By the time I got home, I found a message on my machine from one Beryl Hollyburn, Dr. Skyhill's executive assistant, confirming that I and my guest had an appointment at ISP the next day-that is, today-at eleven. I immediately called Jocasta. Barnard was right that I'd need someone along who could ask intelligent questions and understand the answers. Jocasta's field wasn't specifically biotech or bioengineering, but she was closer to the mark than I was. Besides, I didn't want to drag someone else in to this.
Hold the phone: What if, as I suspected, our murderous X was part of ISP? Wasn't I leading us both into the killing ground?
Not really, I reasoned (desperately wanting to believe my own argument). Although my confidence had been temporarily shaken yesterday, it still seemed logical that X was at the middle-management level, and that his/her senior management didn't know what was going down. Geeking me and Jocasta at the facility, or in transit to or from the place, would attract too much unwanted attention from within the corp, let alone from outside it.
And to maximize the potential for attention, I'd set up a "dead man's switch" with the information that I already had. I'd written a simple program on my telecom that would, unless I manually keyed in an override, dump everything I knew to three destinations: Jacques Barnard, Mark Kurtz at Lone Star, and the city editor at the Seattle Intelligencer datafax. As added protection, I sent Barnard a text-only message explaining what I'd done, and suggesting that he disseminate that information to whoever he thought would benefit from hearing it. Sure, there were ways of defeating that class of precaution, but it was much better than nothing.
The minimal confidence I felt began to slip as we pulled up to the gate. Three fully-armored security guards watched us from various angles, while a fourth removed his helmet and approached the car.
Silvered corneas reflected the light as that one looked us over. Then his fingers flew over the keypad of a palm-sized computer that hung on his belt and plugged into his datajack. I could imagine the tiny unit transmitting an image of me downloaded from those cybereyes, and a central machine somewhere comparing that image with an "authorized visitors" file. Everything must have matched up, because it was only seconds before the mirror-eyed sec-guard said, "Welcome to Yamatetsu, Mr. Montgomery. Follow the road to the administration building. Please don't make any improper turns."
He didn't complete the thought-"or we'll blow you to hell"-but it hung almost tangibly in the air. "Enjoy your visit," he. said-somewhat inappropriately, I thought-and stepped away from the car. The gate silently rolled back, and I drove through.
"Friendly sort," I remarked. Jocasta didn't respond, just kept looking out the window.
The road leading to the administration building was well-marked, leaving no reasonable excuse for straying off course. There were a couple of alternate turnings, leading to outlying buildings, but all such intersections were marked with big glowing No Entry signs in English, Kanji, and interlingual icons. The admin building was almost half a klick from the front gate, which meant the ISP industrial park was bigger than I'd thought.
We pulled up into the lot before the low, windowless building, and I parked in one of the spaces marked Visitors. As I killed the engine, Jocasta finally pulled her gaze away from the view out the window and looked over at me. "I don't like it here," she said quietly. "It feels"-she searched for a word-". . . cold."
I gave her a reassuring smile, though I didn't feel overly reassured myself. "Chill," I said lightly. "It's a corp research facility. Not the most inviting place to spend time." She nodded, but her expression of discomfort didn't change.
I thought about it as we got out and approached the building's front door. I'd heard that magicians can sometimes sense the nature of a location, the emotional equivalent of radioactive background count. Places where there's been suffering or horror would have an especially high count and be greatly disturbing to a mage. This place? While developing their SPISES technology, ISP must have "expended" hundreds of experimental animals, doubtless in unpleasant ways. And later they'd implanted that dehumanizing technology into human subjects. No wonder the place had a nasty, cold feel to it.
The front door soughed open as we approached, revealing to us a reception area that was stylish and almost attractive in a corporate-soulless kind of way. Contemporary furniture, plaques denoting civic awards on the walls, the Yamatetsu logo-a stylized Y-on just about everything. Facing us was the obligatory curved reception desk, with curvaceous receptionist seated behind it. She looked up as we entered, and bathed us in that generic broad, welcoming smile I was coming to know so well. "Welcome to Yamatetsu," she said, but unlike the gate guard, she sounded almost like she meant it. "Mr. Montgomery, and ...?" She smiled at Jocasta, waiting.
"And associate," I told her. Her smile didn't fade one iota. "Of course. Please wait one moment." She touched a key on her desk, and I saw her lips move even though I couldn't hear a sound. Implanted phone, I assumed. I wondered idly how they'd equip next year's model.
Before I was even aware the receptionist had finished, the door beside the reception desk opened and a young elven woman emerged. About my age, short with straight dark hair, she looked like the consummate professional. I recognized her from the telecom message as Beryl Hollybura, Skyhill's executive assistant. She smiled frostily, didn't offer to shake hands. "Dr. Skyhill will see you now," she said coolly. She turned and went back through the door, assuming without a backward glance that we'd follow.
We followed. Down a typical corp office hallway, brightly lit but sterile. I watched Beryl's rear aspect, but found her walk as lacking in attraction as her manner. Jocasta noticed my scrutiny, and snorted with wry amusement. The elf stopped at a door, tapped on it discreetly. I noticed the plate on the door: no name, just the words "Managing Director." There was a muffled response from inside the room. Beryl swung open the door, stepped out of the way to let us enter.
Enter we did, into a spacious, executive-style office. To the left of the door was a comfortable conversation group consisting of a leather couch and two matching chairs around a marble-topped coffee table. To the right was a large desk and credenza set. The conversation group and the rest of the office were scrupulously tidy, but the desk and credenza were comfortably messy, apparently the preserve of a "hands-on" type of manager, he layout was like a comer office, and though two huge windows appeared to be set into two of the walls, the view from those "windows" definitely wasn't Fort Lewis. An azure-blue sea lapped against a tropical beach while palm trees swayed in a gentle breeze. The illusion was so near-perfect that I almost expected to smell salt mixed with the scent of tropical flowers. Jocasta and I both stood and stared like tourists.
The man seated behind the desk chuckled. "My indulgence," he remarked. "I find it relaxes me." He stood up and came around toward us, extending a large hand. "I'm Adrian Skyhill."
I looked him over as we shook hands. He was human, just slightly taller than me, which put him just under two meters, but his bulk made him seem even taller. He was barrel-chested, with a healthy gut. On a smaller man it might have looked obese, but on Skyhill it looked merely ample. He had a round face, with sandy hair and beard, both kept short. There were laugh-lines around his eyes, and his wide mouth seemed to fall naturally into a smile. I disliked him on sight.
I did my best to conceal that reaction. "Derek Montgomery," I said, matching the pressure of his grip.
"Delighted," he said, releasing my hand and turning to Jocasta. "Ma'am?"
"Call me Jane," Jocasta said coolly. Skyhill took her hand gently, and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss it.
"Then I'm Adrian," Skyhill said. He waved vaguely toward the sofa and chairs. "Please, sit." Jocasta and I settled on the couch, while Skyhill took a chair. "Barnard suggested I meet with you, and Kyoto had no objection," he went on, "so here we are. I can give you an hour"-he favored Jocasta with a smile-"no more, I'm afraid." He crossed his legs and sat back. "What can I do for you?"
Jocasta was about to
ask the first of the questions we'd discussed, the one about the exact nature of ISP's research. But something that Skyhill said had caught my attention, and I jumped in instead. "What you just said makes me wonder about the connection-management-wise-between ISP and Yamatetsu Seattle. Do you report to Jacques Barnard?"
Skyhill paused. "It's a little complicated," he said.
"Try me." I told him.
For an instant I could see displeasure on the big man's face, but then his insincere smile returned to cover it. "Yamatetsu favors a matrix-management scheme," he said, "but that's 'matrix' in the old sense, having nothing to do with computer networks.
"According to our management paradigm, I report both to Barnard here in Seattle and to Senior Executive Vice President Eiji at our central headquarters in Kyoto. This ensures that the ISP Division has some autonomy, but prevents our international mandate from being compromised in the name of local concerns." He smiled. "I'm sure it doesn't make much sense."
On the contrary, I understood precisely what he was saying. I also knew that Jacques Barnard must hate the setup with a passion. ISP Division, theoretically, was under the umbrella of Yamatetsu Seattle, which meant that Barnard had profit-and-loss responsibility for Skyhill's organization. But Skyhill had somehow found himself a patron-this Eiji-higher up the hierarchy in Kyoto. Eiji had apparently dictated that Skyhill report equally to both Barnard and himself. From Skyhill's earlier comments, it seemed that Eiji had to concur before Skyhill would blow Barnard's direction. It was the classic prescription for management infighting and an ulcer for Jacques Barnard: P and L responsibility but without the unquestioned authority to back it up. No doubt Skyhill was maneuvering for a shot at Barnard's job, and unless Barnard did something to take him down before he made his move, he'd probably get it. Interesting.
But I hid my speculations behind an expression of vague confusion. "I've never really understood corporate politics," I told him. Then I nodded to Jocasta to go ahead.
"Dr. Skyhill," she began politely, "we understand that the ISP division is concentrating on some kind of electrochemical glandular stimulation. You might call it 'booster technology.' Is that so?"
He nodded. "That's our main thrust at the moment. We call it our Sympathetic-Parasympathetic Integrated Suprarenal Excitation System, or SPISES, for short."
"You did all the preliminary R and D here?" she asked.
"Not really. In fact, we purchased the original technology from a company in the Midwest, whose name I can't mention. Confidentiality agreements and that kind of thing. The tech was in a pretty primitive state when we acquired it, but we invested several tens of millions of nuyen into research and development-all done here in this facility. SPISES is now the premier reaction accelerator and energizer in the world."
"You must have done extensive testing with animals," she remarked.
"Of course," he agreed. "Again, all on-site." He stood and crossed to his desk, picked up a palm-sized remote control unit. His thick fingers touched some keys, and the beach view in one of the office windows" vanished, to be replaced by a simple line map of the ISP facility. A blinking cursor appeared on the map, moving under Skyhill's control to highlight features as he mentioned them.
"We're here, in the central Administration Building," Skyhill began. "Visitor parking in front here, and down south is the gate you came in. This building contains nothing but offices, meeting rooms, that kind of thing. In the basement is the computer system that serves the entire facility." We nodded obediently. "The other five buildings ring Admin at a distance of fifty to a hundred meters." He smiled beneficently at us.
"We wanted to give the workers a sense of space around them, so they wouldn't feel hemmed in, claustrophobic, like people sometimes do in other, less well-designed facilities."
"You've been here from the beginning, Dr. Skyhill?" I interrupted.
"I came aboard six years ago before the corporation had even bought this land. It was Jay Hawkins, Barnard's predecessor, who hired me."
Skyhill's voice contained no hint of animosity, but I filed that fact away for future reference.
Concealed bitterness over Barnard's receiving the senior veep position that Skyhill had wanted? Perhaps.
Skyhill was continuing with his electronic tour. "The southernmost building here, Building A, is the animal lab. Next, here, used to be the computer library, before we updated the system and moved it into Admin. Now Building B is our primate lab. Building C up here is biophysics and bioengineering-labs, machine shops, and fabrication facilities. And here's Building D, the experimental clinic and evaluation labs."
Jocasta pointed to the final outlying building, which was roughly northeast of the main gate. The other buildings all had identifying labels, this one was marked only by the letter E and a trefoil symbol, similar but not identical to the international symbol for radioactivity. "What's this building, Doctor?" she asked. "It's marked biohazard."
Skyhill chuckled. "Proud as we are of SPISES, Jane, we're very aware it's just a step along the way. What do you know about viral surgery?"
"Not much," she said. "Why don't you refresh my memory?"
"Certainly, certainly." The big man settled himself on the corner of his desk. "Viral surgery was an idea that first emerged in the 1980s and 1990s"-he grinned hugely-"mostly in science fiction. The technology to make it a reality wouldn't appear for decades. In fact, it's only just maturing now. The central idea is to use viral vectors to insert tailored strands of DNA into certain cells, and to force those cells to incorporate the new genetic material into their own genome."
"Sounds like genetic engineering," I remarked. "What's new about that?"
Skyhill shot me a quick irritated glance, but covered it with a smile almost before I could notice it.
"Theoretically, it is," he went on. "But in standard genetic engineering, we work either with unicellular subjects-like E.coli bacteria modified to secrete human insulin- or with just-fertilized zygotes before the first division.
Now what about true viral surgery?" He was hitting his stride. I could imagine him strutting around in front of a university biology class, boring his students to death. "Say you're a diabetic, which means you can't-produce enough insulin, an enzyme normally produced by the pancreas. In such a case, your pancreas cells lack the genes to produce the enzyme. If we're limited to genetic engineering, we can create a bacterium that secretes insulin, then inject the insulin into your body daily, and we can make sure that any children you have don't inherit the trait. Not the best answer.
"Using viral surgery techniques, on the other hand, we can take the gene that creates insulin, plug it into a special virus that infects only pancreas cells, and then infect you with that virus. The gene you're missing gets spliced into the genome of the cells that need it, and suddenly you're producing your own supply of insulin. Interesting?"
I had to agree. "Interesting."
"Then take it one step beyond that. Let's say you want, oh I don't know, let's say thermographic vision, but you don't want surgery. Theoretically, we could virally implant a gene complex that alters the cells in your retina to give you thermographic vision. Or how about faster reactions? Perhaps some virally mediated genetic adjustment to the cells of your adrenals. It's one step beyond SPISES, because there's absolutely no implanted hardware."
It still sounded like science fiction to me, but Jocasta was nodding as though it made perfect sense. "I assume you've got a containment lab, then," she said. "P3 protocol?'?
"P5," he corrected, grinning. "At least, that's what we call it. It's enhanced-P3 protocol, with added magical precautions. The magic was my idea."
"Interesting," Jocasta said. "But let's get back to SPISES. Is it ready for market?"
"We've already got agreement in principle for our first sale," Skyhill gloated. "It's still top expensive for many potential clients, but we're working to get the price down."
"I know a little about some of the precursors to SPISES," Jocasta said smoothly. (She di
dn't know any more than what I'd been able to remember of Bent's comments, but I was coming to realize she was one hell of a good bulldrekker.) "I understood that they were very, uh, detrimental to the subjects."
I expected Skyhill to brush it off, but he nodded slowly. "That has been a problem," he admitted, "and we haven't quite beaten it. Some people are totally unaffected by SPISES-negatively, I mean-while others cannot tolerate it at all. We've had to screen our volunteer subjects very carefully, and make sure we show our clients how to handle the screening as well. Of course, we're trying to fine-tune the technology so anyone can use it."
"What are the contraindications?" Jocasta asked. "Lack of anaerobic fitness is a big one," Skyhill answered, "and lack of-well, for lack of a better term, mental toughness. Beta resiliency's got to be about four-zero on the Blaydon-Woczici Personality Matrix, if you're familiar with that test."
Again, they could have been talking Elvish for all I understood, but Jocasta seemed to be following it.
"Interesting," she repeated. "Any chance we could get a tour?'"
Chapter 20.
As a matter of fact, there was, with Skyhill as our guide. Throughout, Jocasta continued talking with the good doctor about subjects totally meaningless to me. So I tuned them out, and concentrated on visual impressions.
Some were disturbing. The bioengineering/biophysics lab, our first stop, meant little to me. I'd seen microelectronics labs before, with their white-robed technicians working micromanipulators while they stare through binocular microscopes, and this one wasn't much different. It was what I saw in the other buildings that was upsetting. In the animal lab, we saw serried rows of cages containing beagles and other experimental subjects and a video of a white mouse, tiny skull trailing optical fibers, attacking and chewing up a huge, fragging house cat. In the primate lab, the soft-eyed capuchin monkeys watched us sadly as we passed.
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