Fragments (2 page)

She shivered uneasily, grimacing at the uncomfortable confusion that always followed
her questions about herself.
That’s what I’m here to find,
she thought.
Answers to the questions.

She turned and sat on the broken asphalt, leaning against the truck’s flat tire and
pulling out her notebook again, though at this point she had the address memorized:
Fifty-fourth and Lexington. It had taken her weeks to find the address, and several
more days to make it here through the ruins. Maybe she was being too cautious. . . .

She shook her head. There was no such thing as “too cautious.” The unsettled areas
were too dangerous to take any chances, and Manhattan was more dangerous than most.
She’d played it safe and she was still alive; she wasn’t going to second-guess a strategy
that had proven itself so successful.

She looked at the address again, then up at the weather-beaten street signs. This
was definitely the right place. She tucked the notebook back into her pocket and hefted
her rifle. Time to go inside.

Time to visit ParaGen.

The office building had once had glass doors and floor-to-ceiling windows, but glass
didn’t last long since the Break, and the entire ground floor now stood naked to the
elements. It wasn’t the ParaGen headquarters—that was out west somewhere, on the other
side of the country—but it was something. A financial branch, located in Manhattan
solely to interface with other corporations’ financial branches. It had taken her
weeks of searching even to find that the office existed. Kira picked her way through
the pellets of shattered safety glass, and the mounds of siding and facade sloughed
off from the building’s upper floors. Eleven years of neglect had filled the floor
inside with dirt, thick enough that small weeds and grasses were already beginning
to sprout through. Low benches, once upholstered in sleek vinyl, had been weakened
by sun and rain and torn apart by what looked like cats’ claws. A wide desk that had
probably held a receptionist was now weathered and sagging, the epicenter of a loose
scattering of yellowed plastic ID tags. A plaque on the wall named dozens of businesses
in the building, and Kira browsed the weather-beaten listings until she found ParaGen:
the twenty-first floor. Three elevator doors stood in the wall behind the reception
desk, though one was hanging crooked in its frame. Kira ignored them and went to the
stairway door in the back corner. There was a black panel in the wall next to it,
a sensor pad for a magnetic lock, but with no electricity it was meaningless—the hinges
would be the biggest problem. Kira leaned against it, pushing gently at first to test
it, then harder as the ancient hinges resisted the force. Finally it gave way, and
she walked in to look up the towering stairwell.

“Twenty-first floor,” she sighed. “Of course.”

Many of the older buildings in the world were too treacherous to climb around in,
devastated in the first winter after the Break: The windows broke, the pipes burst,
and by spring the rooms and walls and floors were full of moisture. Ten freeze-thaw
cycles later, the walls were warped, the ceilings were drooping, and the floors were
crumbling to pieces. Mold got into the wood and carpets, insects dug into the cracks,
and a once-solid structure became a precarious tower of crumbs and fragments; rubble
that hadn’t fallen down yet, waiting for a kick or a step or a loud voice to bring
it crashing to the ground. Bigger buildings, though, and especially ones this new,
were far more durable—their bones were steel girders, and their flesh sealed concrete
and carbon fiber. The skin, so to speak, was still weak—glass and plaster and Sheetrock
and carpet—but the building itself was sturdy. Kira’s stairwell was particularly well
preserved, dusty without being filthy, and the extra staleness to the air made her
wonder if it had stayed more or less sealed since the Break. It gave the stairwell
an eerie feeling, like a tomb, though there was nobody buried in it that she could
see. She began to wonder if there was, higher up—if someone had been walking the stairs
when RM finally claimed them, and they had been sealed in here ever since—but by the
time she reached the twenty-first floor, she still hadn’t seen any bodies. She thought
about going on to look for some, to satisfy twenty-one floors of pent-up curiosity,
but no. There were bodies enough in a city this size; half the cars on the street
held skeletons, and the homes and offices held millions more. One body more or less
in an old forgotten stairwell wouldn’t change anything. She pried open the door with
a squeal of hinges and walked into the ParaGen office.

It wasn’t the main office, of course; she had seen that in a photograph a few weeks
ago: herself as a child, her father, and her adopted guardian, Nandita, standing before
a great glass building framed by snowy mountains. She didn’t know where it was, she
didn’t remember the photo being taken, and she certainly didn’t recall knowing Nandita
before the Break, but there it was. She had been only five when the world ended, maybe
only four in the photo. What did it mean? Who was Nandita, really, and what connection
did she have to ParaGen? Had she worked there? Had her father? She knew he’d worked
in an office, but she’d been too young to remember more. If Kira was really a Partial,
was she a lab experiment? An accident? A prototype? Why hadn’t Nandita ever told her?

That was the biggest question of all, in some ways. Kira had lived with Nandita for
nearly twelve years. If she’d known what Kira really was—if she’d known the whole
time and never said a word—Kira didn’t like that at all.

The thoughts made her queasy, just as they had on the street outside.
I’m fake,
she thought.
I’m an artificial construct that thinks she’s a person. I’m as fake as the faux-stone
finish on this desk.
She walked into the front office and touched the peeling reception desk: painted
vinyl over pressed plastic board. Barely even natural, let alone real. She looked
up, forcing herself to forget about the discomfort and focus on the task at hand.
The reception area was spacious for Manhattan, a wide room filled with splitting leather
couches and a rugged rock structure, probably a former waterfall or fountain. The
wall behind the reception desk showed a massive metal ParaGen logo, the same one on
the building in the photo. She opened her bag, pulled out the carefully folded picture,
and compared the two images.
Identical.
She put the photo away and walked around to the back of the reception desk, picking
carefully through the papers strewn across the top of it. Like the stairwell, this
room had no external opening and had thus stayed closed off from the elements; the
papers were old and yellowed, but they were intact and neatly ordered. Most of it
was unimportant clutter: phone directories and company brochures and a paperback book
the receptionist had been reading,
I Love You to Death
, with the image of a bloody dagger on the cover. Maybe not the most politically correct
thing to be reading while the world ended, but then again the receptionist hadn’t
even been here during the Break. She would have been evacuated when RM got really
bad, or when it was first released, or maybe even as early as the start of the Partial
War. Kira tapped the book with her finger, noting the bookmark about three quarters
through.
She never found out who was loving whom to death.

Kira glanced again at the directory, noting that some of the four-number phone extensions
started with 1, and some with 2. The office took up two floors of the building, maybe?
She flipped through the pages and found in the back a section of longer numbers, ten
digits each: several starting with 1303 and others with 1312. She knew from talking
to adults, people who remembered the old world, that these were area codes for different
parts of the country, but she had no idea which parts, and the directory didn’t say.

The brochures were stacked neatly in a corner of the desk, their front covers adorned
with a stylized double helix and a picture of the building from Kira’s photo, though
from a different angle. Kira picked it up to look more closely and saw similar buildings
in the background, most notably a tall, blocky tower that seemed to be made of great
glass cubes. In flowing script at the bottom of the page was the phrase: “Becoming
better than what we are.” Inside were page after page of smiling photos and sales
pitches for gene mods—cosmetic mods to change your eye or hair color, health mods
to remove congenital illness or shore up your resistance to other diseases, even recreational
mods to make your stomach flatter or your breasts larger, to improve your strength
or speed, your senses or reaction time. Gene mods had been so common before the Break
that almost all the survivors on Long Island had them. Even the plague babies, the
children so young during the Break that they couldn’t remember what life was like
before it, had been given a handful of gene scrubs when they were born. They’d become
standard procedure in hospitals around the world, and ParaGen had developed a lot
of them. Kira had always thought she’d had the basic infant mods, and had occasionally
wondered if she had something more: Was she a good runner because of DNA from her
parents, or because an early gene mod had made her so? Now she knew it was because
she was a Partial. Built in a lab as a human ideal.

The last half of the brochure talked about the Partials directly, though it referred
to them as BioSynths, and there were far more “models” than she had expected to find.
The military Partials were presented first, more as a success story than an available
product: one million successful field tests for their flagship biotechnology. You
couldn’t “buy” a soldier model, of course, but the brochure had other, less humanoid
versions of the same technology: hyperintelligent Watchdogs, bushy-maned lions rendered
docile enough to keep as pets, even something called the MyDragon™, which looked like
a spindly, winged lizard the size of a house cat. The last page at the end promoted
new kinds of Partials—a security guard based on the soldier template, and others to
be looked up online.
Is that what I am? A security guard or a love slave or whatever kind of sick garbage
these people were selling?
She read through the brochure again, looking for any clue she could find about herself,
but there was nothing else; she threw it down and picked up the next, but it turned
out to be the same interior with an alternate cover. She threw that one down as well
and cursed.

I’m not just a product in a catalog,
she told herself.
Somebody made me for a reason—Nandita was staying with me, watching me, for a reason.
Am I a sleeper agent? A listening device? An assassin? The Partial scientist who captured
me, Dr. Morgan—when she found out what I was, she nearly exploded, she was so nervous.
She’s the most frightening person I’ve ever met, and just thinking about what I might
be made her terrified.

I was made for a reason, but is that reason good or evil?

Whatever the answer, she wouldn’t find it in a company brochure. She picked one back
up and stowed it in her pack, just in case it ever came in handy, then hefted her
rifle and walked to the nearest door. There wasn’t likely to be anything dangerous
this high up, but . . . that dragon in the picture had made her nervous. She’d never
seen one alive, not the dragon or the lion or anything else, but it didn’t hurt to
be careful. This was the enemy’s own lair.
They’re artificial species,
she told herself,
engineered as dependent, docile pets. I’ve never seen one because they’re all dead,
hunted to extinction by real animals who know how to survive in the wild.
Somehow, the thought depressed her and didn’t do much to calm her fears. She was
still likely to find the rooms full of corpses—so many people had died here that the
city was practically a tomb. She put a hand on the door, summoned her courage, and
pushed.

The air on the other side rushed in to meet her, fresher and more rich than the dead
air in the lobby and the stairs. The door opened into a short hallway lined with offices,
and Kira could see at the end long banks of windows broken out and open to the air.
She peeked through the door of the first office, propped open by a wheeled black chair,
and caught her breath in surprise as a trio of yellow-brown swallows took sudden flight
from their nest in a bookcase. A warm breeze from the glassless window touched her
face, stirring the wisps of hair that weren’t tied back in her ponytail. The room
once had floor-to-ceiling windows, and so was now like a recessed cave in the side
of a cliff, and she looked out warily on the overgrown ruins of the city below.

The name on the door said
DAVID HARMON
, and he had kept his workspace sparse: a clear plastic desk, a shelf of books crusted
over with bird droppings, and a faded whiteboard on the wall. Kira shouldered her
rifle and stepped in, looking for some kind of records she could search through, but
there was nothing—not even a computer, though she wouldn’t be able to search it anyway
without electricity to power it. She stepped close to the bookshelf, trying to read
the titles without touching the excrement, and found row upon row of financial reference
guides. David Harmon must have been an accountant. Kira glanced around a final time,
hoping for a last-minute revelation, but the room was empty. She stepped back into
the hallway and tried the next office.

Ten offices later she had still found nothing that shed any more light on her mysteries:
a handful of ledgers, and the occasional filing cabinet, but even those were either
empty or filled with profit statements. ParaGen had been obscenely wealthy: She knew
that with certainty now, but almost nothing else.

The real information would be on the computers, but the office didn’t seem to have
any. Kira frowned, disturbed, because everything she’d heard about the old world said
that they relied on computers for everything. Why didn’t the office have any of the
flat screen monitors or metallic towers that she was used to seeing nearly everywhere?
She sighed and shook her head in frustration, knowing that even if she found the computers,
she wouldn’t know what to do with them. She’d used some at the hospital, medicomps
and scanners and so on when a treatment or a diagnosis called for one, but those were
mostly isolated machines with a singular purpose. Computers in the old world had been
part of a vast network capable of communicating instantly, all over the world. Everything
had been on computers, from books to music to, apparently, ParaGen’s vast scheming
plans. But these offices didn’t have any computers. . . .