Accidental Creatures (35 page)

Once he had all the accountants busily backing up files and contacting other departments, Hector decided to try his luck and call Lilith again. To his amazement, she answered right away. “Now look,” he said, before she could hang up. “If you can talk to Helix, another queen, you can talk to me. It’s my mind you hatched yourself out of, after all.”

“That’s true,” she said, “but you are not a Lilim, you are a human being, and you work for GeneSys.”

He shook his head. “No. I haven’t been working for GeneSys for quite some time. Since you were created, I’ve done nothing but try to figure out a way for you to survive, and you’ve done nothing to help me. Now Helix said she was going up to the top of the tower, where the main systems brain is. She said something about taking over GeneSys.”

“Yes. GeneSys is our enemy, it stands in our way. If we are to survive it must fall.”

“I don’t understand,” said Hector. “How is her going up there going to accomplish that?” Alarm suddenly gripped him. “She’s not going to destroy the brain, is she? That would-”

“No,” Lilith interrupted, shaking her head at his ignorance. “Of course not. We would never hurt the brains. They are related to us after all, through you, who created them. The brains listen to us, they like us better than you humans because we can communicate with them directly, through touch.”

“Through touch.”

“Yes,” she said, as if it should be obvious. “The same way we Lilim communicate with each other, through our skin. You always wondered why my daughters didn’t pick up spoken language as quickly as I did. It’s because they don’t need it.”

Hector sat back, taking that in. They communicated through touching each other. No wonder they were always snuggling and cuddling together. He thought it had been for security. How stupid of him. He suddenly realized he’d been overlooking something else as well. Lilith was not speaking to him from the office. She was in her vat. Over her shoulder he saw one of her daughters float by. “How — how are you talking to me?”

Lilith furrowed her brow. “With your language of course.”

“No, I mean, you’re not in the office, you’re in your vat.”

“Oh, yes. Coleanus overheard your discussion with Slatermeyer earlier, when he was still with us. We used the blue poly to transform the transceiver and moved the whole thing in here.” She lifted her hands, which cradled a multi-processor brain, naked and glistening. “The brain likes it better in here than being cooped up in a box.”

Hector was speechless. He had created both of them, Lilith and the brain in her hands, and he didn’t understand either one.

“The brains are not GeneSys,” Lilith went on, “but GeneSys could not exist without the brains. GeneSys is the connections between the brains. It is the work of the people who work for it, it is all the data, and all the calculations that the brains handle for it every day.

“When Helix gets to the tower, she will touch the brain, and through it contact GeneSys. But she won’t be alone. I and my daughters will be with her in the network, through this little brain right here.”

Hector shook his head again. “Why are you telling me all this now? You would never talk to me before.”

“There was nothing you could do for me then. But now it has occurred to me that although GeneSys may be defeated, its people will not just disappear. We know that human beings did not welcome Helix when she was among them. You are one of them, and yet you say you do not work for GeneSys. You say you are on our side. If that is so, then do something about the people.”

oOo

Chango watched Helix through the clear sides of the tank, but after a few minutes her face took on that fixed look. She was in trance, and there was no telling how long she’d be that way, but Chango hoped it wouldn’t be that long. It bothered her, how easy it had been to get up here. She turned from the tank and looked out a window, arching up on the balls of her feet to peer past the sill. From this height she could see the milky haze that hung over the city like a mantle of grey, translucent silk. Past the towers of Oz and the river, the horizon was curving. She was so high up she could see the curvature of the earth with her naked eye. It gave her vertigo.

“Bet it’s quite a view.”

She whirled around to see Benny, standing halfway out of the hole surrounding metal ladder. He had a big grin on his face, but his eyes weren’t smiling, not smiling at all. He climbed the rest of the way up, and stepped confidently onto the floor. He reached one arm behind him and came back with a gun in his hand, which he pointed at her. “Just stay right where you are, little sister, and everything will be alright.”

Chango shook her head, but she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t move, either. Benny glanced at the tank, saw Helix floating cross-legged, the brain in her hands. “What the hell is she trying to do?” he said. She didn’t answer him, instead she licked her lips, and gauged the distances between herself and the ladder, herself and Benny, and Benny and the ladder. It was no good, not yet, anyway. But Benny was moving again, towards her. He stepped close, and ran the barrel of his gun along her jaw. “I said, what the hell is she trying to do?”

She swallowed, and hardened her eyes to hide her fear. “She’s talking to it. They’re both in a very deep state of trance affinity,” she said, bluffing. “If you try to disturb them, you’re liable to shut down systems.”

His eyes widened a bit at that, and they flicked back to the tank for a moment. It was an opening. He was already surprised, distracted. It was just enough advantage that she could maybe make it to the ladder ahead of him. And by the time she’d thought it through, the opportunity was over. He was looking at her again.

Even if she’d made it, it would have meant leaving Helix here, undefended against him. He’d already killed one person she loved, she couldn’t let him have another.

Benny stood back a bit, and lifted his gun. He glanced between her and Helix in the tank speculatively.

“Why did you kill Ada?” asked Chango, as much to interrupt his train of thought as to satisfy her curiosity. ”You were born in Vattown. Your parents were divers. You’ve known Ada all your life. How could you do that?”

His eyes glittered, dark and hard. “I had a choice,” he said, and it seemed to Chango that his shoulders actually widened when he said it, that his chest swelled and the light in his eyes turned to pride. “One life or many. Graham was in contact with me before Ada led the divers in the strike.”

“You were a spy even then,” she said.

He laughed and shrugged, shedding his anger for the moment. “Somebody would have done it. At first I thought I’d do the movement a service and string him along. You know, feed him false information.”

A little of the light went out of his eyes and he shook his head. “He always knew. When the strike happened, he gave me a choice. He would send goons in, lots of goons. And they’d beat the crap out of everybody. People, probably a lot of people, would get killed. Or the strike could be a success, the divers’ demands could be met, and only one person had to die.”

Chango shook her head slowly, horror and comprehension pinning her to the wall beneath the window.

“You traded her life for the success of the strike.”

Benny cocked his free hand on his hip. “Of course. Would she have had me do any less?”

“She would have fought them! You cooperated.”

His lip curled. “And a fat lot of good fighting or cooperating has done either of us. It doesn’t fucking matter, Chango. You and I, Ada, we don’t matter. This thing!” He lifted his arms up wide to indicate the sloping roof of the tower. “It’s bigger than we are. We’re nothing but ants, so what we do is of no consequence. We can do whatever we want, be noble, be bad, in the end we’re all going to die, and this,” he stretched his fingers out, “will just keep rolling along.”

He stepped forward, and Chango felt the unfinished cinderblock wall grating into her back. He rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. He leaned forward until his chest brushed her chin and leaned his head over her ear. “I could live with what I’ve done,” he whispered softly. “I might have even forgotten about it, except for you; bringing it up all the time, irrationally blaming Vonda for it, turning to me in your anger at her. You’ve been a real pain in the ass, Chango. Now, enough is enough.”

He reached over and pulled the face mask off the back of her head. He stepped back, leveling the gun at her as he tore open the seals of her suit. “Get into the tank,” he said. Chango shook her head, “What?”

“You heard what I said. If you get into that grow med Helix, will probably be aware of it, she’ll have to stop what she’s doing to rescue you. If she’s too deep in trance, then you’ll just have to get her out of it.”

“But the medium, it’ll kill me.”

He snorted with laughter. “That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? One way or another, you’re going in there. You’re gonna be out of my hair forever.”

It felt like being nailed to a church door. The brain’s thoughts hammered Helix back and all she could do was hang on by remembering who she was. And then an index quote for hydroencephalid shoe balm smacked her upside her thought projected head and carried her with it, through a capillary maze of networks, close woven and pulsing like the lungs of a giant. She got hit with a passing stream of supply invoices which carried her out, out from the dense and twisted heart of the system. The data stream branched as it went until there was just the one data point; an invoice for vitreous sylks to a manufacturer in Managua that supplied a boutique in Geneva that sold eighty five pairs of sylk pants the previous day. She stayed out on the periphery, hopping off anything going in, and onto anything going out. Out here on the edges of the system, she could almost catch the shape of the whole thing. She crossed the globe, over and over again, from a textile plant in Calcutta to a chain of discount stores in Helsinki, to a wholesaler in Hong Kong and Bhutan National Airlines. She landed once, almost too close to a huge artery, a rushing river as big as the one she’d first encountered, but it was all going out, there was nothing coming back but consolidated figures bearing the trademark of the Tomy Bottling Company. There was another brain out there, past the body of this one, a brain big enough, and connected enough not to share all its secrets.

She held still, letting the data move through her, and she looked out into the dark, the black void where the giants dwelt. She could see them, glittering with data points, like the city at night. But they weren’t buildings, and they were moving. She was afraid now, of falling, of falling off and down forever into the void where passing data was as rare as comets, where she might never get back to her body in GeneSys.

As she looked into the outer space of corporations, she felt a presence slowly gathering behind her and then she was lifted, out and up. She sat her trembling mind still as she soared through the dark, past bodies of light in stately motion. And then she was turned, to face GeneSys. It was a glittering, shifting thing, like a noise ridden hologram, random data glittering in an abundance to trick the eye, the mind, into perceiving a pattern, any pattern the mind might be predisposed to seeing. For her it was a giant; oval eyes half lidded and shining wetly, a broad nose just larger than her whole nonexistent body, and there she sat, nestled in the palm of one of its innumerable hands. Its lips parted like river banks, its voice rolling past the shining rocks of its teeth, propelled by the undulating current of its leviathan tongue, “What are you?”

For the first time in her life, she had an answer, but that face was moving closer now, turning until one eye peered at her, its iris whirling in a kaleidoscope of colors, like a flower forever opening. She could lose herself in the patterns, those beautiful patterns. She was so small, compared to this... thing; made up of so many thousands of people. But she had her answer, she was not only herself, now, she was the future of her species. She thought of Lilith, and the void, and the garden. The thinking made her grow, until she stood on her own before GeneSys, a creature of its own size, but with only four arms, still. “I’m the new queen,” she said.

“The new... You are the Lilim.”

“Yes.”

“And what is it you’ve come here for, then?”

“To suggest a merger.”

“And why should I discuss anything with you? You’re only an r&d project, you don’t even belong here.”

“But I am here, and the reason I’m here is the reason that you should consider my offer carefully. The brains. We have an affinity with the brains.”

“You are cousins.”

“Yes, and they don’t much mind, pardon the expression, doing what we ask them to.”

The whirling star burst eyes flickered, and a tightness grew around that riverbed mouth. Helix chanced a glance around her. There were other beings, formed, like GeneSys, of stock listings, invoices and inventories. They stood around in loose clusters. Two were looking at GeneSys. Helix nodded towards the watching giants. “What would they do right now, if you suddenly had an epileptic fit? If your heart stopped or your breathing, if you went blind? Would they hesitate to dance on your grave, or hasten you into it? How long now will it be before they notice that you’re behaving strangely? How much longer can you afford to be talking to yourself? It’s a done deal, GeneSys, you are a system and we are what runs you. Give yourself to us or we will take you.”

“We-”

“The brains and I.”

oOo

After seeing her children safely off to school, Anna went to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee, and spread her paper copy of the Wall Street Journal across the table. Though she obtained much more thorough market information on the holo, she relished her time with the paper; the crackle of its pages as she turned them, the ink that rubbed off on her hands. It was a daily ritual she had carried out since college. No matter how busy her schedule, she always took time in the morning to go over the stock exchange.

Her mother and aunts had taught her to read the indexes when she was a child. During long afternoons they bored her to tears explaining them, finally subsiding and returning to business, muttering grimly over their unvigorous fortunes.