Revolution World (2 page)

As the glass on the window crashed and shots echoed through the room, she crawled into the lowest bunny cage and hugged that last and slowest rabbit to her like a child's toy. She did not fool herself with the thought that this was the act of a rational person. She just wanted comfort.

The bunnies did confuse the gun's internal computer. However, she was wrong to think the door would hold. After a moment it swung open, the digital lock released without a fuss. The intruder stormed in.

He knows the codes. They must have access to our network. How? Have we been betrayed or did someone manage to hack our security?
Clio wondered, even as she tried to stop breathing.

Please don't let him hear me. I don't want to die,
she thought as she buried her head in the soft fur of the huge rabbit. She felt its heart pound as frantically as her own.

Then something happened that made her inner scientist sit up and slap her inner human right in the face. The bunnies stopped acting like bunnies. She blinked hard when she realized she was watching the remaining half dozen rabbits take cover and slowly advance upon the intruder in a tight formation. They made a series of clicking noises with their teeth like chattering squirrels. The shooting stopped as the intruder searched the darkness.

Then there was a cloud of fur as the rabbits reared back their legs to reveal long fangs and yellowed claws.

"Holy Christ, monsters!" the intruder screamed as he or she floundering backwards, then wheeled, and fled back down the hall, shrieking the whole time. As the rabbit onslaught scrabbled down the hall after the shooter, Clio was lost in wondering how she had made fuzzy lettuce-eaters into ferocious attack beasts.

Was it in the protein folding? Post-translational modification? What could it be?
she asked herself. Clio stumbled after them in a daze, just to see what would happen next.

That's when she heard the sirens. She looked through the hall windows and saw the flashing lights of the police cars, fire engines, and Uncle Bubba's tricked-out hunting truck pull into the parking lot. Her friends and family had taken her pleas for help seriously. She was so happy she could cry.

On the other side of the building, she saw the two intruders burst out of a door and slam it behind them. They were raining bullets and laser pulses in every direction. They dove into a black hovercar that was waiting there. The smaller one was bloody and gripping a bag of papers. The larger one limped, but clutched a bag large enough to contain a few specimens. The car shot off like only a nuclear-powered hovercar can. The police saw the car as it sped off. They were in hot pursuit within seconds.

Clio sighed with relief and staggered towards the lights and the sirens. She could see her mother and two of her sisters were running towards her as she got to the door.

CHAPTER TWO

"W
hat are you doing?" the sheriff bellowed with exasperation forty minutes later. He'd ordered the women to stop touching evidence and go outside for the fourth time. After the initial hysterical hugging and questions, the women began compulsively tidying up the damage.

Harmony came over to soothe the sheriff 's ruffled feathers. She understood his frustration, but she had no intention of letting the man get in her way tonight. Her daughter had been in danger tonight and, worse yet, it had happened inside Floracopia. If any place in this world should be safe, it was the little splicer company she had built with her own two hands.

The problem was that the Floracopia Co-op employed practically everybody in town in one way or another. So the Somata Sisters were the closest thing to local celebrities they had around here. Harmony did feel it was idle vanity to recognize that. The identical quadruplet sisters would have been local celebrities anywhere, though. Harmony smiled proudly when she thought of her daughters.

All four of them were short and curvy with blond curls, green eyes, and, unfortunately, a reckless disregard for the laws of reality. Harmony frequently wished she had spliced away that characteristic. It would have made their lives so much easier. Constantly getting mistaken for each other had stopped being funny when they were about eight years old, so now they went out of their way to look different. Harmony knew the townspeople really appreciated it. Although most people believed they could tell them apart anyway. It was a very small town.

Harmony remembered the day, over twenty years ago, that old Myrna Hix had finally asked the question everyone in town had been dying to ask.

"Missy, are you pregnant?" she rasped.

"Yes, ma'am," she'd answered, determined to keep her voice level. She reflexively put a hand on her belly.

Myrna had sniffed. "Well it don't surprise me, what with all your people dead and you running that devilish gene business. It don't matter that it's all legal now, Jesus don't like it."

"I have to go now, ma'am," Harmony said politely and moved away.

Myrna was having none of that. This was the hottest gossip of the year. "And who's the daddy?"

Harmony had sighed. "That's my own business," she replied.

"Did you mix 'em up in one of your satanic gene buckets?" Myrna asked.

Harmony couldn't keep her voice level this time. "Human gene splicing is illegal, Myrna," she snapped. "Don't ever suggest my girls are strange. You know what would happen if the government thought they were spliced."

Myrna had paled and blinked hard. Harmony was kicking herself inside. She just knew the old lady would spend years making her pay for raising her voice to an elder. The subtle gossip in a small town can drive you mad.

"Well," sniffed Myrna. "Congratulations."

Harmony had watched the old woman scuttle off. And that was the last time anyone had asked her where her girls had come from. Which was good since she had no intention of telling. And they were all strange.

Clio, the splicer, spent most of her time in her lab so she usually wore loose, comfortable clothes like the cotton yoga pants, lab smock, and running shoes she had on this evening. Her sister, Terpsi, kept trying to make her sit in a corner and drink something warm, but every few minutes she erupted in outrage as more people pawed through her precious lab equipment.

Terpsi was what most people thought of as 'the responsible one.' She seemed far too young to be a married doctor with two little boys. Harmony felt much too young to have grandchildren, but she doted on them. Terpsi occasionally worked with the Co-op whenever they had a germ or medical project. Harmony did not like to take medical projects, so Terpsi maintained her own clinic in town as well. She always kept her long hair up in a smooth twist and wore sensible, conservative clothes. Tonight, she wore a soft plain shirt and matching loose cotton pants.

Kalliope was her wild little engineer. That girl always had tools and mad machines hidden in her pockets and grease smears on her face. She was given to wearing overalls, thick boots, and an ever-changing parade of party colors in her hair. Tonight she'd roared up on her homemade steamcycle with bright purple hair, sporting a thin nightgown over jeans. Harmony could see more tattoos on that girl than she'd known a person could have. She resisted lecturing her daughter, but it took effort.

Thalia was the only one of the Somata sisters not here. She was in California this week collecting samples for their next genetech project. Harmony was thankful. Thalia was too charming and persuasive for her own good. She just kept chattering until somehow she got what she wanted.

Harmony kept up a soothing litany as she gently steered the sheriff away from all those interesting cages. The man looked like he would very much enjoy poking around. Not all of the projects Floracopia took on were totally legitimate and she just didn't need any more complications tonight.

"Oh, sheriff, be reasonable. Half the town is tromping around in our parking lot. We've just had a major breech of security. We've got to make sure nobody else gets in," Harmony said sensibly as she patted the frustrated sheriff on the shoulder. She swept him out of a big lab room and into the hallway as graciously as she could. He craned his neck looking for the monsters the local kids always swore were in here.

"Now, it looks like the intruders opened the locks pretty easily, so either they had extremely good equipment or they had clearance to be here," Harmony said as she showed him the outer doors of the lab building. "Naturally, we prefer the employees do not come in after hours, steal specimens and shoot up the place, so we are looking into that aspect of it. We'll keep you updated with any information we have."

Harmony knew that if the girls were local celebrities, she herself was something like a minor deity around this town. She patted her hair to make sure it was still secured in a neat bun and checked her clothes for wrinkles or smudges. Although she always tried to dress and act in a way that was reserved, she couldn't avoid the looks her shining bronze hair drew, any more than she could avoid the whispers about her past.

Well, a single woman with four girls to raise and a cutting edge genetech business to run is sure to draw some comment. And if she was able to use her influence to direct local policy, it was only natural. She knew that any policy that helped Floracopia would help the locals. She grew up here too, after all.

"What are these scratches?" asked the sheriff, bringing Harmony back into the moment.

"What?" she asked innocently.

He pointed to the deep scratches along the walls of the hallway. "They look like they could have been made a pack of large dogs, maybe. But I don't know of any dog that could gouge concrete like that."

Harmony laughed nervously. "Oh look sheriff. I think your men need you." She quickly pulled him in to Animal Lab Two. The scratches were also at the base of the door. The sheriff continued to frown at them despite her attempts to draw him away.

"Is that blood in the corner?" he asked, but a police officer came up with questions that distracted him. Harmony slumped against a wall with relief.

Animal Lab Two was bursting with police and lab personnel sifting through things, taking pictures and bagging evidence. The sheriff smiled in appreciation.

"I do like a well-worked crime scene. Much better than monsters any day of the week," he said as he waded into scene. He looked with disappointment at some of the cages. "They look like normal animals to me."

Harmony decided to ignore his fascination with the specimens and filled him in on what she thought he should know. "It looks as though they made off with some specimens and some notes on our procedures for various techniques. Since the specimens themselves have no real value, we think perhaps a rival business or foreign government are looking to steal some of our intellectual property."

"Most likely it was
our
government," the sheriff remarked aloud. He was distracted. He had been watching a little mouse shoot out an impossibly long tongue and pull a loose pen into its cage. Its cage was labeled 'Garbage Mouse, Batch 42.' It gulped down the pen audibly and began eyeing the sheriff 's shiny badge. The sheriff took a step back.

Harmony gave a tinkly little laugh and shook the sheriff 's shoulder like she was trying to wake him from a dream. "Oh sweetie, why of course our government would never do such a thing. They'd ask for it nicely and we, as good patriots, would give it to them. Of course, poor little small business owners that we are, we have nothing worth the government's time," she said loudly.

She looked pointedly at the gaggle of uniforms behind him. He got flustered, realizing he'd slipped and criticized the government where others could hear him. These days, even a police chief could get snatched by Homeland Security and labeled as a terrorist. Harmony knew he had two kids in high school and couldn't afford to have everything he'd ever owned seized by the government as 'terrorist funds.'

"Of course, of course," he agreed hurriedly. He moved away from her to speak to the other police officers present.

"Good patriots are we, Mother?" chuckled Kalliope quietly. She had walked up behind her mother a minute before. Harmony hushed her with a look. Now that she was free of the sheriff, she could get some work done.

"What did you find?" she asked as she pulled her three daughters into a storage room, one of the few places free of outsiders right now.

"They took some of the Peruvian monkeys and the notes about that project," Clio said without preamble. Whatever Harmony had been expecting her to say, that wasn't it.

"What? Seriously? The monkeys? Are you sure they didn't make a mistake and mean to grab those stupid fire-breathing cows or the electric sheep?" Harmony asked in disbelief. "I could see industrial espionage for those guys, but Peruvian monkeys?" Clio shook her head. Harmony still couldn't wrap her head around it either.

Kalliope snickered, "Were they sea monkeys by any chance?" The others look at her blankly. Kalliope could never get her family interested in the finer points of twentieth century popular culture. They just weren't much on history.

Harmony shook her head and turned back to Clio. "They really took the monkeys? But we're releasing the stupid smelly monkeys into the wild to help rebuild their population. They could just go to Peru and pick some up and no one would ever know." She trailed off for a minute, lost in thought. Then she shot a sharp look at Clio.

"Did you do something to those monkeys, girl? Sweet Mother of God. Someday your tinkering is going to land us all in a maximum security torture jail," she said accusingly as she put her hands on her hips and used that tone only mothers can achieve.

Clio shrugged. "Nothing exciting. Had to get a little fancy and do a p-mod. Thalia was only able to bring back a few and they died so easily. I couldn't clone them any better than we could raise them in captivity. You remember? I don't understand how such a cute primate could be so difficult. Probably why they were going extinct before I got hold of them."

Harmony nodded thoughtfully. "A p-mod? Oh my baby girl, you are brilliant. Maybe that's it. A p-mod is awfully difficult and your method was very successful. I remember reading the outcomes. I was proud of you, honey." Clio brightened up a bit. Harmony knew she was not the best at overwhelming displays of affection so she did not try for a hug at this point.