Accidental Creatures (19 page)

“Holy fuck, she’s going into convulsions,” she heard someone, Mavi, say, “Haul ass.”

Big patches of fog hazed their way across her field of vision, blocking out sight, replacing it with blooms of pattern, moving, changing, a funny grey color that held within it not the hues, but the mathematical understanding of every other color, rendered in shifting moire. And in between those patches, in spaces getting smaller now, she saw Mavi’s face, looking at her as if from far away. She was floating in a sea of green.

oOo

Chango stepped on the gas and tore off down Riopelle, the car jouncing across potholes, sending up sprays of loose asphalt in its wake. She glanced behind her to see Mavi forcing her vathide wallet between Helix’s teeth. She was shaking violently, her hair stiff and streaked white, her face crusted with white flakes of biocide. Quickly Chango looked back at the road. The sunshine and the buildings and the strangled tufts of grass beside the road looked unreal, like they were nothing more than a painted screen, a holographic overlay, masking the horror of life. But the horror of life was seeping through. Over the rush of wind in her ears she heard a hoarse, hacking kind of moan from the back seat, and Mavi swearing as she rummaged through her bag for epidermals. How could there still be sunshine, while this was happening? Eyes wide, she stared down the road, and drove.

A great bubble of grief seemed to rise up into her heart, and break. Clenching her teeth, she laid on the horn, and took the left at Caniff without stopping.

She pulled sloppily up to the curb in front of Mavi’s house and jumped out of the car. “Help me carry her,” said Mavi, “she’s big.”

With difficulty they maneuvered Helix, still quaking, up the front steps and in the door. “Put her on the couch,” said Mavi, “Hugo’s in the pink room.” They deposited her on the faded green couch. Mavi knelt over her and peeled back one of her eyelids, shook her head and stood up.

“What is it? Is she dying?”

Mavi looked at her gravely, “She may be dying, but not of vatsickness.”

“What?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in an onset before.”

“But her exposure...”

“The indications are all wrong. Patients always run a low grade fever by the time they start displaying other symptoms. Her temperature is dropping, rapidly. And those convulsions, I’ve never seen anyone do that before, not with vatsickness. It’s more like a straightforward, severe toxic reaction.”

“To the growth medium?”

Mavi shrugged and looked at her with flat, bleak eyes, “What else? I gave her a clonazepam epidermal, that seems to be keeping the convulsions down a bit, but her system’s in shock. I don’t know what else to do.”

From the couch, Helix let out one of those moans again. Chango shivered. “God, what is that noise she makes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Get it off me,” Helix groaned.

“What?” Chango knelt by her side. “What did you say?”

“The biocide, get it off me,” she croaked hoarsely, “It’s killing me.”

Chango stared at Mavi, who stared back at her. “But the biocide is supposed to help kill the growth medium, Helix.”

Helix closed her eyes in exhaustion. “That’s the problem.” she whispered. “Please, it hurts. If you don’t help me, I’ll die.”

Chango and Mavi looked at each other again, hesitating. “It’s not vatsickness...” said Mavi, “it could be a reaction to the biocide, but—”

“You know I’m not human,” said Helix, staring at Mavi with half lidded eyes, “or at least you should.”

“Let’s get her to the shower,” said Chango.

oOo

Water white with biocide ran down the drain of the tub. Helix rested her head in Chango’s lap, half conscious, comforted by Chango’s fingers on her scalp, scrubbing away the crusted powder. “I can see why you wanted this stuff off,” she said, “it’s nasty.”

Helix didn’t answer her. She was dreaming that she was swimming in a great green vat of growth medium, moving with the currents, and feasting on agules. Mavi had been right. She would die, but not from vatsickness, she would die because she had found what she’d never known she wanted, what she’d always wanted, and as soon as she did, it had been taken away from her. She couldn’t go back, to her pathetic existence as a sport. She wasn’t that, now she knew she wasn’t that. She’d been born to swim in the vats, harvest agules, and eat them. But she couldn’t do that either. After today, they’d fire her for sure.

Helix felt the last of the biocide rinse away, but still her skin burned, still the tremors washed over her.

“Fill the tub,” she said to Chango, “and get some salt from the kitchen and put it in.”

Chango did as she asked, and then sat on the edge of the tub, holding one of her hands. “Is it better?”

She nodded. It was better, better than being coated with poison, but it was a far cry from the velvet caress of the growth medium. She longed for it in her cells. She wondered if she would ever feel it again.

“It wasn’t an accident, was it?” said Chango. “You did it on purpose.”

“Yeah. I had to find out what it felt like.”

“So what did you find out?”

“It’s what I’m meant to do, and if I can’t, I’ll die.”

In the beginning was the dream, and in the dream Hector was in the laboratory, alone. It was late at night, he was in his pajama bottoms. Goose flesh stood out on the exposed skin of his arms and chest. Light came faintly from a single row of phosphorescents at the back of the room. He padded up and down the aisles on cold bare feet, walking past incubators and microscopes, biophages and growing trays. A multi-processor was awake, spilling holographic equations into the air with incomprehensible speed. Hector stopped, and watched the numbers and symbols stream past. He couldn't make anything out; they were moving too fast. As he stood and stared the equations flew at him, tumbling into him through his eyes, his ears, his mouth. His head was filled with them, he felt them working their calculations through his blood stream. He danced and jerked, an arithmetic robot, trying to rid himself of these numbers, these symbols. But it was too late now. They were in him. They were a part of him. He left the emptied screen of the multi-processor and moved towards the back of the room, where a large, rectangular tank lay beneath the round saucers of the phosphorescent lights. Inside the tank, like a corpse laid out in a coffin, lay a body, submerged in the faint opalescent sheen of growth medium. As he approached the tank, she stood up. She was tall and strong, with a long mane of black hair, generous breasts, four arms and gleaming white fangs. And as he stood there, staring, she began to dance. She danced like the Indian women he'd seen on a PBS special once; all rocking back and fourth, angular gestures, stamping of feet and bending of knees. She whirled around him, and he turned, trying to keep her in sight. She was a blur all around him now, and he was inside of her, being born by her dance. The equations that had infected him earlier were coming out again now. He spoke them into the whirlwind, and she stopped.

She stood before him, silent, motionless. She was beautiful. He would have liked to touch her, hold her, make love to her. She smiled slowly and nodded her head, once, and then walked towards him. But as she approached she got smaller. Smaller and smaller until she was no bigger than a gum ball, and she hung in the middle of the air, in front of his face. Hector opened his mouth, she climbed inside, and he swallowed her.

When he awoke the next morning, he knew what to do.

It took months of splicing and selective genetic engineering. For processing and control of the organism, he cloned and modified a multi-processor brain. Following standard animal physiology, he tied autonomic functions like breathing and heart reflex to the brainstem and put the hypothalamus in charge of instinctual drives such as sex and hunger.

For reasons he did not examine at the time, he grew the cerebral cortex beyond the demands of plucking agules from growth medium, leaving space for behaviors to evolve with the demands of the creature’s environment, leaving space for intelligence to grow on its own.

At first the double arms and fangs had been stubborn artifacts of the gene splicing, a side effect of manipulating homeobox genes, but he soon recognized their advantages, and gave up on trying to erase them.

Finally, in a rectangular tank beneath the phosphorescent lights of the laboratory, Lilith, the first tetra, was born. He had been lauded for his work on the brains, but he had never really considered them a work of genius. Everything was there, just waiting for him to come along and put it together. But this, this was something else again. A genetically engineered species with human cognitive ability. He hadn’t needed to make them that smart, but once he’d figured out the basic neural network of NMDA, glutaminergic, and GABA synapses and the balance between excitory and inhibitory neurons, it was only a matter of making space for the network to grow.

Following the sacred design that came to him in the dream, Hector directed the formation of synaptic connections with neural adhesion factors, chemoattractants and neurotrophins. But he designed the tetras with synaptic plasticity, taking advantage of Hebb’s rule of coordinated synaptic activity to reinforce useful connections and inactivate inappropriate ones. Rather than hardwire their behavior, he allowed their environment to mold and nudge them towards their intended function, leaving specific behaviors open-ended.

Despite the problems caused by his approach — the tetras’ insular social system, their uncooperativeness — he had never really regretted giving them choice, independence, intelligence. The concept of a creature of such complexity without those characteristics was an anathema to him, and he knew what GeneSys intended to do with them if they were successful. They wanted to get rid of the vatdivers because they were causing trouble; organizing, calling strikes, demanding rights. In fact, he realized now, the block he’d had on the project was not mental in nature, but moral. Until he saw Lilith in his dream and knew that she would be a person, not a machine, he could not allow himself to solve the puzzle of her creation. He remembered his mother, an inobservant Jew but one instilled nevertheless with the Reformed Jewish version of the golden rule, “that which is abhorrent to you, do not do.” It was a rule she’d taught to him as well.

He need not have worried with Lilith, she was her own being right from the start. For weeks he ate and slept in the lab, observing her, talking to her. Within weeks she mastered language, and started asking him for a nest.

Hector pulled some strings and transferred the experiment to the test facility in the basement. It had once been the proving grounds for the first living polymers. Now it was home to a new prototype, one of his own making.

Months passed, and Lilith swam around in her vat eating agules, and nothing else happened. He had designed the tetras to be parthenogenic, but she had yet to reproduce. Hector started limiting the number of people in the vat room, but that only seemed to make her more restless. Then one night, when he was working there alone, she came to him. He was shocked to see her out of the vat, and even more shocked to realize, as she raised one hand to cup the side of his face, that she was dry. She detested being dry, but he had told her how dangerous growth medium was to humans, and she must have realized it was necessary — she spread her hands across his chest — for this. To his eternal shame, he made love to her that night. He tried to reason with himself that it was necessary. Ring tail lizards, he kept telling himself, were parthenogenic but only reproduced if another ringtail lizard went through the motions of mating with it. They were all females, but one would act the male, mounting the other and stimulating her to ovulate. Male or female, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the act of love. He had not passed his genetic material on to Lilith’s offspring, yet he had caused them to be born, just the same.

And he was glad, because he was a scientist and his creation flourished, and because he was a scientist and Lilith was his creation, he was ashamed.

She laid a clutch of twelve eggs which nestled at the bottom of the vat for six months before they hatched. But these tetras were smaller than Lilith, and tests showed that they were sterile. Lilith began to turn away from Hector and his assistants, devoting herself to her daughters; grooming them, cuddling them, and ordering them around. She laid a single egg, without his or any other human’s assistance.

That egg sat at the bottom of the vat like a time bomb, a bomb that went off, six months later, when Hector went down to the vat room late one night, and found a lone tetra curled up against the outer door

— naked, like they all were.

Her lower arms were wrapped around her knees, her upper arms sheltering her bent head. She looked exactly like Lilith, but when he touched her she gazed up at him with the eyes of an infant, unguarded and unwise.

She'd had a harsh introduction to the world, that was sure. She was covered with bruises and bites. A gash on her left thigh and another just below her right collarbone looked serious. He hesitated before the crouching thing. She was too big for him to carry, but he didn't know if she could walk yet. The others had all started out swimming.

It was chilly in the hallway, and she shivered, looking up at him with wide eyes that looked dark and wet in the cold shine of the halogen lighting. Hector Martin took off his raincoat and drew it over her shoulders. With a tentative hand on an arm, he guided her to a standing position. She leaned on him and nestled her head against his shoulder. He got his arm around her waist. She responded by clinging to him with three arms. When Hector took a step, she followed suit. Good, she could walk.

“This way,” he said pointlessly, steering her towards the elevator. If she was anything like her mother and sisters, it would be weeks before she learned human speech.

Fortunately they didn’t have to wait long for the elevator to arrive. On the ride up to his apartment she slumped against him, fairly pinning him to the wall of the elevator. When the doors opened, she didn’t budge. She liked the elevator. She did not want to leave the elevator. And she was at least as strong as he was, though less coordinated just now.