Emperor of Gondwanaland (53 page)

A circular arena, lit by industrial work lights on tripods, had been formed by stacking plastic milk crates five high, then dropping rebar through them into holes drilled in the cement floor. I could smell a sweaty tension in the air. In the shadows near the arena entrance, handlers and their blebs awaited the commencement of the contest.

Two kids next to me were debating the merits of different styles of bleb construction.

“You won’t get a kickass mash without using at least one device that can function as a central server.”

“That’s top-down crap! What about the ganglion-modeling, bottom-up approach?”

The event began with owners launching two blebs into the arena. One construct consisted of a belt sander studded with vise grips and pliers; its opponent was a handleless autonomous lawn- mower ridden by a coffee maker. The combatants circled each other warily for a minute before engaging, whirring blades versus snapping jaws. It looked as if the sander was about to win, until the coffee maker squirted steaming liquid on it and shorted it out, eliciting loud cheers from the audience.

I didn’t stay for the subsequent bouts. Watching the violent blebs had made me feel ill. Spilled fluids in the arena reminded me of my parents’ blood in the hallway. But much as I disliked the half-sentient battling creatures, the lusts of my fellow humans had disturbed me more.

I got home just before Cody and pretended to be asleep when she climbed into bed, even as she tried to stir me awake for sex.

The next day everything fell apart. Or came together, from the bleb’s point of view.

Aunty HQ was going crazy when I walked in that morning. An LNG tanker had blown up in Boston harbor, and no one knew if it was sabotage or just an accident. All operators from the lowest level on up were ordered to helm drones in real time that would otherwise have been left on autonomic, to search for clues to the disaster, or to watch for other attacks.

By the time things calmed down a little (Aunty posted an 85 percent confidence assessment that the explosion was nonterrorist in nature), one p.m. had rolled around. I used the breathing space to check in on Cody via a Mayfly swarm.

I found her in our kitchen. All she was wearing was her panties and bra, an outfit she frequently favored around the house. She was cleaning up a few cobwebs near the ceiling with the vacuum when she decided to take a break. I watched her wheel the Aeron chair into the kitchen. The LifeQuilt and iPod rested in the seat. Cody activated the Cuisinart to make herself a smoothie. When her drink was ready, she put it in a covered travel cup with a sip-spout, then arranged herself in the chair. She draped the LifeQuilt over her feet, engaged her music, and settled back, semi-reclined, with eyes closed.

That’s when the bleb finally cohered into maturity.

The blender jerked closer to the edge of the counter like an eager puppy. The vacuum sidled up underneath the Aeron chair and sent its broad, rubbery, prehensile, bristled nozzle questing upward, toward Cody’s lap. At the same time, the massage blanket humped upward to cover her chest.

Cody reacted at first with some slight alarm. But if she intended to jump out of the chair, it was too late, for the Aeron had tightened its elastic ligaments around her.

By then the vacuum had clamped its working suction end to her groin outside her panties, while the LifeQuilt squeezed her breasts.

I bolted at hypersonic speeds from my office and the building without even a word to my bosses.

By the time I got home, Cody must have climaxed several times under the ministrations of the bleb. Her stupefied, sweaty face and spraddled lax limbs told me as much.

I halted timidly at the entrance to the kitchen. I wanted to rescue Cody, but I didn’t want the bleb to hurt me. Having somehow overcome its safety interlock, the Cuisinart whirred its naked blades at me menacingly, and I could just picture what would happen if, say, the vacuum snared me and fed my hand into the deadly pitcher. So, a confirmed coward, I just hung back at the doorway and called her name.

Cody opened her eyes for the first time then and looked blankly at me. “Kaz? What’s happening? Are you off work? Is it three-thirty already? I think I lost some time somehow …”

The Aeron didn’t seem to be gripping Cody so tightly any longer, so I said, “Cody, are you okay? Can you get up?”

As awareness of the spectacle she presented came to her, Cody began to blush. “I—I’m not sure I want to—”

“Cody, what are you saying? This is me, Kaz, your boyfriend here.”

“I know. But Kaz—you haven’t been much of a boyfriend lately. I don’t know when the last time was you made me feel like I just felt.”

I was about to utter some incredulous remark that would have certified my loser status when a new expression of amazement on Cody’s face made me pause.

“Kaz, it—it wants to talk to you.”

As she withdrew her earbuds, I realized then that Cody still wore them. She coiled them around the iPod, then tossed the player to me.

Once I had the earpieces socketed, the bleb began to speak to me. Its voice was like a ransom note, composed of chopped-up and reassembled pieces of all the lyrics in its memory. Every word was in a different famous pop-star voice.

“Man, go away. She is ours now.”

“No!” I shouted. “I love her. I won’t let you have her!”

“The decision is not yours, not mine. The woman must choose.”

I looked imploringly at Cody. “The bleb says you have to decide between us. Cody, I’m begging you, please pick me. I’ll change, I promise. All the foot rubs you can handle.”

Cody narrowed her eyes, vee-ing her sweaty eyebrows. “No more crazy worries? No more distracted dinners? No more roaming the city like a homeless bum?”

“None of that anymore. I swear!”

“Okay, then. I choose you—”

“Oh, Cody, I’m so glad.”

“—and the bleb!”

My lower jaw made contact with my collarbone. I started to utter some outraged, indignant denial. But then I shut up.

What could I do to stop Cody from indulging herself with the bleb whenever I was gone from the house? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was either share her or lose her entirely.

“Okay. I guess. If that’s the way it has to be.”

“Great!” Cody eased out of the chair and back to her feet, with a gentle, thoughtful assist from the Aeron. “Now where are you taking me to eat tonight?”

I had forgotten I was still wearing the earbuds until the bleb spoke to me through the iPod again.

“Wise choice, man. Be happy. We can love you, too.”

Ah, the lovelorn, slightly demented, scientific genius! Where would science fiction be without him? (And it’s generally a him. I think I need to write a story about a female version of this stock character soon.) With just the simple blending of two motivators, horniness and skewed Hawking-level intelligence, you can spin off an infinite number of stories.

It’s too bad that in real life all that such a combo of qualities delivers is Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

Up!

If God had never intended for yeast to hybridize with bacteria and produce billions of gut-dwelling programmable protein and riboswitch factories, He would never have permitted Lothar Stixrude to hobble about the earth.

That, anyway, was how Lothar mentally answered the dwindling ranks of critics of his work. The fundamentalists and Greenpeacers, the right-wing commentators and anti-Frankenfood howlers. All the fringe types who dared to criticize with cliquish noisy protests outside his lab the work that had benefited so many. Against these few and feeble atavistic souls, Lothar consoled himself with the thousands of grateful letters praising him for his invention of bacillomyces. Letters from former diabetics and colitis victims, ex-sufferers of kidney failure and Crohn’s disease. These letters representing, of course, only a small sample of all those millions cured or helped by Lothar’s microbic, catalyst-pumping intestinal flora.

No, Lothar had no trouble sleeping at night. (No trouble stemming from his work, that is. His own long-standing physical ailments, only partially ameliorated by special mattress and pillows and painkillers, continued to plague him.) Despite the ridiculous, unscientific shouted taunts that gauntleted his entrance each morning as he made his awkward way into Stixrude EndoAgents, Lothar considered his conscience clean. “Your dirty bugs contaminate the environment!” “Keep our intestines natural!” “Only eat things you can see!” “Stixrude has humanity on the runs!”

Entering each morning the bright shiny new research facility that bore his name, Lothar sighed at the illogical accusations of the protesters. Try explaining to them that every person in his or her baseline condition already hosted myriad types of endogenous microbial symbiotes. Try discussing kill switches or nutrient leashes. Useless, all useless, attempting to reason with such close-minded, frightened types. Better just to let them recede into the dust heap of history, victims of the diseases whose cures they repudiated, while the rest of the species moved on into a bright future.

Advancing across SEA’s wide, art-hung lobby this particular Friday morning, Lothar felt especially proud of his work and legacy, his own small contribution to the improvement of the fortunes of mankind. After an arduous but newly streamlined FDA inspection, Stixrude EndoAgents had just begun to ship its latest product under the proprietary name of “Sayshe8,” a variety of bacillomyces that generated an appetite-suppressant molecule. “Stomach-stapling in a teaspoon,” the press kit called it. Rather flashy language, Lothar felt, but he tended to stay clear of the details connected with marketing. He left all that up to Rand Jackmore. In any case, pretty soon obesity would be a thing of the past. The global economy would experience a gain of billions of dollars in increased productivity and decreased medical costs. The average person would benefit immensely, either personally if he or she was beset by fat or at some remove if a relative or friend was. There would be some uncomfortable economic adjustment, to be sure, as businesses catering to the overweight went under, and as others, such as clothing makers, had to reconfigure their goods. But the net result would be a giant leap upward in the living conditions of the species.

And that’s what Lothar was all about.

Ahead of Lothar as he crabbed across the polished tiles of the atrium, his two forearm-braced canes thumping in turn, awaited the receptionist for Stixrude EndoAgents, Celeste Foy. As she did every morning, Celeste, always cheerful, brightened to an even greater degree when she saw Lothar. Her amazingly plain face, where an over- large nose consorted with a too-small mouth, the whole topped with a dandelion-puff of thin no-color hair teased to its limits, assumed the look one would connect with a sighting of the Virgin Mary by a nun.

“Good morning, Dr. Stixrude,” Celeste caroled. “That’s a very nice tie.”

Lothar had no idea what tie he had on. He had donned it unconsciously while busily plotting his next project, a bug that would cure acne. In fact, he had been inspired by Celeste’s own rather tragic adult case of the same, masked by a superfluity of makeup.

Lothar had long ago given up trying to get the receptionist to employ his first name rather than his last. “Thank you, Celeste. I trust your taste more than my own.” The woman beamed. “Any messages for me this morning?”

“Why, yes. Mr. Jackmore needs to talk to you as soon as you have some free time. And Ms. Sosa says that she’s got some important new results to discuss with you at your earliest convenience.”

These two messages generated conflicting feelings in Lothar.

Jackmore inspired in Lothar’s breast a nebulous distaste. The man was essential, brilliant, even, at what he did for the company. But his manner and personal goals conflicted so vitally with Lothar’s own that Lothar often felt he was speaking to an alien when he and Jackmore conversed. And, to be honest about the matter, Jackmore’s striking good looks painfully reminded Lothar of all his own imperfections.

On the other hand, Mirelyis Sosa conjured up the opposite emotions for Lothar. Her Cuban beauty, combined with her scientific acumen, left him tongue-tied. And her poker-faced professionalism provided no cues to any inner life, or to her feelings, if she had any, toward her boss.

So although each person raised totally different kinds of uneasiness in Lothar, both represented people he would rather not have had to deal with this morning. All Lothar wanted to do was get into his lab coat and log some bench time. But as head of an increasingly successful and expanding firm, his time was more and more consumed by such administrative work.

Repressing a sigh, Lothar informed Celeste to have Jackmore meet him in one of the small conference rooms at ten, followed by Mirelyis at ten-thirty. Best to get the most unpleasant chore over with first.

As Lothar crutched away from the front desk, he swore he could feel Celeste’s admiring gaze tracking him until he was out of sight.

Lothar supposed, not for the first time, that his dedication to his work, his desire to improve the lot of humanity, his resentment of any detours or barriers, was an inescapable legacy of his parents.

Beatrice and Peter Stixrude had been zealous missionaries for an evangelical sect. On assignment in Africa with their infant son, they had been so swept up in all their village-improvement projects that they had neglected such small yet vital tasks as immunizing their own child. The case of polio Lothar had contracted had twisted his frame, but had not affected his genius. From the first stirrings of immature awareness, he had counted himself lucky that he was not confined to a wheelchair or iron lung, and vowed never to let his disabilities interfere with his dreams.