Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  Chowdhury, his voice taut with anger, said, “I prefer to call them …” But the group’s laughter drowned him out.

  In a moment, when quiet reigned once more, Emily said, “But seriously, have you considered the main drawback to using armadillos as your rootstock?”

  Chowdhury’s voice grew tight, and Emily thought she could detect a change in the odor of his sweat. “There are no problems with my armadillos!”

  Emily showed her teeth in an apparent smile. It was hard to keep her mouth from shifting the little bit that would make the expression an unabashed snarl. “I’ve lived in Texas, Ralph, where the roads are splattered with dead armadillos. The reason is simple: When they are startled, they leap straight upward, just to bumper height. It’s a reflex, as such it’s wired into their nervous systems, and into their genes, and it would be just wonderful for the reputation of your Dillies if the same reflex showed up under a highway overpass. Have you done anything about it?”

  There was a moment’s silence. Chowdhury scribbled quickly on one of the papers before him. Then he said smugly, “That is not necessary.” He tapped his keyboard, and the room’s screen wrote an equation beneath the photo. “Square-cube scaling turns the wild armadillo’s leap into the merest of hops for my ‘Armadons.’”

  Frank raised a hand, one finger jutting toward the screen: “How can it even hop, with the legs on top of the wheels like that? Wouldn’t it tear its wheels off?”

  Alan laughed out loud. Emily was delighted. Chowdhury was far less so. His face darkened, and his fingers mashed his keyboard murderously. The screen blinked out. He said, “That is not a problem. I will be ready to demonstrate my prototype soon, and then you will see. I hope that you will even applaud.”

  No one had a chance to say anything more. A discreet beep sounded from their chief’s, Sean Gelarean’s, place. He leaned over his screen to read some message, and then he said, “Emily? Miss Carol says there’s a police officer in the entry. She wants to interview you about the incident yesterday.” He grinned, and the flesh around his eyes wrinkled. “She says she’s disappointed that you didn’t say anything this morning.”

  Emily snorted and rose from her seat. “I was in a rush.” As she backed away from the table, she glimpsed Gelarean’s feet—almost as small as her own—in the shadows beneath. He had kicked off one shoe so he could use the toes to scratch the other ankle.

  Chapter Four

  Bernie Fischer’s personal vehicle was nothing so satisfying as a Hawk. That was an official police vehicle that must, at the end of each day, be put to bed in the official police Aerie. Despite its name, that structure was on ground level, a huge barn, a stable for all the department genimals. There official police handlers fed the Hawks and Roachsters and flicked their dormancy toggles to put them to bed for the night.

  Bernie didn’t even own a genimal. He had no Tortoise, no Roachster, no Hopper. And the reason was not expense. He could afford one, and there were public stables where he could keep it. But he didn’t need it, for his small apartment was not far from police headquarters. It was so close that sometimes he actually walked to work. Other times, he rode a bicycle and parked it in the Aerie’s broad yard. He chained it only elsewhere in the city; where he worked, it was safe.

  Despite a gray sky and the promise of rain to combat the summer heat, today was a bicycle day. He hadn’t, as he had expected, slept very well. He craved peace, and quiet, and the soft, floating sensation of a Hawk on the wing. The bicycle, when the streets were smooth, as they were by spells, and the litterbugs had been doing their duty, as they generally had, came as close, he was sure, as he would get today. There would be paperwork on both the rape-mutilation and the terrorist attack on the expressway. There might be some legwork to do. He would probably not need the Hawk’s speed or weaponry. They would instead delight some other member of the force.

  He could at least look in on the Aerie before he had to face his desk. He grinned as he pedaled, dodging traffic and pedestrians. If, he told himself, he could get there early enough, he could spend a little time staring at the sleek forms of the Hawks. Perhaps, if the Aerie’s grooms had not done their work as perfectly as usual, he could run a hand down a neck to straighten feathers.

  But he never had the chance. As he pulled into the Aerie’s yard and swung his right leg back and over the seat, standing on the left pedal while he coasted toward the bike rack, Connie Skoglund hailed him. She shouted, one arm upraised, her uniform blouse stretched tight across her torso, and once again he admired her. He changed course and stopped in front of her. Her scent, of soap and perfume, stood out against the earthier odors of the Aerie and made him think of other days, and nights.

  “The Count wants you,” she told him. “Right away.” Above them, a Hawk noisily departed one of the Aerie’s three launch platforms, small, circular decks set against the slanting roof. An elevator within the building carried the birds and their pilots up to what, in a barn, would have been the hayloft. From there, ramps led to arched doorways, each on a different level, stepping upward from the front of the building toward the back. The arches, their tops filled in with stained glass salvaged from some ancient mansion of the city, opened onto the platforms. The platforms themselves pivoted on central hubs, so that the blast shields erected along one edge would always be behind the Hawks when they took off into the wind. They reminded Bernie of the rotating gun platforms on naval warships in old movies.

  He grimaced to show his disappointment. The Hawks would have to wait, while he straightened feathers of another sort. “The Count” was Lieutenant Alexander, the chief of the department’s detectives, and the nickname was appropriate. His parents, presumably suffering from pretensions to glory, had given him the first name of Napoleon.

  “Any idea what for?”

  Connie shrugged. “Something to do with that airliner. All I know is, I’m on witness duty. I’ve got about twenty of ’em to interview today.”

  “See you later?”

  She looked at him appraisingly. “Dinner?” When he nodded, she added, “Come over to my place, then.”

  * * * *

  Historians know that Napoleon Bonaparte was short and suspect that Alexander the Great was not much taller. The Count did better on that score, for he and his immediate ancestors had enjoyed the benefits of better nutrition. His more distant ancestors had been of taller stock, and he was as blond as only a Scandinavian, or one sprung from that region, can be.

  He also had strikingly red lips. Though one might think that a Napoleon Alexander would be called “General” or “Emperor,” and though he was fair, not dark, and was not given to long black capes, that feature was the one that had dictated the form of his nickname. If it failed to capture the flavor of his temper, no one seemed to mind.

  “Fischer! How did those goddamn terrorists get away?”

  Bernie, standing in front of his superior’s desk, gave a deliberately sloppy imitation of a military salute. He had been in the army, and he wasn’t about to give the SOB the real thing. “Sir?” The Count insisted on the word.

  “The night shift checked the passengers. Three quarters of them dead, and every one of them absolutely innocent. Passports in order, no guns in their briefcases or purses. Nothing!” The Count slapped a hand on his desktop in emphasis.

  “The crew, sir?”

  “Dead, every one of them. No one’s talking. But their papers are in order, and …” He snarled. “They had to get away!”

  “I didn’t see anyone leave the Sparrow after it fell, sir.”

  The Count spun in his swivel chair to stare out his office window at the front of the Aerie. A rack of bicycles, including Bernie’s, was visible in the yard below. He sighed gustily. Finally, he admitted, “We have the cockpit voice recorder. It actually looks like there weren’t any terrorists. That Sparrow simply stopped responding to the con
trols. It just went berserk. “

  “Sir? But how …?” Bernie didn’t own a genimal, but he knew they weren’t supposed to act independently. They were supposed to be totally obedient to their masters, except when left to their own devices. That was why he had had to switch off his Hawk on the expressway. Left alone, it might well have eaten the Sparrow, or some of it. But as long as he was at the controls, it had to obey him. That was the way the gengineers had designed them.

  “I have no idea,” muttered Lieutenant Alexander. More loudly, he added, “But they’ve got that thing in a hangar out at the airport, and they’re taking it apart. If they find anything, they’ll let us know. And then—even if they find litter!—you can get to work. I want the son of a bitch responsible!”

  So did Bernie.

  “While you’re waiting on them, I want reports. On that rape thing, and on just what you did see yesterday.”

  * * * *

  Later that morning, after the overcast had burned off and the heat had returned, Bernie’s phone rang, echoing around the carrel that served him as an office. He grinned as he lifted his hands from the keyboard of his official municipal antique, an electronic typewriter with a mere half page of memory. Now, maybe, he could escape. Maybe he could get out of the building. Maybe he could even fly a …

  It was the Count, and his message was simple: “They’ve found something out at the airport, and they want someone to come see. So go. And take a camera.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Delightedly, he launched the Hawk from the Aerie’s uppermost platform, the jets thrusting the bird into the air, the wings snapping into place, the ground dropping abruptly away beneath him. He burned fuel with a prodigal hand, setting a direct course for the airport, wasting no time in soaring to gain altitude, certainly not to mesmerize himself with whirling landscapes as he had the day before.

  Mere minutes later, he was descending on the hangar apron. Dust flew as he parked the Hawk, this time without the dormancy switch, for here there was nothing to make the bird misbehave. He dismounted, stroked his vehicle’s neck feathers with one hand, and strode toward the small door set like a sally port in the hangar’s gate. The electronic camera he had brought bumped against his chest, swinging on the strap around his neck. It would record anything, in any light, that he could see with his eyes.

  A balding man in a gray suit stood beside the door. Bernie introduced himself and held out a hand. The other took it, said, “Alan Praeger, Air Board,” and opened the door. As it closed behind him, Bernie stopped, frozen in place by the scene before him.

  The hangar was, of course, large enough for an airliner. A distant air-compressor labored inadequately to fight off the sun that beat down on the metal roof; the cavernous room stank of sweat and dust and spoiling meat. The Sparrow sprawled across the concrete floor and was dwarfed by the walls around it, and by the human mind’s insistence on interpreting walls on a more human scale. Yet it was recognizably a sparrow, a small—a tiny—bird, and it paradoxically shrank the hangar to the point that the white-coated technicians laboring over the spot-lit chest, neck, and head seemed to have escaped from some tale of munchkins or brownies.

  The Sparrow’s abdomen was open, the exposed flesh already dark and dry; that was, Bernie thought, where the rescue crews had cut to retrieve the bird’s victims. Great gashes, still shining wet, had clearly only recently been opened by the technicians’ laser scalpels. “We’ve been dissecting the thing,” said Praeger with a gesture.

  “I hear you found something?”

  “Over there.” Praeger pointed to the other side of the hangar’s cavernous space, where more spotlights illuminated the Sparrow’s passenger pod. More technicians labored there, their efforts concentrated on the cockpit area. Praeger started walking, and Bernie followed.

  A bench had been set up to one side of the work area. Most of it was covered with the workers’ tools and test instruments. One end was clear, except for a padded case that stood open like a casket awaiting a shipment of crown jewels. Their course, Bernie realized, would end at that casket, and he wondered what they had found.

  Praeger pointed at the casket. The padding was creased in the center, like that in a jeweler’s ring box. In the crease rested a black plastic oblong with numerous metallic legs. “A chip,” said Bernie.

  Praeger nodded. “It had been added to the controller’s motherboard. We have no idea what it does yet.” He drew a pen from his shirt pocket and pointed at a line of identifying numbers on the chip’s casing. “We do know it’s a PROM— programmable read-only memory—chip. With the right equipment, someone could have stored a program in this thing.”

  And if that program could have taken over the Sparrow … “The perfect sabotage,” said Bernie. “Like a virus program.” The police had been dealing with those for decades. Invented for laughs when computers were new, soon adopted by saboteurs and vandals, now they were a favorite weapon in battles for corporate control. They were also used by political terrorists.

  Praeger nodded again. “Long-distance. Remote control. And untraceable.”

  Bernie could already visualize other possibilities. A crook could make an armored car deliver its cargo wherever he wished. Or send a murder victim’s vehicle over a cliff. Or separate a kidnap target from its guards. Or … He reached for the casket.

  Praeger stopped him. “No, Officer. This is a federal case.” Bernie agreed reluctantly. The man was right on two counts: Anything to do with terrorism was inevitably and promptly yanked out of local hands, as was anything that interfered with interstate commerce. But the feds did know that the local yokels could help. That was why they had summoned him, and … “It stays with us. We’ll let you know when we’ve analyzed the program.”

  Bernie had to settle for what his camera could record.

  * * * *

  Aloft once more, Bernie set his Hawk to soaring in circles, but this time he paid little attention to the whirling landscape. He was thinking: It would be weeks before the feds had any results to share, and there was no reason to expect that the chip would reveal a thing about who had set it to subvert the Sparrow. He needed a different approach, an alternative way to seek the villain responsible.

  Could he dismiss the idea that terrorists had done the deed? Too many groups had tried to claim the credit, but he could not rule out the possibility. He preferred it, in fact, to the thought that the villain was some nut bent on random destruction. Either might be the case, though he would rather hunt a rational foe—if rational was a word that could possibly fit with such a crime—one with a reason for his act, for through that reason, he might be able to track the man.

  Bernie reflected on what any detective had to look for when he sought to solve a mystery. Modus operandi? That was unique, and therefore no help. There would be no clues in the department’s records of the past. Did anyone gain from the Sparrow’s attack? There must be dozens of insurance beneficiaries, heirs, disgruntled spouses. The sort of pedestrian grunt-work checking all of them out would need could safely be called a last resort. Who had had the opportunity to install the chip? Just every maintenance worker and pilot who had ever been in the Sparrow’s cockpit, in every airport it had ever landed in. Even, for that matter, in the factory that had built and installed the control unit.

  What was left? Nothing. It was indeed the perfect crime, untrackable until the villain—terrorist or whatever—said or did something to arouse suspicion. Perhaps, however, he could study that modus operandi. He could find out, even before the feds reported, just how a non-spec chip like the one they had found would have to work. How could a tiny thing like that possibly take over something as huge as an airliner? How could it possibly make the airliner do things so far outside its normal range of behaviors?

  He needed a gengineer. Fortunately, he remembered, he knew one. He had met her just the day before. She had even
been on the expressway, in the midst of the disaster, and she should therefore have some interest in the case. Now all he had to do was remember her name, and where she worked. Unfortunately, all the papers he had filled out, with all the information he needed, were back in the office.

  But … Neoform was the company. That much he recalled. And he knew where that was located. He tipped the Hawk’s soaring from its endless circles into a straight-line course. As he flew, he struggled to recall the name. The kid, the kid with the feather, his name had been Andy. Hers …? The Neoform complex grew visible in the distance, and it came to him: Emily.

  * * * *

  When he reached the Neoform headquarters, he was surprised to find another departmental Hawk in the parking lot. It had been toggled into dormancy, presumably because of the Buggies that surrounded it. If it had not been shut down, it might not have been able to resist temptation.

  He took an empty space across the aisle, positioning his Hawk so that it faced the other, and put it as well to sleep. Who else was here? Was their business related at all to his own? He supposed he would find out soon enough.

  As he walked toward the building entrance, he noticed a Tortoise drinking from the trough before it. Its shell bore splatters of something that had once been liquid. He supposed that most who noticed would have no idea of what the liquid might have been. To him, the splatters said that this was indeed the right place, and Emily—Emily Gilman, that was it—was here.

  As he approached the glass doorway, he thought he recognized the figure standing before the receptionist’s barrier. Connie, here? She had said she would be interviewing witnesses, and the computer would have parceled out the lists. Had it been alphabetic? Or random? His hand hovered over the door handle, and he decided it didn’t matter. It was just coincidence that their paths had crossed here and now.