Clade, p.11
Clade, page 11
“Good morning, sir”—her smile is blindingly angelic—“your meeting is in the pistachio room.”
“The pistachio room?”
A bee-sized butterfly touches down on his right wrist, flutters its blue-and-yellow wings flirtatiously for a moment, and then dissolves into his skin, leaving behind a block-print image of itself.
“Just follow your nose,” the receptionist says.
“I don’t smell—” But before Rigo can finish, the odor kicks in, strong enough to taste.
He follows the aroma from the reception area to an elevator modeled after a wrought-iron birdcage. It takes him up four floors. From there, he sniffs his way down a mullion-gridded corridor, lined with potted ferns, to a conference room illuminated by louvered skylights. The skylights are squeaky clean, miraculously free of dirt, seagull shit, or the desiccated splashprints of raindrops.
Whipplebaum and Dorit are seated at a conference table chiseled out of massive, altar-thick granite. There are twenty gray leather chairs at the table. All but three are occupied. A cloud of flitcams hovers above the table, pervasive and annoying as mosquitoes over stagnant water.
“Good morning,” Whipplebaum pipes cheerily. “Help yourself.” He gestures toward a buffet table offering coffee, orange juice, ice water, and a variety of bagels and pastries including pan dulce.
“I don’t see any nuts,” Varda says.
“They’re at the other table,” Rigo mutters under his breath.
He pours himself a cappuccino, grabs a danish, and takes the open chair next to Dorit, trying not to feel overly self-conscious. In his pink polyester he sticks out like a lollipop on a French dessert tray.
“Sleep well?” she asks, sipping a latte.
“Like a baby.” Rigo can’t believe the plethora of ascots and bow ties. This isn’t just a bunch of gengineers phreaking out over doughnuts. Half the attendees seem to be wearing a different cologne that contains molecularly encoded information: name, title, job description. With every breath, this data filters through Rigo’s nostrils. From there it somehow lodges in his short-term memory.
“What’s going on?” he says.
Dorit lowers her drink. “Some last-minute concerns about the new ecotecture and pherion conflicts. It seems that some of the recent data from the warm-blooded plants grown by Noogenics are suspect.”
The cappuccino scalds his tongue. “Suspect?”
“It’s probably nothing more than faulty biosensors,” Dorit muses. “Don’t you think?”
“It’s possible.” Rigo feels as if all the saliva in his mouth has suddenly drained to his bladder.
“Nevertheless, some of the Xengineering folks are uptight,” Dorit says. “They’re afraid the plants have been contaminated—maybe on purpose.”
“You mean sabotaged?”
Dorit nods. “Xengineering has brought in an ecotectural analyst from RiboGen to analyze the latest pherion data from the plants and determine if there have been any mutations that might lead to a clade conflict.”
The analyst, Harish Fallahi, is seated next to Whipplebaum. Dorit waves a dismissive hand. “It’s absurd, of course. In addition to the more-than-adequate security provided by Noogenics, the plants have built-in defenses to protect them against unauthorized access.”
“Who would want to sabotage them?” Rigo says.
“Any number of political or religious orgs,” Dorit says. “You have no idea how many people want to see this project fail.”
Then the meeting is under way. Full steam ahead. The first order of business is the timetable for “going live” on the comet. Here, Rigo’s responsibilities are presented as part of a paint-by-number schedule for job completion. He knows exactly what his vat team is supposed to do, in what order, and when. Basically, it’s no different from what they’ve been doing at Noogenics the last six months, except it’s in zero-g and the time-frame is twelve hours.
No problem.
Next on the agenda is the reclade process. For the colonists—who will live on the comet permanently in near-earth orbit—the procedure is far more time-consuming than it is for members of the temporary implementation team, which includes Rigo and his vat crew. One clinic has been set up to handle the colonists. Another will take care of the IT workers. Rigo and his team are scheduled for reclading that evening. Following the meeting, he has a couple of spare hours before LOHopping to the reclade facility for the remainder of the day. Then it’s back to San Jose for the night. He doesn’t leave for the comet until tomorrow morning, so he and Anthea can have dinner, spend some time together.
After the reclade bullet item, it’s on to system integrity and the whole sensor/mutation/sabotage question. Whipplebaum turns the meeting over to the ecotectural analyst, who takes up a position next to the wallscreen at the front of the room. He’s a thin dude, wiry and abrupt, with a walnut-hard Adam’s apple and tonsured ebony hair, which is thinning outward from the middle at the same time that it recedes inward from the edges, like a moat that is slowly drying up, progressively exposing more and more land area.
“As you know, there has been some concern regarding the integrity of the Tiresias offworld ecotecture.” Rigo can’t quite place the clipped lilt. Indian or African. “This is due to a number of biochemical changes recently detected in the warm-blooded plants.” Images of a number of artificial molecules, unfolded and folded pherions, display onscreen. “Since most of the changes were clade-specific it appeared they might not be random, but could be carefully targeted mutations.”
Fallahi pauses, his bomb ready to drop. Rigo tenses, stares at the molecules on the wallscreen, certain that one of them came from him—a snippet of DNA or clade-specific pherion that slipped into the plant while he was inside it and jammed its gears like a chemical monkey wrench. All will be revealed—and instead of going to Tiresias he’ll lose his job.
“When dealing with ecotecture,” Fallahi continues, “it’s important to look not only at the internal design but external conditions as well. Since ecotecture is intended to be an integral part of the environment, by nature it interacts with the world on many different levels. Unfortunately, more often than we would like, it does so in ways we do not intend and cannot always foresee.”
So much for premeditated foul play. Bodies shift, and clothes sigh in collective relief. Rigo remains rigid, unwilling to relax. He could be the unforeseen factor Fallahi’s talking about.
“In some situations,” Fallahi says, “a single event can lead to several different effects.” Another pause while more data populates a screen on another wall, boxing them in information. “In other cases, several unrelated factors working in concert can combine to create a single effect . . . a spontaneous self-organized instantiation.”
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.
