Bioluminescent vines covered his office ceiling, glowing as brightly as fluorescent fixtures. By the window sat a snackbush; its small, cylindrical fruits tasted like sausage. Around the window’s edge hovered the leaves and blossoms of the honeysuckle vines that climbed the building’s exterior; a few tendrils crawled over the sill. A shelf held a small, boxy veedo unit, its screen accompanying the soft music the unit was bringing into the room with a constantly changing display of random blobs in pastel hues.
Frederick’s office computer was a state-of-the-art bioform. A pot full of dirt erected a thick, woody trunk beside his desk. Branches held broad, stiff leaves before him. One leaf, covered with touch-sensitive spots, served as a keyboard. Four others hung side by side to serve as a monitor, currently displaying the file on Renny’s upcoming court hearing. A box of oblong gigabyte floppy-cards, each in a protective sleeve, sat to one side. One of the sleeves lay empty on the desk. Its floppy lay like the filling in a sandwich between two specialized leaves that could read the pattern of magnetization that encoded all the information the floppy held. The floppies themselves were manufactured; the rest was grown.
Distant sounds, not quite covered up by the music from his veedo unit, caught at his attention. Rattling metal, squeaking wheels, humming machinery, voices. The evening cleaning crew had arrived to vacuum hallway floors, tidy offices, wash windows, water plants. Frederick sighed. He didn’t usually stay so late, even after a meeting. But he made no move to leave.
The voices drew nearer. They were high-pitched, feminine, and there seemed to be three of them, bantering cheerfully back and forth. Frederick felt his anger fade to be replaced by a deep wistfulness. “I wish…,” he said, and he stopped.
“What do you wish, Freddy?” asked the dog. His tail was wagging gently.
What he really wished was the same sort of camaraderie in his own life. Once he had had it. He had had friends. He had had fans. He had been happy. But the Engineers had killed them all. And then he had let the Endangered Species Replacement Program try to console him with a human body. That had distanced him from other people more than his original body ever had.
The dog had called him Freddy, and it hadn’t stung the way it had in the meeting. Perhaps Renny…? He dismissed the urge to say anything other than, “I wish I could make out what they’re saying.”
The dog snorted. “Singing in the cotton fields, Freddy.” He pricked his more acute ears toward the door. “One’s asking, ‘When you goin’ to set a little seed, honey?’” He changed his voice: “The other says, ‘We know you’re sweet on her. There’s bees all round your head all day.’” His voice shifted again: “‘That’s why you wear that kerchief. Save that pollen!’” And then again to sing, “‘Shakin’ my anther for you!’”
Frederick sighed. “They’re bots, of course.”
Renny didn’t answer. Instead, his tail went stiff and he growled softly as a heavier tread sounded in the hall and a rough voice said, “Haven’t you got started yet? Enough goofin’ off!”
The man winced. Such a tone had never been aimed his way, but those that had were bad enough. Too few humans—full, natural-born humans—were not overbearing, abusive, disdainful, condescending, rude. He wondered if the bots were any happier than he in their dormitory ghettoes, away from their human masters and supervisors, their overlords.
Frederick got out of his chair with a grunt. He stepped to the window, looked out at a sky with a thin band of light still hovering on the western horizon. The city’s lights were on, marking windows, streets, and flowing traffic. He shrugged and turned toward the snackbush at his elbow. He picked a sausage. He looked at the dog and half smiled to see his ears pricked toward him, his face expectant. He picked another, tossed it, and turned again to the window.
He stared at the sausage in his hand. Once, he thought, he had had no hands. His mouth had been aimed at the underside of a sink, and later at the ceiling. Someone else had had to put food into his mouth. He hadn’t even been able to feed himself.
And now he worked for BRA. He shook his head at the irony and put the sausage in his mouth. His wife had been in the same fix as he. So had their kids, the calliope shoats. Now Porculata was gone. The kids? He would have liked to send them to Duncan, but Barnum was dead, poisoned by an attendant who had turned out to be an Engineer sympathizer. The other three, Ringling and Baraboo and Bailey, had permanent gigs playing circus music for a New Orleans disney. And when he had offered, they had refused. They were happy where they were. He sometimes thought they were smarter than he, though they had never been able to speak.
The rattle of his office doorknob drew his attention back to the room behind him. He watched the door open, a hand appear, holding a cloth and a pump-bottle of cleaning solution, a figure, her scalp covered with small yellow flowers, her trunk as green as grass and remarkably feminine in the contours that showed beneath the green sheath of her leaves, her face intelligent and sensitive. She wore only a short apron rather like a carpenter’s around her waist; its pockets were weighted down with cleaning equipment. He watched the eyes widen as the bot realized the room’s lights were still on. He heard Renny’s chuff of inquiry, almost as if he had cleared his throat, and he actually, if briefly, smiled at her startled jump.
“Excuse me!” said the bot. “I didn’t know…”
“Come on in,” said Frederick. “You can work around us, can’t you?
She nodded. “But… We’re not supposed to. Will you be here long?”
“A while.” The truth was that he had no idea how long he would linger in his office. There was no work that needed doing, but then there was nothing he could do anywhere else either. “What’s your name?”
After a moment’s hesitation, the bot murmured, “Donna Rose.” She stepped all the way into the room and let the door close behind her. Her eyes searched the room, lighting first on the veedo, source of the quiet music that warded off utter silence, then on the computer, on Renny, his face aimed like a sword at her midriff, his ears sharply erect, his tail furiously active. Finally, she sprayed her cloth with cleaning solution, turned her back, and reached for a nearby shelf.
Frederick and Renny continued to watch her. Her movements slowed and stopped. Her hand still on the shelf, she turned back toward them. “I…”
When she faltered, Renny said, “Been doing this long?”
Her eyes widened at the dog’s words. “Ever since,” she said. “Ever since I started working.” She did not seem very old. “Always this building.”
“Do you know what we do here?” asked Frederick gently.
She shook her head. “I’ve wondered.”
“This is the BRA building,” he explained, and she nodded slowly, uncertainly. That much she had heard. “The Bioform Regulatory Administration. The government set it up when gengineering was still new. It was supposed to keep people from making anything that could get out of control. Like diseases, or genimals that might destroy crops, or plants that would take over forests and fields.”
“Like honeysuckle,” said Donna Rose. She abandoned her cloth and bottle on the shelf and stepped nearer to him.
Frederick nodded. Once there had been a plant called kudzu that had done its best to smother the landscape of the American south. The honeysuckle had replaced it with unsurpassable vigor; the new plant was now found even in Canada, while kudzu was scarce. “BRA wasn’t very successful, was it?” he said. “The technology got too easy to use. It became available to too many people, even in children’s gengineering kits.” He watched her as he spoke, but she seemed oblivious to his reference. One of those kits, he had learned years before, had led indirectly to her kind. A teenaged boy had played with himself as young gene-hackers often did, and… “Now our job is to try to help the world adapt to the inevitable. Sometimes that means fighting—we’ve got gengineers trying to develop a virus to kill honeysuc
kle.” He snorted.
“Is that what you do?” Did she seem suddenly wary? Was she afraid that he might have a virus that would kill her?
He shook his head as Renny growled, “Tell her, Freddy. You’re just as futile as the honey zappers.” The dog looked at the bot. “As soon as they release a virus they think will kill the stuff, it stops working.”
The man sighed. “I’m supposed to protect those genimals that turned out to be smart.” He gestured at the dog. “He’s been hanging around this office too long. He knows more than he should.”
“Too many human genes,” said Renny. “Too nosey.”
“That’s what he’s got,” said Frederick. “So do you, though you’re not a genimal. You’re a plant, a plant with as many brains as me.”
“He’s a genimal, though,” said the German shepherd.
When Donna Rose looked surprised—Wasn’t he human, truly? How could he be a genimal?—Frederick explained how he had gained a human body. Then he said, “But appearances don’t really count, do they? There are too many humans who don’t want us around.” Donna Rose nodded, and he described Renny’s plight.
“The enemy,” she said. “They hate us. They want to kill us all.”
“I’d like to think it’s not that bad,” said Frederick. “But I’m afraid it is.”
“Litterheads!” said Renny. “They want the Good Old Days back. The Machine Age, when all us plants and animals knew our place! And they’ll wreck every bit of gengineering if they get the chance.”
Donna Rose stared at Renny, saying nothing, as if she had never before seen a genimal talk back to a human being, even if that human was only an artifact, a product of the same technology that had made the dog.
As if, thought Frederick, being human was a matter of appearance only. And perhaps it was, to his fellow artifacts. To true humans, born humans, however… He sighed. “You may be right,” he said. “I don’t want to believe it, but…” He had seen the Engineers progress from demonstrations and picket signs to streetside Roachster bakes and terrorist massacres. He had seen news reports of murdered bots, stripped of roots and leaves and flowers. And he had seen the Engineers’ numbers swell. He had seen them gain sympathizers, even within BRA. The trend was there to be seen, though he prayed that it would not go as far as the bot and the dog clearly feared.
“We do the best we can,” he finally added. Briefly, he described Jeremy Duncan’s secret lab. “We keep it quiet,” he said. “We don’t want any attention from the Engineers.”
“There’s a lot more of us,” said Donna Rose. Her voice bore a plaintive note. “I wish you could make us human.”
“Someday, I’m sure,” said Frederick. “The principles are just the same. Though that’s not necessarily the answer.”
The veedo music stopped, and a voice announced a special news program, “Coming up right after we hear from…”
Renny got to his feet, stepped nearer to the bot, and licked her hand sympathetically. “It wouldn’t help,” he said. “It doesn’t help him.”
Frederick shrugged and sighed. “There’s another office for the bots. It sets up the dormitories in the parks. And it’s planning to set up more of them, on rooftops, on islands in the bay. They’ll be harder for the Engineers to get to, safer from whatever they might do.”
There was nothing he could do, Frederick knew. Not for Renny, though he would keep trying. Not for the bots. Not for anyone. The Engineers would rise up on a tide of prejudice and persecution and sweep everything away. His mood was so bleak that he barely noticed when the veedo began to speak of Engineers marching on the bot dorms in the city park.
“Oh!” cried Donna Rose. “What’s happening?”
“Turn it on,” said Renny, his ears pricking toward the veedo set. “Let’s get a picture.”
Frederick obeyed, tapping at the keyboard of his computer. He did not use a mouse-glove, though one lay forgotten in the drawer, because such interfaces worked best with electronic computers. They did not interface well with bioforms.
The small screen replaced its random colors with a long shot down a major avenue. The street was filled with people, and the picture flickered with the flames of torches. Many of the marchers, but by no means all, wore the blue coveralls and cogwheel patches of Engineers. Visible in many hands were kitchen knives, axes, machetes, crude swords of the sort that still haunted Frederick’s nightmares. The narrator was saying, “…heading toward the park. They gathered in the streets less than an hour ago. There was no apparent provocation.”
The view jumped to an outdoor reporter, standing beside the mob of Engineers, a building facade at her back. Beside her was a burly Engineer with an axe over his shoulder. “What are your plans for tonight?” asked the reporter.
“Chop the bots!” was the reply, punctuated by a shaking of the axe in the air.
“But why?”
“They’re obscene! Things! Machines, not genes!”
Donna Rose moaned. Renny crossed the room to the window, where he reared up on his hind legs, scanned the cityscape outside, and said, “You can see the glow from here.”
Frederick and Donna Rose joined him, ignoring the veedo screen for the moment. “See?” said the dog, and yes, they could. The crowd itself was not visible, but despite the streetlights the torches they carried did indeed cast a noticeable glow against the overcast.
“And there,” said Frederick. Where he pointed they could see a street end-on, vehicles excluded by the press of bodies, the pavement obscured by the sparks of a host of torches.
“What are they going to do?” Donna Rose’s voice trembled on the verge of tears.
“Chop the bots,” said Renny. “Just like they want to dock this dog. Purify the planet.”
Together, they turned back toward the veedo screen. It now showed a daylight scene, and the announcer was describing the Engineers’ target: “Every dawn,” he said. “Every day, they leave their jobs just like everyone else at the end of a long day.” The screen showed the weary workers walking, boarding subways, Bernie buses, trains, going home.
“They work in factories. Night shift.” A view of assembly lines, staffed almost entirely by bots, the blossoms on their heads making long rows of colorful blossoms, interrupted occasionally by the smoother heads of humans. “In office buildings.” A cleaning crew like that of which Donna Rose was a member. A human supervisor stood by, idle. “Stores.” A discount store, an all-night diner.
“Going home.” The gates to the dormitories in the parks, the bot ghettoes, the gardens in which they slept and chatted away the days, stood open wide in welcome. They streamed through, found the small plots of earth they called their own, and stopped. The roots that bushed around their shins unraveled, stretched, kissed the earth, and burrowed in. The leaves that coiled around their trunks unfurled to drink the sun. Faces tipped like flowers toward the light. There could not possibly have been a less threatening scene.
The scene changed and changed again until the screen held a group of bot pedestrians striding toward their bus, a Bernie, a greatly enlarged Saint Bernard with a passenger pod strapped to its back. Nearby were three humans, well dressed, prosperous, on their way to their own jobs. They sneered, stepped aside as if to avoid contamination, and passed on. The bots took a few more steps and passed a shabbily dressed human who extended a cane to trip the nearest. As the bot picked herself up, the man grinned and spat. In the background, a grimy face peered from the tangle of honeysuckle that choked the mouth of an alley.
The narrator said, “Prejudice is widespread. The worst comes from the poorest. They blame the bots and the gengineers for stealing their jobs. The poorest, however, say nothing at all. They can’t be bothered. They are the honey-bums.”
The camera jumped back to the park to show the high chain-link fence around the dormitory area, its harsh
lines softened by the leafy mass of honeysuckle growing thickly around its base. Honey-bums lounged near the vines, never far from the drug that consumed their lives. “We try to protect them.” Security guards stood near the entrance to the dorm.
“But security is not perfect.” The scene turned dark once more as the view returned to the present and night. The mob of Engineers had reached the park and begun to spread out, approaching the fence on a broad front. The guards were now conspicuous by their absence, while axes, machetes, and bolt-cutters made short work of the vines, of the fencing, and of any honey-bums or guards who happened to stand in the way.
The veedo cameras spared no detail of the slaughter that followed. The mob used its steel weaponry on every bot who had not, for whatever reason, gone to a job that night. Some, like the human poor, were unemployed, for there were more menial jobs than bots to fill them. Some were heavy with seed. Some were young, not yet even able to draw their roots from the soil and attempt to flee.
Renny lay down on the carpet and whimpered. One forepaw twitched as if he would like to cover his eyes.
“Lily,” screamed Donna Rose as one slender bot was hewn down. “Mindy Alder. Hyacinth. Angelica. Rosa Lee.” For a moment, she hid her face in her hands, but that could not last. She had to see. Her hands moved aside to clutch at her cheeks, the fingers digging into her temples, the nails tearing blossoms loose, blood flowing.
Her blood, the blood on the screen, the blood on the ground, none of it was the colorless or green-tinged or latex-white sap of plants. It was red, as red as that of any true human, as red as that of the Engineers themselves.
The city’s riot police did not arrive until a forest had been laid low. When they did come, riding Sparrowhawks and Roachsters, equipped with tear gas and riot shields and sonic grenades and rubber bullets, the Engineers faded away, flowing back through the gaps they had made in the security fences, returning to their homes, their faces, brought to the veedo screen by long-range lenses, full of righteous satisfaction.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 70
