Mira started to scurry around the perimeter of the dark thing, Javier moving behind her. The snaking appendages observed them both, but it was the small being’s mind that commanded the demon’s attention. As if with numerous serpents’ tongues, it could almost lick the thoughts that crackled from her mind into the air.
Satin pushed Patryk into the access chute. He was babbling, sobbing, clawing at his goggles to get them off his head as if he feared their rubber frames would melt into his skin. Poised on the rungs set into the wall of the utilities tunnel, Barbie took hold of the boy and helped pull him through. Satin couldn’t see past the shoulder of his pony when he tried to turn his head, but he shouted out for Mira and Javier blindly.
Two of the striped tendrils lashed out, extended like thrown spears. They wrapped themselves around Mira’s head.
“No!” Javier almost fell over her, caught hold of one of the muscular shafts and tried to tear it off her. He had dropped his empty gun.
The tendrils started to contract, then, jerking Mira off her feet, raising her into the air. Her legs kicked and she clawed at the coils across her face as they tightened.
She had let go of Brat’s pistol. It struck the side of Javier’s foot, and he hunched down, felt for it frantically. “No, no, no!” he bellowed, as he looked up and saw Mira being drawn close to the mound of flesh. He scooped the gun into his hand, and pointed it up at the indistinct hump that was the thing’s head.
But he might hit Mira.
But that might be for the best.
“Come on!” Satin roared, unable to see what was happening on the other side. He was tempted to put a plasma bullet into the creature’s back now that he could see its gray flesh more clearly in the light from the utilities tunnel, but the plasma was dangerous as wildfire, and his friends should be coming around its flank, coming any moment. He started folding his cybernetic body into the access chute. The limbs could make it but his torso, broader and inflexible, became wedged.
Javier hesitated, torn, and in that moment the creature brought Mira against its chest. She was engulfed into the heart of shadow. At first, that was what Javier believed. But then he knew it was more than that. Terribly more than that.
He rose, thrust the pistol, and cried, “You fucker!”
The arms came for him next. One slapped over his wrist, looped around it, squeezed. He let go of the pistol’s grip but the trigger guard hooked his index finger. Another limb looped around his throat. He was lifted. He hovered in mid-air. Floated closer to the engorged mass.
He was brought almost level to the face, and an instinct made him close his eyes so that he could not make it out. Snakes...Medusa...he would turn to stone. As soon as he shut his eyes, he heard a voice in his head. It was distant, watery, like a voice over a Ouija phone.
“Javier,” the voice said.
He opened his eyes.
Only inches away from the creature’s chest. But now the arms began to lower him. To loosen from his neck and wrist. He was dropped and fell onto his hands and knees, gasping for breath.
“Javier,” the voice said again, growing fainter. “I can’t hold it.”
“Mira,” he croaked.
“Run!” she blurted, surprisingly loud.
Javier was up and running, then, skidding around the side of the creature. Behind it he saw the lighted access passage, and pushed off to one side was Satin’s abandoned pony like the shed husk of a gigantic spider. Barbie had reached in to help unbuckle him and pull his odd little larva of a body through. She cradled him in her arms now.
Javier dove into the chute, shot through it, almost fell to the floor of the utilities tunnel beyond. He looked up to see Patryk seated against the wall. His eyes were red as if a caustic chemical had been sprayed into them, but when they turned his way Javier knew that his friend could still see.
“Where’s Mira?” Satin said.
“Dead,” Javier told him. He still had Brat’s gun in his fist, and he squeezed it as if he might crush it. Crush it like black coal into a glittering diamond, a crystal from which red laser beams burned, shooting out between his clenched fingers.
“Fuck! Fucking hell!” Satin groaned. He looked up at the access chute. “What are we going to do now?”
“We’re going to go.” Javier took Patryk by the arm and helped him to his feet. “We’re going to go home.” But his eyes returned to the blackness at the end of the access chute he had just plunged through. And his hand still squeezed his gun’s grip. Crushing it. Crushing.
TWENTY-THREE: DEADSTOCK
“This is a prime example of Black Angus cattle,” John Fukuda said, pointing to the specimen in question. “A thick neck and straight back, a wide brisket and round rump, a thick rib eye, and perfect intramuscular fat.”
“And no troublesome head or legs,” Stake added.
“Unnecessary parts. But if you like to dine on heads and legs, maybe I’ll grow a special breed just for you,” Fukuda joked. “Do you want me to throw in tails, too?”
Stake took a step closer to examine the animal, if it could still be thought of in that way. It occupied one of many narrow pens lining both walls of a long central hall, each creature in this section identical. Several hoses were inserted into the blunt stump of the thing’s neck, and one hose emerged from its back end. It rested upon its belly and the flipper-like vestigial limbs that were all it had for legs. It did not stir or shift its body in any way, and its sides did not even rise and fall in the act of breathing. Stake wondered if he would even hear a heartbeat if he were to put his ear against it.
“We use better, more up-to-date processes than what Alvine Products was using,” Fukuda boasted, as they continued on down the high-ceilinged hallway. “And we’re always experimenting with new ones.”
Stake stopped short when he heard a loud burbling sound from one of the headless cattle. He turned to see a young woman in a white uniform making adjustments to a support system on a small rolling cart. On its bottom shelf was the pump that circulated the animal’s fluids. The worker looked up and smiled apologetically at Stake for distracting him. To him, it had sounded like the creature had just been decapitated and blood had been gurgling out of its neck. However, the great living carcass appeared undisturbed in its blissful, dreamless state of oblivion. Stake commented to Fukuda, “You should breed office workers like this. Corporations would love you.”
“What do you think I have working in my administrative department?” Fukuda took Stake by the elbow. “Kidding.” They continued on. “By the way, last month I had an entrepreneur of sorts approach me with the request that I design a headless, limbless breed of human female for a brothel he was hoping to establish at an asteroid mining outpost. His staff, as such, would need a minimum of care. And no pay, of course. ‘The perfect woman,’ he joked to me. ‘No head to complain with, no legs to run away.’”
“What a fuckbag,” Stake murmured.
“Huh? The clones, or him?”
Stake gave Fukuda a look. “Him. So what did you tell him?”
“I declined.”
“Out of a sense of outrage, or because you thought it might make you look bad?”
“Outrage?” They had come to the end of the hallway, and a transverse corridor offered them a choice of directions. Fukuda gestured to the right. “Would you like to see our pork pigs? They come from a fine heritage, a very old breed – extinct in its natural state, actually – called Gloucestershire Old Spots. Very moist meat, with a fine texture. Or are you in the mood for chicken?”
“If I see much more, I might become a vegetarian.”
“I didn’t take you for being squeamish. And you seemed to enjoy that steak I treated you to in the Bioforms cafeteria.”
“I’m just anxious to talk to your man, Fujiwara.”
“Of course. I’ll cut the tour short, then.” He indicated they should go to the left. “This way.”
As they walked down this narrower connective hallway, Stake asked, “So Fujiwara works here,
instead of at your main building?”
“He keeps a lab here and another at Bioforms, as he has projects going at both facilities. He’s one of my best researchers and designers. He has imagination. That was why the owners of Alvine were so keen on hiring him.”
“He was never charged for what their cult was trying to do?”
“What they were trying to do is open to speculation, since it never happened. One could say the creatures they were secretly breeding were an army of monsters for some apocalypse they saw coming. Or one could argue they were an experimental brand of meat product. Anyway, the owners are all dead now. Pablo was just one of their team, doing as he was instructed. He was questioned, but not prosecuted in any way.”
“But did he reveal all his research to authorities?”
Fukuda smiled over at Stake. “Of course not. People have to pay for such knowledge. And pay others not to ask too much about it.”
They arrived at the Research and Development department; specifically, lab suite RD-3. A recognition scanner appraised Fukuda and buzzed him in. Trailing him into the brightly lit series of large, interconnected rooms, Stake idly wondered if the scanner were good enough to have seen through his mimicry had he presently been imitating his employer.
The two men passed work counters covered in computer systems, arcane equipment, printed documents, petri dishes, and the scattered remnants of take-out food and coffee. A holographic model of living cells had them hovering and crawling in the air above one counter, each individual cell as big as a tea saucer.
They found Pablo Fujiwara alone in the furthermost room. Stake didn’t know where to look first – at the man or his specimens. Both were equally eye-grabbing. Fujiwara was a slight man with close-cropped hair but a great, curling and waxed Salvador Dali mustache. He was wearing a Buddy Balloon T-shirt, featuring that VT show’s star, the 150-pound sphere that was Buddy Vrolik. Beneath his image were the words: SOMEBODY KILL ME. It was Buddy’s catchphrase, and he said it at times of duress (as when his family members were having one of their frequent arguments) and at times of overwhelming pleasure (as when a visiting comely female dropped something in front of him and bent over to pick it up). Fujiwara’s pants were of a peach-colored leather. Stake realized they were like Janice’s bed sheets: living human skin cells. He saw a small support pack clipped to the waistband, to keep the cells alive. He then spotted a matching leather jacket draped over the back of a chair.
When they’d come in, Fujiwara was sprinkling something that looked like fish food into a tank filled with a greenish solution, in which writhed a mass of large, fat and lazy eels. They had gill slits but no fins nor even eyes, nothing more than a soft little beak-like mouth, which opened blindly to catch the raining feed. Fujiwara smiled at the approaching men. “My new pets,” he explained. “Do you like boneless chicken?”
“Those are chickens?” Stake said.
Fujiwara was as enthusiastic as an artist at a gallery showing. “A step backwards in deadstock evolution, maybe, but it’s all about building the better mousetrap. Or better mouse. I know there are those markets that wouldn’t purchase this breed or even its meat, because they have brains and the animal lovers will be barking, but these cuties would actually be easier to set up and harvest than the plugged-in battery chickens. So we’ll still find our buyers.”
Stake tapped on the glass as he watched them, then motioned toward a much larger eel-like creature that rested in a long tank dominating a counter against one wall. The tank was so narrow that the thing had no room to move, lying at the bottom like a pinkish log. Stake was reminded of a jumbo-sized shawarma in a Middle Eastern restaurant, ready to be shaved for a sandwich. The living cylinder had a mouth and gill slits but again, no other features. “And what’s that? The king of the boneless chickens?”
“Boneless pork,” Fujiwara said proudly. “I call it my five-foot-long hotdog.”
“Yummy,” Stake commented.
“Pablo, this is the investigator I told you about,” Fukuda cut in. “Jeremy Stake.”
Fujiwara shook his hand, and his expression became a bit more serious, maybe even a little wary. “Hi. You want to know about Dai-oo-ika.”
“Him, and Alvine Products. What were you doing for them?”
Fujiwara picked up a take-out coffee and sipped it, avoiding Stake’s eyes in the process. “I was doing my job. Following orders. Designing and developing.”
“Monsters?”
He snorted. “What a word – monsters.”
“Well, what were those things they had you making?”
Fujiwara hesitated, still not looking at him. “A kind of life form unfamiliar to us in this dimension.” Then, he admitted, “A kind of army.”
“To bring about some kind of apocalypse?”
“I didn’t see the whole picture, you know – I wasn’t part of their cult. I was just one blind man, with his hands on one part of the elephant. But yeah, they seemed to think some big cosmic event was nearing, or else they were going to set it off, and the army was a part of that.”
“But how much havoc could this army create in a colony like this, no matter how big and dangerous the creatures became? If I wanted to bring about a local Armageddon, I think I’d make microscopic creatures instead. A plague.”
Fujiwara met his eyes at last, and looked very grave as he said, “They would have gotten very big, my friend. And I didn’t understand everything about them, but if they’d been allowed to develop fully and mature, it seemed like they were going to have some powerful attributes. Gifts. A range of psi abilities.”
“You say another dimension. So you didn’t design these life forms from scratch.”
“I was given a very unusual DNA sample, and some very unusual information on a chip. They called this chip the Genomicon. I was told the DNA was from an extradimensional life form, but not from any dimension the Earth Colonies have had interaction with, to my knowledge. I don’t know if the Kalians bought it on the sly from a Theta researcher, or what. And they sure as hell weren’t about to tell me that much. Anyway, the DNA was degraded – prehistoric, actually – and I had to sort of extrapolate. Patch it back together.”
“Is Dai-oo-ika the same kind of life form you were growing for the Kalians?”
“Oh no, but related. Another extrapolation. I consulted the Genomicon in making him, too. No, the creatures for the Kalians weren’t as anthropomorphic, though they had some similarities, of course. The Spawn, as they called them, had gills like sharks and just two forelegs, and they were a dark purple color, though like Dai-oo-ika they were eyeless, with only sensory organs like tentacles for a face – a little bit like the eyes of Tikkihottos, I suppose, but I think these were also the creatures’ psi organs.”
Stake turned toward Fukuda with deliberate slowness. “Again, nice pet for your sweet young daughter. You should have made a plague, too, and put it in a locket for her.”
Before Fukuda could say anything, Fujiwara continued, while beginning to nervously twist one end of his mustache around and around his finger. “Look, Mr. Stake, you’ve got to be discreet with this information, okay? The cultists that didn’t die in the earthquake got themselves assassinated by a rival group called the Children of the Elders, who want to make sure this apocalypse never happens. I don’t want these Children coming after me, too, thinking I’m part of the Ugghiutu cult.”
“Mum’s the word. I just want to find this doll, this Dai-oo-ika, for your boss here. Did he tell you my suspicions? That Dai-oo-ika might have harmed the girl who stole him, and ventured off on his own power?”
Fujiwara began pacing, twisting and twisting his mustache. “I thought I’d inhibited his growth. And limited his intelligence.”
“He’s a precocious child.”
The bio-designer made a little groaning sound. “How do you think he harmed her?”
“One of the monsters at Alvine Products consumed a rescue worker like an ameba would. Could Dai-oo-ika do that?”
“Dai-oo-ik
a has light harvesting complexes, for photosynthesis.”
“I’m asking you, do you think he could do what that Alvine monster did?”
“How should I know? I didn’t even know they could do that, let alone Dai-oo-ika!”
“Scientists,” Stake said.
“The best thing you can do, in my opinion?” Fujiwara looked up at Fukuda while he paced. “When you find our friend Dai-oo-ika, you should destroy him. If you’re still able.”
Stake and Fukuda looked at each other grimly. Fujiwara himself had just echoed Stake’s earlier sentiment. Would that be enough to make Fukuda listen?
Stake returned his gaze to the bio-designer. “Maybe you ought to destroy that Genomicon, too.”
Fukuda spoke up. “It’s in my possession now,” he said. “And I’ll...consider it.”
TWENTY-FOUR: PLEASANT CONVERSATIONS
What had earned Ron Bistro his status as the “Punktown Prince of Porn” was no doubt his very ordinariness, which made it easier for the men who watched his vids to identify with him. It made them less intimidated by the proceedings, made them feel they too might frolic with the likes of a Simone Pattycakes or the belly-dancing twins, Ufuk and Ulku Istanbul. Well, at least through Ron Bistro his fans could do so vicariously. He had come into fame when, on the set of a picture he was shooting back when he was a mere camera operator, the scripted action had developed into an all-out orgy and Ron had been dragged by one actress out from behind the camera. His inept enthusiasm had endeared him to his future audience. Now, ten years later, he was less inept in front of the camera, though time had made him all the more ordinary looking.
Today wasn’t the first day he had personally dropped off his daughter Caren at the Arbury School, nor the first time he had applied his charms to his daughter’s schoolmate, Yuki Fukuda. But Yuki had not watched any of his vids and didn’t find him any more charming than the fathers of her other schoolmates (in fact, there were quite a few who she found much more worthy of a crush), and as for his wealth – well, again, every Arbury girl’s father had a wallet that bulged more in the back than anything Bistro had up front. So Yuki merely smiled and nodded politely as Caren’s dad tried to make small talk with her, in front of the school before the first bell had sounded.
Deadstock: A Punktown Novel Page 24
