Accidental Creatures (33 page)

“You’re right, of course. I had planned on a scandal for him, but that’ll take too long. We need to act now.”

“Well, we’ve already had one instance of a gunman breaking in and shooting someone, why not make it a spree?”

“Are you actually suggesting that you just break into his apartment and kill him?”

“Why not? Provided I have my plane ticket first, of course.”

Graham stared at him for a very long time. “That might actually work,” he said. oOo

It took Graham several hours to work up a schema of the building’s systems. Now it hung in the air over his desk, a glittering thing of lines and data points. “You’ll take the maintenance stairway down to Hector’s floor, and get into the ventilation duct here” he said to Benny, pointing at an enlarged section of the diagram detailing the ventilation system around Hector’s apartment. “Once you’re inside, go straight past six side vents, and take the seventh one in. When it branches, go left. It’ll take you right to Hector’s bathroom.”

Benny eyed the schema skeptically. “How am I going to get out of there? Security’s probably looking for me already.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got your escape route all mapped out. After you’ve killed him, call me, and I’ll tell you where to go.”

Benny laughed. “Sure you will. Why don’t you just tell me now?”

“Look, you’ve got your plane ticket. If you have a way out of here too, why not just use it right away?

That’s what I’d do, if I were you. The escape route is my insurance that you do what you say you’ll do.”

“Yeah? How do I know you’re not going to screw me again?”

“Oh please. I’m taking a huge risk keeping you around now. Believe me, the sooner you’re safely out of the country, the better off I’ll be.”

Benny thought about it a moment and nodded. “I guess that’s true, because if I get caught, you can believe I’ll be telling them everything.”

“Fine. We understand each other very well then.”

oOo

Slatermeyer struggled to keep up with Chango and Helix as they wound their way through the innards of the GeneSys Building. With Helix’s arms, and Chango’s dexterity, he didn’t stand a chance.

“Slatermeyer, are you with us?” Chango called from a utility ladder up above. They were in the conduit now, ropy masses of cable rose up through the shaft beside him. “I have to rest,” he called up. “Can’t we stop for a second?”

He heard her say something to Helix, and then, “Okay, for a few minutes. You climb up to us.”

They sat in a small utility closet on stacks of spare cable. “Where are we?” he asked, wiping his forehead.

“Oh, you’re almost through,” said Chango. “It’s only five floors up to Hector’s from here.”

“How can you tell?”

Chango nodded at the junction box on the wall above her head. In black marker it was labeled WW22.

“West wing floor twenty-two,” Chango translated. “Hector’s on the twenty-fifth.”

“We’re not stopping there,” said Helix, resting three arms on her knees and pointing up with the fourth.

“We’re going all the way to the top.”

“Well, we’ll have to show him to Hector’s apartment. He can’t find it on his own,” said Chango. Helix agreed reluctantly, rubbing a fang over her lower lip in chagrin. Slatermeyer fished the ball of blue poly from his divesuit pouch and rolled it between his gloved fingers.

“You were saying something about that stuff earlier,” said Helix. “What does it do again?”

Because it would prolong their rest break, Slatermeyer did his best to explain the properties of the blue poly as he understood them. “The camera was still working, so the stuff must be transmitting the electrical signals, or converting them into something analogous. If I’m right, there would no longer be any need for an interface between the brains and the electrical systems that they run. It’s a huge breakthrough in efficiency and speed of processing.”

Helix nodded her head at the ball in is hands. “Can I see it?”

He handed it to her. She turned it around in her hand, sniffed it, licked it, and then looked at him. “Can I use some of this?”

Slatermeyer frowned. “What are you going to do, eat it?”

With a pained expression, Helix shook her head. “If this stuff does what you say it does... Then I think we need to use it.”

“What do you mean, ‘use it’?”

“I mean try it out. We’ve got plenty of electrical cable around here. Let’s seed some of it with this stuff.”

“You better be careful, some of these cables are carrying a lot of juice,” said Chango.

“What are you talking about?” Slatermeyer stood up. “This stuff hasn’t been tested yet. I’m just making educated guesses here. There’s no way to be sure exactly what it does without testing it first.”

Helix shrugged, and stood up herself. She opened the door to the junction box above Chango, and looked back at Slatermeyer over her shoulder. “Here’s the first test.”

He tried to grab her arm, to stop her, but she had other arms to shove him away as she slammed the blue poly into the junction box. The wires inside were spliced together, their raw ends twisted around each other and held fast with plastic caps. It wouldn’t take the blue poly long to get past those. Soon it would be leaching into the wires themselves, and it would spread.

Clenching his jaw, Slatermeyer tried to push past her, to pull the blue poly off the wires before it was too late, but she slammed the door to the box shut and repelled him again. He stumbled back against a pile of cabling.

“Excuse me,” said Chango, standing up. “I think I’ll sit over here.”

“Don’t bother,” said Helix. “It’s time to go.”

“But-“ Slatermeyer pulled absently at his hair. “You can’t just-At least let me take some for experiments.”

Helix snorted. “Don’t you have some in the lab?”

“Oh, well, yes...”

“Then use that. Let’s go.”

oOo

Hector paced the carpeting, doggedly pressing redial on his transceiver. No one was answering. Helix and Chango must have left already, presumably Slatermeyer as well. Any one of them might have picked up the transceiver, but now only Lilith and her brood were down there, and he knew what he could expect from them.

He gave up the transceiver in frustration and went to the kitchen cupboard for the bottle. He was pouring scotch into a water glass when he heard a noise from the bathroom. He moved into the hallway in time to see Slatermeyer in a divesuit, stepping out of the john.

“I see you made it,” he said, and returned to the kitchen for another glass.

“Do you have anything I can wear?” asked Slatermeyer, peeling the divesuit from his body where he stood. “I can’t stay in this thing one moment longer. How can they stand it? All your sweat is trapped inside with you. It’s like being marinated.”

Hector set the glass on the counter. “I’ll get you something,” he said and went to fetch a robe.

“So where are Helix and Chango? Are they going through with that business about the brain?” asked Hector, handing Slatermeyer a generous glass of whiskey.

“Tsss,” Slatermeyer hissed, leaning back on the couch. “More than that. They took the blue poly I’d collected. They’ve already introduced it to the building’s electrical system.” He raised his glass up.

“Cheers.” And drank deeply. “Aaugh, that feels good. You don’t know what it’s been like. I know I’ve been exposed to the growth medium. How could I not be? It was in the air in that place. Hey, I should take a shower, right away.” Slatermeyer jumped up, nearly spilling his whiskey, and headed for the bathroom.

“What you were saying about the blue poly before,” said Hector, trailing behind him, “it didn’t make much sense.”

“The stuff bonds with electrical circuitry — becomes it actually,” said Slatermeyer, twisting the knobs of the shower. The rushing water nearly drowning him out. “It must be the bonding and propagation qualities. The camera worked just like it should, but all of its wiring had been replaced by the blue poly,”

shouted Slatermeyer over the hissing spray.

Hector leaned against the frame of the doorway, his mind reeling. “How does it handle the current?

Electrical signals in biological systems are minuscule compared to those in electronics.”

“I’ve been wondering about that too,” Slatermeyer yelled. “It takes less energy to transmit a signal through the poly. I’m thinking it may use the excess to drive cell division. But we’re all going to find out first hand what this stuff can do, any minute now. Those women, the tetra and the other one, they put it in a junction box. No telling how fast it might spread.”

Shaking his head in awe and horror, Hector walked back into the living room and took another drink of whiskey. The multi-processor brains were organic computers trapped in an electrical and fiber optic network. They required neurotranslators to process input from those lines. If Slatermeyer was right about the blue poly and its ability to transmute electrical lines into electrolytic lines, without loss of function, then there would be no longer be any interface between the signal and the mind that perceived it. He suppressed a shudder of shocked delight at the prospect and set his glass back down on the table. He turned on his transceiver and examined his own multiprocessor’s systems, calling up graphs and status codes for the brain’s electrolytic transmissions and its neurochemical composition. It wasn’t the kind of thing most people accessed, but it was there. Glutamic acid and histamine levels were stable. Norepinephrine production was down, which was to be expected, he hadn’t used the multi-processor much today. All in all, everything looked normal.

Using the access Lilith had given him, he called up systems monitoring for the building, and requested a biochemical schema of the whole network.

He stared at the brightly colored webwork, intricate in its structure and varied in the patterns of its chemistry. The network echoed the shape of the GeneSys Building itself, and in the region just below and to the west of where he stood, bright orange serotonin levels blazed like solar flares. There was a shot from the bathroom. Hector stood stock still, staring at the display, the gunshot echoing in his ears. He nearly called out to Slatermeyer, and then he turned for the door and ran.

As the tower rose, it got narrower, and the crawl spaces and access ways became fewer and ever more cramped. At last Chango and Helix were forced into an elevator shaft. They were at the thirtieth floor, the top of the gold top castle.

There was no more up to go, the shaft ended just above the elevator doors. Chango crawled up on the lip of the floor, resting her back against the doors.

“There used to be an exclusive men’s dining room up here, the Recess Club,” said Chango. “My mother told a story about a party her mother attended there as a child. A fabulous New Year’s buffet with a champaign fountain in the center and lobster tails arrayed all around. Everything was glittering and opulent, like a jewel.”

Helix was looking hopelessly around the elevator shaft. “We’re close,” she said.

“It was here, on the top floor. Let’s go take a look at it,” said Chango, twisting around to pry open the elevator doors.

The elevator lobby was disappointing. Dark red carpeting, faded with age and dust, covered the floor and the rich oak trim was cheapened by the dusky rose paint job. But at the far end was a massive pair of carved oak doors, their panels chased with curving leaves and acorns. Chango, her grandmother’s memory sparkling in her mind, stepped up to them and took the doorknobs in her hands. But when she tried to turn them they wouldn’t budge. She gave the doors an experimental shove, but they were as resistant as iron. She could batter herself against them until she knocked herself out. They were stronger than she was, and they were locked.

“Chango, come on,” Helix said. She turned to see her standing in the doorway to a maintenance stairway. “It’s open.”

Chango followed Helix up the stairway, which was narrow and painted industrial grey. Above the thirtieth floor it wasn’t painted at all, just unfinished cinderblock ending at a forbidding metal door. Helix opened it and the stepped onto a narrow landing around a wire-grid cage. Behind the cage was an enormous column of cables, all twisting around one another like bloodvessels around a heart. An open rung staircase led up around the cage to a door of the same material, standing open in invitation. Beyond it was another set of stairs, these ones wood and obviously ancient. They came right up through the floor of the room above. Chango had got ahead of Helix somehow, and she stood halfway up the staircase, her eyes level with the floor. There was someone up here. Above the hum of the metal flanked exhaust fans that hulked along the walls she heard an arrhythmic clicking that could only be produced by a human being fiddling around with something. It was not a noise a machine would make. She scanned the floor for feet, but all she found were the metal brackets which supported the exhaust fans an inch above the floor.

As she emerged through the hole in the floor she had an acute and exquisite sense of being someplace she was not supposed to be. Her skin tingled all over, making her hyper-aware of the air touching her, of her position in space. This was a bigger thrill than even seeing the Recess Club would have been. She kept constant watch for the clicker, but her view was blocked by the column of cables rising through the floor. The clicking sounds came from behind the cable. Chango circled around it slowly, careful to lay her feet down in silence. A folding chair stood empty, a soda can abandoned on the floor beside it. Chango froze, expecting someone to come and sit back down at any moment, but nobody did, and the clacking went on.

“Do you hear that noise?” said Helix beside her, making her jump. Helix pointed up to where the column terminated in a large metal ring set into the ceiling. “It’s the neurotranslator.”

A complicated series of metal rods ran from one edge of the ring down along the cable to a series of brackets on the floor. The rods were moving, sliding into different positions in the brackets and clicking against them as they did so.

“Hector told me about it. How without it the brains are useless because they can’t be hooked up directly to electrical systems. Soon I guess it’ll be obsolete.”