Chapter 7 #3
“We are looking at breeding human chimeras,” she reminds me. “I’ve allowed this plan to go unchecked because your brilliance has given me confidence in the safety margins. But I think you’re getting reckless.”
“And I think you’re getting greedy,” I reply. “You were thrilled I was dead. You were going to have chimera tech in every lab in this company. You were going to shoehorn it into everything from cereal to surveillance.”
“And what if I was? Do you think this genie is going to stay in the bottle? We are already testing potential transmission via genetics in a live female host. Does the girl know she’s part of your experiment?”
“Of course not. Only you and I know that, Veronica.”
“Well then. Perhaps it would be best for the both of us to realize how mutually precarious our situations are here,” she says.
“I would not be pleased if you were to gate-keep the research we have funded, and I think you would be very unhappy if the woman who looks at you with doe eyes and for some reason thinks people don’t notice the two of you screwing like rabbits were to find out what she was hired for. ”
The plan was to see if we could get a pretty young thing pregnant, then run tests on the child, if there was one, as it grew, to tell if there were any effects or evidence of transmission of abilities.
It made sense when she first pitched it because I didn’t know anybody involved at that point.
Lydia wasn’t real to me then. She was just a means to an end.
Veronica is shrewd enough to sense that things have changed. The woman has a nose for power, if nothing else.
“What do you want from me, exactly?”
“I want to have a line of pets for children. Hamsters that turn into mice, and back again.”
“You do realize that a lot of people can’t tell the difference between hamsters and mice in the first place,” I say. “It’s a less than ideal use for our tech.”
“Fine. I might be misspeaking slightly. When I say line of pets for children, I mean military grade tech for the government. And when I say hamsters that turn into mice, I mean we want to be able to turn soldiers into animals and back again for surveillance and tactical purposes. Imagine someone being able to infiltrate a foreign base while masquerading as a snake, or a dog.”
“They’ll just start killing anything that moves,” I say. “I don’t like it, and I’m not going to approve it.”
“You’ll scratch my back,” Veronica says. “Because I have spent a very long time scratching yours. That is how these arrangements work.”
I did not develop this technology because I wanted it to be used for war. I developed this technology the way the best scientists develop everything, by mistake, and because it is cool as hell.
* * *
Lydia
They’ve forgotten I’m here. And by here, I mean close enough to hear what they’re saying because obviously I picked up a glass from the drinks tray and held it to the door so I could listen in.
It’s surprising how clear the conversation is like this. They’re not making a decent effort to lower their voices, so that helps too.
There is an absolute pit in my stomach when they start talking about Simon’s personal breeding program. She knows about it. My mind whirs, and I remember back to when I tried to quit and she wouldn’t let me. What a bitch. Opposite of a girl’s girl.
As for Simon… he must have picked me out of all the applicants and decided that I would be the best receptacle for his addled genes. That makes me feel a number of things, none of them particularly good.
He wanted to breed me the moment he laid eyes on me.
Then I hear about the military stuff, and that is bad too. It’s obvious that Veronica is basically blackmailing him. She has power, and I don’t like that.
The second I hear Simon’s footsteps coming, I take a step back and fill the cup with water. When he walks out, I am sipping from it. He will never know how very well I surveilled him in this moment.
“Back to work, boss?” I sound a little too bright, but hopefully he thinks that is for Veronica’s benefit.
“We will drop by the lab,” he says. His smile is tight. For Veronica’s benefit probably, but maybe mine as well.
He leaves, and I follow. As we leave, I can hear Veronica muttering under her breath. She sounds pissed. I’m kind of pleased by that. It means she’s not getting her own way.
She really wanted me to leave him to die in the woods. Now, given what he’s said about how he found his way back, if I hadn’t stayed, maybe that’s exactly what would have happened. Maybe she’d have gotten her wish.
Simon goes to the lab and starts gathering stuff up. He’s got the air of a man who is a bit worried security is going to show up and escort him from the building any time. He’s probably right to me. It’s obvious that Veronica didn’t plan for him to come back.
“Do you think she interfered with your formula to try to make you be stuck?”
“She doesn’t have the ability to understand what I do,” he says.
I’m not sure about that. I think he’s underestimating Veronica’s intellect and drive for power. But this isn’t the place to discuss that. And it’s the not even the main thing on my mind.
The thing I can’t stop thinking about is the fact that this company has been trying to breed me.
They think they own me in some sense. Not legally, of course.
You’re not technically allowed to do that to people anymore.
But there are still ways of setting people up so they may as well be owned, and that’s what they’re doing to me.
It’s what he’s doing to me, too. The man I just helped save.
He’s been betraying me from the first day we met.
“What made you choose me?”
“Hm?” Simon is going through files, copying some to a thumb drive.
“Out of the applicants for the writing job. There must have been hundreds. Almost everybody can write these days. And I bet there were people with stronger biomedical backgrounds too.”
“Well, maybe,” he says, not entirely focusing on me even as he answers. “But you are very qualified.”
“Hm,” I say.
“What is it, Lydia? What are you really trying to ask?” He turns toward me, giving me his full attention all of a sudden, and I immediately blush and back down.
I don’t want to play my hand too soon, and I don’t want to ruin the nice moments we’ve been having.
He was so touched when he realized I waited for him.
I liked the way that felt, when he was pleased with me.
But, of course, I have to deal with the part where he wants to knock me up with a chimera baby. Can’t just let that slide. That’s kind of a huge fucking deal.
“Nothing,” I say, when I realize he asked me a question and is waiting for me to answer with his brows drawn down across his eyes in a hard line that makes me feel like squirming in front of him.
He takes in a breath and looks like he is about to say something, but the machine beeps and he is redirected back to his original activity, thank god. I think I was about to get in trouble there.
Trouble? Why would I even consider myself being in trouble? Of course I am not! He’s the one who should feel bad. He’s the one caught up in this terribly morally bankrupt scheme, and I am the one being used…
He looks over at me and I flash a quick smile.
It’s wrong how easy it is for handsome men to get away with terrible things. It’s really deeply wrong. Someone should do something about it.
“Here,” he says, giving me the drive. “Take this. I’m going to grab a few things, and then we can go.”
I’m going to do something about it.
We carry all the stuff out of the building and to his car. Simon stacks it in the trunk and we leave.
“Are you going to set up a lab at home?” I ask the question while we are making what feels like a getaway.
He gives me a sidelong look, as if he knows he can’t straight up lie to me because I am not that stupid, but he also can’t tell me the truth.
“I’m going to take some time away from the lab, and so are you,” he says.
I bet he’s taking the stuff that’s going to stop them from getting chimera pets up and running. But I bet, in turn, Veronica already has that stuff. She wouldn’t let him know her plan unless she was pretty sure it was already too late to stop her. That’s the kind of person she is.
I can’t say that, though, because I’m not supposed to know about any of that, and I am absolutely not going to play my hand too soon. This is all way too good to make that mistake.
Simon takes me home with all the lab stuff, because of course he does. I may as well be the lab stuff. I might as well be a pile of folders in a cardboard box. Or a series of vials clanking gently in a holder that wasn’t really designed to be driven around.
Maybe I am tired from my long vigil of waiting for him. Or maybe it just puts me in a bad mood to know that multiple people met me and decided the most valuable thing about me was between my legs.
I keep the feelings to myself, stuffing them down. With any luck, they might never come out and even up having a disproportionate and outsized effect on my life when I could just have brought them up now and had a relatively mild conversation about the whole thing.
Simon has a home office space that has been mostly empty, but starts to fill up pretty fast once we put all the things in it. I wonder how he’s going to keep doing his work without the benefit of the larger and more complex machines, but by this stage I somewhat don’t give a fuck.
“You look tired,” he says.
“You look old,” I snap back.
He lifts a brow at me. “That’s unusual for you,” he says, cataloging my behavior rather than being affected by it. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, nothing,” I tell him.
“You need some attention,” he says. “I’ve returned after a long absence, you had every reason to be concerned you wouldn’t see me again, and we have spent most of the day at work. You need to be given a proper reward for all you have done for me.”