With this, the EA launches into a complicated explanation that begins with an outer-membrane integrity check on the primary habitat plants, cascades into pressure-damaged sensors, and ends with unexpected quantum resonance in the chemical structure of many of the gengineered pherions.
Rigo knew about the membrane integrity check. It took place the night before he went into the plant. Air pressure inside the habitat had been increased in order to measure stress levels, deformation, and leakage, if any. In this case the test called for a pressure greater than the sensors were designed for. An oversight. It occurs to Rigo that by the time he made his way into the plant it might not have completely depressurized. With the sensors malfunctioning, there’d be no way to know. Not with any certainty. Which might explain why air seeped into his biosuit, instead of the other way around. So he couldn’t have contaminated the ecotecture. He’s off the hook.
“By quantum resonance,” a project leader named Lynn Choo says, “I take it you mean a superposition of states.”
“Yes,” Fallahi says, head bobbing. “Two or more chemical structures existing at the same time.”
“So,” one IT member says. “The faulty sensors registered pherions in one state, but not the other?”
“Not exactly.” Fallahi shakes his head. “There’s no toggling involved. It’s not like flipping a switch— going from one structure to another. Both structures coexist at the same time.”
“In other words, the sensors were detecting only one chemical structure and not the second. That’s the data we were getting?”
“Correct. In some cases, there was a confusion between the two. The structure that was reported was a combination of both states. Not real, or even possible for that matter,” Fallhali says.
“Why did the quantum superposition suddenly show up?” Lynn Choo asks, in follow-up. “Isn’t that something we should be investigating?”
“It didn’t
suddenly
show up,” Fallahi says, “it’s been there all along right under our noses, so to speak.”
“Okay. Why didn’t we
see
it until now?”
“After overpressurization,” Fallahi says, “the quantum sensitivity or orientation of the sensors changed temporarily. For a short time, the visible became invisible, and vice versa.”
“What changed, exactly?”
“We’re still looking into that.”
It sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo to Rigo, metaphysical hand waving. Which is pretty much what quantum physics is. The connection between the rational and the irrational, the possible and the impossible, the real and the unreal.
“What about the colonists?” Dorit says, worry lines fracturing her face. “Are there going to be any incompatibility problems between us and the plants as a result of the quantum superposition?”
“Not to worry,” Fallahi assures her. “It’s a both/and situation—not either/or. As I indicated, the molecules don’t exhibit one chemical structure or another, but both. Since neither structure interferes with the behavior of the other, all of the clade-specific molecules—pherions—will continue to function exactly as designed. The only change that occurred was observational.”
“But what about side effects?” Lynn Choo presses him. “Unexpected chemical reactions catalyzed by the dual nature?”
“So far we haven’t found any problems,” Fallahi says. “In truth we don’t expect to find any.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Tiresias pherions are unique. Their design doesn’t incorporate any cross-clade compatibility. It’s a uniquely encrypted, insular subclade. No physiology like it exists anywhere in the world.”
No wonder Dorit talked the way she did last night, about leaving the past behind and exploring what it means to be nonhuman. She’s cutting her connection to the sum total of human biological history, making a clean break. Rigo glances at her. She seems satisfied with the answer, as if having her most fervent desire validated, she can now relax.
Shortly after that, following a wrap-up by Whipplebaum, the meeting adjourns in time for lunch. It’s noon, three hours before he has to report to the reclade clinic. Dorit finds him in the main lobby of the Xengineering building, drags his ass off to a local brew pub that smells of hops, waxed mahogany, and polished brass. The pub caters to upper-clade types who don’t give him a second glance. As if he belongs there. Is one of them.
Rigo orders the house specialty, a peach lambic. Dorit opts for a lusty brown stout topped with ice-cap thin foam.
“To the future,” she says, raising her glass in a toast. “May we both find what we’re looking for.”
Their glasses clink. There’s a sense of finality to the sound. Like a parting kiss or the crack of a gunshot in one of the old movies Anthea occasionally downloads for him if they’re too tired to do anything else.
“I want to thank you,” Dorit says.
Rigo licks the distilled taste of fruit from his lips. “For what?”
“Reminding me of what it is to be human.”
It strikes him as a strange thing to say for someone who wants to shitcan humanity. She smiles, then reaches out and touches him affectionately on the arm. The contact zaps him the same as last night. She closes her eyes for a moment, as if savoring the contact before finally releasing him . . . reluctantly it seems, and a little sadly, but resolutely.
Relieved of the tension, his muscles liquefy, although it could just be the alcohol detonating in his empty stomach.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I shouldn’t have done that. It was selfish of me, unfair to you.”
“It’s okay.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “It’s time to let go once and for all. Not just for my sake.”
What the hell is she talking about? The lambic seems to be numbing not only his lips but his wits.
Dorit stands. “Promise me that you’ll—” She halts in midsentence, leaves him hanging.
Rigo scoots his chair back, and pushes unsteadily to his feet. Leans forward, his hands on the edge of the table. “What?”
“We’ll talk later,” she says. “Now is not the time.” She takes her napkin, daubs her lips. “Good luck tomorrow.”
“You, too.” It sounds lame, but Rigo doesn’t know what else to say. She has a way of disarming him, turning his thoughts to mush.
Dorit crumples her napkin and tosses it on the table. “Take care. I hope you’ve enjoyed your taste of freedom. Make the best of it.”
Before Rigo can stop her she turns and sashays out the door, leaving him to pick up the tab.
ELEVEN
Anthea spends the morning in her office, going through the information Doug has datamined during the night.
There’s not much . . . none of the gems she was hoping to find that would make sense of the scene Ibrahim depicted on the sketchpad—help bring it into sharper focus. It’s frustrating. On top of that, she started the day feeling all agitated and out of sorts. Not enough intimate time with Rigo and she gets irritable. He seems to calm her in a way she doesn’t understand, can only feel. It’s not just physical but psychological. Rigo gives her something she can’t find in anyone else. She just hopes the same is still true for him. Despite their recent night out, he seems distracted lately, aloof. Which has got her down. Plus, Ibrahim’s hanging on by a thread. He spent the night sedated, in a drug-induced coma to keep him from thrashing around and hurting himself or the hospital staff. Something’s bottled up inside him, some terrible knowledge that’s slowly devouring him.
So far they have identified discrete elements of the drawing. A palm tree. A river. A building. What might be a hedge of interlaced roses or a thorny fence with coiled razor wire instead of blossoms. It’s hard to spec. Based on a number of reported (though unconfirmed) incidents of child labor, indentured servitude, and bioenslavement around the world, Doug has narrowed things down to a relatively small number of possible locales.
“OAsys, in Huambo, Angola,” Doug says. “RiboGen, in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. And Ecotrope, in Surabaya, Indonesia.”
Each of these ecotectural research pharms has come under scrutiny in the past six months. The problem is, none of the locations is an exact match with Ibrahim’s drawing. In each case, one or more elements is wrong.
“Maybe different parts of the drawing are from different places or times,” Anthea suggests. They’ve been looking at the entire pattern, analyzing it as a whole.
“A collage?” Doug says, affecting the nasal patois of an Ivy League academic sucking on a pipe.
“Right. They could be connected in his mind, memories of several separate events that have been merged into one. What do we know about each one?” she asks.
OAsys is a former military-industrial complex bioweapons manufacturer that now develops personal defense systems and nonlethal armament for law enforcement agencies, including the security police employed by most politicorps. “They’ve employed children for efficacy testing before,” Doug says. “Kids whose families can’t afford to support them. After the parents sign a release form, OAsys takes the kids in, provides food, clothing, and shelter in return for their services as human guinea pigs.” Company PR euphemistically bills it as disaster relief or humanitarian aid. They’re giving the kids a job, schooling, an opportunity to bootstrap themselves out of poverty and into a career. Which might explain why Ibrahim is as gregarious and outspoken as he is.
RiboGen develops pherion encryptionware for politicorps and private groups like churches, socio-centric cults, and various ethnocentric communities. “Essentially,” Doug says, “the corp is responsible for the current proliferation and diversity of clades. Without RiboGen there would be far less clade-specific segregation in most ecotectural communities.” A bad thing according to RiboGen’s behavioral analysts, who point out that segregation is no different than tribalism, a natural human tendency that is more stabilizing than destabilizing—as long as tribes remain economically and socially equal. Plus there’s the cultural preservation and common belief-system angle. Most people want to be part of a community— extended or nuclear—that reinforces a mutual history or shared worldview. RiboGen makes it possible to safely establish and preserve these kinds of demographics by hardwiring them into the environment. The company works closely with politicorp giants like Noogenics to create and maintain ecotectural systems for bioremediated zones.
“In addition to tribalism,” Doug says, “the politicorp contracts with governments to manage population density and distribution.”
Ecotrope specializes in reclading—integrating and interfacing between disparate ecotectural systems. If a plant or nanimal developed for one ecotecture looks like it could be useful in another environment, Ecotrope gengineers the molecular code to migrate the species. “Where Ecotrope really makes a killing,” Doug says, “is when one politicorp buys out or merges with another and two radically different ecotectures need to be integrated. In most cases, it’s easier to reclade one population than it is to create an entirely new ecotecture capable of supporting both communities.” Naturally, following the initial design and development phase, a lot of real-world testing must take place. Computer modeling can only go so far. Something might work in-virtu, but not in-vivo. “Ecotrope is supposed to use carefully monitored clinical trials when testing a new reclade code,” Doug says. “But several human rights watch groups claim that a lot of illegal testing takes place by the pharms that Ecotrope outsources work to.” Supposedly, the pharms test their section of the code before turning it over to Ecotrope, which then assembles the parts into a whole and tests aboveboard.
“Of course, the illegal testing has never been proved,” Doug adds as a footnote.
“Why not?”
“The pharms are hard to pin down and regulate. They mix in legitimate work with the illegitimate. That way, the chances of a random audit turning up anything illegal are minimized.”
“What makes you think that Ibrahim escaped from a clandestine test facility used by one of these corps?” Anthea says.
“Several new sniffers, programmed to look for unregistered and uncatalogued pherions, have turned up in refugee camps and other clade-neutral locations. Places where human rights groups and nonprofits traditionally operate safehouses and clinics.”
“Have any HRGs claimed responsibility for neutralizing a human experimentation lab?”
There are a number of high-profile guerilla orgs— the ICLU, Free Live Free, and the Vivisecessionists— as well as thousands of underground saboteurs. Any one of them could be responsible.
“No,” Doug says. “But that’s not surprising. It’s not like Nader-style activism—trying to draw public attention to itself and a cause. The lower the profile they keep, the longer they will be able to operate. Distributed services and manufacturing is a double-edged sword. Nonlocalization makes it difficult to keep tabs on what a corp is doing. Not just by regulatory agencies but industrial spies. At the same time, it makes a corp more vulnerable to attack. They have a lot more exposed surface area to defend. They’re open to incursion on a large number of fronts.”
“Couldn’t the sniffers be from a black-market pharm?” This possibility gnaws at the back of her mind with small, persistent teeth.
“They could be. However, the bits of molecular code the sniffers are keyed to appear to be fragments. Part of a larger sequence. That suggests outsourcing.”
Not only that, Doug has images. High-rez satellite pictures of three suspected human experimentation pharms. They appear as a triptych on her office wallscreen. At first the maps are 2-D. But Doug runs them through a program that looks at topography, analyzes shadow length as a function of time-of-day and the position of the sun, and eventually extrapolates a 3-D topology. The simulation is so detailed she can actually make out faces on the computer-generated people, read the watch on a woman’s arm.
Still, the results are inconclusive. The pharm in Ibrahim’s sketch—if it is a pharm—could be linked to either RiboGen or Ecotrope. The problem is, it’s hard to know how accurate the drawing is—how reliable the artist is.
“The similarities could be nothing more than coincidence,” Doug says, “random chance.”
Anthea paces in her office, hugging herself. “What’s the latest on his condition?” she asks.
“No change,” Doug says, meaning that he’s still deteriorating. “Right now he’s resting peacefully. Sound as Snow White.”
Pretty soon, Anthea thinks, no kiss in the world will wake him. “When was the last time anyone looked in on him? In person, I mean.”
“One of the on-duty nurses stopped by ten minutes ago. A doctor is scheduled to examine him at two this afternoon.”
“What I’d like to know,” she says, “is how we ended up with him? If somebody brought him here for a reason, why was he abandoned—left to fend for himself on the street?” It doesn’t add up. Especially since he’s already confessed that he escaped or ran away. At least, that’s what he believes. No telling if he had behind-the-scenes help he doesn’t know about.
“You have a call on line five,” Doug says, slipping from Ivy League professorese to gum-chewing administrative assistant. “It’s flagged urgent.”
Anthea stops. “Who is it?”
“Your supervisor.” Smack, pop.
She runs a hand through her hair. “Okay. Put it through.”
Tissa appears on the wallscreen in front of Anthea. Tissa is in her office, seated at her desk. “There are a couple of BEAN agents online who want to talk to you,” she says. “I put them on hold, but I don’t get the feeling they’re going to get tired of waiting and hang up. They seem pretty determined.”
Anthea’s intestines slither uneasily. “What do they want to talk to me about?” she says.
Tissa cocks her head to one side. “What do you think, girl?”
“Ibrahim.”
Tissa gives a somber nod. “I tried to give them the usual runaround about patient confidentiality, but they had a warrant to question you.”
Anthea’s eyes widen. “A warrant? You’re kidding.” It means they’ve taken the trouble to wade through a swamp of red tape to get to her.
“Somehow,” Tissa says, “they identified you as his case worker.”
“How?” That information is supposed to be secure. Inaccessible.
Tissa’s wiry coat hanger shoulders twitch in a shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine.
I
certainly didn’t tell them.”
Anthea paces, gnaws on a thumbnail. “Did they say what they wanted?”
“No. They just wanted to be put through to you.”
“All right.” There’s no avoiding them. If she doesn’t talk to them now she’ll end up doing it on their terms, in a far less comfortable setting.
“Let me know how it goes, girl,” Tissa says, grimacing in sympathy. “If I can do anything to help.”
“Thanks,” Anthea says.
Tissa vanishes, is replaced by the image of two BEAN agents in nondescript monochrome gray leisure suits. They’re seated at a table in what appears to be a conference room with lots of windows and potted plants dangling sound-absorptive leaves the size and shape of elephant ears. One agent wears a meringue yellow tie, the other pastel lime. She’s heard somewhere that pastels are supposed to put people at ease. It’s an involuntary psychological response that BEAN tries to take advantage of by incorporating it into the uniforms of its agents. The subliminal warfare isn’t working. The last thing she’s feeling right now is ease.
“It’s Howdy Doody time,” Doug remarks, in the crackly timbre of an old vacuum-tube radio announcer.
“Ms. Lucero?” the yellow agent begins, clasping his hands on the table in front of him. He’s a venerable cauc in his nineties, with earnest wrinkles on his forehead and sagging cheeks.
There’s no sense pretending she doesn’t know Ibrahim, so she does the next best thing. “What can I do for you?” She folds her arms across her chest to keep from biting her nails.
“We understand you have a dangerous illegal alien in your custody,” the green agent tells her. “Ibrahim Darji.” He’s younger and thin-faced, his voice pinched with impatience. Intense hazel eyes under flip-up eyescreens that resemble yellow awnings. Neither one bothers to give a name.
“Dangerous?” Anthea asks. She lowers her arms. The last thing she wants is to appear defensive.
“I’m afraid so,” the yellow agent says.
“Really?” she says. “He didn’t seem all that bad to me. Not compared to some of the kids I get.”
“He’s not dangerous in the same way,” the yellow agent says.
Anthea frowns. “I don’t understand.”
“We have information that he was smuggled into the country by a terrorist org,” the green agent says.
Anthea blinks in surprise. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“A group calling itself the Fun da Mentalists,” the yellow agent says.
“But why?” Anthea asks.
The yellow agent rubs his face with weary fingers. “That’s what we’d like to find out, Ms. Lucero.”
“We have reason to believe that he’s been doped with subversive pherions,” the green agent says. “A time-delay molecular code intended to damage or destroy part of the core ecotecture.”
“That’s why it’s critical we take him into custody as soon as possible,” the yellow agent says.
“Am I at risk?” Anthea asks. A logical question, given her close proximity to him over the past couple of days.
“Possibly,” the green agent says. “The pherion doesn’t appear to be contagious in the usual sense. But there’s a lot we don’t know about it.” Implying that anything is possible.
“He’s dying,” Anthea says. “Our doctors don’t know what’s killing him or how to treat him.”
The news elicits a nod, but little detectable sympathy.
“We don’t have much time,” the green agent says. A muscle on the left side of his jaw bunches. “We need to identify what he’s been doped with and find a way to neutralize it.”
Anthea hollows her cheeks. “What about keeping him alive? Making certain he doesn’t die?”
“We’ll do our best,” the green agent says, noncommittal. “If there’s any way to save him, we will.”
Translation: as soon as the agents find out what they want, Ibrahim will be disposable. BEAN won’t waste any more time or resources on him. He’ll be deported, posthaste.
Anthea begins to pace. “What exactly do you want from me?”
“We want you to stay with him after we pick him up,” the yellow agent says. “Keep him calm.”
Anthea makes her decision, stops. “Wait a minute—you mean he’s not with you?” Forcing her voice to remain steady.