Accidental Creatures (11 page)

“Well, new to Vattown.”

“That's what I mean. I heard — I heard you were adopted, by some corporate dink, excuse me, professional man.”

“He's a research scientist.”

“Oh yeah? What kind of stuff does he do?"

Helix shrugged, “I don't know.”

“You don't know? Well, what kinds of projects is he working on? I mean generally, don't spill any trade secrets or anything, for gods sakes.”

She shook her head, “I don't know.”

Hyper stared at her. “Industrial ecology, biomathematics, gene splicing...” Helix shrugged again.

“You've been living with the man for, what, ten years, and you don't know. Okay.” Hyper drew on his cigarette and pulled the transceiver’s imaging lens down over one eye. He glanced at the hologram reflected through the lens, his eyes flickering as he called up new files. He glanced from Helix to the holo several times in rapid succession. “Do think I could-I don’t mean to be bold, or embarrass you or anything,” he glanced at Chango and then back to her, “would you mind, could I look at your back?”

“My back?”

“Yeah, it looks like you only have one collarbone. I was trying to mount a set of manipulating arms onto the existing armature of this robot I’m working on. I thought I’d have to hang it up, but if I can see how it’s been done, with you-”

“Hyper builds robots,” said Chango, answering Helix’s glance with a reassuring nod. She felt like she was outside herself as she stood, turned her back to him and lifted her tunic with her upper arms. Beyond the numbness of her fear she felt a burning curiosity. What would he be able to see?

She heard him looking, and then felt his hands on her back. She flinched, and then relaxed as they ran, warm and soft, along her muscles and bones. Of course she couldn’t see the hologram he was working on, but she sensed he was tracing her.

When he was through he slipped the transceiver over her head, so she could look through the imaging lens and see what he’d drawn — an anatomical rendering of her back, arms and shoulders. “What are you going to do with that?” she asked, backsliding into a paranoid fantasy of her image plastered on every building in Vattown, labeled with the words ‘Look at this freak.’

Hyper led her to the work area, to a thing with the lower body of a small tractor, and two waldo arms bolted to a steel drum with a hole cut in the middle. A gas combustion engine painted to resemble a face rested on a pivot on top of the drum.

“See, if I mount ball sockets here and here-” His fingers traced the metal struts the same way they had touched her own flesh. “-I can support the second set of arms without adding a whole new framework for them.”

“What does it do?”

“Well, it’s not finished yet. Eventually I want to put a pivot piston in here, and that’ll make the head nod up and down as it rumbles and spews smoke. And then it rolls around on the tractor treads, and the arms are operated by radio control and can pick stuff up. I want the extra arms so they can hold this-” He hefted a dented saxophone. “I’m calling it Close Enough for Jazz.”

Chango wandered in from the front room. “Do you still need a counterweight for the pivot piston? I may have just the thing.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool because I haven’t found anything... symbolically correct yet.”

“It’s out in my car, why don’t you come out and see.”

oOo

“Did you get into that data card yet?” asked Chango as she and Hyper walked to her car.

“What? Uh, no. No, It’s not giving up easily, and I’ve been busy with Robo-Mime. Is she asking about it?”

“She did at first, but I think she’s forgotten about it.”

“Well, she’s obviously never read any of it. Unless all that ignorance was an act. She any more forthcoming about her father to you?”

Chango shrugged, “I think his name is Hector. I didn’t really ask about him.”

“Hector? Hector Martin?”

“That’s it,” said Chango.

Hyper choked, “Her father is the Dr. Hector Martin? Christ!”

“You know him?” asked Chango.

"Know him? I know of him. He's the inventor of the multis.”

“Multi’s.” Chango shook her head. So Helix’s adopted father was the man behind the multi-processor brains that run nearly every major networked system in the world. Maglev, stock market, polymer plants. Shit, even the temperature and ventilation systems in most big buildings. “Geez,” Chango cast her gaze to the tower of the GeneSys building, hazy in the distance. “Talk about friends in high places.”

oOo

Hyper gave Chango a crate of DataKleen memory enzyme in exchange for the chrome fossil from the Russell Industrial Center. They drove to a faded cement block house surrounded with sunflowers.

“Pele’s house,” Chango said.

The woman who came out the front door to greet them had skin like a painted pony, irregular patches of black on a white background. The color scheme carried over into the cloud of thick hair surrounding her head. She was dressed in a yellow housecoat. “Hey Chango, I hope you came to fix my truck.”

“Actually it was more to make a trade, but what’s the problem?”

“It’s burning oil.”

“Ow. They’ll take you off the road for that.”

“You don’t think I know it? I’ve got a lot of goods to get to the market this week.”

“Alright, I’ll take a look.”

Helix sat on the porch with Pele, drinking iced tea and watching Chango crawl around under Pele’s blue pickup truck.

“I still like to watch her fix stuff,” said Pele, glancing sidelong at Helix. “What about you?”

“Me? What?”

“Do you like watching her? She’s a nice girl you know, but fickle.”

Helix looked at Pele in confusion, she was going to ask her what fickle was, but she got distracted by Pele’s appearance. “You go to the Eastern Market, to sell stuff.”

“All the time.”

“You see a lot of people.”

“If I’m lucky.”

“How do you deal with... with-”

Pele smiled. “With this?” She waved her hand at her skin, her hair. “I don’t ever really think about it, unless someone reminds me. I get that sometimes, from people who don’t know me. They always ask me the same thing, ‘Are you white or black?’ They really don’t mean anything by it, they’re just surprised, and they say the first thing that comes into their heads. I don’t take it to heart, you know? In the end, they have to deal with who I am, not what I look like.”

oOo

Chango traded Pele the DataKleen for a cube of holotoys and collected a carton of reefers for fixing the truck. “See?” she said to Helix in the car, “this is how it works. You get by.”

“Where are we going now?”

“We’ll go to Hannah’s. I’m hungry.”

“Who’s Hannah?”

“Hannah's Eclectic Homestyle Restaurant. It’s been around for ages. Used to be a Polish place but back around 19 or 20 it got bought by Hannah and her husband Ricky. Hannah just started cooking whatever came to mind with whatever was at hand. Menu changed constantly. Her daughter Rita runs it now. Food's still pretty good, but Hannah, man... Well they say Rita's daughter Gabrielle has the touch, and she's almost sixteen. She'll be out of school soon.” Chango shrugged. “One can hope.” The Eclectic Homestyle Restaurant was housed in a brown brick building with a peaked cornice and blue tiles set in at the corners of the doorway. Chango led the way under a red awning and flung open the door. Helix followed her into a large, bright room filled with tables and chairs, humid with the smells of food and loud with the chatter of voices and the rattle of silverware. “Hey Chango!” cried a voice over the din. In the far corner of the dining room a bald young man waved vigorously at them.

“Magnusson,” Chango murmured as they wound their way between the tables, “one of my very best buddies.” As they got to the table Chango reached across it and snagged a sausage off of his plate.

“Hey!” he protested but Chango only chortled gleefully and ate it, waving her burned fingertips. “Magoo,” she said, ushering Helix into the seat across from him, and sitting beside her, “meet Helix. Helix, this is -”

“Magnusson,” he interjected, leaning forward and extending a broad, flat hand. Her fingers brushed the back of it as they shook. His skin was smooth. He had a round head and a round, pudgy body. He was not only bald, she noticed. He didn't have any eyebrows or facial hair either. That’s why his skin felt so smooth. He didn't have any hair at all.

“Nice to meet you,” said Helix, suddenly realizing with a twinge that she was staring at him. His eyes were pale, pale grey, colorless, but not red. He looked like a grown up baby.

“Magoo cooks here. He's gonna get us free lunches, right Magoo?” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure, long as you don't mind taking my bus shift tonight.”

“Bus shift? You're still doing dishes nights? I thought Rita said she'd put you on prep.” Magnusson shrugged, “Sure, she said it. But now I'm doing lunch rush 'cause Octavio got sick, and meanwhile, they still need busers at night. So, I'm busing.”

“That sucks. She promised you.”

He snorted, “C'mon, nobody believes promises, not from an employer, right?” Chango nodded acknowledgment. “It still sucks,” she added.

“Yeah, well, it can only be so bad you know. I ain't divin',” he softly nodded his head towards a group of five seated in a booth on the other wall. Tank harnesses hung off of their lean, divesuited bodies. Hard men and women, mostly older than them but there were a few with eyes it seemed already darkened at the sight of death, though it stood for them, probably thirty, even forty years away. They were an animated group, smoking and laughing and living it up, partying at the end of their shift. But death hung around them like a cloud of smog that ground its darkness right into their pores so that they seemed steeped in something. Something that would slowly curl around the double helix of their DNA and twist it, twist them, into something else. Helix found herself searching their faces, trying to find beneath the angled planes of skin the shape they would become.“Why do they do it?” she asked, “if it’s so dangerous?”

“For the money.” said Magnusson.

“Most of them only plan to dive for five years, take their pay and get someplace where the living is cheap,” said Chango. “Only sometimes they find that five years isn’t enough, sometimes they find that nothing is enough.”

One of the vatdivers — a tall, dark-haired man — glanced over at them and detached himself from the group. “Oh no, it’s Benjamin,” grumbled Magnusson under his breath.

He approached their booth with quick strides of his long, lean legs. His vatleather jacket, still new, crinkled stiffly as he leaned over the table. “How's it going over here?” he asked. He had hard, bright blue eyes.

“Hi Benny,” said Chango, “What's new with you?”

“Not much, just snagging goobers.” He slid into the booth opposite Chango and Helix. Grumbling, Magnusson slid his plate over and made room. Benny reached a hand towards his sausages, but he brandished a fork at him. “Back off, man,” he snarled.

Laughing, Benny rested his chin in his hands and looked at Helix. “So, you’re the new girl, huh? Nice to meet you.”

Helix nodded and leaned closer to Chango, “Hi,” she said, her voice cracking. She felt her face grow warm.

“I heard you ran into a spot of trouble,” said Benny, “how are your ribs?"

“Much better, thanks.”

“She heals fast,” said Chango.

“So how do you like Vattown?”

“It’s nice,” Helix said, “it smells good.”

They all stared at her.

“I’ve heard this place get called a lot of things,” said Magnusson, “but good smelling, never.”

“Yeah, top on most peoples grudge list about Vattown is the reek of the growth medium.” said Benny.

“You really like it?”

Helix shrugged, “Yeah, it smells... warm.”

“Mmm,” Benny grunted, then turned to the others, “You hear about the new hiring requirements?” he asked.

“What, you have to be seven feet tall and blond now? I’d think they’d be happy to get anybody they can, these days,” said Chango.

“That’s just it, they are. They’ve just loosened up the genetic requirements, so first generation mutations are okay.”

“What?” said Magnusson.

“You heard it, they’re hiring sports now. Of course they’ll be classified temporaries, so the company can get around giving them benefits, including health insurance.”

“Fucking company,” said Chango, “this is why we need a union, Benny, to keep them from getting away with crap like this.”

“I’ve never argued with that, Chango.”

“No, you just won’t do anything about it.”

“Aw give it a rest already, would you? If you’re so keen on the movement, become a vatdiver and form one. You can, now.”

“I’m not going to throw my life away for a bunch of people who won’t even help themselves.”

“My feeling exactly,” said Benny.

“Where would you go, to apply?” asked Helix.

“Are you serious?” asked Benny.

“No,” said Chango. “She’s not. You’re not serious.”

“I was just wondering. He said they were hiring, and I need a job so... What is it like, diving?” she asked Benny.

“Well, you put on an anodized rubber suit that makes you sweat, a face mask, breathing equipment and a twelve pound air tank and then you go and swim around in a bunch of poisonous, murky water. It’s a real giggle.”

“I was just asking.”

“Well you don’t need to know,” said Chango, “because you’re not going to do it.”

Helix stared at Chango, sudden anger lighting her eyes. “I can decide that myself,” she said. They went on staring at each other for a moment more, Helix having difficulty keeping her eyes from jumping back and forth between blue and green, and then they both looked away.

“She’s right, you shouldn’t dive,” said Benny, his eyes wandering about the outlines of her raincoat.

“Someone like you would be a prime candidate for vatsickness.” Helix studied the place mat in front of her. It had a scalloped border of disinfectant enzyme, pale pink paste that left a little streak of bioelectric neutralizer on the surface of the table every time you moved it. Enough fidgeters, and you’d probably never have to wipe the table down.

“I’ve got some holotoys for Hugo.” said Chango. “How’s he doing, anyway?”