Prime

by Nate Kenyon

  He took a table near the back, next to a couple of bodyguards with bands of grafted muscle across their backs and arms and a group of mutilants with artificially cleft palates and disease-enhanced skin. They looked at him as if he didn't fit in. A long time ago he'd had a girlfriend who'd looked at him like that. She'd decided to go in for elective surgery to remove her right breast, and he had been unable to talk her out of it. He was old fashioned. Preferred his women with two breasts. The last time he heard she was dancing in some high profile pheromone club that catered to fetishists. Go figure.

  A woman approached him from the bar. She was tall and slender and wore a black, skintight bodysuit. She had the sort of unique looks plastic surgery couldn't fake: a round, cherubic face, nose a little too long, eyes wide apart and very dark; the symmetry of her features was off just enough to be intriguing. He'd seen her somewhere before and it unsettled him. He never forgot a face.

  She slipped into the seat across from him. “I know you—you're the guy from New York, right? What do they call you—the Librarian? What are you doing here? Something to do with New London Tower?"

  "Just a pleasure trip."

  "That's a killer bug, you know? Nobody wants to use that wire anymore. Used to be some of the best gamers were on it. They gotta be getting somebody to go in. You'd be the guy if it were me."

  "Sorry.” He couldn't help staring at her familiar face, taken by the way she seemed utterly unaware of the effect she was having on the entire room full of men. Yet she knew plenty about the New London web scene. Maybe she just watched it on the news, like everyone else.

  "So why do they call you the Librarian?"

  "What?"

  "Your hack name, silly. Where'd you get it?"

  "The New York Exchange. I guess because I get in and out fast and quiet, and I know what I'm doing. I don't fuck around."

  Hint of a smile. The light, musky scent of pheromone perfume. Her tongue peeked out to wet full, pink lips. “'Seventeen seconds to glory?’”

  It was what they'd started calling the NYE job after it was all over and the bug was dead. In the free net chat rooms he had become something of a celebrity in a star-starved world. Ever since the Hollywood crash there had been many digital heroes, but few real ones. Big business sculpted and packaged everything with such precision it was difficult to tell where reality ended and dark marketing began.

  "I suppose so. My fifteen minutes."

  "So what happened to you, anyway?"

  "I retired. It's a tough life, and I figured I could sleep late, build holograph projection kits in my basement, watch the races. Seemed like a good idea at the time."

  "But you were so good—the Maui crash, everything...” she touched his bare forearm with her fingers, and it felt like an electric shock. He maintained his calm and managed not to jump, but only just. Lightly stroking his skin, she held his gaze with her own. “I watched you in the Vid-net. You were very nice-looking in that."

  "It was a reconstruction. They smoothed my face and gave me a stronger jaw.” Something was wrong here. If she knew so much about him, why didn't she know where his nickname came from?

  "What's your name?"

  "Kara."

  And then it hit him, where he'd seen the face: in old movies, the two-dimensional kind blown across a flat screen. His father used to get drunk and watch them late at night in the basement.

  "You're a clone. What'd they give you, sixteen years of memories? That's more than most get."

  She removed her hand. His flesh tingled slightly where she'd touched him. “You don't have to be so awful about it. I was just being nice."

  "Sure. Nice is good business. But I have to be honest, you're making me a little uncomfortable."

  "And why is that?"

  "You approach me at a bar. You're wearing an outfit that presents you as a sexual object. You're touching my arm within two minutes, and your perfume is specifically designed to arouse men. So far, so good, except you're asking me detailed questions about my life, which doesn't compute. If I were a john, you'd be quoting me prices right now."

  Kara sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. Classic defensive posture, Bellow thought. Also didn't fit. God, but she was beautiful. What the hell was he doing here with her, anyway? He had a job to do, and he could begin down in the sewers, off the grid. As good as she looked, he didn't figure this woman was going to get him there.

  "Excuse me for being impressed by your work."

  "I'm not exactly the type of man you'd be interested in, now am I? Again, assuming you're not looking for payment for your services."

  "What sort of man do you picture me with, exactly?"

  "One with money, for one thing. A sense of style and culture. Someone who knows his place in the world and goes after women like possessions to put on the shelf in his trophy room."

  "Women as sexual experiences,” Kara said. “Conquests. I think you have the wrong idea about me."

  "I think you're lovely."

  "And I fuck like a holovid star. Is that right? You think I'm a whore. It must be easier to go through life jumping to conclusions like that."

  "In my line of work, you have to judge a situation quickly. If you don't, you might end up dead."

  "I have all my shots,” Kara said. “If that's what you're wondering."

  But Bellow was no longer listening. Through the window he'd caught a glimpse of the same boy who had passed him on the way into New London Tower, the one with the tattoo. Something in the boy's face as he walked by...

  Bellow was up and out of his chair before he had a chance to think. He heard the girl shout as he pushed past the bouncers at the door, then skidded left and pounded down the pavement, leaving the club's music behind. The boy was barely visible up ahead in the fog, black jacket trailing out behind him like a cape. He ducked into a vintage leather shop, Bellow close at his heels, and pushed through racks of musty smelling bomber jackets right out the back into a narrow alley where steam vents hissed and sputtered like angry machinery.

  A door closed on Bellow's left with a slight click. It was short and squat, ebony metal, almost seamless within the soot-blackened brick. He blinked and pulled up an access grid. The door didn't show up on any web map. If he hadn't seen it swing shut, he would never have known it was there. Bellow had his wind up. New London wasn't as dangerous as some places he'd been, but there were plenty of spots to get in trouble. When he had been younger, he'd been able to handle himself just fine. But it had been a while since he'd been in a scrape, and his joints wouldn't work quite as well as they once had.

  The handle had a thumbprint lock, but it was an old model and easy to bypass. In less than twenty seconds he had it open.

  The corridor was lit with ancient tube fluorescents and crisscrossed by laser sentries. Bellow darted down the gritty tile, ignoring the beeps as the sentries armed themselves and centered on the small of his back. The corridor was too short for more than one shot. He counted silently to himself then darted quickly to the left as the charge released with a low pulse of sound. Light dug into the tile by his right arm, spitting up sparks as he skidded around the corner in time to see the boy slipping along the edge of a cavernous room filled with genetic equipment.

  Tables with thermal-cyclers, gene extractors, Deepwell plates, tumblers, freeze dryers, and microscope cameras lined the walls next to full-size freezers coated in titanium. Containers filled with test tubes and sample jars sat behind a refrigeration unit with a tempered glass door. In another corner, a robotic arm slumped lifelessly over a deep steel sink and dissecting table, along with a professional holodeck imaging unit.

  Bellow spotted a centrifugal concentrator floor unit and a top-of-the-line Tampo High-III Universal High-Throughput Screening System. Whoever owned this space was not messing around, he thought. The equipment alone had to be worth millions.

  But that was not what kept his attention. Vats filled with half-formed clones took up much of the central space. Genetic growth timelines
had been tweaked; Bellow could almost see them expanding before his eyes.

  Bubbles trickled to the surface. He heard a sound like water in a bathtub as one of the half-formed shapes twitched inside its vat of saline and blood, a bony limb ticking against glass.

  Bellow saw a shadow move behind the vats, and he stepped forward. The boy did not try to run. He smiled as Bellow jacked him up against the vat.

  "I told them to leave me alone. You go tell them again. No tails, understand? I do this my way or I'm gone."

  The holographic hand on the boy's skull flexed like a spider crawling down his face. Bellow flinched and the boy twisted under his arm and darted away, his shadow bulging and oozing beyond the murky fluid tanks.

  Bellow let him go. His interest had been caught by something else.

  He stepped close to one of the tanks, a curious trembling in his stomach. There was a full-term clone inside. The shadow of a woman's naked breasts and curve of hips floated close, closer, and its features became visible. The eyes were closed, the nostrils not quite defined, but the looks were unmistakable.

  Kara's sleeping face drifted down at him through smeared glass.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  -5-

  His contact from Kong Nuantan's restaurant was small and lithe and spoke a broken Korean dialect that was hard to follow. He led Bellow back through the tiny dining area with its cheap plastic chairs, buffet line, and the smell of a damp basement into the narrow galley kitchen. Woks hissed and spit steam as the smell of ginger and scallions filled the air. The workers, Hispanic or Brazilian, all wore identical mesh uniforms with leggings underneath, their hair held back with nets. Several of them had prison holo-tattoos on their right wrists, the mark of the Jupiter moons.

  At the back door, a second man emerged from the shadows and ran a hand along Bellow's body, pausing once near his right armpit. The man removed a tracking bug the size of a tick and squashed it between his fingers before it could nip and scrabble away. “One moment,” the man said in English. He removed a pulse wand from his back pocket and switched it on. Bellow heard a sound like a hundred tiny marbles falling to the floor as the rest of the tracking bugs that had bred on his clothing went rigid, their navigation systems disrupted by the pulse, and tumbled from his body. He wondered who might have placed them on him: Crowther or maybe the boy while they were struggling among the vats.

  It could have been any number of people, Bellow thought. There were very few places to hide from big business. He'd been sloppy, off his game. That worried him. The six years spent in retirement at the eco-pod in Arizona, partially shielded from the heat while cultured grasses grew in soft green carpets across golfing ranges and neatly manicured backyards, had softened him more than he realized. He didn't know why that had seemed like a good idea in the first place; manufactured suburbia had never been his thing. How had he spent his days, anyway? He had vague memories of a slow and painful recovery after Mexico City, making woodcraft projects in his basement and surfing vacation sites online through a drug-induced haze, but nothing concrete. It didn't seem possible that he could have survived.

  The two men showed him out into a small alleyway where a manhole cover was ajar. Bellow pushed it the rest of the way aside and stepped down onto a rusted, dripping ladder, the rungs slimy with mold.

  His senses were tingling as the two men set the manhole cover back in place and he was plunged into darkness. This was not a frequently used entrance; his information was old.

  He navigated down the rest of the way by feel, and at the bottom he lit a glow stick and stuck it in his front pocket. He was standing in about a foot of water at the entrance to a sewer line just big enough for him to walk through upright. It looked unused, and he wondered if he'd made a mistake. But then a light flashed at him from somewhere far ahead in the dripping darkness, and he set out through the muck, the sounds of tiny rodent feet skittering out of reach.

  When he reached the end of the tunnel, the shadowy figure of a woman in dark clothing stepped out through a narrow gap in a series of rusted iron bars set into the wall. If he hadn't seen her emerge, he would have never imagined that a human being had passed that way in the last hundred years. She shined a flashlight in Bellow's face, blinding him. “Are you clean?"

  "You already know I am from the sentries up top."

  "Implants?"

  "Corneal."

  She glanced away and fumbled with something, and the light slipped down for just a moment. Bellow caught a glimpse of smooth, naked neck and soft hair. I could have taken her out right there, he thought. It was comforting to know he still recognized an opening.

  She removed a device the size of a deck of cards from a battered blue backpack, the kind with double zippered pockets. Then the light was back in his face. He felt a momentary flash of heat as the wave disruptor did its work.

  "You'll be offline for about two hours, no permanent damage,” she said. She lowered the light and looked at him in the soft yellow glow; he saw jet-black hair and the same beautiful features from the bar.

  "I don't believe it,” Bellow said. “What the hell are you doing down here?"

  "Did you think it was an accident, bumping into you like that?” Kara said, a smile gracing her lips. “Chin-Hae got your message. We had to make sure you weren't followed."

  "But you are a clone."

  "Recruited and officially offline,” she said. “Been working with the resistance for a few months now. I was right behind you out of the club, but I lost you in the alley. Why were you chasing that kid, anyway?"

  "Not sure,” Bellow said. He thought about the half-formed shapes he'd seen in the vats, drifting among the blood and saline. He was again unsettled by how slow he'd been on the uptake; he'd let her get too close before without knowing her game. It wasn't like him, and he wondered if Mexico City had done permanent damage, after all. If so, this would be his last job, and it would surely end in a bad way.

  He wondered, not for the first time, if this were some kind of test he didn't need to take, and whether he was like a washed up ballplayer who wanted to return to some past glory but wasn't smart enough to know when his skills had eroded too far to get him there.

  She reached out and touched his chest. “I meant what I said in that club, you know. You ... fascinate me. I don't know why. I feel like I know you."

  "You should be more careful who you meet in dark, lonely sewer pipes."

  "You can't deny there's a connection. So what are we going to do about it?” The sexual energy flowing through her was almost unbearable. Her hand remained on his chest, and he could feel the heat of her touch through his clothes.

  Maybe he'd misjudged her when they first met, or maybe not. One thing he did know was that he couldn't afford to get distracted.

  He took a step back and her hand fell away. He felt a momentary ache at the look on her face. “Business,” he said. “Before pleasure."

  She studied his eyes a moment, then shrugged. “Did you bring something for him?"

  He dug the motherboard out of his pocket. “It's not much. Late nineties, I think."

  Kara took it in her hands and inspected it. “He'll be pleased."

  She led the way back through the gap in the bars and into another tunnel. That led to another, then another. He saw no signs of human traffic in any of them. A few minutes later, they faced an ancient iron door with a spin lock—the kind that looked like it belonged on a submarine hatch. Kara turned it with little difficulty and the door swung open without a sound.

  Beyond the door was a chamber made of old stone and concrete. Two men with portable directed energy weapons stood at attention about ten feet away. Bellow had been hit with one before and the pain had been nearly indescribable. Like cooking in his own skin. He showed them his palms.

  "This really him?"

  "He's okay,” Kara said. “Stand down, Charlie."

  They lowered their weapons. “Doesn't look like much,” the other said. “Supposed to be some big deal
bug hunter? What's the—"

  Bellow was across the room in less than a second, disarming the one on the left with a soft Kali chop to the hand, careful not to break any bones, while removing the other's weapon with a gentle twist. It all happened so fast that nobody else had a chance to move.

  The two men took a step back, mouths hanging open, the one called Charlie rubbing his wrist where Bellow had chopped him. Bellow smiled. He had worked hard on Filipino hand-to-hand combat practices when he was young, and he was glad to know he wasn't as rusty as he'd feared, at least not with this. The techniques came in handy often enough.

  He had a feeling he was going to use them again very soon.

  "Hey,” Kara said. “You didn't have to do that. Charlie, don't be such an ass. He's friendly."

  "If these are the kind of resistance fighters Chin-Hae is recruiting, you're all in trouble,” Bellow said.

  "No harm, no foul,” the one named Charlie said as Bellow handed the weapon back. He stepped away from the second door. “Sorry, dude."

  This one was new steel with a fingerprint lock. Kara pressed the pad of her thumb to the lock, and it clicked open. A wash of voices hundreds strong hit Bellow in the face as the door opened, along with the ripe smell of many human bodies living in close proximity. Beyond lay a huge chamber teeming with life and divided clumsily into cubicles with cardboard and frosted plexiglass, tiny living quarters dotted with microwaves and couches and narrow cots.

  Wash lines were strung up overhead, clothing hanging limply from them. Electric cords snaked everywhere through the dirt. A little boy with a dirt-smeared face peered out from behind an old cookstove, pointing a toy gun made of a plastic drawer handle and a rubber band at them.