|
|||||||||
| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
|
Little Green Army Men
|
|||||||||
|
Sharpe had been quiet most of the trip home. He said perhaps ten words to her when he sprung her from jail, another couple on the plane. His PI gave them both a hello grunt when he picked them up at a terminal, but that was all that was said. Now they were within a few blocks of her apartment when Sharpe smiled to himself. “So, how was the joint?”
“It’s amazing how effortlessly you make me hate you.” She said it without humor, and she wasn’t sure whether she meant there to be any. It had been a hard couple of weeks for her, and she was beginning to wear thin. And now all she wanted to do was get home and hold Clara. Two weeks ago she’d told herself she never really wanted kids… of course, she had always wondered how much of that was a defense mechanism, since it was medically dangerous for her to try. Sharpe’s smile faded, and he gave her a concerned look. He was probably about to say something, but an explosion rocked his truck, sent it flying into a parked car. The passenger airbag hit Dagney so hard she thought her nose might be broken. She tasted blood, and felt faint. She realized there was smoke, and that she could hardly breath. She started to fumble with her seatbelt, her mind responding more quickly than her traumatized body, idly wondering whether the truck was on fire, and what had caused the explosion, when a man in paramilitary gear opened her door, and grabbed her hand. She tried to gasp, and resist, but the air was so thick and heavy, and the fight was already going out of her. She slumped in his arms. Dagney woke up on a table, not dissimilar to the one in the jail doctor’s office. She was restrained, tied down to the table, but she could already feel the leather strap around her right wrist slackening. “Be queit,” a man’s voice said; it was gentle, with the slightest hint of concern. “Where’s Sharpe?” she asked, rubbing her eyes with her one free hand. “Sharpe is fine, so is the detective. They left them in the car. Really no reason to do otherwise. But you’re different. You have firsthand knowledge of a lot of things you shouldn’t. Sharpe might have some preliminary reports from you, but you didn’t put everything in the reports. I know that, because he hasn’t tried to put you in a rubber room. I know you’ve just met me, but I really don’t have time for a loyalty test; I’m afraid you’ll just have to trust me. You need to come with me if you want to live.” He stood up to his full height a moment, and light cut across his face. She instantly recognized him as the man from Appalachia, the one her father brained with a canister of oxygen. She moved to flee, but her other hand and both feet were still fixed to the table. Her body tensed and her mind half shut off from fear. He gave her a confused look, then smiled a bit. “Ah. No, I’m not here to harm you. I’m not the first you’ve seen, then.” He gestured to a wall of strange pods. Floating in bubbles and fluids were copies of him, naked, breathing through horrible looking series of tubes shoved into their various orifices. “What you encountered before was only someone who looked like me.” He reached for her other wrist restraint, and she tried to claw at his face with her free hand, but he caught it. “If I wanted to hurt you, wouldn’t it be easier with you tied down? Now I can’t free you while fighting with you, at least not without causing you considerable damage, and neither of us want that. So please,” her fingers unclawed, and her arm relaxed, “thank you.” He finished her wrist, and then helped her sit up. He undid the clasp on her right leg while she worked on the one on her left. “You can call me Weir- it’s what everyone calls me. I’m part of the W series, which I presume makes me one of the more recent batches, hopefully with most of the predilections for mutations ironed out.” She stood on her own feet, beside Weir, and realized he was a good deal shorter than the man she’d seen in Appalachia, shorter even, than most of the men she worked with. “Where the hell are we?” “Pod storage. It’s a low-traffic lab, but with life-support and anesthetic equipment; that’s probably why you’re here. I imagine in the morning Blackpool was planning to interrogate you, torture you, interrogate you, and if they thought you had nothing more to say, kill you. That’s pretty standard operating procedure for these kinds of scenarios.” “And you’re not with Blackpool?” “No, or, not exactly. I’m part of the same program as the guys in the pods, and we’re usually subordinated to Blackpool commands- but I hit my head at some point in the programming and lost parts of my coding. So I’m a bit more of a free thinker than most. Still, I’d rather not test the limits of my retarded free will.” “We’re going to go through a hall. There’s a Blackpool guard that patrols through here, but his loop takes him fifteen minutes or so to get back here. Safety systems were left off because of a sensitive test procedure down in Dr. Piers labs. We should be fine. Stay close behind me- and if anything happens, run. We’re underground, so the way out is up two floors, a left, a right, left, right-” “B A start?” He stared at her, confused. “You don’t get it? What’d you grow up in a- oh, nevermind.” “Be quiet. They still have sound detection on- we don’t want to be found out just so you can make outdated pop-culture references.” “Outdated? That’s a backhanded way to call me old, you little- all right, zipping.” “Thank you,” he mouthed silently as he opened the door into the hall. She followed him a few steps out the door, but at a stairwell she stopped, and tried to turn up it. He grabbed her shoulder, pointed to a small infrared laser pointing across the threshold about six inches off the ground, and then to two more up the doorway. She followed him around two corners, then down a set of maintenance stairs. They stopped in a dark lab, this one more tightly confined, packed with important and expensive looking machinery. After standing around for close to a minute, Dagney began to bounce excitedly. “Okay, come on, let’s get the fuck out of Dodge.” “Unfortunately that can’t happen yet.” “Why not?” she asked, eyeing the dark lab nervously. “They’ve got motion detectors, infrared cameras, and a lot of security infrastructure making sure no one breaks into this facility. Unfortunately, it also keeps us locked in. But in the morning, we should be able to basically walk out the front doors. There’ll be enough employees milling around we’ll be less likely to be detected.” “Basically?” “Yeah. Unless we’re caught. And then the general badness ensues.” “General badness?” “Yeah. Gunfights. Probably a good deal of death. In that case our odds of getting out of here go from pretty good to flipping a coin- and to scotch the odds that extra bit you lose in the event you drop the coin, too.” “So we do… what the fuck, exactly?” “We wait.” “Math can’t describe how badly I want to kick you in the eyeball right now.” “But I bet Calculus could. Calculus is a bear.” He smiled again, and in that low, underground light his skin appeared olive. It had been so long since she’d had olives, and she couldn’t understand why, but his skin looked to have the same supple texture, and before she realized she was doing it she ran her fingers across his cheek. “What are you doing?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said, but that was at least partially a lie. She’d done this several times before in her life, moving slowly towards someone, her eyes closing, lips pursing. Maybe she still felt enough like a girl that she didn’t want to admit to making the first move, but she kissed him, first along the jaw below the cheek. “I don’t,” he said, but didn’t find the words as she kissed closer to his chin. “We,” he was breathless as her lips moved towards his, and he stopped trying to speak. He kissed her, a little too hard, a little too enthusiastic, like the first time she’d kissed Jared Ferguson in the seventh grade, and she couldn’t help but wonder if it was the first time he’d ever kissed anyone. Her hands moved across his chest, but stopped at his belt loop. “You don’t have a condom, do you?” “Think I left mine in my other fatigues,” he said wryly. “And you say there’s probably a slightly less than 50% chance we aren’t getting out of here alive?” “Oh, I’ll get out, just fine; but 50% for you,” he was grinning, now. “And you don’t just say that to all the girls, right?” “Only the ones I’m rescuing from half-certain doom- well, I guess it was more certain before the rescue- though I don’t know if it qualifies as a rescue, really, at 50%- just moving you to circumstances that are slightly less bad.” Dagney furrowed her brow, trying desperately to do back of the envelope calculations about whether the bad decision she was about to make was worth it. “Aw, fuck it,” she said, and kissed him. They made love for hours. Whatever he lacked in experience, he made up for in passion, vigor, and eagerness. She slept soundly afterwards, curled into his arms on the floor of the laboratory. Dagney woke to smelling salts held under her nose, and before she’d even opened her eyes heard an older man begin speaking to her. “I’m afraid that you’ve been plucked from the lion’s den, only to land in the belly of a whale. I’m Dr. Piers, and while we’ve never met, Dagney, it doesn’t feel like it to me. I’m the one who’s been feeding your Mr. Sharpe the leads that have taken you on your various adventures. And I see you’ve, well, met Weir. I asked him to bring you here safely, and wait until morning. I didn’t anticipate the pair of you… bonding. There’s no simple way to explain this to you, but I’m afraid you’re going to have a baby.” “Wait, what?” “It’s inextricable, actually. Terminators are designed to be infertile, also asexual; he shouldn’t have been attracted to you. Both of those conditions are persistent over 97 percent of the time in Terminators. It makes your circumstances rather remarkable.” “But we just-” “I’ll explain. To better monitor in vitro fertilization, we coded a gene into the terminator ‘seeds’ so that upon conception- successful fusion with an ova- the bonded cell lets off a bioluminescent glow. The effect lasts only a few hours, in fact, by now it’s abated, but when I first encountered you, your belly was lit up like a Christmas tree. So I took a small sample of your blood and tested it. You’re pregnant.” “The danger I referred to is the fact that terminator seeds are programmed, genetically coded, if you like, to grow quickly. We usually incubate them in artificial wombs, because, frankly, we were worried about the potential consequences of allowing a live mother to be exposed. At least theoretically, the anomalous DNA should be shielded from your body, so there shouldn’t be an immune reaction to the baby, but… we’re in uncharted waters, here.” “Terminators? I didn’t just stumble into a James Cameron movie, did I?” “No. The term ‘terminator,’ at least as its used agriculturally, came from Monsanto gene-mod crops, developed jointly with the US Department of Agriculture. The technical term is genetic use restriction technology, GURT, one of the uglier acronyms I’ve ever come across. The seeds are designed to be infertile. There are two purposes, potentially, behind this technology, one commercial, one safety-minded. On the one hand, it ensures gene-mod crops can’t reproduce on their own and essentially push out natural plant life, and on the other it makes sure a gene-mod company can continue to sell its modified seeds to consumers on an annual basis.” “The idea behind our terminators is similar. Weir, along with his brothers, is a human-plant hybrid, mostly corn if you’re curious. The research so far has been conducted to create better soldiers, though terminators have potential applications in any number of fields where unsafe conditions might benefit from subhuman workers, mining, space exploration and the like.” “But we didn’t want them entering the population and interbreeding with humanity, and we also didn’t want them deciding to settle down and have a family- hence the restrictions we placed on their sexuality. It’s admittedly not an entirely genetic approach; a large portion involves socializing the terminators to dislike the concept of romantic entanglement.” “At one point we discussed having them give off foul odors, to drive off potentially interested mates, but the decision was made against it, because it was thought such an odor might make infiltration more difficult, and make terminators easier to spot in the field; also, odors are one of the least efficient romantic destabilizers. Ironically, by creating genetically superior specimens, they usually come out as terrifically symmetrical and attractive, as you’ve no doubt come to realize.” “But what we may have neglected in our research was variety. All the terminators come from ten stem cell lines, essentially they’re all cloned from ten chimaeric gene pools built from advantageous traits, five male lines and five female. I suppose it’s possible we socialized the terminators to seem like siblings, hence a limited sexual attraction. So a new specimen, one unrelated either genetically or socially, and particularly one entering estrous, would have been irresistible.” “I’ve had my moments,” Dagney said, though having slept on a chem lab floor didn’t make her feel particularly attractive. “Though I do wish you hadn’t grown fond of him. You see, Weir is special, in that he’s loyal to me. The terminators are hard-wired to respond to military or paramilitary command. Unfortunately, this includes Blackpool, the private military corporation, infamous for their contract work for the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who also run Cox’s internal security. They have an army, two, really, the one with little green army men and their contracted one.” “Yeah, about that. You said they’re custom-built from desirable genes, so why is Weir about my height?” “Most of them are, except the 5th and 6th lines. Most functions of a military can be adequately performed regardless of height, and shorter soldiers do so with slightly greater caloric efficiency. It’s not a lot, but spread across an entire fighting force, it’s a 5-10% supply reduction- to say nothing of the fact that a smaller target is less likely to be hit in combat. But, the point I was striving to make: I don’t believe Weir will be coming with us. The plan is for the three of us to egress, but there’s a rather high likelihood that we will be discovered, and that Weir will have to buy us a chance to escape. Between the Blackpool guards and the rather strong likelihood they’ve activated more of the terminator soldiers to strengthen patrols, I don’t see any other real possibility.” “So I should hold off on sending out the wedding invites, then.” “At the minimum,” he said gravely. “I’ll need a moment to gather things I’ll require, files and the like. I’m also uploading a handful of Trojans into the servers, here. Probably not enough to permanently damage any of their systems or data, but perhaps enough of a disruption that they won’t recognize immediately what I’ve left with. Twenty minutes and we’ll go.” “Where were you with the Trojans when I needed them…” she muttered. “Weir?” she said softly as Dr. Piers wandered away. “Hmm? Oh shit. I fell asleep, didn’t I.” “Nothing to be ashamed of. You earned a nap.” “No, I… I really should have been keeping watch.” “Seriously? Look, if they’d found us, we were otallytay ewscrayed.” “Thanks.” “For what? Making you feel better?” “No, for not making the obvious ‘stand at attention’ joke; I could tell it was just on the tip of your tongue.” “Actually, it wasn’t- though it should have been; I’m still a little sextarded.” “The lights are on; I take it the doc’s here.” He blushed, just a little, even through the slight chlorophyll coloring of his cheeks. “Yep.” “Sorry about that. I should have been more discreet.” “I’m a big girl- I can take responsibility for myself.” Dagney bit her lip. “On that note, how do you feel about fatherhood? Because apparently you knocked me up.” “Shit. That… makes sense. Not probability-wise, obviously, but it would make sense in that it’s the one thing more potentially dangerous and tragic than the situation we were already in- and so of course that happens.” “Strong jaw line, strong hair line, and cynical, too? If we make it out of here alive, I may force you to move in with me.” “I’m supposed to be irrationally afraid of monogamy and commitment, right? I’m seriously out of my depth, here, so I’m asking only kind of tongue in cheek… because that doesn’t sound so bad.” Dr. Piers hollered from his computer desk: “You’re supposed to be staying emotionally detached- so stop bonding!” Weir grinned, like they were a pair of elementary school kids conspiring against an overbearing teacher. “He’s just upset because the company refused to fund his idea for sex-terminators.” “Oopsy.” Piers said to his computer. Weir stood up, his entire body suddenly at attention. “What’s oopsy?” “Apparently they have a file transfer limit I wasn’t previously aware of. I’ve moved too much data, and IT security has been informed. That means we need to leave sooner rather than later.” “Did you get me a gun?” Weir asked. “Duct-taped to the top of the inside of the cabinet behind you.” Weir opened the cabinet, and pulled out a 9mm Glock. “You’ve watched The Godfather too many times.” “Not possible.” “You ready?” asked Weir. “One second,” said Piers, tearing a thumb-drive out of his computer, which made a sad “beewoop” noise in complaint, “there. Lead the way.” Weir tucked the gun into his waistband, and beneath his shirt, and opened the door into the hall. Then he froze. A Blackpool guard was walking right towards them, and for a moment he eyed Weir, certain he recognized him. Dr. Piers poked out from behind Weir, who basically eclipsed him. “Morning, Paul.” The guard’s scrutiny and scowl disappeared, and he nodded. “Hey, Doc. Friends of yours?” “Yeah, a couple of colleagues from out of town. Think they’ll be doing some consulting work for us- once we get some things lined up. In the meantime, we’re headed out for breakfast. Can I bring you back a crescent or something?” “Only if you want my wife sending you another nasty email- she’s very protective about my cholesterol, and my saturated fat. Not that I understand why- she’s got more in each thigh than I have in my entire body, but that’s married life, you know?” “We’ll see if we can’t scrounge you up an apple, or a carrot.” “And with that I feel like somebody’s jack-ass, but I appreciate the sentiment. You haven’t signed them in yet, have you?” “Uh, no, they’re not here, officially, as we haven’t gotten the clearance for it yet.” “Yeah, I didn’t think I’d seen any guests on the sign-in. Just make sure they’re not using their cell phones or taking pictures, all right? And have a good morning.” He walked past them down the hall. Dagney lowered her head and spoke softly. “For a merc he doesn’t seem like a bad guy.” They walked cautiously up the maintenance stairs, then up two more flights of stairs, and around four corners, they hit the security checkpoint at the entrance. Piers whispered: “And here’s the point where it all comes down to whether or not we can lie well enough.” “Morning, gentlemen. These are a pair of my colleagues. I snuck them in early this morning, hoping I could sneak them back out without being noticed. But then we bumped into Paul, and, to not get him into trouble, we decided we would go out through the front door.” The older guard was a man who might have retired, but never really left the military, his hair still high and tight beneath a ridiculous little black hat. He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t have to tell you how much shit that could have caused. I’m going to need ID, and biometrics for both of you.” He held up a flat scanner, and Weir put his palm flat against it. “Jack Kammerer, doctor, University of Luxembourg.” The guard eyeballed his fatigues. “I do contract work for NATO.” “Sprechen sie Deutsch?” the guard asked. “No, but I parle-vouz Francais pretty well.” The guard continued to glare until the machine dinged happily, apparently not finding any reason to doubt him. Dagney held out her hand, which jittered as the guard pressed the scanner against it. “Irene Donovan. Not actually a doctor, yet, actually, still just a doctoral student. At Brown.” The guard seated behind a computer got up just enough to look at her over his monitor. “So if I checked their graduation databases I’m not likely to ping your name, then.” “Not unless you can hack their student schedules,” she said, and realized immediately that they might take her up on the suggestion. The older guard turned his head. “Right. You two can go through. Piers, a word?” He and the doctor huddled close together, but he spoke loud enough she could hear- and was likely meant to: “Messing around with doctoral students? I’m not telling you how to conduct your business, but my father told me even dogs know not to shit where they live.” Dr. Piers blushed. “It’s nothing so sordid. I just like having women around the office, pleasant to look at; she’s less than half my age, and I’m not that kind of cliché.” “Okay, Piers,” the guard slapped the doctor on the back, “just drive safe.” The computer in front of the other guard gave off a high-pitched squeal. “Wait. We’ve got a lock-down. Clear that doorway before the blast doors come down.” Weir shoved Dagney backwards, clear of the door, and launched himself through the doorway. “What the hell?” asked the older guard, reaching out for him, recognizing the aggressive approach. Weir punched him in the throat, then shoved the doctor through the door seconds before it shut. There was the quick sound of gunfire. “We need to leave, now,” Piers said. Dagney was rooted to the spot. “Child, I appreciate your concern, but we’re no use to him here.” Then he shoved Dagney down the corridor. More Blackpool guards rushed passed them, and Dagney heard one of them say, “There’s an attacker in the labs.” Which likely meant Weir was still alive. She hated herself for hoping, because she knew he wasn’t going to make it out. The guard at the parking gate was glued to his radio and hardly paid them any attention, just waved them through. Dagney got into Dr. Piers car, and they started driving. They were silent until reaching Dagney’s apartment. “Is the child still here?” asked Piers. She nodded. “We’ve been calling her Clara. How did you know about her?” “I’ll get to that... but I’d like to see her.” Surprisingly, Dagney still had her keys, and opened the door. Dr. Piers stepped inside, and started speaking. “Derek’s farm was a closed experiment- a Petri dish, really. His crops have all been destroyed because of contamination. But Clara was the pearl inside the oyster, so to speak. His pesticides had been doctored, with hallucinogens and various narcotic and mutagenic compounds. He wasn’t intended to use them as a sexual lubricant, that is what we in the scientific community call a happy accident.” “Do you… think that the pesticide contamination made him into a vegetable rapist?” “Oh no. He might have accidentally absorbed some of the substances through casual use, and in that case if we’d caught him injected it or snorting it or cooking it into rocks and smoking it, that would be a consequence I might feel responsible for. We weren’t aware of the particulars of Derek’s erratic behaviors, only that he was a strange man, and that that would make for an interesting variable.” “You see, terminators are each hand-crafted, or at least created individually. They normally can’t reproduce, so at the moment that’s the only way to create more of them. Derek was supposed to be testing a line of terminators that could infiltrate a normal corn harvest, each kernel yielding thousands of individual zygotes. If it had worked, the terminator project could have repopulated the entire US Army, with thousands to spare- but of course, it didn’t.” Nelson emerged from the bathroom, cradling Clara in his arms. She cooed when she saw Dagney, and burped when she saw Dr. Piers. “Can I- can I hold her?” Dr. Piers asked, his expression suddenly soft, his mouth hanging open. Nelson looked to Dagney, who shrugged, and so he handed her over. “She’s beautiful,” he said. She burped again, spitting up a little on his shoulder. |
|||||||||