Hub - Issue 13 Read online

  Sam said, “I love you. And I’m asking you, please, don’t do anything stupid. For Benny’s sake, if not for mine.”

  My pad rang; it was Albert.

  Benny waved the dinosaur, splattering drool on my heels. Sam waited.

  “I promise,” I said.

  And I answered the call.

  #

  I purchased the Reserve with the first royalties, spreading green across the hell of a New Jersey ex-industrial estate. By Benny’s fourth birthday, the meadows rippled with clover and dandelion and overhead dragonflies and swallows competed in games of aerial acrobatics.

  Alfred was happy: he was rich.

  Sam was happy: he was always happy.

  And I had butterflies.

  “The blue ones are best!” Benny informed me. He sat at my feet, peering up at my work screen.

  “Why’s that?”

  The bright colors of Benny’s toys lay scattered on the lab tiles. Vivariums lined the walls, home to fluttering multitudes. I thought of Terry and the grim, cold lab I’d begun in. Benny pointed to the tank of Pieris protodice variant XA52. Their wings were a rich summer-sky blue. “They’re happy.”

  “Happy like chocolate chips?”

  Joyous laughter tap danced between the sequencers. “Silly!”

  He had my mother’s eyes.

  A ways off, a car pulled into the parking lot.

  "Do you know who that is?" I asked.

  Benny listened. "Is it--"

  A door creaked open. Sam crept in, mock-sneaking. His tie hung askew.

  "--Daddy!" Toys went flying as a small bundle of excitement flung itself at its father, who whooped and swung the boy off the floor and onto his shoulders.

  "Have you behaved?" Sam asked, tickling him.

  Benny shrieked and beat his father’s shoulders and head with small fists. "Yes!"

  "Good as gold," I confirmed.

  "Guess what we're going to see!" said Benny.

  "What?" I asked, as if I didn't know.

  "Cars! Lots of cars! Racing! Right? Right, Daddy?"

  "That's right." Sam bounced on his heels, delighting the boy. "I'll be home in time to make dinner," he told me.

  "Have fun."

  "Be a horse!" Benny commanded, and the two of them trotted out.

  My brother-in-law arrived not long after. The years -- and the botox -- had been kind to him. He wore a simple charcoal suit and loafers, confident enough in his wealth that he had no need to flaunt it.

  “What do you want, Alfred?” I said. I clicked my tongue; the work screen obligingly loaded the XA52 template.

  Alfred strolled over. “Must I have a motive, dearest Juanita?” A hand slid down my shoulder; I could feel him waiting: would I shrug him off or lean in?

  I did neither.

  “You, have ulterior motives? Heaven forefend.” Even in this innocent conversation, a part of me listened for Sam.

  Yes. I had slept with Alfred.

  He chuckled, a low and knowing sound. “You aren’t just another pretty face, my dear. No matter how hard you pretend.”

  “Alfred, my mother was a pretty face. And it killed her. What makes you think I would ever--” I stopped; I was being taunted. "This is about your new line, isn't it? What do you want, new colours or new base genotypes?"

  Fashion was a fickle, ever-evolving king.

  Alfred grinned like a shark. “I’m thinking bigger. Better.” He pulled his pad from a blazer pocket and showed me. I scanned it, reading the titles of biochemistry journals and with growing bemusement. Alfred believed in knowing as little as possible about the things that earned him money. . . .but here was research, in linkblue and white.

  A shame most of it was pseudoscience.

  I put the pad aside. “Alfred, humans do not have pheromonal communication. Our vomeronasal organ is practically vestigial,” I said.

  “My dear, that isn't the point.”

  I took another glance at Alfred’s reading list: human mood indication via analysis of minute skin secretions. Reports of interest to security services, interrogator and divorce lawyers, but few others.

  Ah. I understood. "Let me guess, you want me to key the butterflies to these chemical secretions instead of perfume."

  Alfred leaned on the back of my chair, smelling of cologne and warmth. "You make it sound so scientific, Juanita. Think what it could do. . . . colour-coded emotions. 'Know your partner's moods! Broadcast your state of mind! A whole new form of communication!'" He gestured as he spoke, underlining advertisements only he could see.”

  “How droll. And you think that is commercially viable?” I wished Alfred would leave. He had pet geneticists now.

  And I had guilt.

  “Darling, 'Moodflies' would take the emotionally repressed yuppie world by storm. I promise you." He leant over so that his cheek brushed my hair. “This is what you wanted. Butterflies the world could not do without.”

  On my work screen, I called up a particular XA52 chromosome. The screen filled with strings of dots in primary colors, annotated with tiny footnotes. Here a metabolic regulator, there a sex-linked immunity to parasitic attack, further down, the corrupted remnants of a rare invertebrate retrovirus. Life: adjusted to my preference. Life that would never be loved by anyone but Benny and me.

  “You would never get a permit,” I said. The mandates were explicit on rewrites that ‘embraced humanity’. . . and once, years ago now, I'd made a promise to Sam.

  And of course, sometimes you don't want people to know what you're feeling.

  Alfred’s silent laughter stirred wisps of my hair. “You should know by now darling, that cash can make problems disappear.”

  "Yes." I tapped an icon on the screen.

  The door banged; two ex-marine security guards filled the doorway. Alfred's devil-may-care smile sharpened, becoming something diamond bright and sharp and cold. "Does your husband know you're such a frigid, conflicted bitch, Juanita?"

  "Yes." I'd explained it to him the day he proposed. "Now get out."

  #

  They were late back from the racetrack. I cooked pasta. I didn’t even burn it.

  It sat concealing in the saucepan.

  They didn't come home.

  At 8 o'clock, the doorbell rang; I answered it to a vaguely familiar woman and two stiffly silent policemen.

  The woman whispered shrilly to the police, “I can’t tell her! She’ll fire me! She’ll make my boss fire me...” It was Lizzie, Alfred’s model, an assistant PA now, having fucked her way up the food chain. Her eyes were big and bruised and tearful.

  “Ms Diaz?” an officer said. “Can we come in?”

  I gripped the door frame, feeling my nails dig into the wood and splinters dig into my fingers. Blood sang in my ears. Blood does sing; I never thought it did before.

  "Who?" I asked the officers.

  Benny or Sam.

  An officer doffed his cap. He was young. Earnestly so.

  Sam or Benny.

  "I'm sorry, ma'am. There was an incident--"

  "--Benedict," Lizzie interrupted in a deafening whisper. "The car hit little Benedict."

  #

  Hospitals smell dead. They smell of lemon antiseptic and wax floor polish and the cloying stench of new plastic. I sat in a private waiting room, where faulty lights flickered and buzzed like raging wasps. I borrowed a pad from a nurse; when the doctors came, I was hard at work.

  They said soft, horrible things. Things like "lumbar vertebrae," and “oxygen starvation" and "internal hemorrhage" and “do you want to come and say. . . ?”

  No. I didn't. I wasn't going anywhere.

  The fluorescent lights flickered. A clock ticked away the time.

  Sam wandered in. His shoelaces were undone and his tie was still crooked and his face was full of listlessness and pain. A prim, white-coated doctor walked at his elbow, brimming with compassion.

  I smiled at her as pleasantly. "Fuck off. I'm busy."

  Sam knelt by my chair like a puppy be
gging for attention. "Nita. Sweetie. Talk to me!"

  I flipped a page on the e-pad. "Do you think Heliconius charitonius would make a good base genotype?"

  My husband withdrew; I didn't look up. "That's all? Benny's gone, Juanita. He's... he's..." Sam's voice broke. "Do you care? Did you love him at all?"

  Did I care about Benny? Benny with Sam's face and Mother's eyes? What a fuss.

  I pointed to the pad, to the winding line of base pairs on the screen. In my mind, I could see its lacy wings and the faceted glitter of its eyes.

  "I'm making them blue."

  Blue like a summer's day and happy like chocolate chips.

  I tabbed onto a fresh page and began to sketch. The lines were shaky, as if the stylus trembled.

  Sam's turned and walked into the citrus-antiseptic distance. The doctor hovered in the doorway like a white-clad moth, then she, too, slipped away.

  "GATCGTA . . . ." I whispered my mother's nonsense prayer –- the name of a cloud of monarch butterflies -- to the failing lights and polished floor of an empty room. G. A. T. C.

  #

  Outside the lab, the Reserve blossomed. Painted ladies and cabbage whites flitted like angels, fragile and as fleeting as dreams. I watched the news, curled in the lab’s lobby sofa after kicking the secretaries out. There was the crowd, the racetrack, and there was Benny and there. . . the camera shied away, jumping to interview a white-haired patriarch with a ruddy face and God on his side. His son was gone, too: a formula-one driver. At high speed, helmets can only do so much. Too much god on the brain, too much hate on the brain, brain gone squish out the ears. . . .

  “You fucker! I wasn’t there!” I smashed in the patriarch’s righteous face with the chair, smashed it until glass and plastic crunched on the lobby tiles and the rage collapsed in on itself, as broken as the television.

  Beyond the sterile confines of my lab, the butterflies danced. God, they were so fragile: a little poison and all that magic would disappear, leaving bodies of brittle sticks and colored tissue paper. The Madgellion spill all over again.

  Alfred was right. I couldn't let that happen. Couldn’t let Them stop me. How could there be a world without butterflies?

  On the third day I muted the terminals’ ringtone. On the fourth day I packed up Benny's toys. I didn't want to step on them.

  They'd break.

  Benny would be sad.

  Terry did not bother with calls or doors.

  “I’m too old for this.”

  Sleep abandoned me on the shore of cold, hard consciousness. I sat on a lab stool at work bench, my head pillowed on an arm and hair in my mouth. Terry gazed down, arms folded, foot tapping. I was twenty-six again, discovered napping on my night shift.

  Then the world came back.

  A draft gusted by, raising goose bumps; somewhere nearby, a window had been forced.

  “I need to fire security,” I said. Or had I already done that? I could not remember. The building echoed oddly: an empty noise of lonesome corridors.

  Terry snorted. I had not seen her for... years. Age had finally settled on her face and her hair had gone white and fine. She leaned over my shoulder, reading the sequencer outputs and my softly glowing pad.

  “You never published,” she said. “I waited and waited, looked in all the journals, but you never shared what you found.” She touched the e-pad. The pages flipped: a chromosome; annotated genes; chemical equations; the Mandate, black text accusing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. And then, as thoughts shed sleep, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Terry did not answer. She explored the lab -- so much finer than her humble college domain had been -- running fingers across tech and tools and tables. “Sam is frantic. You aren’t answering the phone.”

  I looked away. My mouth tasted sour, like dreams gone bad.

  “That project you’re coding is beautiful. Elegant. It might even live.” Terry came around the table again. She smiled, a small smile, mouth just turned up at the corners. “It breaks every single regulation.”

  “I know.” And I did. The haze of frantic madness was clearing, leaving dull nothing behind.

  “Are you going through with it?”

  I had made a promise once. I’d kept to it, through everything, because. . . . But it had not helped. It had not saved--

  “I’m rich, I’m beautiful, I’m everything my mother wanted to be and wasn’t! So Why--” I gripped the desk edge; there was nothing to throw. Nothing to break

  “Do you love, Sam, Nita? He’s still here. He’s waiting and he loves you.”

  I said, “All I ever wanted to love were the butterflies.”

  Metal jingled. “My jeep’s out front,” Terry said. “It’s nothing special. Take it if you need to... The spill’s a long way off.” She left the keys beside me. “If you need to do this, he’ll still love you. Mandates be-damned.”

  It was the pollen in the air that made me cry.

  I sat up the rest of that night, watching the stars wheeling. An automatic recombination program ran in the lab, adding a final sequence and injecting artificial eggs with my creations. It was a special sequence, that final one, and it would nestle there in the noncoding DNA and continue on and on and on forever.

  My Benny.

  It wasn't the only change. . . but it doesn't matter. It would be like explaining 2+2 and the colour blue.

  #

  The jeep could do 0 to 60 in 8.8 seconds. On the drive south, I never did more than a speed limit-strict 59. I slept an uneasy night in North Carolina, parked on a residential back street under sulphur street lights.

  I dreamed of half-remembered things and barren winter and police sirens.

  The air changed from mild to warm to sultry heat. Towns grew thinner and the golf courses overgrown. The air smelled of distant filth: of contamination and swamp mud. An hour passed the last house, the road was washed out; the jeep revved as the four wheel drive tasted dirt for the first time.

  The Madgellion spill had made a wasteland, a nightmare of poisonous mud and the twisted corpses of moss-draped trees. Restoration fungus sprouted in irregular lumps like so many grasping hands. Zombie hands, mottled and slimy. They'd permitted some moron to rewrite and he'd messed it up.

  That evening, the jeep dipped into a hidden mire and could not escape. Terminal traction failure, the dashboard told me.

  In the trunk, life stirred.

  I rested my head on the steering wheel. I would not cry.

  “They’ll take everything away from you.” My voice sounded odd, unused and rusty. “They’ll take the Reserve and your work, your butterflies and everything.”

  But not Benny. Not Sam. And all the world apart from me would have butterflies.

  My mother’s voice whispered across years and miles. “Look at them, darling, you can love them. You can love them, and they’ll never hurt you. They’re all we need.”

  Truth. But truths can change.

  I heaved the crates one-by-one across the desolation. Eggs had hatched and eaten and grown and wrapped themselves in silk cases. Like seeds, I thought, and sewed them.

  Midnight had given way to twilight when I came for the last crate. I could hear them: the sound of autumn leaves. All the old, unwanted flesh cast off. They hatched quick, grew fast and they would spread to every corner of the earth

  “Nothing short of a nuke can stop you,” I told them. “And who would want to stop you?” Mud seeped through my jeans as I knelt to split the box seam with Terry’s key.

  Seven-dozen wings unfurled and fanned. Green for envy; yellow for love; red for anger; dusty silver for pain...

  And blue for joy.

  “I made them, Alfred!” Dawn came rushing over the horizon, bright enough to blind, to burn, to chase night into shadows and nothing. Wings and sunlight brushed my cheeks. “I made them. But not for you.” Butterflies humanity would never be without.

  They took wing all at once, sweeping upward in a million flurries of gold and red and g
reen and blue. Each one more than a butterfly.

  Each a prayer.

  And a benediction.

  About the Author

  January Mortimer has been published in such fine publications as Ideomancer, Fantasy Magazine, Heliotrope and Aeon Speculative Fiction Magazine. She lives in London and owns up to a fondness for good books, cheese on toast and frogs – although not necessarily in that order!

  Reviews

  Broken reviewed by Marie O’Regan

  Doctor Who: Robot reviewed by Scott Harrison

  No Dominion reviewed by Lee Harris (mini review)

  Broken

  Directed by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason

  Starring Nadja Brand, Eric Colvin, Abbey Stirling

  Revolver Entertainment

  RRP: £12.99. Released 2nd July.

  The premise at the heart of Broken is a simple one – what would you do in order to survive? The film starts with a woman (yes, blonde, yes, pretty) seemingly buried alive in a wooden box. We see her struggle to force the lid off, only to be felled by a blow to the head from The Man (Eric Colvin) - yes, really - and his shotgun. From there, things get even more unpleasant. The woman is forced to remove a razor blade that’s been inserted into her abdomen in order to cut the rope around her neck tying her to a tree, before she slips and hangs herself, loosing several feet of intestines in the process. Collapsing in a sobbing heap on the floor, she is asked by The Man, ‘Would you continue?’ We then fast forward two weeks to another blonde, Hope (Nadja Brand), who finds herself in exactly the same situation, trapped in the box. She survives the initial tests and by so doing becomes The Man’s slave, intent on staying alive in order to find out what’s happened to her daughter, no matter what The Man does to her.

  Supposedly based on true events, this could have been an interesting exercise in the dehumanisation of a victim by the captor, and indeed there were flashes of this: when Hope eats whatever leftovers The Man throws her way; when she accedes to his demands that she tend the garden of vegetables; giving up attempts to escape when he stamps on her leg, breaking it badly; even when she screams at another captive to shut up (ostensibly to avoid The Man’s wrath and what he might do to the new captive, a teenage girl, but also because the noise of her crying is getting on both their nerves). But ultimately we don’t empathise with the victim at all, as the only emotion the film provokes is that of disgust.