Analog SFF, May 2008 Read online

  "Get yourself to a login prompt,” he said.

  "Ready."

  "Okay. Type the following credential.” Tyler then recited a login ID that included some kind of prefix and a suffix. Only the middle part was like my own ID, which I never had to use unless my biomatch was on the fritz. He waited a little bit, then gave us a complicated password.

  Swami's face lit up like a reefer. Or so I assumed. “I'm in!” he said, laughing. “I'm really in!"

  "I'm confused,” I said. “Why did we need the windows, scope, and computers, just for that?"

  We hadn't. What Tyler had given us was simply a super user account and password that shipped with the company computer. No one had ever changed the default, a stupid oversight, but common.

  "Getting in is just the start,” Tyler said. “You're going to need my help breaking other barriers, mining data, and a lot more."

  I couldn't really follow what Swami and Tyler were doing most of the time, and I gave up participating in the conversations. I was just a middleman between them in an already awkward process.

  After a week and a half of working a little almost every day, they began to piece together a picture of what was going on. They began to ask questions about the company, about patent law, and other things. My job became to research these things. Sometimes the information was readily available, especially the more controversial items, since the debates filled public records. Details about the company were harder to come by, but with a few assumptions here and there, things became clearer.

  * * * *

  Meanwhile something significant happened, and something else significant didn't. What didn't happen was anyone hearing from Tina again. What did was that my parasitic arms began to grow back. What had started as aching became swelling, and then skin breaking. I guess my chest cells weren't able to change into knuckle cells, so the fists had to punch their way through. I didn't go back to the hospital to have it checked out, for many reasons. Besides, the skin cracked and healed all along, so it never got messy. But it itched like hell.

  Obviously my arms had some kind of regenerating tissue in them, something unheard of in humans. Like an amphibian growing a new tail, I grew new arms. It even occurred to me that my “baby arms” might have been cut off when I was a newborn, and when they grew back, my parents might have given up. The only reason I had to suspect that was my mother's overcompensation, always telling me that the arms were a gift of some kind.

  I'd worked at the company long enough to know the value in self-regenerating bones, muscles, skin. It would be worth a fortune.

  Several things led us to conclude that the “test signal” that Tina found, the one that looked like me, was not only deliberately injected into her queue, but it was also a viable target, an organism with unique stem cells, probably. It was impossible to trace who put the target in her queue or where the target originated, but clearly Tina was set up to contact me about it.

  Her e-mail told as much. The company was doing something bad to me, she'd said, and she had helped them. What had she done? She had convinced me to cut off my arms, that's what. Not only cut them off, but donate them to research. It seemed as though that was part of the plan—to get me to sign over my discarded tissue.

  Without knowing why I was interested, my boss Dave linked me to some interesting reading. Companies like Good Fortune were crippled by patent law. They can't patent drugs or organisms that are common to living beings. Long back, labs tried to patent genes sampled from Third World tribes. Someone even tried to own the whole human genome. Vampires, people called them. Still, the demand was high for cures, longevity treatments, and other innovations. In this semisocialized industry, how could one make enough money for the expensive research?

  That's where Genie came in. It was legal to patent nonhuman organisms that were extinct, since there were no living stakeholders. If you could regenerate a dinosaur's DNA, you could either own it and keep it proprietary, or patent it and make money off it. Another thing you could patent was a transgenic organism that was composed of more than one species, spliced together. Those two were what most of our targets turned out to be. The problem with transgenics was that it was illegal to “instantiate” them because of potential biological risks. Extinct species were also controlled, but less so. One school of thought said that because they had once lived, they were not mutually exclusive of modern life-forms, while another view was that they might well be. The uncertainty left loopholes in the law.

  I was trying to figure out whether I was a solitary example of a species, in which case there were no applicable laws, or whether I somehow fit one of the categories typically handled by Genie. Time to consult a patent lawyer.

  Her name was McKenzie, and her office in a high-rise had one of those views you see on TV. The office itself wasn't so glamorous. The furniture looked cheap, and you couldn't read anything on her SmartDesk because of the books and papers piled up on it. McKenzie was a handsome woman of about fifty, blond hair tied back tight, wearing a brown pantsuit. She made me nervous, and I sat in a worn leather chair, rubbing my chest and hoping my scabs wouldn't bleed.

  McKenzie hit the nail on the head immediately when I told her what happened to my amputated arms. “When you sign away tissue samples,” she said, “they become the property of the owner, so long as they are used in accordance with the terms of the agreement."

  "Which means?"

  "If your tissue does not occur normally in nature, and if it has the potential I think it does, it means that your company can patent it. They can develop treatments and cures with it and own the profits. You'd get nothing."

  She went on to explain with excitement some precedent cases, both failed and successful. Moore. Slavin. York versus Jones. Glamorous names like that. Kilroy versus George Washington. University, that is. It all came to a head when they realized that all the data they needed to cure several nasty diseases was available for free. Decades of detailed military medical records held reliable data that could correlate all sorts of diseases with genetic history, eating habits, exposure to hazardous materials, and more. All one had to do was to mine the data in a meaningful way, and a medical revolution could pop out. Department of Defense doctors fought for patient privacy—and they are good fighters—until someone found a way to use the information anonymously.

  It wasn't enough to simply strip the names. They had to build a completely different data set, using not only made-up names, but made-up places of birth, made-up medications, and made-up diseases. This sanitized data was sold, and places like my company used it all the time. When we found some correlation, we'd have to submit the finding to DoD, which would translate the result to the real world using a codec. We paid a fee, and they gave us exclusive rights to the finding.

  But this business about someone patenting my tissue samples hit me from left field. I must have looked puzzled because she put down her pen, folded her hands, and sighed. “Let me try to be clear,” she said. “If the laws were just a little different, you would be patentable yourself. This isn't exactly true, but let me say it this way for simplicity. A deformity can be patented because it's not a normal human condition. You are the only stakeholder, so you can patent your bad genes, or good stem cells, or whatever makes you unique. What seems to have happened here is that your company's computer came up with a—what did you call it?"

  "Target."

  "A target like you. Only someone realized that you already existed."

  "I'm pretty hard to miss."

  She nodded politely. “Or they knew your arms would regenerate, so they created your test signal as a trap. Either way, they contrived a situation to get you to cut off your extra arms and sign them over to them."

  "They did a damn good job of it too."

  "Your Genie system alone wouldn't let them patent anything. To be patentable, an invention has to be proven to be useful. They have another system that does that."

  "The Simulator. A system that creates a virtual organism, and monkeys
around to see if it cures cancer or whatever."

  "They've covered all the bases.” She smiled. “Now, about that agreement, when you signed over your discarded tissue. What were the terms?"

  "I didn't read it."

  "Do you have a copy?"

  "No."

  "I'll dig it up,” she said. “It will be on file. All you have to do is sign a release so I can get it."

  I rubbed my chest where two new sets of knuckles were kneading their way through from the inside. “If I signed away all my rights, doesn't that mean that I don't have a case against the company?"

  "Not necessarily,” McKenzie said. “Can you prove that you signed the papers at a time when you didn't have the benefit of your full intellectual faculties?"

  "Maybe,” I said, thinking. My mind had been in a haze that day. “Yes, I think I can."

  "How so?"

  "First of all, I was being prepped for surgery. They had an IV in me."

  "God only knows what was in that,” she said. Of course, there were probably medical records that someone other than God had access to, but she sounded like she was rehearsing her case. I liked her.

  "Then there was Tina. She was the one who talked me into signing. She practically held the pen for me."

  "Fraud and coercion,” she said. “Anything else?"

  "I think Tina will testify on my behalf,” I said.

  She smiled briefly, then grew serious. “You have a very strong case, Mr. Tanner. You stand to make many millions when all is said and done."

  "How many millions?"

  "Let me work that up. The more I think about it, the higher I think we can go. Hundreds of millions, without a doubt."

  My head swam and my chest ached. “You're kidding."

  She put down her pen and closed her notebook. “This company is going down."

  "That's great,” I said, not so sure.

  * * * *

  McKenzie assembled a legal team covering the necessary disciplines. I received a call from her the next week. No one at the hospital could back my story, she said, so my case hinged on having Tina testify. McKenzie sent a private eye my way, a guy named Lund. He was tiny but stout, with muscles. He had a shriveled scalp with short, sparse hair that stuck up in different directions, like the way my dad's generation used to spike their hair. I took him to visit Tyler in the pen.

  "Lund thinks that Tina has probably gone to find her estranged mother,” I said.

  Lund focused his eyebrows at something invisible, then brightened and looked at Tyler through the window. “We thought you might be able to help track down your ex-wife."

  Tyler's mouth turned down, and he looked like he was going to spit. “It's been twenty-three years."

  "A few good guesses are all I need to get started."

  "Like what?"

  "Favorite places, alternate names, family ties, old dreams. How long were you married?"

  "We weren't. Lived together for seven years."

  Tyler proceeded to throw out some random ideas. Tina's mom liked Broadway, disliked cold, and had enjoyed Atlantic City. Therefore, Las Vegas? Other possibilities for other reasons were Baton Rouge and SoCal. Lund was good to go, but I had something else to discuss with Tyler.

  "Any luck with Swami's magic weeds?"

  "Not specifically, but we're making progress."

  "That's better than we're doing finding Tina."

  "Not to worry,” Lund said.

  "And how are you doing with Genie?"

  "I'm all over her,” Tyler said. We pretended Genie was a person, so the wardens wouldn't suspect Tyler was wired into anything. “If you can't sue the panties off of the company, I can at least stuff Genie into a bottle."

  "You sound like you've done this before."

  Tyler hummed Beethoven's “dit-dit-dit-dah,” musically pleading the Fifth. I looked over at Lund, who was making no pretense at respecting our privacy.

  "Okay, Lund,” I said, “Let's get out of here so you can find Tina."

  The next day Lund called to say that he had all the inside information about Tina's car that was in any system. The vehicle did not have a transponder, and there was only one data point logged. Tina had passed through a tollbooth entering Delaware a couple of days after my operation. Not much help. Lund said it didn't mean she was still in Delaware. She could be anywhere.

  He had also tried to check her bank records but was unable to buy or steal anything useful. “Your friend has really covered her tracks,” he told me.

  "That isn't like her,” I said. “Is it possible that she just hasn't made many tracks?"

  "Yeah,” he said, miffed. “Very possible."

  * * * *

  I went by Tina's office, not expecting to find her, but I was just drawn there. No sign of her. Bored and lonely, I stopped by to see Swami.

  "How's the search for your herb coming?” I asked.

  "The proceeding is so painful, and so slow, slow, slow,” he said, apparently quoting something. He brightened and wheeled his chair full around. “But we'll find it. Tyler helped me get into the targeting algorithm. I can also bypass the simulator's kill function. That's a lot of help, but it creates a hell of a lot more targets to look at."

  "How long do you think it will take?"

  "Me no know. Could be years."

  "Whoa.” It occurred to me that Swami had conflicting goals. He needed Tyler to help him with his project, but that meant involving me—and I was in the process of jacking the company. “Let me ask you something, Swami. You said something once about us being organisms, not an organization, right?"

  He smiled, pleased that I'd remembered. “Yeah, right."

  "Why would someone like you work in a place like this?"

  "Because there's no revolution that can turn this country around. Fighting the system is a waste of time. The only way to change anything is from the inside, using the same ways that got us here to get us to somewhere else."

  "Fight fire with fire, eh?"

  "Well, yeah, you could say it's the means to an end. The company's not the enemy, you know. I share a common goal with it: healing the sick. It's disappointing that I'm sincere about it, while the company has an ulterior profit motive. But if you've got a better way, I'd like to know about it."

  * * * *

  The lawyer called, and I went over to meet with her. It sounded like there was some big news already, and we couldn't talk freely on the company phone. McKenzie leaned forward in her chair. Though she still sat higher than me, and her dress was as tidy as ever, her informal posture made me feel more like a partner than a customer. She had two piles of paper on her L-shaped SmartDesk, which also had a lot of virtual stuff strewn around.

  "Have you ever heard of biocolonialism?” she said with a gloating air.

  "No."

  "The government owns patents on people's genetic material."

  "I think you spoke of that once before."

  "Yes, but this time there's a lot more to it. They started with minority races in shrinking populations such as island cultures, ostensibly to preserve vanishing peoples. But it got ugly."

  She went on to tell me that I was part of a class-action lawsuit they were developing. It went beyond my case, and would take a lot longer, but it would bring justice to a lot more people. I didn't like the sound of all that. I'd thought we had a clear case, I'd easily win, and life would go on. I could be generous to those who'd helped me and make a better life for myself. But the more she talked, the more it sounded like harder work than what I was used to and it would involve more people. I was all for justice, but slowing it down wasn't my idea of progress.

  The lawsuit had become grander than just someone tricking me out of a patent. First, she had done some research, and there were a lot of potential cures possible from my tissue, not just regrown limbs. My nervous system was different from normal people's, and it was possible that cures to spinal and brain injuries and disorders could be derived. If I happened to suffer one myself, I'd have to pay to
license the patent.

  "Don't you see what that means?” she said.

  "Yeah. I could get ripped off again."

  "Think broader than that. This is a very exciting area for us. In the business, we call it hyperownership."

  "Whatever."

  She smiled knowingly. “I know it sounds technical, but during testimonies, we'll call it by its real name. It doesn't matter if you own all of someone's body or just a part—if you use it for gain without permission and compensation to the rightful owner, it's slavery, pure and simple!"

  That made me laugh uncontrollably, until it made my breastbone burn. Then I coughed and coughed, my chest wracking from deep inside, all the way out to my cursed bony knuckles.

  McKenzie had laughed along, then winced, but didn't know what to do. “Are you all right?"

  "Yeah,” I said, gasping. “Ouch. You're serious?"

  "Totally serious. We will prove that your company, through manipulation, fraud, and duress, tried to enslave you for profit. We'll also get them for malpractice, coercion of unwanted radical surgery, deliberate dismemberment in particular. So you'll get a bundle for that too. And there's more."

  "What's this class-action business?"

  "You aren't the only victim of this sort of thing. We are gathering evidence that there are others in similar situations. I have a partner who would also like to speak with you about your mother's medical background. There may be a possible settlement there too. A big one."

  Everything had become big, and I went back to work with a big headache.

  I went right to Swami and told him most of what was going on with the lawyers. I thought that the promise of explosive justice would be music to him, but he dismissed it.