Chapter 14
DO YOU… REMEMBER MY… NAME… Azure?” It comes out in a pant. Bounces off the concrete walls around us. We’re climbing stairs. So many damned stairs. Have been for the last ten minutes. I’m fine, revs doing their job, but Old Woman looks even more ready to keel over than usual.
“Of course.” She told me. One of those unremarkable names, and honestly I assumed it wasn’t her real one anyway. It was short, began with a “J.” Or maybe an “L”? That early-to-mid part of the alphabet.
“And it is?”
“Lana.”
“Jasa.”
“That’s what I said.”
We’ve finally, blessedly, reached the top of the stairs. Off to the side is the empty Loop platform that we were presumably supposed to be arriving at. A steel door is all that lies ahead, guarded by a keypad. Old Woman walks over to it. “What if you’d needed to shout out something to warn me?”
“ ‘Look out!’ usually does the trick. Or ‘Duck!’ Or maybe ‘Run!’ I mean, we’ve done that last one already, and it worked fine. I feel like there are usually options.”
She starts inputting a series of numbers. A long one. “Is it a way to emotionally detach yourself, do you think?”
I shrug at her back. “It’s just what I do.”
“But only since Oceanus.”
Before I can ask how the hell she knew that, there’s a magnetic snick and the door opens.
I follow her through into the pristine, clinical white of a lab.
I slow to a halt, staring around as the door hisses shut again behind me. Definitely a lab. There are tables with test tubes, glass-fronted fridges with test tubes, centrifuges with test tubes. Other stuff too, but a hell of a lot of test tubes. “And this is…”
“Home.” She moves down the aisle with enough unconscious confidence to back up her claim.
“Themis housing rules have changed since I was here last.”
She chuckles. “This place isn’t exactly on-net.”
“You don’t say.” I frown around. Some of the equipment against the wall is big.
Advanced-looking. A couple of the machines are at least three metres wide and stretch from floor to roof.
Their digiglass outputs are covered in complex chemical notations.
“So if this is home, I believe you owe me some answers.”
Old Woman nods. “Alright. My full name is Jasa de Alwes. I know you hate names, but—”
“De Alwes?” I repeat.
“Oh, good. You’ve heard of me.” Oddly dry, though it’s hard to figure out why through my shock.
“The geneticist.” I say it a little dumbly, though I have no doubt she’s exactly who I think she is.
“Yes.”
“Who came up with Ichor. Who created biosecurity.” Who is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the existence of my job.
She smiles sunnily.
“But you’re dead.” Jasa de Alwes died almost fifteen years ago. One of the first commercial targets of Ten-O-Ten. It was a landmark moment. I remember the celebrations when the news came out.
“Evidently not.”
I recover enough to shut my mouth and not say anything else stupid. Jasa de Alwes. Damn. The freaks in her EMP ring make a lot more sense now; she’s the one who pioneered the methods to create the original models. After creating the first lifers, of course.
“A lot of people want you dead.” I shake my head, absently brushing my fingers along a row of empty test tubes. “Ooh, a lot of people want you dead.” Her obsessive secrecy makes sense now. If Atti had identified her voice and told the Keres she was still alive… damn. The bounty they could raise.
Then a whole bunch of other factors fall into place, and I groan.
“The Keres are the ones after you, aren’t they.” It’s not a question. “They sent the canary.”
She spins a centrifuge cheerfully. “Told you I’d give you answers.”
I glower. “These are bad answers.”
She shrugs.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to refactor. “You’re taking a hell of a risk, telling me this.” She continues to have the file over me, I suppose, but still. That keeps her alive eleven more days. And the Keres are going to be pissed if I keep protecting her.
“True. But there’s more.”
I groan. “Yeah. Listening.”
“What do you know about my ‘death’?”
“Only what got reported. You were the first big crowdfunded hit after the Ten-O-Ten commercialisation. Proved to everyone what a good decision it was.” Hard to keep the cynicism from my voice, at that last part.
“You know who claimed it?”
“Of course, it was all over the… oh.” I understand. “Oh.”
“The Keres offered me a deal. I could live, keep all the tokens I’d earned, keep working on my research, and let the rest of the world believe I’m dead.
They got the reputation of being better than the rest of the pack, and all I had to do in return was share my existing work with them, and run my quantum sims on hardware they owned. ”
I feel mildly ill. “So you handed them the specs of every existing bio at the time. And access to anything else you might come up with.” New bios like the Argos… es?… have made things trickier in the past few years, but before that, every single one was a creation of this woman.
The Keres’ first decade of assassinations—the ones that made them what they are today, gave them their precious reputation—were basically cheating.
They… probably don’t want that getting out.
“Which ended up being you. And people like you,” de Alwes continues, oblivious to my horror.
I’ve been peering into one of the fridges, trying to determine its contents, but I stop cold as the words register. “You created revs?” It’s hard to keep the disbelief from my voice.
“It was an accident, less than a month after I made the deal with them. Before the commercial amendment had even officially gone through. Same genetic tech as Ichor. I was experimenting, and the sims just…” She sighs.
Mildly apologetic. “By the time I realised what they could do, so did the Keres. And you can guess how they felt about letting me ignore the possibilities.”
I absolutely can. I reel beneath the revelations.
“So why now?” I recover enough to voice the question, even as ten others occur to me. “What changed in the last six months that made the Keres decide you were no longer friends?”
“I think they realised I was poking around where they didn’t want me.”
“For what?”
“For you.” De Alwes shrugs at my bemused look. “You’re my greatest achievement, Azure, and they wouldn’t even let me look at your file. I had to know how you were going.”
“Well… now you know, I guess.” Not sure if I feel more flattered or Frankenstein’s monster, right now.
Explains a lot, though. “And in return, you’re giving me the choice of fighting the Keres—which they will take personally, and assume I’m trying to help you because you’ve told me all of this—or never finding out about Oceanus. ” The scales are about even, there.
“That first one also means saving my life, if that helps,” de Alwes observes.
The scales tip toward killing her, and being done with it.
“The Keres know what happened in Oceanus, too. They know and have been hiding it from you. I took that file straight from Floor 132 myself.”
Damn. Gently, ever so gently, back to keeping her alive.
It’s no secret that Floor 132 of the Keres Building is its vault; corp data is protected under DeGov, so it gets special public monitoring on top of the Keres’ internal security.
The latter of which, de Alwes almost certainly would have been pressed to advise them on over the years.
No wonder she was able to get that file.
“Fine,” I grind eventually. I should probably be angrier, but part of me always wondered if my employers—former employers, now, I guess—knew more than they’d let on.
Not that I’m exactly happy about any of this, still, but no point in lingering on it.
I nod toward the door. “Where are we? Which district?”
“Caelum.”
I grunt. Caelum’s the wealthiest area of Themis. North wall, multiroom apartments. Reserved for workers and with more ID tech than anywhere else in the city. “Couldn’t make it easy.”
“I can get us to the Core without passing through any scans, if that helps. It’s not a way the Keres know.”
I brighten. “You sure?”
“Sure enough.”
Perfect. The Core is where my non-Keres contacts are, assuming they’re still alive. The old woman is finally being helpful.
“Lead the way,” I say with relief.