Accidental Creatures (34 page)

“What are the rods for?”

Helix shrugged. “How should I know?”

On the other side of the cable, near the stairs, a metal ladder ran up through a hole in the ceiling, straight to the canted roof of the tower. She and Helix climbed it to the uppermost floor of the tower. This room was even smaller than the one below. A strip of floor just three feet wide ran between the bulging ducts from the exhaust fans below and the translucent walls of the round tank which housed the brain. Light from windows set in dormers in the slanting metal roof reflected off the tank, bathing the dirty grey walls with lambent radiance. The reflections undulated with the movement of the growth medium. It was the brain that caused the ripples on the surface of the tank. It was much larger than an ordinary multi-processor brain. It was nearly as big as she was, and it bobbed gently in the fluid, tethered by its brainstem which trailed to the bottom of the tank and into the neurotranslator below. oOo

Benny pulled back the shower curtain. The man stared back at him with surprised and sightless eyes. He’d gotten him in the side of the head. A lucky shot, or maybe not. He’d seen Martin before, when he came with Graham to get Helix. This wasn’t Martin.

“Shit,” Benny swore softly. If Graham found out he’d shot the wrong guy, he’d never let him go. Fuck Graham anyway, he thought. He’d been double dealing him from the start, he didn’t have to know about this.

Benny stood away from the shower and dialed Graham’s number. “Well?” said Graham, leaning over his desk.

“I got him. Now get me out of here,” Benny told him.

“Martin’s dead?”

“Yeah.” Benny hoisted his handgun into view for added effect.

“Good.” Graham nodded. “Go back to the ventilation shaft you came in by. Take it in towards the center of the building. It’ll open up into a large air shaft running down the length of the building. Take it down to the fifth floor. From there you can get out through a side duct and into a maintenance stairway. Be careful. You’ll be coming out on the third floor balcony, and there’ll be people around. Keep your head down and walk, don’t run, to the exit doors. You got it?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it.”

“Good luck then, and bon voyage.” said Graham.

Benny followed Graham’s directions and found the air shaft without difficulty. He climbed down a metal ladder bolted to the side of the shaft. There was a steady breeze blowing down the shaft, tugging at his sleeves. Around the eighth floor, the shaft ended abruptly. Graham hadn’t said anything about this. Somewhere nearby a machine was humming steadily. Benny looked around. The only way out from here was through a wire mesh gate in one side of the shaft. It was padlocked shut. Benny stood to one side and shot the lock, the bullet ricochetting off the sides of the shaft. He pulled the grate open and crawled inside. If anything the wind was stronger here. He turned a corner and suddenly found himself being sucked head first down the duct. Up ahead he saw the whirring of huge fan blades. Benny pressed his arms and legs against the walls of the duct, trying to stop himself. He just managed to skid to a halt at the lip of the duct, where he teetered precariously for long moments while attempting to push himself back from the edge. The sound from the turbines was deafening. The duct walls vibrated with it, threatening to numb his hands and feet and send him plunging into the blades. Slowly, he inched his way back up the duct, eventually turning so his shoulders and feet pressed against the walls. He got out at the first access panel he could find, and stood in a narrow crawlspace between some plumbing and an optical fiber conduit, catching his breath and waiting for his heart rate to return to normal. He couldn’t understand what went wrong. He’d followed Graham’s directions, and they weren’t complicated. Of course, he realized, that was the problem. He’d followed Graham’s directions. Graham had meant for him to wind up there, he had no intention of ever letting Benny go. If he was going to get out of here, it was going to be on his own.

He quickly became lost in the building’s tangle of crawl spaces, access ways an air ducts. Eventually he found himself in an elevator shaft. Looking down he saw the top of an elevator rising towards him. He didn’t have time to get out of the way, so he jumped on top of it and rode it up several floors until it stopped and he could crawl off again. He found a small niche for himself beside a junction box. This was hopeless. He might as well just try to get to a stairway and hope the building’s security cameras would pass him over. He was ready to pry open the doors to the elevator shaft and take his chances when he heard the voices up above. “There used to be an exclusive men’s dining room up here, the Recess Club. My mother told a story-”

He knew that voice. It was Chango. She was up there. God knows why; screwing around again with stuff that was none of her business. Sudden rage blinded him. She was always harping on Ada’s death, trying to find out “what really happened.” He’d put up with it all these years, and all these years, she’d never let him forget, not even once, that he was to blame. Well, now she was to blame. If she hadn’t brought Helix to Vattown none of this would have happened, and he wouldn’t even be here now. Graham had betrayed him, and he’d never find his way out by crawling between the walls the way Chango did. If he was going to risk the maintenance stairs, he could do that any time, right now he had a chance to take care of that meddling sport once and for all.

oOo

Hector Martin ran down the corridor, punched the elevator button savagely and then changed his mind. He couldn’t wait for an elevator. He dashed to the stairway, glancing back the way he’d come. The corridor was still empty, but whoever had shot Slatermeyer had probably meant to get him instead. Once they discovered their mistake...

Hector ran down the stairs as fast as he could, the punctuation of his feet landing on the steps jumbling the thoughts in his mind.

It had to be Graham, or some agent of his — that young man he’d had with him when he took Helix, perhaps. How did the shooter get inside his apartment? Not through the door, unless he’d been there all along. No, Hector knew how he got in. Chango had come into his bathroom through the cold air return. If she could do it, so could somebody else. Hector couldn’t imagine Nathan Graham crawling through an air shaft on his belly. He would get his suit dirty. His lackey then, who was probably that vatdiver —

Benny - that Hyper had mentioned.

And something was happening to the multi-processor brain network in the building. He needed to talk to Lilith, but in his panic he had left his transceiver behind. It didn’t matter, she wouldn’t answer his call, she never did.

He realized this was a terrible place to be, an empty stairwell. If this Benny was after him, if he could crawl through the innards of the building, the last place Hector should be was anyplace isolated. He needed to get around a lot of people, and it would be preferable if they were all paying attention to him. He thought about the serotonin levels in the brains. That kind of change was bound to have effects nobody, least of all the office workers using the network, could be prepared for. He glanced at the number over the door on the next landing. Floor 19 — accounting. He went through the door and down the hall, striding past the reception area for the department of procurement. “Sir?” the receptionist at the front desk said, swivelling his head in Hector’s wake. Hector ignored him and pushed open the doors to a large office filled with desks and the insistent bleeping of transceivers.

He went to a desk in the middle of the office where a woman about his age was gazing absently at a cost-earnings chart. “Excuse me,” he told her and jumped on top of her desk. The holographic chart painted his pant legs with stripes of orange and blue. “Excuse me everybody,” he said to the surrounding hubbub. “Can I have your attention please?”

The office fell silent but for the continued bleepings of the transceivers, which went for the moment unanswered. Everyone was staring at him. A few bent their heads together to whisper questions. “Who is that?” “What’s going on?”

“I’m Dr. Hector Martin,” he said, getting blank looks from all around. “I invented the multi-processor brains,” he added, and saw some of them nod their heads in recognition. “I’ve been a researcher here at GeneSys for the past twenty years and-”

“Please,” said a balding man in a teal blue suit. “Don’t shoot anyone. Whatever they did to you, it wasn’t our fault. We’re just accountants.”

Hector shook his head and held his arms out at his sides. “I”m not going to shoot anyone. I’m not even armed. I realize this is unusual, but I had to get your attention, because soon, something even more unusual is going to happen.”

It didn’t matter what he said, they were afraid. Even more so now that they knew he wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill disgruntled employee out for revenge. At least that was something they knew about. They were afraid not so much because of the prospect of what might happen next, but because they were being shaken out of their familiar routine.

“I’ve been working on a project for the past three years that has enormous potential for the company.”

A few of them relaxed at this. Fine, let them think this was an overly theatrical presentation for a new product. Anything to keep them from panicking.

“One of the side-products of this research is a new kind of biopolymer with properties and applications previously unheard of. My colleagues and I have discovered that it has the ability to replace all our electrical and fiber optic lines with biological conduits, removing the need for an interface between your multi-brains and the transmission lines they manage.”

Some of the accountants murmured with approval, but most still had that “What does this have to do with me?” look on their faces.

“While this is a very exciting development, and will, I’m sure, dramatically boost speed and productivity in the long run, there is bound to be a period of adjustment and for a while things may be... well, a little crazy.”

The accountant who had spoken before said, “When is the new network coming online?”

Hector glanced at his watch. It had been about fifteen minutes since he left the apartment, but without knowing the rate at which the blue poly was spreading, it was impossible to say how soon the change would become noticeable. But Slatermeyer had said that Helix had exposed the wiring to the blue poly just before he got to Hector’s apartment, so the stuff had about fifteen to twenty minutes to spread before he checked the network. He finally shrugged and said, “Some time in the next eight hours, I think, maybe as soon as a half hour from now.”

“Today?” exclaimed a tall, red-haired woman towards the back of the office. The man in the teal suit wrinkled his brow. “We didn’t get any memo on this.”

Hector shook his head. Other people were starting to add their two-cents worth. “We always get a memo,” said the red-haired woman.

A young woman in a pale yellow suit shook a pile of mylar forms in her fist. “We don’t have time for this. We have to get the quarterly reports done!”

“We’ve always had at least two weeks notice before an upgrade. Nothing is backed up,” said a man sporting perfect hair and a red an blue striped tie.

“Yeah, what’s the big idea, coming in here and jumping up on a desk like that? Why are you telling us this? Why didn’t we get a memo?” demanded a heavy woman with bobbed chestnut-brown hair.

“There’s no time for a memo. Please everyone, stay calm. Everything will be alright if you just stay calm. The blue biopolymer was introduced to the building’s electrical system by... accident,” he said. No sense telling them about Helix and the other tetras just yet. They’d find out about them soon enough.

“By accident!” cried the woman in the yellow suit, slamming her mylar forms down on a nearby desk.

“Yes, by accident.” Hector raised his voice over their restless grumbling. “Now to start with, we should try to back-up everything we can. You,” he pointed at the balding man in the teal suit. “Assemble a team and get them started backing up your files. You,” he pointed at the woman in the yellow suit. “Contact as many of the other departments as you can. Tell them the system may be offline for a while, tell them to back up their records, and have them spread the word too. If we act quickly, we may be able to save most of the company’s records.”

“This stuff is going to wipe out the records?” said chestnut haired woman in alarm.

“There’s no telling what it might do,” said Hector.

oOo

Helix looked at Chango, shrugged, and crawled out of her body suit. Chango crouched at the edge of the tank, back bowed, legs braced to take Helix’s weight as she stepped on top of her and got her upper fingers around the edge of the tank. Helix pulled herself up with her arms and hooked her feet on the edge, teetering on the rim of the tank before carefully lowering herself into the waters. Their touch as they surrounded her was different from the waters of the vats. There was a different quality to the currents, a busyness, a subtle hum of activity. It tingled on her skin like a light electrical charge, increasing as she drifted closer to the brain. Now that she was in the waters, she could see it much more clearly, the fine crenelations everywhere on its surface, swirling like smoke rings, like wandering riverbeds of thought. She hesitated, then reached tentative fingers to trace the ridges. The texture of the brain was pulpy like an agule, but soft; yielding, delicate. Steady state polymer prices were up ten points, morphables were down five, she thought, only it wasn’t her thinking it. The garage was at seventy-five percent capacity, electrical usage was nearing ten-thousand units, and the production rates for vats 57, 19, 40 and 28 were sixty percent below quota. There was some connection between these things, some design hidden in their juxtaposition, but it escaped her. She cradled the brain in her hands, squeezing lightly to get its attention, but the stream of thoughts continued, temperatures and humidity levels and payroll activity and personnel changes. There was so much of it; streams of figures marching through her mind like an advancing army, relentless. This wasn’t anything like the experiences she’d had with the other Lilim; nonverbal conversations in her mind. Conversation was impossible, because beyond the ceaseless activity of the brain, the sorting and collating and adjusting, there was no who to talk to. Like a fish swimming upstream, Helix struggled against the flow of information, working her awareness down towards the stem and its interface. oOo