by Lee Bond
Dave gripped the syringe. He knew very well what would happen. Every Kingkiller, every gearhead worth his salt said the same thing. The only thing worth more in the world than Dark Iron was a man who could make weapons. Crews would spend more than what Jimmy had on the table right now for a days’-worth of service from a disreputable ironmonger, and Nickels the Fish was from the outside. Even if Nickels had only a single ounce of engineering in that brain of his, he’d be worth more to Nicked Jimmy than all the Dark Iron he’d ever guzzled. If that valued prize died …
Dave the bartender blinked. It was either carry onward or involve himself. He sighed miserably. He’d done it to himself. “How much?”
“All of it, Dave. Every single drippy-drop.” Staunch Mel pantomimed squirting the syringe. “Our precious lad over there gets a solid ounce. On your wisdom, though, not too much at a time, barkeep, else our fish taste it. We’ve got all night, and the way our new friend keeps talking about how delicious your brew is, like as not he’s going to work through an entire keg in the next hour. Mind your P’s and Q’s and all will be well and we will have ourselves an Ironed-up blacksmith by night’s end and you shall still have your bar. Now, you can’t get a better nor fairer deal than that, hey?”
Dave watched Staunch Mel sashay away. The syringe in his hand weighed a thousand pounds. He hung his head. There was no other choice. If he didn’t drop Dark Iron into Nickels’ drinks, things would go from poor to rotten in a flash.
No other choice. There weren’t nowhere else for a poor bartender calling himself Dave to hide any longer, not with how things were in Arcade City.
10. Black Clinic
The Black Clinics, run by the secretive and ever elusive Andros Medellos, were, for those who were even in the position to know of their existence, legendary.
The creed held by Medellos Medical -by Andros himself- was simple; ‘If you don’t like who you are and you’ve got the money, be someone else’. Not necessarily a principle that flowed smoothly off the tongue, but again, if you had the money, you could grow yourself a tongue that could say things like that with absurd ease.
Knowing about one of the legendary Black Clinics and finding one were two different things, and for one extremely good reason; beyond a simple clinic where one could go and have their eye color changed, or have horns added to their forehead, beyond a place where implants and augments were slapped in under the skin to make you smarter or faster or more intuitive or one of the hundred million other things men and women sought to do to themselves on a daily basis and all in the search of being the best version of them they could be … people who went to Andros Medellos sought one thing above all else.
Uniqueness.
Medellos could graft alien DNA into yours, take your pathetic, paltry, boring genome and make it something wonderful, bypassing thousands of years of natural evolution, skipping over mechanical devices that did the same, violating and abusing stringent Trinity Laws every step of the way. Medellos had the knowledge and power to restructure who you were from the ground up, creating things that were wondrous or terrible, or better yet, both to behold.
People seeking Medellos and his miraculous transformative talents were desperate. Or rich. Or powerful. Or mad. In more than a few cases, they were all those things and more. His last customer, the redoubtable Injiri Katainn of the Yellow Dogs, well … he and his Family had been desperate to break into the Latelian Regime’s criminal underground, eager to secure and cement a stranglehold on operations in preparation for the day when that xenophobic hothouse was pried loose and the citizens introduced to a whole new array of drugs, alcohol and other illicit things.
Injiri. Injiri Katainn was a masterpiece. Or had been; with the state of things in Latelyspace, it was more than probable that no matter how masterful Katainn had proven himself to be, he was dead. Pity, that. Such elegant work had gone into the man.
Medellos Medical was nearly impossible to find unless you knew someone who’d been. People assumed that the unofficial Conglomerate had Clinics dotted throughout Trinityspace, boutique genetic enhancement shops tucked away in dark alleys, secreted in asteroid belts, hidden behind cunning facades.
People hunting for Medellos Medical assumed that because he was rich as any properly recognized Conglomerate he had thousands –if not hundreds of thousands- of employees scattered throughout those alleged Black Clinics, imagined a never-ending sea of men and women and Offworlders all eager and greedy for the next best thing, the thing that only they could imagine.
The thing that only he could muster forth, out of clay and wishes.
They all thought wrong, but Andros was never one to correct. It was that gossip, it was those assumptions and rumors, that helped him evade Trinity’s punitive fist. For all Its power, for all It’s immense domain, It was still just a machine relying on people to do It’s footwork and that was why Medellos Medical thrived.
People were fallible. Medellos knew that very well, oh yes he did. Where they weren’t fallible, they were greedy, and where they weren’t even greedy they were just dead. Simple as that. And so it was that whispers of one Clinic in the Montcalm System, hidden in the asteroid belts of Rilek-12 and another in the heart of a stable zero-heat sun persisted, and all was well with the world; those whispers kept Trinity’s hands and eyes and ears busy, busy, busy.
So busy, in fact, that they missed the obvious.
There was only one Black Clinic in existence at any one time. It stayed in one solar system long enough to do a handful of jobs, then it moved. Usually to the other end of Trinityspace, though it was a bit trickier than that; Trinity was amazing at piecing together random, seemingly unconnected pieces of a puzzle and had come close to capturing the elusive Andros Medellos on more than one occasion. These days, Andros broke shop and shipped everything through a dozen or so haulage companies across dozens of different routes.
Andros had learned from his youthful errors. His Clinic was down for a year, sometimes longer, now. Trinity was frantic to find him, desperate to have the master geneticist put down for violating all that was good and proper in the human DNA sequence.
Andros smirked. Under normal circumstances, Trinity’s desperation and need were at precisely the right levels to arrange a meeting. But that couldn’t happen, not now, not ever. The genetic wizard would rather die than spend a single second ‘talking’ with Trinity, no matter there was a very real chance it was in possession of those things that Andros had been searching for all these years. Ahhh, such a dreadful revelation, so many decades ago…
***
“Who are you?” The gender neutral voice washed out from every speaker in the room.
Andros looked up from his work, mind reeling with possibilities. Could it be Tevak Shallasie, the stupid human geneticist who imagined he was better than a Bruushian Overlord? The puny wriggling monkeyman had certainly been making a loud stink of late in the media, doing his paltry best to ruin his main competitor’s stellar career.
It seemed the most likely possibility. Tevak refused to believe the carefully crafted cover story Andros employed, and for no other reason than ‘just because’. Though correct in every possible way, Tevak’s insistence was irritating.
Andros put the atomic scalpel he held down carefully. It wouldn’t do to slice through the cunning flesh he wore, not if Tevak had somehow hacked into the few security cameras in place throughout the lab.
“I am Andros Medellos.” He sketched the tiny, self-indulgent bow he did every time he introduced himself. “Geneticist.”
The neutral voice responded instantly. “There is no record of any being in your solar system with that name.”
Andros quirked an eyebrow. Tevak had gone above and beyond, this time. Impressive. As an aside, the Overlord wondered how much money the fool had spent to acquire data spanning an entire solar system. Either way, he had prepared for such a revelation, so the lie was already on his lips. “A simple name change. A bad union with a childish wife and an impecunious and greedy fam
ily forced both that, and relocation, here. The particulars of our union dictate that through the breech in cohabitation and support, I am financially indebted, and to what I imagine would be an outrageous sum.”
“There is no record of any male being with your physiognomy appearing in any one of the five thousand, three hundred and forty-three learning establishments in your Galactic cluster capable of providing you with the education and skill required to implement sixteen of the various genetic enhancements and/or implants you have trademarked since setting up shop.” The voice echoed.
“As you say.” Andros nodded. “I am skilled. Very. Enough to ensure that my departure from an unwanted marriage stays that way. Cosmetic surgery is simple enough. I …”
The voice interrupted. “Of those sixteen diverse Human augments, thirteen betray a certain … depth of knowledge I do not normally permit, and of those, five alterations own sub-cellular level manipulations that are a direct violation of a dozen different Laws.”
Andros plastered a smile on his face. “You are not Tevak Shallasie.”
“I am not.” Trinity’s voice betrayed the tiniest bit of amusement, a brief harmonic lost in static. “Who are you?”
The Bruushian Overlord began carefully making his way towards the back room, false skin blistering at the imagined sensation of being followed by the watchful of Trinity Itself. Never in his million or so years of life in servitude to the Great One had he ever imagined a race of beings willingly and voluntarily giving the power of life and death over themselves to an actual machine! It made no sense. How could anything not even organic provide the kind of command and control, support and sustenance when it had no need of anything like that?
He had made an egregious error in not properly considering the threat level of this Trinity AI, but he had considered the danger around him as offered by Tevak and a few others, just in case his previous stint as ‘Scaly Eye’ was found out: an escape pod. Hand-built, cautiously and slowly over fifteen years, it was purely organic and as close to actual Bruushian technology as was possible given the relatively backwater solar system.
Organic, it would be almost impossible to track.
Before entering the room, Andros turned back. “I am Andros Medellos. Geneticist. Your Laws mean little to me, Trinity AI. Your children seek to better themselves in ways that fall far outside the genetic mandate of a species. I possess both the knowledge and inclination to provide them with such.”
“You are in violation of My Laws. An Enforcer has been dispatched.” Trinity paused. “Remain where you are, accept arrest peacefully, volunteer your skills to My service, and sentence will be commuted.”
Andros laughed. Serve a machine? How ridiculous. He pushed his way through the thick door and climbed inside his carefully grown ship. The warm embrace of quasi-sentient booster braces slithered around him, gripped him tight. Soft, gentle chirrups from the pod itself filled Andros’ ears, and he growled back in his native tongue.
The pod launched itself with a burst of tremendously concentrated matter, matter that pushed through the simple floor of the lab to strike the even more carefully laid illegal explosives.
The lab went up in an apocalyptic-sized fireball that instantly gutted more than half the block in fire, smoke, and force, neatly disguising Andros’ hasty departure.
And thus, Black Clinic had been born, with a Bruushian Overlord playing cat and mouse with an angry machine mind for decades.
***
“He’s very … resilient, isn’t he, sir?”
“Hm?” Andros looked up from the chart he’d been staring at blankly for the last fifteen minutes. “Ah. Yes, yes he is.”
Jordan Bishop was indeed proving to be almost foolishly resistant to the genetic changes he’d requested. As one of the most successful organisms in Trinityspace, the Bishop line held within their blood and guts a very … insistent genome. That wasn’t to say that what the man wanted wasn’t doable. On the contrary. Andros hadn’t met a challenge he couldn’t handle, given the time and the … resources.
In this instance, it merely meant that he was going to have to be more … creative. That creativity might break Jordan in the process, but that was the way the DNA crumbled.
Andros put the chart down and tilted his head, staring at the misshapen lump that was currently Jordan Bishop, ex-Conglomerate head for the single largest commercial enterprise in known space. The man was covered in a conversion bubble so that if, and at this particular moment it was a worrying if indeed, if this latest round of alterations failed, he wouldn’t … go soggy. They’d very nearly lost the mighty Jordan Bishop the last time his stubborn DNA had started unraveling in response to the host of treatments. Half a heartbeat longer left unchecked, the mighty Bishop would’ve been people soup cooling gently on tiled floors.
Andros wrinkled his nose. Humans turned into soup with distressing ease.
“We found the why of it, though.”
Andros quirked an eye. That was good news. “And?” he asked without turning to look at his servitor; the few people working in the Black Clinic whom he also spoke with had admitted their inability to understand why they were continuing with their attempts to transform Jordan into … into whatever it was the man had wanted.
Andros would never turn his back on Jordan, not even now, when the sordid tale of his descent into madness, his bizarre obsession with a woman he’d stolen from Latelyspace, his blackened rage at some random SpecSer operative, had broken wide. Everyone in Trinityspace knew –or thought they knew- everything there was to know about Jordan Bishop’s Icarus-like plunge from the very heights of supremacy.
Alas, they didn’t know what Andros knew. They didn’t know Jordan like Andros did and they certainly didn’t know –and wouldn’t understand why even if these mythical ‘them’ were unlucky enough to fall onto the truth- the reasons why the golden-hued, honey-tongued geneticist risked capture every extra day they stayed where they were, working on a man who’s bloodline buckled and fought at every single wrinkle they tried to install.
Andros approved of Jordan’s vendetta. He applauded it. Men like this Garth Nickels needed eradication. Quickly, and decisively.
“As you thought, sir.” The servitor whispered gently. “The Bishops have maintained rigorous and scrupulous control over their genetic heritage. There are markers and indicators at the very lowest levels of Jordan’s DNA chain indicating he was … is … one of the purest Humans in Trinityspace.”
Andros plucked at a lip. There were hundreds, thousands of ways to ensure that the very essence of who you were remained precisely as it was. No big news there, not in today’s day and age. But they were talking about Jordan Bishop, a man with a lineage shooting back through time straight as an arrow. There were dalliances, to be certain, and illegitimate offspring … how could there not be? But the purity of Bishop’s genes was nigh-on miraculous! Andros reflected that he’d pay a pretty penny to acquire another Bishop to check his or her sequencing against Jordan’s. Merely to see clearer.
He tilted his head the other way, eyes tracking the subtle motions beneath the bubble. Jordan was trying to claw his way out again. A purely animalistic response.
The last time this had happened, they’d hooked his brain to an AI built for the purpose of decoding the man’s thoughts, all to find out if what they were doing should continue; the pain –marked as fluorescent tracers burning through Bishop’s mind- had been beyond human comprehension, yet ask they had, and answers had been given.
The answer? Unsurprising. Jordan Bishop was still as eager to turn himself into a weapon capable of killing and destroying Garth Nickels as he had been the very day an Enforcer had blown his arms off.
“This is intriguing. A pure bloodline thirty thousand years old is a miracle in and of itself. A dynasty working to ensure that purity over the same amount of time borders on religious fanaticism.” Andros shook his head. It was impossible. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Anything was possible.
In this inst
ance, though, it was not. It was a thing that could not be.
The Dark Ages shattered everything.
To assume or expect or accept that the Bishop Family Line could go on being perfect and unsullied across thirty thousand years and Dark Age after Dark Age was to believe in fairy tales.
“It is amazing, sir.”
Jordan Bishop continued trying to claw his way out of the impervious conversion bubble, long, slow languid movements that were quite eerie to behold. Were the man conscious of what was happening to his body inside that bubble, he’d start screaming and never stop, for Jordan Bishop, one-time ruler of an Empire almost equal to Trinity Itself’s, was nothing more than slurry in a bag, a brain in a box. It was impressive that the soup was responding to the reptilian brain’s desire to be free.
“And improbable.” Andros turned away from Jordan and the conversion bubble. Did he want to investigate the mystery of Jordan’s lineage? It would mean contacting Ariel Bishop, the titular head of BishopCo.
Ariel was as Jordan had been, once upon a time: razor sharp. She’d taken the reigns of a Conglomerate very nearly ruined by the incredible damage done to its Earth-based holdings and resurrected the entire corporate entity. She’d severed ties with the Dark Age Cabal –a sensible decision, that, given the current climate- and was battling with Trinity Representatives to free the Conglomerate from Trinity’s Restrictions concerning the oldest business in the universe. If Ariel was successful, if she managed to force those Reps into seeing benefit in allowing BishopCo to be situated wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted, there would be no stopping her.
Andros believed quite firmly the woman would be successful in no time at all. The damage done to BishopCo’s earth-based holdings was beyond extensive. It was all-inclusive. Not only that, the towers that’d fallen had torn holes right through to disreputable Ground Zero.
