The Android's Dream

by John Scalzi

  “I didn’t tell you to look through human DNA,” Creek said.

  “I know,” Brian said. “But isn’t that why you wanted an intelligent agent that was actually intelligent? To find stuff you didn’t already think of? And look at it this way. You were behind before. Now you’re ahead. Because I guarantee you no one else has thought of this yet. Of course, time’s ticking.”

  chapter 6

  Robin Baker was adopted at the age of four days by Ron and Alma Baker, a nice couple from Woodbridge, Virginia, who had opted not have children on their own after a geneticist read their charts and found nightmare after nightmare of recessive genetics in their makeup. This may have had something to do with Ron and Alma Baker hailing from the same small town in downstate Virginia where the same four families had been interbreeding almost exclusively for centuries, thereby reinforcing several undesirable genetic traits. Ron and Alma, while only nominally related on paper, had a genetic consanguinity somewhere between halfsiblings and first cousins. Their geneticist declared this a neat trick and strenuously advised them against making any kids the old-fashioned way.

  This was just fine by Ron and Alma, who left their hometown precisely because they both considered the vast majority of their kin to be inbred freaks. Just because they weren’t didn’t mean they couldn’t breed a new generation of freaks. So they weren’t in a rush to have their sperm and eggs fuse and grow. But they did like kids, and they were nurturing by inclination. This led Ron and Alma to sign up with Prince William County as foster parents. This was how Robin came to them.

  The Bakers were told by the Prince William Child Protective Services that the little girl was the only child of mentally deficient woman who had been used as a prostitute and who had died while giving birth. Ron and Alma, who were assured that the child was herself in all ways physically and mentally fit, instantly fell in love with the child, named her after a favorite aunt of Alma’s, and started the adoption process immediately. They then proceeded to give their new daughter a perfectly pleasant and utterly unremarkable childhood. Outside of a broken arm in the fifth grade from falling out of a tree, Robin had no physical troubles of note. In high school and college Robin did well but not exceptionally in academics, eventually earning a B.A. in business and a minor in biology from George Mason University, both of which she immediately applied by opening Robin’s Pets with seed money provided by loving parents Ron and Alma.

  Creek breezed rather impatiently through the information about Ron and Alma. They were fabulous parents, which was great for Robin. But adoptive parents didn’t tell him anything about Robin’s genetics. He went rooting through Prince William County’s sheriff reports for mentally deficient prostitutes and their pimps. He found a report that matched his search query and opened it, and then pulled up the photos of Robin’s biological mother.

  “Holy Christ,” he said.

  Robin’s mother was photographed nude, front and side photos. Her breasts were large and swollen, as was her belly. She was clearly pregnant; Creek would have guessed seven or eight months. Her gravid torso gave way to limbs that tapered at the end not to hands and feet but to hooves that were clearly not designed to allow clean, bipedal motion. In the front-facing picture she was supported by two police officers on either side, allowing her to stand. In the side picture she hunched on all fours. Her limbs, of human proportions, balanced her awkwardly in this position as well. Any motion, two-legged or four-legged, would be difficult. Her front was smooth, either that way by nature or shaved for effect. Her back was thickly covered in electric blue wool. A human neck gave way to a sheep’s head. From the front-facing picture, sheep’s eyes gazed into the camera, placid, complacent.

  The police report provided details. Robin’s mother had been found as part of a hybridized menagerie kept by Arthur Montgomery, chairman of ZooGen, the second largest provider of genetically modified pets and livestock in North America. Montgomery’s personal estate featured a small but fully stocked biogenetics lab and factory, in which Montgomery personally designed the hybrid creatures using livestock on the estate and gene samples that were later discovered to have been taken from members of ZooGen’s board of directors, specifically shareholder-elected members who generally voted against Montgomery and his bloc of directors. In addition to Robin’s unfortunate mother, other hybrids combined human genes with the genes of cows (Guernsey), horses (Jordanian, a ZooGen variation of the Arabian), and llamas. The hybrids had numerous human physical characteristics but were no smarter than the animal breeds from which they originated.

  One would naturally assume that Montgomery had assembled this menagerie for his personal pleasure, but that assumption would be incorrect. Montgomery was straightforwardly and blandly heterosexual and took care of his needs with longstanding Tuesday and Thursday outcall appointments with the Washington DC area’s leading escort service. Montgomery’s game was subtler than that. One doesn’t work in the modified animals field without eventually becoming aware of the unsettlingly large number of zoophiles out there. Their numbers were hardly restricted to farm boys with access to alcohol and a herd of sheep; there were executives, legislators, and celebrities whose personal kinks ran from simple “furry” play—dressing up in animal costumes—to diddling the dog when they thought no one was looking. Over the years Montgomery’s personal web of corporate and government informers had provided him with a comprehensive list of who had what quirks and how they sated them.

  Montgomery’s scheme against his victims was simple: Gain their trust—generally accomplished through business deals or PAC donations—introduce them to the menagerie, give them the one free taste that makes an addict, and then provide access in exchange for certain business and governmental favors. Usually this worked beautifully, and the occasional recalcitrant could be brought into line through the threat of exposure. Montgomery, of course, had an extensive video collection. All told, the scam worked nicely for Montgomery (and by extension, ZooGen) for a number of years.

  It came crashing down, as things so often do, because Montgomery got greedy. Montgomery was blackmailing Zach Porter, the CEO of a small cosmetics company, and needed some additional leverage to convince Porter to use ZooGen’s modified rodents for his company’s animal testing. So he let the sheep hybrid get pregnant. Montgomery had specifically designed the hybrids with 23 chromosome pairs for just this sort of eventuality, and tweaked the embryo with DNA and RNA therapies as it developed. He wasn’t sure what the resulting creature would be, but no matter what it was, it wouldn’t be good news for Porter, who had married into the cosmetic company’s exceptionally Christian fundamentalist founding family.

  Montgomery expected Porter would fold and he would then abort the fetus; Montgomery wasn’t expecting that Porter would counter the move by shooting him dead in his ZooGen boardroom and then kill himself with the next shot, which is what Porter ended up doing. Porter’s suicide note led the Prince William Country sheriffs to raid Montgomery’s estate, where they found the menagerie and Montgomery’s blackmail videos. There were unusually high numbers of prominent suicides in the DC area over the next few days.

  The pregnant sheep woman presented a problem. Prince William County health officials were inclined to abort the pregnancy, but Zach Porter’s in-laws and widow threatened to file a lawsuit halting the procedure. Half-sheep or not, life began at conception and aborting the near-term fetus was wrong. The county, which wanted the whole thing to go away, took the in-laws up on their offer to pay for the medical needs of the pregnant sheep woman until she gave birth. The delivery a month later was presided over by both a doctor and a veterinarian, neither of whom could stop (or, possibly, was inclined to stop) the mother from bleeding out during the complicated delivery. A genetic scan showed the child’s DNA to be mostly human save for some junk sheep DNA apparently randomly positioned among the chromosomes. They declared her human and offered her to Porter’s in-laws and widow.

  They refused her, saying she was no kin of theirs. Their inter
est in her did not extend past the fact, and the moment, of her birth. Porter’s parents were already deceased, and at the time the human DNA donor of the sheep woman was unknown. The baby girl was declared an orphan and placed in the care of Ron and Alma, who were never told the full sordid story of the birth of their adopted daughter, and therefore were never able to tell her anything meaningful about her past. Robin Baker had no idea she was anything but fully human.

  “That’s some fucked-up shit, Harry,” Brian said, as he passed along the information. “And I believe ‘Fucked-Up Shit’ is indeed the technical term, here.”

  “I’m suddenly reminded that you were eighteen when you had that brain scan,” Creek said.

  “You have a better way of describing it, then,” Brian said.

  “No,” Creek admitted. “You’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Brian asked.

  “I don’t know,” Creek said. “Finding our lost sheep has suddenly become a little more complicated. I have to think.”

  “Think quick,” Brian said. “You have an incoming call.”

  “Who is it?” Creek asked.

  “Just you wait,” Brian said, and put the call through.

  “Hi,” Robin said. “It’s Robin. Find your sheep?”

  “Funny you should ask,” Creek said. “Listen, Robin—”

  “Would you like to go out on a date?” Robin asked.

  “What?” Creek said.

  “A date,” Robin said. “You know. Two people go out and eat food and make small talk and wonder what each other look like naked. You have dated before?”

  “Yes,” Creek said.

  “Okay, so you know how it goes,” Robin said. “What do you think? I’m thinking tonight would be good.”

  “It’s kind of sudden,” Creek said.

  “No time like the present,” Robin said. “You’re cute and I did a search on your name and came up with no outstanding warrants for your arrest. That’s good enough for dinner in a public place.”

  Creek grinned. “All right,” he said. “Where would you like to meet?”

  “Arlington Mall,” Robin said.

  “You want to eat in the mall?” Creek said.

  “Oh, no,” Robin said. “I’m a cheap date, but not food court cheap. But there’s something there I’d like to try out. Actually, you should try it out with me. Ever play basketball?”

  “Sure,” Creek said.

  “No bum knees?” Robin asked.

  “Not yet,” Creek said.

  “Perfect,” Robin said, “Meet me at the west entrance, then. Ground floor, seven o’clock. Dress casual. Bye.” She clicked off.

  “That’s going to be an interesting date,” Brian said.

  “I need you to connect me with Ben,” Creek said.

  “‘Ben’ as in my brother Ben,” Brian said.

  “That’s the one,” Creek said.

  “Interesting,” Brian said. “I don’t suppose he knows about me.”

  “I have to tell him that the sheep we’re looking for is a woman who runs a pet store,” Creek said. “I think telling him his younger brother’s been resurrected as a computer program might be a little much for one day.”

  Archie almost missed the connection between Robin and the sheep. The Rod-ordered background check offered nothing of interest; a long-term scan of her business records showed her ordering a sheep only once in the history of her store, and it was a common breed, not something genetically modified. Archie kept going back in Robin’s history, past the point of boredom, until he was presented with an electronic version of the very first document of Robin’s life: Her birth certificate. It listed “Jane Doe” as the mother and Zach Porter as the father.

  Archie moved to close out all the documents, then hesitated. Somewhere in the back of his head the name “Zach Porter” fired up some neurons. Archie decided this would be a good time for a break.

  “I’m going to get a snack,” he said, to the room. “Anybody want anything?” Ed, the other guy, barely looked up from his show and shook his head; Takk was still out of it.

  Rod and his crew were camped out in a shitty apartment in a shitty complex in a shitty part of town. Rod’s “apartment” was jacked up with some serious equipment which Archie would have suspected to be mighty tempting to the local scum. But he also noticed, on his couple other times out, that the local population gave the door of Rod’s apartment a wide berth. Being a scary motherfucker meant no one messed with your shit.

  The vending machine was at the end of the hall, next to the stairs; the sticker in the top right corner of the display case read “Ross Vending, Inc.” Inside the display case was a truly interesting assortment of vendables, from small cartons of LSL Milk (irradiated for a six-month shelf life) to three-packs of Whisper brand condoms, with patented Electro-Ecstatic™ moleculebinding technology to make the condom membrane as thin yet impermeable as possible. Archie had never tried that particular brand; something about the combination of an electric charge and his genitals just didn’t seem appealing. Slot B4 held a small bag of white chocolate M&Ms. Archie smiled; those were in fact pretty tasty. He slipped in his credit card and pressed the button.

  It felt like someone had stabbed him directly in both eyeballs. Archie crumpled, banging his head on the vending machine on the way down. As his forehead jammed against the vending machine Plexiglas, the rattle of the impact dislodged information about Zach Porter; Archie finally remembered why he remembered that name. He spent a couple more minutes on the ground, gathering his strength, before he wobbled back up and headed back towards the apartment. About three-quarters of the way there, he realized he’d forgotten his snack. He went back to get it.

  Back at the computer, Archie pulled up news stories relating to Zach Porter, and there it was: Porter involved in a murdersuicide involving Arthur Montgomery. Of course, Archie knew the name Arthur Montgomery very well. If a religious organization as laid-back and nebulous as the Church of the Evolved Lamb could be said to have an apostate member, Montgomery would have been it. In one of the few real church scandals on record, Montgomery had joined the Church, worked his way into the top ranks of the church’s genetic hybridization concern on Brisbane colony, and then snuck off back to Earth to form ZooGen, using Church genetic techniques.

  Montgomery had gambled that the Church would back off rather than sue him and have its entire genetics organization and its goals hauled into court and into the papers. The gamble paid off. The Church’s genetics program was not a high-priority enterprise in a commercial sense—its goals were esoteric and long-term—and the Ironists who ran Hayter-Ross didn’t want anything to rock the business end of their organization. And in any event one of Dwellin’s more maddeningly vague prophecies suggested that something like this was supposed to happen. The Church officially let it go, although it suggested to its individual members that they might consider investing in ZooGen stock, since Montgomery had stolen some very advanced and likely profitable techniques.

  So in one of those nice little ironies, Church members soon comprised the single largest voting bloc of shareholders. After Montgomery’s murder, they worked quietly to install a Churchvetted executive as the new CEO. Several years later, ZooGen’s executives and board voted to be acquired by Hayter-Ross. This was quickly approved by the shareholders and by the FTC, which saw no conflict as, outside of livestock, Hayter-Ross had been to that point a marginal player at best in the bioengineering field.

  Like many Church members, Archie was aware of the scandal that led to Montgomery’s murder, and how he’d tried to blackmail Porter; the sheep-woman Montgomery had hybridized had been a horrifying use of genetic engineering. But with all the documents laid out in front of him, Archie began to suspect for the first time what the connection between the pet shop lady and the Android’s Dream sheep was. Archie called up Robin’s insurance records to get the name of her provider, snuck into their system to grab her DNA map, and ran it through th
e processor.

  “Oh boy,” he said, after the comparison was done. Then he called out to Rod Acuna.

  “You’re shitting me,” Acuna said to Archie, a few minutes later.

  “It’s all there,” Archie said. “She’s mostly human, but there’s whole sequences of her DNA which are from your sheep genome.”

  “She didn’t look like a sheep,” Acuna said.

  “Looks like most of the sheep DNA is in areas of the code that are switched off in humans,” Archie said. “It’s called ‘junk DNA.’ It wouldn’t affect the way she looked or how her body worked. Functionally she’s totally human. But according to this DNA, she’s about eighteen percent sheep.”

  “Fucking scientists,” Acuna said. “Ruin a perfectly goodlooking woman like that.” He flipped open his communicator and made a call.

  “The hell you say,” Secretary of State Heffer said, to Ben Javna, over the communicator.

  “No joke, sir,” Javna said. “Our sheep is a pet shop owner from Virginia.”

  “That’s it?” Heffer said. “You don’t have any other sheep? Real ones?”

  “That’s all we got,” Javna said. “All the real Android’s Dream sheep are dead from sabotage. Whoever’s killing them off is moving fast.”

  Heffer rubbed his temples. “Well, crap, Ben. This is all we need.”

  “Where are you, sir?” Javna asked

  Heffer looked out the window of the delta, which was just starting the downslope of its parabola. “Hell if I know,” he said. “Most of the Pacific Ocean looks like any other part. We’ll be landing in LA in about forty-five minutes and then I’ve got to make an appearance at the State Department building. The director there is retiring. I get back into DC around midnight your time.”

  “What do you want to do?” Javna asked.

  “What are our options?” Heffer asked.

  “None that I can think of right off the top of my head,” Javna said. “DNA aside, this is a human being and a U.S. and UNE citizen. We can’t hand her over to the Nidu for a ceremony without her consent.”