Accidental Creatures (37 page)

Chango kicked out with both feet, connecting with his knees. His shot went high, and he buckled backwards. Without thinking, she was up, pushing him squarely in the chest, adding her weight to his backward momentum. The coping caught him behind his shins and she ducked down, out of the reach of his grasping hands as he flipped backwards and sailed over the edge of the tower. Chango gripped the coping with trembling fingers and pulled herself up, craning her neck over the precipice to watch him get smaller and smaller, until he hit the ground far below. oOo

Despite all that Lilith had told him, Hector was unprepared for what happened when the Lilim took over the GeneSys network. The blackout he attributed to the blue poly in the electrical system. The worst part was the voice. The voice would drive anyone crazy.

It sounded as if it were made up of all the voices of all the GeneSys employees, and it probably was. Anyone who worked for GeneSys for a month or more would have had their voice printed for use by the speech recognition controls on the multi-processor brains. There were millions of voice files in the company databanks, and GeneSys was using all of them to scream.

Hector kept catching himself listening to it, trying to find his own voice in the shrieking babble. The red-haired woman found hers. She got up on her desk, as he had, and started shouting over and over again, “I’m dying. Get it off me!”

Hector tried to tell everyone to turn off their transceivers, but most of them were beyond listening to his single voice. He started going from desk to desk, turning off every transceiver he could find; grabbing an occasional accountant to switch off a wrist console or lapel receiver. He started going through one of the desks, furiously opening and shutting the drawers, searching for his lost data card. But after about the twelfth circuit of the desk’s compartments, he realized it wouldn’t be here. Hyper had his card.

He reached for the power button on the transceiver that lay on top of the desk, but stopped midway, gazing at the images on the hologram. Bodies rolled over one another, fighting or making love, he couldn’t be sure which. He realized they were tetra bodies. Lilith’s daughters. Their images resolved into a row of them, standing against a black background with their hands clasped in a criss-cross pattern. One of them lay on her back feigning sleep.

One of the tetras broke from the row to dance at the feet of the sleeper. Hector knew that dance, he remembered it from the dream he’d had of Lilith.

The sleeper rolled over on her stomach, and the dancer walked nimbly up her spine, pausing at her shoulders to lean over, and touch one finger to the sleeper’s lips. She somersaulted off the sleeper’s shoulder to stand — arms outstretched — at her waking, rising head.

Cutting through the babbling multi-tonal voice was a softer, calm voice, Lilith’s voice. “They say it began in a garden, but there was no garden. It began with a dream. the dream I dreamed of the dreamer’s face.”

The dreamer. That would be him. Lilith was telling the story of her own creation, her version of it. Galvanized, Hector turned to a woman nearby who was trying to lift a filing cabinet onto her wheeled office chair, presumably so she could wheel it out of there like an insect abandoning a doomed hive, trying to take everything she could with her.

She grappled awkwardly with the double file and Hector took it from her, set it back down on the ground and put his hand on her shoulder to turn her towards the hologram. “Look,” he whispered close in her ear, pointing to the pantomime creation story, which had started all over again. “Look at the story. See them dance? This is not death, it’s birth. Look at what is being born today. Isn’t she beautiful?”

The man with the perfect hair wandered by, clutching a stack of mylar forms and muttering, “Have to deliver the specs to audit. They’re late. The specs are late to audit.”

Hector stepped in front of him. “I’ll deliver these for you,” he told him, taking the forms from his hands.

“Look at this. See them dancing? They call themselves the Lilim. Before they came into the world, they were in the void, dreaming themselves into existence. They were born through the dream of a man who worked for GeneSys. They are the best of his work, and the company’s best hope for the future. They are going to take us to levels of competitiveness and innovation previously unheard of.”

Another accountant had given up senselessly over-watering her cactus and turned to listen to Hector.

“We are not dying,” he told her. “We are being reborn.”

Lilith sat in her vat with the multiprocessor brain in her lap. Her daughters sat in a circle around her, their arms linked. Coleanus and Nicar, the two closest to her, held her lower hands so they were all connected; thinking their thoughts, telling their story.

She could feel Helix too, far off in the network, struggling with GeneSys, trying to subdue it with the force of her mind. The behemoth battered her with a thousand hands, and Helix hung on, kicking and punching. Her upper left fist connected with its midsection, and GeneSys exhaled sharply in a gust of shock. Helix could feel Lilith and all her sisters with her, and they breathed in the hot breath of the giant and began to sing, and Helix opened her mouth and the song came forth.

It was a lullaby to put GeneSys to sleep, and weave for it a dream of a new incarnation. Lilith had always thought she would have to kill GeneSys, but that was not precisely the case. Hearing the song, the giant’s limbs slackened, and its eyes fluttered shut.

In the darkness inside the elevator, Anna Luria furiously punched the number for maintenance on her transceiver. “Before the garden, there was I, swimming in the blackness between worlds. I dreamed the dream of the dreamer’s face,” said a voice. The hologram was a sea of static which cleared momentarily to show her a nightmare vision of multi-limbed creatures locked in mortal combat. “Stop it! Stop it!”

screamed that strange voice, “Get them off me!” Panicking, Anna hung up. She tried another number, the personal code for the senior maintenance supervisor, Harriet Gorski, but again all she got was the voices, and a crazed stutter of images — children on a playground, a vat full of women, all of them with four arms. The freakish ranting of the voices was drowned out by a song, wordless and strange. On the holo, all the women were singing. It was a sound like the beginning of the world, and hearing it, Anna slumped to the ground, curled in a corner of the elevator and closed her eyes. oOo

By the time Lilith began to sing her lullaby, Hector had some thirty or so members of the Department of Procurement avidly watching the Lilim’s creation story. One by one they curled up on the floor or on top of their desks and went to sleep, lulled by the tidal rhythms of Lilith’s song. It tugged at Hector as well, but he did not allow himself to sleep. He didn’t really need to, he’d already had the dream. Instead he walked about the office, righting upturned chairs and unstacking precariously tall piles of mylar forms. It wasn’t long before people started to stir, and when they woke, many of them turned to him expectantly, as if he could tell them what to do next. Well, he supposed he could, under the circumstances. If the panic had been bad here, he could only imagine what had happened in the rest of the building, where there was no one to explain anything. Chances were, a lot of people out there needed help right now.

oOo

Anna wasn’t sure how much time passed before the lights came back on. She’d been asleep, dreaming that the whole GeneSys building was a garden, a garden of thought. She blinked and sat up. The overhead light glowed softly, and the elevator buttons were lit. She was descending once more. Experimentally she pushed the button for the first floor, and the elevator slowly came to a halt, and the doors opened.

She stepped out into a building decimated by panic. Office furniture stood scattered around the main floor. Many of the shop windows were smashed. A metal desk stood wedged in the doorway of the Hallmark shop. A hapless employee had managed to hook an extension cord onto one of the chandeliers, and now clung to it, whimpering, thirty feet or more above the marble floor. “Hang on!” she shouted at him, “Help is coming.” Help, from where? Here and there, office people stood looking about themselves in dazed confusion. Her glance flitted to a home furnishings shop, Tolby’s. They featured the finest in biopoly upholstery. She darted to a group of people standing around the vacated security desk.

“Go in there and drag out as many cushions as you can,” she said, pointing at the shop. “Pile them under that man hanging from the chandelier, in case he falls. I’m calling the fire department.” They didn’t recognize her, but they seemed relieved to have somebody tell them what to do, and scampered off readily to carry out her instructions.

Anna hesitated before punching 911 on her transceiver. She was afraid of what she might hear — those voices. And of course, once the fire department was notified, the media would get wind of it. She had no choice, these were her people. She punched in the number, and fairly sagged with relief when it was answered by a normal human being.

“Send everyone you have, immediately,” she told the receptionist, “and we’ll need an extension ladder or something, we’ve got a worker hanging from a chandelier about forty feet above the floor. There’s probably people stranded or injured all over the building.”

She hung up and turned to see a stream of office workers coming down the stairs to the mezzanine. Oh no, she thought, more panic-stricken employees, how am I going to handle them all by myself? But these people moved in an orderly fashion, and at their head was a figure she recognized. Hector Martin, looking a bit dishevelled, but whole and alive.

He spotted her and quickened his pace. “Anna. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. What about you?”

“Fine.” He turned to a woman in a yellow suit at his left. “Janice, please go down to maintenance and see how things are. We’re going to need them to rescue people who’ve gotten stuck in crawl spaces or elevator shafts. Take some of your colleagues with you.” He turned to Anna. “Is the communications network functioning now?”

She nodded.

“Good. Call here to the security desk when you get there,” he told Janice.

“I called the fire department,” Anna told him, oddly and wholly inappropriately irked at his competence. Hector nodded, his gaze wandering to where the man still dangled from the chandelier. “How long ago?”

“Just now, but they’re coming right away.”

He turned to a tall, balding man, and said, “Take the rest of your people and search the mezzanine and balcony levels, identify anyone who’s injured, but don’t move them, just keep track of where they are for when the paramedics come.”

“Martin, what happened?” Anna said as the office workers departed. “It has to do with your project, doesn’t it? I went to your apartment but you weren’t there. There was someone else — in the shower he was dead.”

He nodded again. “My assistant, Colin Slatermeyer. I think - I know it sounds crazy but I think Graham sent someone to kill me. They got Colin instead.”

“After what’s happened here today, nothing sounds crazy anymore. I had the same idea myself, when I found him.”

“Have you seen Graham this morning?”

“No.” She shook her head. “You still haven’t told me what happened.”

“I will,” Martin said, holing out a hand in placation. “I’ll explain everything, but first we’ve go to make sure everyone is safe.”

It took several hours for the rescue crews to case the building. They pulled victims of the panic out of ventilation ducts and elevator shafts. The man hanging from the chandelier was brought down in a cherry picker. The number of building personnel unaccounted for dwindled rapidly as those who had successfully fled the building were contacted on the now perfectly functional communication network and instructed to take the rest of the day off. However despite security’s best efforts, Nathan Graham could not be located. Besides Colin Slatermeyer, there were five known fatalities so far. Most of them had thrown themselves off the balconies. One man had electrocuted himself trying to chew through a multi-processor cable.

When she wasn’t busy with the rescue efforts, Anna was in frenzied conference with the public relations department. She had managed to buy a media blackout from the fire department by providing the city with a generous donation of flame retardant cellgel. She made a mental note to consider it as a yearly thing, around Christmas, say. It would make for a nice tax shelter and the PR couldn’t be beat. The statement issued to the holoweb cited a temporary power failure, and stressed the fact that all systems were back up and functioning normally. No mention was made of strange voices or mass hysteria. An in-house memo to all GeneSys employees instructed them to direct questions from the media to the public relations department, and the concessions director was instructed to make restitution of damages to shopkeepers contingent on their following the same policy. Through it all, she was deeply grateful that her children were in school. She made arrangements for them to stay with her mother for a few days.

With the press release issued and as many potential leaks stopped as possible, Anna turned back to Hector. “How about that explanation now?” she said.

oOo

Chango crawled back through the window to find Helix resting in the tank, her head above the grow med. “You’re alright. What happened?”

“We won. The mind that was GeneSys has gone to sleep, and dreamed itself into something new. A corporation ruled by both economic and biological imperatives. An organization dedicated to its own survival and the prosperity of its members, both human and Lilim.”

“So what happens now?”

Helix shrugged. “For me, not much. We’ll have to figure out a way to enlarge this tank. Seal off this room and get the temperature and humidity up.” She cast a disparaging glance at the dust-black walls and roof.

“Maybe put in some skylights.”

“You’re staying.” Her heart sank.

Helix nodded. “I’m going to have my daughters, live out my life, and die, right here.”