“One more game,” Josué wails, his voice sulky. “Please? I’m not tired.”
Anthea talks to him at length. Rigo can’t hear the words, only the soft dovelike cooing of quiet logic and reason. He knows that voice, cajoling. She’s used it on him before.
Josué’s having none of it. He stamps his feet. Cries. The racket is only partly muffled by the parchment thin walls. One thing about fights is that they cut down on the electricity. Rigo can feel the ap vibrating, all that sonic and mechanical energy being converted by embedded piezoelectrics.
Rigo snags a Corona from the fridge, flops on the couch, and turns on the wallscreen to drown out the noise. It’s an interactive setup, so Rigo links his IA into the display.
Grainy flitcam images from
ION
, an independent netzine that Anthea subscribes to, fill the wallscreen. Currently, during a news segment called subversION, the site is broadcasting undercover from an Indonesian sweatshop. An image of twelve-and-under kids pixilates. The kids are doing piecework, assembling riboware in the sweltering humidity of a sheet-metal hothouse.
Rigo shifts uneasily on the couch, takes a full swig of beer to wet his dry mouth and wash away the unease left by the dying woman. He resists the urge to scratch the spot where her embalmed fingers clutched his hand and wrist.
“See if you can dig up something else to watch,” he tells Varda. “Something more relaxing.” The download Anthea has the screen tuned to is relentlessly depressing. An electronically fuzzed voice-over of an ICLU rep talks about efforts being made to free the sweatshop kids and place them in foster homes.
While Varda mines the mediasphere for Woody Allen reruns, Anthea walks in. It’s hard to tell if the scratches on her face and arms are from Josué or some kid at the counseling center who went ballistic on her. It looks like she’s gone ten rounds. There are black half-moons under her eyes, penumbras of fatigue. She’s wearing skimpy red shorts and a sleeveless white cotton blouse. She grabs a beer from the kitchenette, plops down beside him, sharp elbows and hips denting the cushion.
“What’s up with Josué?” he asks.
“I’ll tell you later, after I calm down.” She’s bird thin, looks too skinny at the age of thirty to ever have a kid of her own. Which is too bad, because she’s mad crazy about kids, super with Josué, and would make a great mother. “How’s your mom?” she says.
Rigo strokes her leg while he tells her about his mother’s steadily deteriorating condition, the pharm-bred drug, and his thoughts about what to do with her if it doesn’t work. The ugly gang scarring on Anthea’s thighs hasn’t started to pucker yet. In another few years, she’ll need skin grafts to get rid of the dreamlike squiggles carved into her, hallucinatory glyphs that scare the crap out of him but are also a turn-on.
“That’s terrible,” Anthea says when he’s done.
“I don’t know what to do,” he confesses. “She won’t listen to me. I’m at a total loss.”
“It’s up to her. She’s old enough to decide what she wants. Doesn’t need you telling her what to do. If she wants advice, or help, she’ll ask for it.”
Maybe. Maybe not. Anthea doesn’t know his mother like he does.
They chill for a while. Her skin is soft, the stroking meditative. Rigo can feel the beer going to work on her, unknotting muscles. The moment drags on, comfortable. Eternal. With Anthea, it’s always this way. From the very beginning they clicked, were attracted to each other like subatomic particles. He trusts her, feels like they can talk about anything, no matter how intimate. There are no secrets between them. She’s not like some of the back-stabbing
cabronas
he’s gone out with who lie, say one thing and then do another. With Anthea he won’t get hurt, knows exactly where he stands.
When the subversION segment ends another one starts up, perversION. Anthea sets her empty beer on the floor and turns to him. Her eyes are bright, as if they’ve soaked up all the light from the screen. She leans forward, hair spilling down in front of her eyes, and pecks him on the nose.
“Is that all I get?” he says.
She nibbles on his left ear, teasing nips, and then pulls back, leaving the lobe to cool in the air.
“There’s another one,
mami
,” he says, turning the other ear.
She straightens, touches a thoughtful finger to her heartthrob lower lip—full and ripe without lipstick or collagen.
Rigo puts his hands on her hips, pulls her close. Feels her hands slide across his pectorals, down to his ribs. Tickling.
He yelps in surprise, twists sideways. Clamps his arms to his sides, trapping her fingers, and then fumbles for one of her armpits. Hits home. She giggles, tries to squirm away, and spills off of the sofa. They tumble to the floor, roll on the carpet until they’re gasping for air, sweaty with laughter. He ends up on top, ass pressing into her stomach as he pins her arms to her sides.
“Wanna jig?” she says.
“I think I might be up for that.” Rigo eases off her.
“Not in the bedroom.” She tugs him to the sofa with one hand. “I don’t want to wake Josué.”
“No problem,” Rigo says.
Anthea slips off her skimpy shorts. Rigo helps her with the blouse, sliding it over her upraised arms.
Onscreen, two people kiss as she undresses him. To Rigo, it’s like seeing himself in a mirror that reflects a different place or time . . . a different self.
“Take it slow,” she says, straddling his legs, settling her hips onto his lap.
Her nipples are raspberry plump. He presses one between his lips, feels it swell against the tip of his tongue. His fingernails rattle along the xylophone of her rib cage, grip the skeletal wings of her shoulder blades. They raise a little, spreading wide to carry him aloft. All he has to do is hang on and he’ll be lifted up, all the way to heaven.
THREE
Next morning, Rigo still feels a little out of sorts from his encounter with the dying woman. He can’t seem to shake her bad air. It’s like trying to get rid of a stubborn hangover. He offlines Varda—he can do without the grief—and pods to work early before either Anthea or Josué are awake, hoping that the daily routine will restore some semblance of balance. For the most part it works. By the time he arrives at Noogenics, he’s broken through the surface tension of his funk into the breezy air of normalcy. He’s back on track.
For once, there’s no overnight fog clinging to the horseshoe crab curve of the Monterey Bay coast, and eager fingers of sunlight slip over the hills above the Pajaro Valley to touch Noogenics’s thousand square kilometers of biovat domes. The company is a heavyweight politicorp, with production facilities similar to this in countries all around the world. Six years ago he started out as a vat rat, wading through growth ponds of putrescent ecotectural sludge in a biosuit. Now Rigo is a systech in charge of his own crew of vat rats, monitoring the growth of gengineered plants designed by various ecotectural engineering firms. With any luck, his experience at Noogenics will get him into an ecotectural engineering program. He’s already taken a few online introductory classes in organic chemistry, biostructural design, and mechanosynthesis, and applied for an educational grant from Noogenics. All he has to do now is come up with enough credit to pay for half of his education, and the politicorp will cover the other half. Easier said than done.
Most of his team is already in the locker room, stripping off morning sprayons and slipping into biosuits, by the time he arrives. The mood is upbeat, jovial. Rigo likes to think that it’s more than the pherions they’re dosed with to enhance productivity, foster teamwork, and improve morale. He likes to believe his crew is held together by a sense of camaraderie, an esprit de corps, that would exist even without the bond created by the pherions.
“Hey, bro,” Rigo says, giving each one a slap on the back or punch in the arm—Antoine, Naguib, Luis, TomE and Hsi-Tang. Even Claribel and Rana, when they join the group from the women’s locker room. He treats them like any other brother—no easing up or lowered expectations—and likes to think they appreciate the equality. That goes for the whole team. Give everyone the same respect, and in return they’ll respect not only him but each other.
Rigo dons a biosuit. He doesn’t have to wear a suit, but still likes to get his hands dirty, muck it up with the rest of them on a daily basis. It helps keep him in touch with his team, lets them know he’s not above any of them.
“Rig, you’re looking a little wrung out,” Naguib says good-naturedly as they head out to their vat buildings.
“Yeah,” Rana says, chiding him. “I’d say those
cojones
are drooping a little.”
“You’re just jealous,” Rigo quips, slipping easily into the locker room banter.
“Fuck that noise,” Claribel, the resident same-sex advocate, says.
“Well, I wish I’d gotten some,” Luis says. “My nuts are definitely not sagging from fatigue.”
Antoine grins. “Those aren’t
cojones
you got, dude, those are udders. You ought to visit a dairy farm.”
“Or a milkmaid,” Hsi-Tang says, getting into the act.
One big, happy family, with none of the fuckedupness that comes with actually being related. Together they’re responsible for ten vats. The project they’re currently assigned to involves the cultivation of warm-blooded plants. As a result, they work in sub-zero temperatures. Their biosuits contain piezoelectrics that generate heat through movement. The worst part, aside from the ass-freezing cold, is the dark. For three months now, they’ve been working in low-light conditions. It’s depressing. With only a few hours of sunshine in the morning, at lunch, and after work, it’s like living in eternal night. Could be worse. At least they don’t have to work in zero-g. The next phase of the project involves the modification of these same warm-blooded plants for the colonization of Mars and big, ice-covered asteroids in the Kuiper belt. Noogenics and Xengineering, the ecotectural firm that designed the plants, have already snagged a Kuiper belt comet and brought it into high-earth orbit, where alpha-phase testing and training will take place to see if warm-blooded plant settlements are even feasible.
They pod out to their assigned vat buildings, riding the monorail between geodesic domes, smooth opalescent hemispheres, dodecahedrons, and diamond-paned greenhouses, all of which reflect light with the oily iridescence of insect eyes. At the terminus platform, they jostle off and quickly settle into the daily routine. Rigo links his IA to the database for his vats, scans the vital stats for temperature, humidity, starch and oxygen content, microbe and nutrient levels, pherion concentrations. Each dome is home to a different type of plant, gengineered for a specific function: water uptake, purification, and storage; mineral retrieval plus separation; ambient heat generation and insulation; photovoltaics; bioluminescence. The plants are modular symbiots, designed to work in concert as a habitable ecotecture.
Once he’s finished his check, Rigo has Varda download instructions to his team. In addition to the regular vat maintenance—filter replacement, refrigeration coils, circulation pumps, and underground piping—there are occasional data failures to deal with.
Today, a number of plant sensors are offline; he’s getting no info feed. So Rigo cycles into the first building through its air lock. Feet crunch on ice, the sound brittle in the frangible air. An enormous gourd-shaped plant, as large as a big top in a circus, crowds the building. Under the narrow beam of his helmet light, the outer membrane is the color of eggplant and freckled with an array of tiny round windows that remind him of hard white blisters. The windows double as lenses—focus the feeble sunlight admitted by the vat dome into the hollow interior of the plant which is a balmy thirty-one degrees centigrade. Pores on the inside surface of the membrane absorb carbon dioxide and humidity, while microminiature air locks and cold-traps minimize the loss of oxygen and water to the drier outside air.
The defective sensor is inside. Rigo enters the plant through a wet, airtight cleft on one wall. It grudgingly admits him, prim as an evangelical’s pursed lips. The interior is suffused with bright, starchy light from bioluminescent spots radially distributed on the central support stalk. The floor is fibrous. Tough. At the same time, it possesses a springy resilience. Bouncy. Overhead, the windows form pustules that reflect a compound image of him. It’s quiet as a tomb, or a womb. All he can hear is his breath and the magnified pumping of blood, as if he’s connected through a placenta to something greater than himself.
“Rigo?” Varda says.
“What?”
“You’re leaking.”
Rigo catches a faint whiff of orange peels and lavender. Blinks. Hermetically sealed in his biosuit, he shouldn’t be smelling anything. The suit prevents him not only from contaminating the warm-blooded plants but from coming into contact with any of the proteins and pherions they secrete.
Rigo exhales, presses his lips tight, and takes a deep breath through his nose. If anything, the scent is stronger. “How bad is it?” he asks.
“You’ve lost positive pressure.”
Great. His chest tightens and his pulse races, shifting into Bernoulli mode as his blood vessels constrict. He hasn’t been claded for direct exposure to the plants, there’s no telling what their defense mechanisms will do to him.
Don’t think about that. Concentrate on something else. Like damage control and minimizing the exposure.
“What are you doing?” Varda says. “Waiting for the other shoe to sing?”
Holding his breath, skin formicating, he stumbles for the air lock. It takes forever to cycle through the sphincter, into the vat building, and through the door. Outside, Rigo pops the seal on his helmet, leans against the concrete wall of the control building, and gulps in fresh, sun-fogged air. Rivulets of sweat trickle down his brow and neck. He’s sodden, perspiring faster than his biosuit can wick away the moisture. He tilts his head back, stares up at the cerulean sky.
“Well?” Rigo asks.
“I wouldn’t say that, yet. It’s too early to tell.”
What now? he thinks.
“You should report to the corporate clinic,” Varda says. “Get checkmarked, just in case.”
True. The sooner he neutralizes any pherions in his system, the better.
But if he does that, he’ll have to file a report, explain what happened. The biosuit must have sprung a leak when he cycled into the plant. A micro tear. It’s not his fault—accidents happen—but the incident will look bad on his record, which has been spotless to this point. He’s been so careful; that’s one of the reasons he was promoted to systech, despite his lack of a formal education or training. Now this.
He sends a groupmail to his team, a brief note telling them that he has to pick up something, then pods back to the main building.
After five minutes, he should be feeling something— numbness, itching, muscle spasms, nausea, incontinence. But by the time he reaches the locker room, he’s still not experiencing any symptoms. Maybe he didn’t get dosed with a high enough concentration. It’s puzzling. Rigo has his IA link to an online biomed scan. Parses through the readouts for his vital signs, immune system, pherions. His blood pressure and heart rate are elevated, no surprise, but other than that everything seems to be normal. Relief spreads through him, a soporific dye that calms the jitters.
He’s dodged a bullet.
Rigo strips off the biosuit and inspects it under the sterile glare of the ceiling lights. Sure enough there’s a little gill-like slit in the crease of a neck fold, just below the helmet seal. Not the sort of breach that would be found without close examination. The suit isn’t that old. It must have been defective or damaged. The split is smooth-edged, a shallow cut that finally opened over time.
So all he needs to report is a damaged suit, requisition a new one. With the right spin that will look good, like he’s on top of things.
Following lunch, it’s back to the grind. A crazy afternoon, barely enough time to breathe let alone think. At one-thirty, Xengineering comes online, requesting updated performance info for each of the warm-blooded plants under Rigo’s care. No explanation. For some reason, the gengineers need the data now, they can’t wait for a standard end-of-week or end-of-day report. Whatever they’re stressing about is serious, time-critical.
Rigo’s stomach knots. He was in direct contact with the ecotecture for only a couple of seconds, but it might have been long enough to cause a problem. Who knows what his own pherion profile might do to the carefully orchestrated biochemistry of the plants. If there
is
a problem it could be traced back to him. He’s already reported the tear, with no mention of the exposure. Too late now to change his story. He’ll have to stick with what he said, ride it out.
Next time—assuming there
is
a next time—he’ll know better. He’s learned his lesson, won’t make the same mistake twice.
Hopefully the request from Xengineering is simply a precaution. They got word of the tear and want to be sure there’s no contamination. In addition to compiling and organizing today’s data, Rigo has to scramble to include back-data from the beginning of the week. And they want data for all the plants, not just the one he came into direct contact with. He finishes around three, squirts the data to Xengineering, and holds his breath.