Accidental Creatures (20 page)

By the time he managed to propel them both towards the door, it had shut again. He reached over and hit the open door button and when he looked back he found that his raincoat had slipped from her shoulders, and in the struggle to put it back on her he missed the door opening and had to hit the button again. Finally, in desperation he just got out, and she followed him. Thank God it was so late, he thought as he walked down the hall supporting a four-armed woman half-clad in his raincoat, guiding her groggy way to his apartment. He got her inside and deposited her on the couch in his living room.

It wasn't until that moment that he realized what he'd done. He'd made a decision without ever thinking about it. He could have put her back in the vat room, but her wounds had been inflicted by the other tetras, and something told him that if he put her back in there they’d kill her. Still he could have taken her to the lab. That was the right place for her, surely. But he hadn't even considered it. Without thinking, he'd brought her here. Maybe it was just as well. If she was discovered, it could lead to the destruction of her and all her kind.

The fledgling tetra squirmed on his couch and whimpered. Blood from her cuts was soaking into the cream colored cellweave upholstery. The stains faded even as he watched, absorbed and metabolized by the living fabric.

Hector bit his lip, hesitating to leave her alone for even an instant, but there was no help for it. He rushed to the bathroom, got adhesive bandages, cellular tape, peroxide and a clean cloth, and came back. It took about five seconds. She was still there. He sat her up and cleaned out her cuts, sealing the two big ones closed with cellular tape. He didn't know how to give stitches, and taking her to someone who did was out of the question.

After having her wounds tended, the tetra wanted to cling to him some more. Hector sat on his couch, an infant with the body of a twenty-five year old woman clinging to him with four very strong arms. “I guess she thinks I'm her mother,” he thought, and laughed, long into the night, at the absurdity his life had become.

He woke late the next morning, still on the couch, still with the tetra wrapped around him. Well, everyone knew he'd been working late last night, but he still needed to make an appearance some time today. He couldn't afford to attract any attention, not now. With effort he pried himself free from his sleeping child, and went into the bathroom for a shower. After he'd dressed again, he ran the tub, and went into the kitchen, rummaging around in the cupboards until he found an old box of kosher salt. All the other tetras had spent their first days floating in growth medium. He dumped half the box of salt into the tub. This was nothing like growth medium, of course, but it was the closest he could get, right now. He didn't like the idea of leaving her alone here for several hours, but he had to do it. Maybe being in a tub of warm, salty water would make her feel at home, and keep her quiet. She settled into the water with a blissful smile that bared her fangs, and looked at him with eyes of bright, sky blue. Dark brown hair sprang in clumps from her skull, but just the same, he thought she was beautiful.

She sighed, and her throat convulsed as she uttered an inarticulate, guttural noise. “Hgcklx,” she said. It was the first sound she'd made that was identifiable as a syllable.

“Helix,” Hector Martin said back to her. “Your name will be Helix.” oOo

Lilith dreamed she floated in the warm, void waters of the womb. Her womb, the womb of her mother. A pattern emerging from the whorl of nonbeing, coalescing in the darkness. Until the dream. The dream she dreamt of the dreamer's face. He opened his eyes, and he saw her, and through his eyes, and his dreaming vision, she was born.

She told her daughters that she dreamed herself into Hector Martin's mind in order to be born, but in truth she couldn't be certain whose dream she was. Before he saw her, did she exist? Perhaps, but not as she was now, and not here.

What she knew of the world she had learned from the multiprocessor brains, cousins to her through Hector’s imagination. They told her of the numbers and structures that formed the basis of life for the people she was born among. But she and her daughters could not live on such things. They needed agules and the waters that grew them. They needed warmth, and each other’s touch. Coleanus swam up to her and tucked her head into the crook of Lilith's neck, one hand absently reaching for a breast. She and her sisters had long since given up feeding from her, and now, like Lilith, subsisted on the fruits of the waters. But still they sought her out nearly every day, to rest comfortably in her arms; sharing in that contact the knowledge of their minds and hearts.

Lilith laid her cheek against drowsy Coleanus' damp hair and felt her sigh, felt with her a wave of deep contentment, the joy of being alive.

After a time marked only by the currents of the waters, Coleanus dislodged herself, drifting softly away on her back, then turning and diving beneath the waters. She returned with an agule, plump and purple, its tendrils tapering away to slender succulence. She raised it above the waters with her upper hands, offering it to Lilith, who took it, bit into the body and twined her fingers among the tendrils. She pulled them taut and severed several with her teeth. Swallowing, she handed the agule back to her daughter. They shared it, its sweet salty taste, its chewy texture, the slickness of it sliding down their throats. After the meal Lilith swam around the vat on her back, drifting past her daughters, staring up at the girders of the ceiling, now strung with ferns and vines. The air shimmered with warm mist. Since they’d driven the humans out, they’d made this place theirs, coaxing the vat system’s brain to raise the temperature and humidity. Even the waters were warmer now. Humans kept the vats too cold. The fruits grew better now, and the blue biopoly Hector and his staff were so taken with. The lights had been harsh white halogens when she got here, now they’d been replaced with bio-spectrum capsules which gave off a warm glow.

Amoritas came up onto the platform and slipped into the waters beside her. She wrapped her upper arms around Lilith’s neck, the lower ones encircling her waist. Through her touch Lilith knew that the second vat was thick with ripe agules.

She had made this place a home for herself and her daughters — her nest - but what of her other daughter, the new queen? Lilith had cooperated with Hector Martin’s plan regarding Helix, hoping that in believing she was human, her daughter would find a place for the next generation among them. But after talking to her last night, she knew that was wrong. Helix needed to know what she was. She thought she was insane, she didn’t understand her attraction to the vats.

When she suggested Helix get a job as a vatdiver, Lilith had never imagined her diving in one of those ghastly rubber skins, but of course she would have to. They thought she was human, and humans needed the suits. But Helix would be a prisoner inside one, one fourth of an inch away from her home. And how could she use her arms? It was only a matter of time before she took that stupid suit off, and given GeneSys’ predilection for policies, she would probably get in trouble for it. Maybe even lose the job Lilith had so carefully arranged for her.

She’d been about to tell her the truth, but Helix hung up. And Lilith couldn’t call her back. The number she had was for the transceiver Helix had left behind in Hector’s apartment. She’d tried it anyway, and left a message, but she had little hope she would check her messages and call her back. Regretfully she dislodged Amoritas and swam to the ladder. She no longer shivered when she left the waters, but was greeted by air as warm and moist as her own breath. She took the catwalk to the second floor balcony, and entered the tiny office which they kept sealed from the rest of the vat room's environment.

Inside it was dry, though still hot. The little room was crowded with multi-processors, transceivers and other equipment left behind by Hector and his researchers. It was an unfortunate but necessary compromise. Try as she might, Lilith was unable to keep the electronics from dying in the steamy climate surrounding the vats.

She sat before the case which housed the multi-processor brain, lifting the top panel off so she had access to it. She found the keyboard clumsy compared to communicating directly with the brain, through touch, the way she spoke with her daughters. Lilith plunged her upper hands into the growth medium surrounding the brain. Gently she cradled it, silently saying hello with her hands.

“Sisterlilith,” the brain acknowledged her.

“Brain, remember when we approved an employment application and sequestered the applicant’s lab test results? I want you to go back to that section of personnel records. Give me everything that’s appeared in Helix Martin’s file since she was hired,” Lilith thought to it.

As she’d feared, there was an application for Helix’s dismissal, filed just this afternoon. The reason cited was negligence on the job. An incident report described how she’d taken her divesuit off in the vat and then fought with her “rescuers.” So it hadn’t taken long at all, for her daughter’s true nature to come forth.

Helix’s inevitable break from bondage had won her dismissal from the only nest she’d ever known. It was intolerable. Now that she’d felt the waters of the vat on her skin, she would die without their touch. Lilith checked the dismissal application’s status and discovered that it had yet to be processed. “Brain, list security codes for personnel with jurisdiction over dismissal applications,” she thought. A stream of codes poured into her mind, each accompanied by the name and title of the person that held it. She scanned up the list, to the topmost echelons of the GeneSys hierarchy, searching for someone whose unorthodox decision would go unquestioned. She selected Anna Luria, corporate CEO, but Lilith’s momentary concentration on her code was enough to awaken the GeneSys security system and send it grumbling after her with access checks.

She withdrew to the labyrinthine calculations of the payroll system and waited. She was okay as long as she dealt with individual brains, the one in the office or others in the network, but collectively they supported the consciousness of the thing called GeneSys, her mortal enemy. It did not like her, and she did not like it. A company, Hector called it, implying that it was simply an organization of human beings, but she knew it was more than that. It was a thing unto itself, and just as she had to drive Helix from her nest, because there can only be one queen in a nest, she would someday have to defeat GeneSys, because it controlled the vats her species needed to survive.

Lilith returned to the list her brain had given her, crawling up it carefully, watching for access checks. She stopped at the security code of one Nathan Graham. She had used this code before, when she wanted to make sure Helix got hired. It had been good enough to get Helix her job, it would have to be good enough to let her keep it.

Helix lifted an arm to scratch at her forehead, then took her hand away. That spot was starting to get raw. Her arms were already pocked with raw patches from her scratching. She even had one on her cheek. Chango insisted that the itching was an after affect from the biocide, but she knew better. She knew it was an itch to get back into a vat of growth medium, and go back to being what she was, and she knew it would not go away until she did.

She sat with Chango on Mavi’s couch. “When I go back to work, I’m not wearing the suit anymore,”

she said.

“What? Are you crazy? You’re not going back there. What you did was grounds for dismissal. The only reason you haven’t been fired is that they thought you’d be dead by now.”

Helix stared at her in sudden silent rage. Stared until Chango’s face swirled and dissolved from the tears in her eyes. She turned her back to her, reached out her hands to claw at the air and screamed. Her voice echoed back at her from the walls, from the world. “I have to go back,” she shouted, turning around again to see Chango staring, her eyes two mismatched dinner plates. “Either that or...”

“Or what?” Chango muttered, her hands fretting with the hem of her t-shirt. Helix nodded, gazing at her. “It’s not like I’m really alive now, anyway. Not anymore.”

There was silence in the room. From down the hall Helix heard Mavi’s voice, muffled, speaking to Hugo in the pink room. Chango wrapped her thin arms around Helix and held her — held her and rocked her while their salt tears formed a poor approximation of growth medium between them. After a while Helix pulled back, and wiped her face. “Jesus Christ, Chango, what am I?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “But we can go see Hyper. Maybe-maybe he knows something.”

Helix wrinkled her brow but got up from the couch. They were about to leave when Mavi came in from the hallway. Her face was ashen. “Chango, go fetch Benny. It’s starting. He said he wanted to be here when the changes came.”

Chango looked from her to Helix. “Go get him,” nodded Helix. “I can wait.”

By afternoon Hugo’s remains were carried out by the coroner in a body bag. Helix stood in the living room with Chango, Mavi, and Benny, and watched the hearse pull away.

“At least his suffering is over,” said Benny, his hands stuck in his pockets, his back bowed and his chest curving inward, as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

“Do you want some valerian?” asked Mavi, giving him a worried look.

“No, no thanks. I’d better get down to the mortuary. Hugo had a little money left, about enough to cover his funeral. I might as well get it over with.”

“Are you sure? There’s time, you know. You could stand to relax.”

He shook his head, “I don’t want to relax. He’s dead, Mavi. How can I relax? Maybe once he’s buried, maybe then it will seem alright, but it doesn’t now, that’s for sure.” He glanced at Helix. He didn’t say anything, but she knew what he was thinking. It should have been her that went out of here today in a body bag, but she was fine. Hugo had slight exposure, and it killed him, she swam naked in growth medium, and lived.

“Come on Helix,” said Chango, “let’s go see Hyper.”

oOo