidoh says after a moment.
“Who is it?” Other than Ephraim, she can’t imagine who would want to talk to her.
“Xophia.”
Fola blinks. Stares.
“The transmission is encrypted and was squirted over an unauthorized channel,” the IA warns.
Fola moistens her lips, chapped with sudden nervousness. “Put her through.”
Xophia has changed. Six months on the shuttle have thinned her. She looks tired. Travel weary. Fatigue occludes her eyes, shadows every movement down to the smallest eye blink. Dressed in a pink sprayon jumpsuit, she’s floating close to a recessed, wall-mounted hospital bed covered with gauzy, antiseptic blue sheets. The gauze is wrinkled, twisted around a motionless figure that could be a gerontocrat or half-starved refugee. It’s hard to know. Her view is partially blocked by a fold-down rack of linen-filled trays. Both the jumpsuit and sheets are speckled yellow-brown.
“We’re supposed to maintain radio silence during the trip,” Xophia begins. “But under the circumstances, I think it’s important for you to know what’s going on.”
A muscle in Fola’s eyelid twitches. Her throat pulses.
Xophia shifts to one side. The flitcams streaming her image shift with her, bringing the patient into view. A frail-looking geront with wax-paper skin. The guy’s bald scalp looks diseased—a hodgepodge of wrinkled tattunes that, on closer inspection, appear to be shriveled lips. Puckered, subcutaneous, cancerous. In addition to the sheets, the patient is restrained by g-mesh that limits the movement of his limbs, keeps him from bouncing around the icosahedron-shaped clinic. His face is sunken, caved in on itself. His cadaverous mouth forms a knot of determination around the siptube lodged between his teeth. The thick tube is clogged with brownish sludge. Fola can’t tell if the stuff is going in or coming out. It occurs to her that this is the source of the crusty polka dots on Xophia’s jumpsuit.
“There’s been an outbreak of some kind,” Xophia says. “Within the last twenty-four hours. A lot of people on the shuttle are starting to get sick.” She frowns in irritation as the siptube slides free or is spat out and gobs of the paste erupt from the caldera formed by the geront’s mouth, spewing in all directions.
Fola grimaces. But Xophia doesn’t seem to mind. “Since I’m the only one on board with any emergency medical training, I’ve been pretty busy.” She snags the loose end of the siptube, holds it absently. “The problem is, I have no idea what it is. According to the datastream from Earth we’re monitoring, the same thing is happening back there . . . which is weird. The bruises that are showing up—the growths that people are getting—look a lot like historical stuff you’d find in the mediasphere. Old ad images and tattunes. Pre-ecocaust, mostly. I’m wondering if maybe it’s an ad virus that mutated and went berserk. Whatever it is, it’s being transmitted electronically through the infosphere. Otherwise, there’s no way we could be infected since we haven’t been in direct physical contact with anyone else for months.”
She reinserts the siptube into the geront’s incontinent lips, swabs his mouth with a damp cloth, and replaces his bib. She completes the maneuver deftly, with practiced ease and patience.
“Anyway”—she glances up—“I just thought you should know what’s happening. A lot of the refugees on the shuttle are worried about family members and friends they left behind. But with the radio silence, there’s no way to contact them to find out what’s going on.”
That’s it. The datasquirt ends, a freeze frame with Xophia looking straight at Fola, her hand still holding the siptube in place. There’s something on her palm. A malignant black-and-white face that Fola doesn’t recognize. Then the transmission washes away in a downpour of static.
Hey, hey, whaddaya say,
Let’s all pray for Judgment Day.
“Do you want to reply?” Pheidoh asks.
Fola nods, takes a second to clear her throat and rub her nose with the back of her hand. “What was on her palm?”
“An image of Sydney Greenstreet playing the character of Ferrari in Casablanca.”
“Is that a digital video?”
“No. It’s an old black-and-white flat-screen movie.”
Fola hollows her cheeks as several flitcams, disguised as insects, emerge from the stained-glass foliage to transmit her image.
Five, six, seven, eight,
Meet you at the Pearly Gate.
8
HACK JOB
The only flesh Rexx has ever cut into with a knife, besides a steak, is the scrotum of a deformed calf at the Hello Dolly Animal Pharm.
“If you wanna be a gengineer,” his father had said, “you’re gonna learn firsthand what genes are.”
Rexx was ten at the time and had already decided that the last thing he wanted to do was follow in his fa
ther’s footsteps. Part of it was that he’d always hated his name, which was an acronym for an ancient programming language—REstructured eXtended eXecutor—that his father waxed nostalgic about whenever he got drunk. Rexx might be saddled with the name, but he could hitch himself to another wagon. A different stereotype.
“Genetics is a messy business,” his father said as he led the defective clone from the holding pen to a cutting table in the corral outside. “The sooner you learn that, the better.”
In the searing afternoon light, the scarred tabletop was stained with dried blood and had an empty tin bucket set on the ground next to it. The air was clotted with flies, the stench of burnt cow hair, pig slop, and manure.
“Gonna fix this little feller right up,” the pharm hand helping them said. “Don’t want him shootin’ his wad in the gene pool.” He winked at Rexx, then wrestled the calf onto the table, pinning it.
His father pointed to the scrotum. “Them balls have got a load o’ bad shot. They got to go.”
“Go where?” Rexx said.
The pharm hand grinned, revealing thirty-two pearl-finished teeth. Each one a miniature replica of a Colt .45 grip, designed to pistol-whip his food into submission each time he took a bite.
His father grabbed Rexx by the hand, swallowing it whole in his blubbery whale-size palm, and forced Rexx’s fingers to the squishy testicles. The calf flinched. Rexx jerked.
“Feel ’em, goddamnit! Ain’t no different than yours. ’Cept maybe a tad bigger.”
The balls quivered, then steadied as the pharm hand leaned his weight onto the calf. When the calf was calm, he took out a knife and handed it to Rexx. “Here ya go.”
“Take it,” his father said.
Rexx took the knife. The handle was hot, the blade bright.
“Don’t worry,” his father said. “I’ll help ya.” With his free hand he stretched the scrotum tight around one ball. “Okay, now cut here.” He made an arc with the fingertip of his other hand.
Except for the trembling tip of the blade, Rexx remained motionless.
