Analog SFF, May 2008 Read online

  "I'm trying to discover something by accident!” he squeaked.

  "Class D Serendipity,” a superimposed title noted, until the klutz tripped over that too.

  We refined discovering things by accident to an art. Genie, our supercomputer, generated billions of genetic combinations, including the human genome, other organisms, and primordial mixtures of everything. The output was fed to a subsystem, the simulator, which would “grow” an organism to spec, and try to determine whether it was likely to have congenital problems that were “incompatible with life."

  The simulator was licensed to kill. The more they improved it, the more potential life forms it eradicated. The beauty of it was, when a test subject failed, no one cared or even noticed. It was just data. Of course, Genie lacked the ability to make final judgments, which is why they had openings for real people. They loved med-school dropouts—kinda smart, kinda cheap—which is how they found me. Because of my hands, my parents thought I would make a good surgeon, but during my first visit to an ER, I discovered by (car) accident that the sight of blood made me faint. I was a good fit here at Good Fortune Genetic Design.

  I only needed one more target, and I'd get two weeks off, so I went back to work, not caring how dubious the targets in my queue were. I'd promote the first decent one and get my butt out of there. I'd already discovered four virtual species of potential interest. No cures for diseases like my pollutant-associated mutation syndrome (PAMS), no missing link, or Bigfoot. But my teddy panda had promising marketing potential, my frog-hog's skin had useful properties for burn victims, and I have no idea what they might do with this squirrel monkey thing.

  My call light came on, and the bell trilled my favorite guitar riff from “Love Slave.” I jumped a bit, thinking that someone had already returned my promoted target, rejecting it. Then I saw the ID. It was a lady who used to work on our floor.

  "Tina Peshj?” I said out loud. She never spoke to anyone while she was here, much less me. Why a call now?

  "That cow is calling you?” That was Kaitlin, in the next cube.

  I laughed at that. The other women said that Tina had an udder on the back of her neck. I think it was really just a clump of huge skin tags, but it did look rather like an udder. That's not why people called her names though. She was a bitch, and rumor had it that she had slept her way to a “comfy position” up in Special Projects. Who would actually sleep with that “cow” was beyond me—and I was pretty desperate myself.

  "Yeah, it's Tina. Want to come check it out?” Any excuse to get Kaitlin to pay attention to me.

  "I'll pass,” she said. I was tired of hearing that. “Aren't you going to answer her?"

  "Not for a five-dollar nickel."

  I freely admit to being an asshole. I'm very loyal when it comes to friends, though I haven't many of those.

  Tina's message asked me to come up to her office to see an unusual target she'd come across. I told Kaitlin that Tina just needed some help because she didn't understand how Genie worked, and I headed for the elevator. In fact, I was intrigued, partly because it was Tina and partly because I'd never been to Special Projects before.

  Tina had actually asked me out once, when I first joined the company. I refused. I was queasy that way. It bothered me when she turned her head too quickly, because her blond hair would flip aside, and I'd see the thing on the back of her neck. She wasn't all that hideous when her hair stayed in place, though. I might have actually gone out with her, but by then, I'd heard of her reputation as the company whore.

  I found her office on the fourth floor. Not where the bigwigs were, but definitely a step up from our prairie dog village. Here the halls had long lights that reflected off the ceiling and nice textured wallpaper that had a pattern of endless double helixes. Tina had a real office with a door and a window that overlooked the half-empty parking lot. I entered quietly, and Tina did not turn to see me right away. Her hair covered her neck. From that limited view, she looked like any other girl, and I wondered why she hadn't had that growth removed a long time ago.

  "Hello,” I said.

  She turned. She wore jeans and a black T-shirt with a Led Ventrickle logo on it. No makeup. The only thing she had fussed over was her hair, for obvious reasons.

  "I requested an image,” she said, looking me over a bit, I think. “It ought to be finished any time now."

  Sometimes a creature would be so strange you'd want to render a detailed image. Some of them were just wrong. So messed up, like the human gastropods. Or the saber-toothed rectal worms. But most of the time, they were hilarious. We'd all gather in someone's cube and laugh our heads off at the pictures. After a while, even the sick ones were kind of funny. We gave them stupid names, and then we'd get serious, and try to find something useful.

  I looked her SmartDesk over, trying to figure it out. Everyone's is configured differently, but hers was pretty jacked. It was completely level, not inclined at all. You had to lean over it to see past the glare from the window. Then, instead of stacks of windows tiled up everywhere, there were only two windows open, plus her touchpad and tele. One window was her work queue—a single target—and the other was a folder labeled “Next Week,” closed, with a virtual gargoyle paperweight on it. With so little, her monitor might as well have been an old upright.

  "What have you got?” I said.

  She dragged the target to flip it over, and the image appeared. I leaned over. It looked just as I thought it would, based on the data: Target 9381093—humanoid, hunchback, “slimb” (supernumerary limbs, non-Hedgehog protein) et cetera. The thing had two extra arms extending from a half-formed second collarbone on the chest.

  What do you know, a four-armed freak. Just like me.

  No, sorry. A natural-born surgeon, that's what I was supposed to have become. Well, I had the hands for it all right, but not the stomach.

  At first I thought it was a joke, but none of my friends were smart enough to pull off a hack like that. I flexed my twenty fingers and stared at the familiar four-armed image. The face was not rendered, but mine reflected faintly on the desk.

  "What do you think?” she said.

  "It looks like me."

  "Scary, huh?"

  "What the hell is this thing?” I said. “I mean, why would it pop up like this?"

  "I really don't know,” she said, wrinkling her eyebrows in puzzlement. Then she looked at me—at my arms—awkward as it was. “Listen,” she said, “why don't we go out and take a long lunch? We can talk it over."

  "Well, okay,” I said. “But first, I've got another idea. Let's go ask Swami."

  Upstairs there was this guy, Ben Lebinsky, who everyone called Swami. Wheelchair bound, smart, independently wealthy—we all wondered why he bothered to work. Usually no one talked to him because he could be a real SOB, and you never could tell what he was thinking. But sometimes people are misunderstood, and I once had a good conversation with him about botany, of all things.

  Swami was in his office, which, like Tina's, had real walls and a door. The door was open, and Swami had his back to us. He was staring at his desk. On his window shelf were several bonsai trees, and a huge picture of a strange tree hung on his wall. It didn't look like a real tree, but some kind of fantasy thing. A caption said, in a green vinelike font, “The Healing of the Nations.” There were other posters, too, done in throwback style. One had a gray Star of David made of heavy chain links on a black backdrop, with the cryptic title “80,000 Careless Ethiopians” in red. The Jewish symbol and obscure African reference made a curious combination. Another depicted a musical score, but when you looked close, the music was made of tiny DNA strands. You see a lot of DNA motifs around here, but otherwise Swami was a unique character.

  "Hey, Swami. I'm Jimmy Tanner. This is Tina Peshj."

  He turned his chair halfway around, apparently unable to move his neck much. As soon as I saw him from the front, I remembered that he had cerebral palsy. He sat in his chair, head cocked, arms bent oddly, making me self-
conscious of my own extra arms. He was about thirty, and had long, stringy black hair.

  "Hey guys,” he said. His head bobbed a little when he talked, and he seemed friendly enough. “One Tree. What can I do you for?"

  "Tina came across a weird target today, and we thought we'd see what you made of it."

  "Genie moves in mysterious ways,” he said. I knew he was brilliant, but I didn't know why he pretended to be so superficial. “What ‘cha got?"

  We hadn't brought an ID for him to look up, but described the six-limbed target.

  "You found Spider-Man,” he said, sounding very serious. Then he chuckled and lifted a bent wrist in my direction. “Your cousin!"

  "It seems like a pretty big coincidence,” I said.

  "There's a difference between irony and coincidence,” he said with an air of condescension.

  "Whatever."

  "Maybe someone wanted Tina to come to you."

  He tried to be friendly again, but I didn't buy it. A smile faded. “So,” he said, “what are you going to do? Are you going to pass that target to the next round?"

  "I don't know,” said Tina, looking at me with uncertainty.

  "Why would anyone go to the trouble of forging a target, just to get me and Tina together?” I said.

  Tina scrunched her face in disgust, and Swami put an upright finger over taut lips. “I don't know,” he said, turning to Tina.

  "Don't look at me!” she said.

  Her face was getting red, so I decided to change the subject. Not that I don't like seeing people squirm, but in her case, I'd rather see it in private. “So what's with the trees?” I said.

  Swami smiled genuinely this time. “I just love trees,” he said. “Did you know they have their own missing link?"

  "No...” Sorry I asked.

  "Man descended from some early form, and there are missing pieces to the puzzle. If you think about it, the same is true for trees. They didn't just start out tall like that. They had to compete for sunlight with other plants, and different ones grew taller and taller. Still, the species are more similar than different, losing their leaves at the same time and all that, so there must have been common ancestors to modern trees. Maybe only one ancestor. The One Tree."

  I studied the tree mural on his wall again. It was a computer-generated image. The trunk was not straight but curvy, and the branches made it look like a bonsai—artistic, with oversized leaves. The leaves had wide, pointed fingers, with serrated edges.

  Swami saw me studying it. “I'll leave it as an exercise for the student to figure out the species of The One Tree."

  "I think I get it,” I said. “You're rich, but you work here because of your interest in botany. You are using Genie to help you find your missing link, aren't you?"

  He smiled and nodded in approval. “You're on the right river. Let's leave it at that."

  Tina swung her arm back and forth at her side. “Okay. Thanks anyway."

  * * * *

  I took Tina to lunch. That was the first date I'd had since starting the job and only my third since dropping out of med school. I actually hadn't dated that much during college either, partly because I was too busy and partly because my mom never liked any of the girls I dated. There were two reasons they went out with me, she said. Either they did it out of pity for me, or else they were deformed themselves.

  "It's nice to have high standards,” I once complained to her, “but what the hell do you expect? I have four flipping arms, for God's sake."

  "They'll make a nice girl very comfortable some day,” she said.

  That's a mother for you—definitely not of this world. My dad was the opposite. He once advised me not to get married, but to always try to have affairs with married women. The theory was that if they were already married, they wouldn't demand a commitment. Up to then, I thought my parents had been a happy couple, but I guess they were just stuck with each other.

  "Your mother and I were raised to be happy and independent,” Dad explained. “Not values conducive to marriage, when you put them together. Thousands of years of family values and silly love songs, undone by one generation who thought it knew better!"

  I felt really sorry for him, but he punched my shoulder and winked at me.

  "Thank God,” he said with a chuckle.

  Lunch with Tina was okay. We took the rail to a place on the other side of town that neither of us had been to. It was a New York-style Italian deli, and the obviously Italian New Yorker that ran the place was constantly yelling at all the obviously non-Italian immigrants that were carrying on his family legacy for him. No table service, so we had to wait at the counter while they fixed our orders. I had a pepperoni roll smothered in sauce, and Tina had a dish of some kind of pasta casserole. We went to sit by a mural where the Tower of Pisa threatened to collapse onto our lunch.

  I hadn't expected romance; neither of us are that type. That's for perfect couples, of which there aren't any. Some myths have outlived their usefulness. I did have the feeling that she was checking me out, though. She confirmed it by mentioning my arms.

  "Why don't you have them removed?” she said, locking her eyes to mine.

  I forced a little laugh. “You're a blunt instrument, aren't you?"

  "I wasn't born a bitch,” she recited. “It's men like you that made me one."

  That made me laugh for real. She smirked with satisfaction.

  "Well?” she said. “Don't the arms get in the way? I can't imagine they were any fun to grow up with, and I should know."

  "Kids used to pick on me. Seriously, the first time I asked a girl out, I wore shin guards, in case she tried to kick me."

  Tina laughed. “I'm still wearing my shin guards. Not literally, but you know what I mean."

  I did. My shin guards had become the cynical facade I put on every day. But the kicking still hurt.

  "My parents said my arms were a gift,” I said. “You know, like I was deformed for a reason."

  Tina laughed out loud. “Gawd! How stupid can people be?"

  "I know. A gift, right. My mom thought that with four arms, I would be a brilliant surgeon. How she thought a pair of useless claws could perform surgery is beyond me."

  Her eyes had a twinkle in them. “Well, couldn't they hold the clamps or something?"

  "That's exactly the sort of thing she used to say. It was ridiculous."

  "Are your parents still around?"

  "They both flipped off a couple years ago."

  She didn't say she was sorry to hear that, because she wasn't. There's nothing more sickening than fake emotions. “So now you can get rid of the arms."

  "Oh. I don't know. I'm just used to them, I guess.” She had a point though, getting me thinking that I sure didn't need to keep the damned arms just for my parent's sake. “Why don't you get your growth removed?"

  I tried to lock her eyes, they way she had done to me, but this time she looked at the floor. “I'm afraid to."

  "Why?"

  "I don't really know. My parents were, so I am too."

  "Do you think they had a good reason to be scared?"

  "I think my parents thought something bad would happen to me, like I'd lose my strength. Maybe there's a hormone secreted."

  I made the shape of a letter omega, my hand approaching one ear, arcing over my head, and out the other ear. She'd gone over my head.

  "You know, like Samson,” she said.

  "Samson. Wasn't he some old super hero?"

  "Yeah. When his main squeeze cut off his hair, he lost his strength."

  "So you really don't know why you shouldn't cut it off,” I said as I got up to dump our lunch trash.

  "No."

  "Then why don't you?"

  "That's a dumb question,” she said. “Just who would take care of me if something went wrong?"

  "You have friends, don't you?"

  "If only. Do you know how hard it is to take care of someone when their health is really, really bad? I don't have those kinds of friends."<
br />
  "Well, maybe there's nothing that's going to really happen."

  She looked at me with disdain. “Well, maybe there is. What's with you anyway?"

  "Why don't you ask your parents?"

  "Why don't you leave me alone? No one has heard of my mom in years, and my dad's in jail.” She pushed the table away enough to fold her arms in defiance.

  "Perfect,” I said, not letting her get away with that. “So we'll start with your father."

  "You're such a jackass,” she said, failing to suppress a smile.

  "No comment."

  "None taken.” This girl was good.

  "I'll pick you up Saturday morning,” I said.

  * * * *

  Prisons haven't changed much since those old black-and-white movies. The prisoners are still low-lifes, the walls are still bare and smell of painted cement, and the wardens are still ugly people, most of them. Tina's dad was in that kind of place, not one of those white-collar suites. He had been caught hacking a government system, she told me on the way there. It wasn't a habit of his to break the law, but when you do something innocuous in the wrong place, it can be a federal offense. Like saying the word “hijack” too loud on a passenger jet. Her dad, Tyler, got himself fifteen years for peeking at the personnel folder of his boss at Homeland Security. That was the story, anyway.

  We were scanned and taken to a visiting room. Tina was very anxious. She kept fixing her hair. I couldn't tell whether she was excited or disgusted to see her father. She hadn't told me so, but I could tell there was something more than his conviction between them. Tina sat in a hard plastic chair with metal legs, along a wall with a thick Plexiglas window, like banks had. The hole to talk through was made with clear baffles, so you couldn't make contact or pass anything through. I stood behind her.

  Presently, her uniformed father was escorted to the other side. Tyler Peshj was a man of average build, with greasy brown hair that was combed to an artificial perfection. He looked to be about fifty, but had a worn expression that was littered with the scars of acne. When he saw Tina he perked up. The escorts let go of his shoulders and departed through a back door.

  Tina had completely dropped her bitch persona and was trying not to sob. “Daddy,” she said.