Organo-Topia (4 page)

Professor Bernhard Vitol ripped open the door. “It's you again. What'd I do this time?”

“Need more info, Prof,” Maris said. The smell of stale sweat cascaded off the Professor, the tsunami of sour air olfactible to the naked nose. “Get a patty with me? Do you good.”

The eyes shifted left, then right.

Peterson held up his hand. “Don't slam it on me. Three hots and a cot or a hot one with me on a bench. Which is it?”

The eyes dropped to the rumpled trousers, the ringed armpits. “Five minutes?”

“Three, and I'll be comin' in with a warrant at four.”

A deep sigh and the shoulders slumped. “All right, Detective,” the Professor said, and the door closed.

At two minutes, Maris scratched his head. He wouldn't…?

The Detective sprinted around to the back of the modest house, the outside as prim as the inside was cluttered. No fences in this neighborhood, and behind the house was the neighbor's, twenty feet away, Vitol just slipping in the door.

Maris was on him, grabbed the shirt shoulders from behind, and hurled the Professor back onto the lawn.

He went fetal as he fell. “Don'thurtmeDon'thurtmeDon'thurtme…”

“What the jerk you doin', Vitol?!” Peterson whipped out a pair of cuffs, got one on him. “I just want info, for whinin' out loud. Don't make me arrest you for that!”

“OkayOkayOkay…”

“Hell, I'll even throw in some fries. Won't get those at the county jail.”

“Fries? Real ones?”

Maris considered, decided he could expense it out. Lieutenant Balodis wouldn't be happy, but she could go jerk herself. “Real ones.”

“Deal.”

All that for some real jerking fries. Probably planned it. “That's what I like about you, Professor. You suck the advantage out of every opportunity.”

The cuffs back on his belt, the two of them shambled down the street, the burger place on the corner. The Professor's bulk took up most of the sidewalk, Peterson walking half in the gutter, the elephant and the flea.

“Come with me, lover boys,” the waitress said, glancing between them, clearly deciding they were spouses.

The bench complained it'd have to file for a work injury. Peterson decided he might too, the Professor painful to look at, Vitol somewhat shy of Mister Galaxy.

Maris traked for Professor Vitol's file. “Bernhard, why didn't you tell me you refused to donate yesterday? Now there
is
a warrant.”

“Draconian, the way they suck up sperm!” he complained.

“Worse now that the stock at Plavinas Incubation got wiped out.” He looked at the approaching waitress. “Two burgers and two sides of real fries.”

“One side per table,” the waitress said, throwing a glance toward the door. “Don't you read?”

A sign just inside the door made it plain.

“One real, one fake, we'll split.”

“Hey, you're that Detective I saw on the holo, aren't you?” The waitress grinned at him, raking her eyes across him like hot coals. “Honey, you can get your potato fried any way you want. They're comin' out with an immersie about you, hormones included.”

He hated it when he got a lot of neuranet time. The last time it'd happened, he'd had to move and make his address clandestine. “Two sides of real fries.”

“You got it, bone-boy.” She twittered as she pranced away.

Probably has an immersie playin' on her corn right now, Maris thought. But you couldn't really enjoy a full-infusion immersie without jacking in. He fingered his mastoideus socket. Last night, he and Ilsa had jacked into each other while jerking each others' brains out. It'd been deep.

“What'd you want to ask me?”

The Detective brought his attention back to the Professor. “That progression, who you doin' that for? Department of Reproductive Statistics?”

“Confidential,” Vitol said, raising an eyebrow.

Daring me to arrest him, Maris thought. “Okay, so don't tell me. Why's it happening?”

“What, the decline in fertility?”

“No, the shrink in your penis. Why the decline?”

Bernhard leaned forward, sour breath overpowering sour sweat. “No one knows.”

“Huh? They can jerk out an egg-snatcher and a sperm-catcher, but they don't know why Ihumes are infertile and don't know how to fix it?”

“They got theories, but no one really knows. Interplanetary travel is one theory. You know, exposure to gamma rays, which doesn't account for the sterility of people who stay planetside their whole lives. Pollution index is another. Air and water so foul, food so modded, our DNA has lost its ability to messenger the right hormonal mix.”

“What about nanochines?”

“Some conspiracy jerk's wet dream. Completely baseless. Carbon nanotube assemblies need a power source. Without solvent polyhydrocarbonates, they don't propagate from person to person.”

“The carbons go somewhere.”

“Carbon dioxide, mostly, aerosolized.” Vitol leaned back, his breathing heavy. “Standard ATP breakdown. But that leaves the phosphate theory.”

“Oh?”

“Low phosphate levels limit the growth of organic systems. Phospolipids are central to epithelial development. No phosphate, no skin. And nanochines burn through phosphates faster than a jacker through an immersie.”

The Detective nailed the Professor with his gaze. “Why not nanochines?”

“No propagation.”

“You mean, they can't get from one victim to another? What if they found a way?”

The Professor nailed the Detective back. “I hate to think about it, but not part of my expertise.”

The burgers arrived, but they sat there untouched while Maris and Bernhard grazed on fries like epicures on caviar, moaning with delight. Potato just couldn't be synthed.

Finishing off the last one with a groan, Peterson sat back and belched, while Vitol dove into his disk of fried synth meat patty on a fake baked bun, topped with fictitious lettuce, mock tomato, phony pickles, fabricated onion, and a slurry of sauce supposed to imitate mayo, mustard, and ketchup. The sauce looked a bit too much like the proto he'd seen at the last four crime scenes.

“So if nanochines found a way to get from victim to victim, could they be responsible for the decline in fertility?”

* * *

Doctor Juris Raihman frowned. “You again. What the jerk did
I
do?”

“A simple question, Doctor Raihman.” Maris looked him over for more signs of laboratory scuffles. The washbasin was completely dry, no recent use. “If nanochines found a way to get from victim to victim, could they be responsible for the decline in fertility?”

“You investigating a murder or solving humanity's problems?”

“Just the answer, Raihman, just the answer.”

The man across from him leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking.

No such thing as leather, Peterson reminded himself, despite the latent tanning esters in the air. The use of animal hide to upholster furniture had gone the way of the cow itself, bred into extinction through domestication. The cost of growing them in a Petrie dish far exceeded their worth, their production too ecocostly.

The long pause alerted him to deep thought or creative evasion.

“Profile, Raihman,” he murmured on his trake, not caring if the other man knew.

Doctor Juris Raihman, lead researcher at the biofirm, Valmiera Nanobotics, was forty-five years old, infertile, married to an Ifem, no children, graduate of the Riga Stradins University Medical School, triple board-certified in nanobiology, fertility, and endocrinology. Previous position as head at the Department of Reproductive Barriers, Division of Vaginitis, Bureau of Testicular Reticulitis.

Of course, Peterson thought. Why do they put such obvious information in these profiles? An Imale married to an Ifem won't produce anything together but sighs in the night!

Raihman looked left then right.

Sensing the need to head off obfuscation, Maris asked, “What'd you do over at Testicular?”

“Scrotum assessments,” the Doctor said. “Look, Detective, I know you're just doing your job, but don't you think the decline in fertility is best left to—”

“Experts like you? And let you jerk us all over again? Probably the reason we're in this mess. Get an orange wardrobe or answer the question. Which is it, Doctor?”

“You get the jerk out of my office, you officious little dick.”

Peterson leaped across the desk and pinned him against the bookcase. “Jerk me once, shame on you, jerk me twice, shame on me. I won't get jerked again.” He pulled his fist back.

“All right, all right.” He held his hands up in surrender, as if a blasma pistol were pointed at his face.

Maris lowered his fist.

“Yes, if. But that's a gigantic ass 'if,' Detective.”

“What would be required?” He backed away and dropped into the chair, seeing he'd cleared the Doctor's desk, its contents strewn about the office.

Raihman cleared his throat and adjusted his smock. “You really are a jerking prick, you know.”

“Save the compliments and answer the question.” He was tempted to arrest him just for his obstinacy, but being obnoxious was a constitutional right.

“Victim to victim transmission requires a vector, Detective, some means to carry the nanochine from one polyhydrocarbonate-rich environment to another. You know why they're called nanochines?”

“They're small.”

“Ludicrously small. A nanometer is ten-to-the-negative nine meters. Nanochines are comprised of carbonanotubes maybe five hundred nanometers across, the size of mycoplasma bacteria.”

“Lacking cell walls, they're resistant to beta-lactam antibiotics that target cell wall synthesis.”

“Braggart. Their programs are encoded in ionic imbalances. They power their locomotion from their polyhydrocarbonate environments, their respiration producing carbon dioxide and water, using the excess carbon to reproduce. They have to live on something.”

“What if they hibernated?”

“And waited for the polyhydrocarbonate environment? Unlikely, Detective.”

“What's in sperm?”

Moon-wide eyes stared at him.

If he'd been looking the other direction, Maris thought, he'd have broken his neck.

“Spurious question. Ridiculous! You're implying Valdi Muceniek wasn't an isolated incident.”

“I'm not implying it at all. I'm stating it as fact, Doctor.”

The moon rose, an evil eye across a blighted land, cursing any who dared procreate, leaving wombs barren and parents' hearts despairing, nanochine-induced infertility spreading like a venereal disease, the engines of creation disseminating their own destruction.

Maris stood on the steps of the Fertility Ministry and looked out over that blighted landscape. Magnacars whined in perpetual servitude on the avenue below him. Wires slashed apart the sky. Buildings moped in the gloaming, lighted windows hinting at suspicious activity within, darkened windows declaring it. Isolated trees punctured holes in the urban landscape, eked out nutrients from earth devoid of nurture, leaves gone pale with airborne toxin. Somewhere a siren wailed, ruing its regret to the unfortunate victims. A fitful breeze carried the hesitant stench of ionized air and rotted garbage.

He liked this time of day. He couldn't have said why. He could have said the same about his job. Death didn't discriminate. It was inevitable as sundown. The ebb of day, the blight of night. A soul stolen away, taken by a thief who benefitted not at all from the theft, as though taking someone's life might enhance one's own, like a reputation. In these murders, it was more than just one life; it was the continuity of life itself, murdered more foul than life itself.

Peterson turned to the building and looked up. Window embrasures stared indifferently back at him.

A magnacar wound down its whine on the street below, and a figure emerged. Shoes up the stairs tapped out a staccato beat.

“I got here as soon as I could,” Ilsa said, giving him a peck on the cheek.

“Thanks,” he said, his mouth near her ear, the smell of her like a meadow at sunrise, the feel of her like the kiss of dawn. He handed her a mastoid dongle, the one marked female. “Jack this in. You're Ilsa Liepin, certified Brefem, applying for a natural birth permit with your husband, Maris Liepin. New name, new neuranet address, new everything.”

“Where—?”

“Undercover does this all the time.” He pulled her against him. It thrilled him to have her close, all the teen testosterone without any of its angst.

“How come Undercover gets to have all the fun?” She met his gaze briefly and smiled. “Well, almost all the undercover fun.”

He giggled. “Jack time.” He slid the dongle marked male into his mastoid jack.

His corn flickered and flashed an icon. “Upload complete,” his coke chirped.

“Ready?”

She nodded, and he extended his arm to her.

Together, they walked through the doors.

The interior sterility exceeded the exterior indifference. The Fertility Ministry looked anything but fecund. White ceilings reflected white floors. White walls faced whiter walls. The light was source-less, seemed to come from everywhere. The one blot of color on the white-on-white was the pale, wan receptionist. “May I help you?”

Needs some face caking, Maris thought. Or paint. “Uh, Maris Liepin. My wife Ilsa and I would like to apply for a natural birth permit.”

The man hesitated, accessing their identities on his corn. “Why didn't you apply on the net?”

“For something this important?” Ilsa said, shaking her head. “And get bombarded with neura-ads for fertility supplements?”

“And erectile enhancements?” Maris traded a smirk with his wife. “No, thanks, kid.”

“I see your donations are up to date,” the receptionist said. “Surprised they're still accepting yours, Mr. Liepin. You should be honored.”

“After that disaster at Plavinas Incubation yesterday, they'll be begging from Bremales a lot older than me.”

“Terrible, wasn't it? The Coalition is sending its crack investigative squad, I hear.” The young Omale pushed a scanner toward them, flickering scan lights cutting across its surface. “I just need a retinal image from you both to get your agreement. That agreement includes allowing us to access your most recent fertility exam. Further, you'll be committing to an attempt every forty-eight hours. You'll need jack in to record your hormonal profiles. A link will be sent to your neuramail with instructions on how to upload your recordings. During the two-year waiting period, your donations must be kept current at all times. Any single instance of being late or missing your donation will result in a reset of the two-year waiting period.”

“A reset?” Ilsa asked.

“It starts over,” the young man said.

“You'll be finished with your indenture by then,” Maris grumbled.

The Omale gave him a brief smile. “The application fee is ten thousand lats, please.”

Mules shouldn't work at places like this, Peterson thought. As if an Ihume would be any better, stealing resentful glances at every customer, a green slime of envy dripping from their gazes at their fructiferous supplicants, the rot of rivalry eating away at their souls.

“Just look into the scanner, please.”

Ilsa leaned forward. Blue beams danced across her orbital socket.

“And now you, Mr. Liepin.”

Maris leaned forward. Bright flashes of blue left afterimages on his cortex, like a searing immersie or a distant slash of lightning.

“Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Liepin. Good luck in all your procreation.”

Maris grinned at Ilsa and kissed her deeply. “Oh, uh, guess we'd better wait.”

Outside, as they trotted down the steps, he could see she was about to burst with laughter.

As soon as the magnacar lid slid shut with a snick, she threw her head back and guffawed.

He watched her, bemused and warmed.

Back at his apartment, they didn't make it to the bedroom.

“Now what?” she asked a long time later, her voice in his ear thick with the rich tones of love.

“Now we wait.”

“For what?”

“Yeah, I wish I knew.”

* * *

“Here's a nanotector, most sensitive model to date, designed to sense carbodensities above seventy-five percent by mass at a hundred yards.”

“Will my sneezeweed set it off?” Peterson took the sensor from Doctor Rihard Briedis, spider filaments wrapping his finger.

“No, Detective. Carbodensities above seventy-five percent are found only in compressed biomass agglomerates such as coal or diamond. And nanochines can't survive in either without organophosphates to assimilate.”

Maris nodded and thanked the other man. Then he stepped from the building to hail a magnacar. The street hadn't changed, industrial-park gloom and garbage-dump doom, powerlines overpowering the sky, the plaintive bleat of the garbot.

Maybe it just looks different at dawn, he decided. Maybe Ilsa had lavished light upon the darkness in his world.

The commute to the precinct was the usual crate of egg-shaped magnacars, creeping en masse toward their goals, people rushing to get nowhere.

We once drove ourselves, he thought. On some planets, they still did, and in vehicles they owned. The idea seemed ludicrous. Thousands of egos on a collision course, all scheming how to get ahead of one other, preening in ever larger, more powerful machines, packed together on a single roadway going nowhere, thinking they were getting ahead.

Now, we all know we're powerless, Maris thought, one magnacar among a hundred thousand streaming through a city so thick with grit it got between the teeth. It deposited him at the precinct steps. One glance toward the station door told him all he needed to know.

Coalition.

Black-suited crats in spit-shine spats scanned the street with dark shades and impassive, anonymous faces, one to each side of the entrance. They picked him out the moment he alighted. The magnacar whined away, lamenting his fate.

Lieutenant Anita Balodis slithered out the door and down the steps toward him. She looked as casual as an alley-drunk slinking into a liquor-jack store. “It's over, Peterson.”

“Jerk that!”

“Look at me, asshole,” she said, her voice flat.

Something about her tone. Maris did, and he saw not defeat in her eyes, not capitulation, but determined knowledge, defiant resistance.

She stepped close. He realized she was taller than he was. He wondered when that had happened. “I'll say it quick. I'll say it once. We knew this was coming. Undercover's got a guise and vehicle. It's got all you need. Take your friend with you. We'll say you stole the magnacar. Find out what's going on, Peterson. For all of us.”

She stepped back and gestured at the bounce boys bounding down the steps toward them. “A few friends from the Coalition want to talk to you. They've taken jurisdiction of your nanochine cases.”

They took him into a room with a single lamp. They used words instead of fists. They badgered him about the case. Fists would have been more merciful. He kept most of the information to himself, denying them the big picture.

Balodis knew and hadn't told them, he realized.

The tragedy at Plavinas Incubation had stirred the Coalition from its slumber. Targus IX was a minor planet, an important link along the Scutum-Crux trading routes, but mediocre in manufacturing, natural resources, and labor.

Up and down the galactic arm sat worlds with far more political heft. And near the end of the galactic bar was Riga. The big fish. The gorilla in the galaxy. The Coalition of the Waltic Constellations extended from the end of the galactic bar a quarter of the way out along the Scutum-Crux arm, its capital perched astride one of the richest seams of energy and heavy metals in the galaxy.

You didn't want the Capital getting in your business. The Coalition's attention was more desirable elsewhere. Local governments protested its heavy-handed interference on a constant basis, but in an obsequious way. Too loud, and your government got replaced. Same with law enforcement. A crime as atrocious as the annihilation of quarter-million fetuses at Plavinas Incubation had invoked Coalition takeover.

“It's ours now, Peterson,” Colonel Teodor Astrauckas told him. Head of the Coalition Investigation Department, Crestonia Region, he poked his face into the light, the last of the interrogators. “Got it?”

“Bungle away, Colonel.”

“That means you stay away from everyone involved. Plavinas Incubation, Sabile Nanobio, Doctor Raihman, Iveta Rozītis, Gizela and Valdi Muceniek, all of them. You know what happens if you go near any of them?”

He stifled a yawn. “I get an ice-cream cone.”

“Patarei Prison, Detective, an orange allsuit, a mattress thick as a board, a cell the size of a closet. You won't get a trial, you won't get a lawyer, you won't get a sentence. You just go. And you don't come back.”

“I won't get to see you again. I'm so disappointed.”

“You really are an obnoxious jerk. Even your boss says so. Our case. Stay away. Got it?”

Peterson shrugged. “Your case. Your mistake.”

He walked out of the precinct feeling curiously light. The constraints of reporting to a supervisor, of keeping semi-regular hours, of being chained to a string of cases—gone.

During a bathroom break, he'd neuramailed Ilsa. She waited in the back of a dark restaurant two blocks away, a favorite with Undercover, where patrons never removed their shades. “But I can't go with you,” she said. “My indenture.”

Lieutenant Balodis had told him to take her. Maris suspected they'd take care of the indenture.

A waiter approached. “The bouillabaisse is divine,” he said quite loudly, leaning toward Maris, finger to the menu. “You're being surveilled,” the waiter added quietly. “At the cue, head for the deep freeze.”

Maris reached for Ilsa's hand, her eyes wide with fright.

A dark-suited and -shaded Ifem approached the waiter. “Pardon, where's the head?”

Only dicks and jugs called it that. “Restroom for patrons only, ma'am.”

“Jerk your patrons only!” the Ifem dick snarled. She whipped out a truncheon with one hand, seized his throat with the other. “The head, dammit!”

“What're you doin'?” A patron across the aisle stood and lunged at the Ifem dick.

Chaos erupted.

Maris led Ilsa toward the back, found the deep freeze just past the walk-in. The heavy door swung aside. At the back stood cases of synthe-steak, crates to the ceiling. The stack slid silently to one side.

Peterson plunged through the opening, Ilsa right behind him. The short passageway spilled them into underground storage. Near a roll-up door hummed a magnacar, a two-seater, hatch open, the glasma tinted dark.

They leaped in, the hatch closed, the door rolled up, and the magnacar shot out.

He looked back. The roll-up door was rolling down.

“What the jerk was that all about?”

He slid his blasma pistol from its holster. “Later.” A satchel at their feet. Guises.

The magnacar sped through a garbage-clotted alley, the refuse leaping aside to avoid getting plowed. A jacker too plowed to dodge got bounced, the magnacar bleating a warning and attempting to swerve. The magnacar shuddered on impact, and Peterson glanced back in time to see the jack-addict crumple.

“We have to stop,” Ilsa said, “He might be hurt.”

“Didn't feel a thing,” he said.

The magnacar plunged from the alley into traffic and headed for the outskirts, toward the shuttleport.

“Look in the bag on the floor while I watch for pursuit.” He kept an eye out the rearview.

“What is all this?”

“There'll be two mastoid jacks. Put one in, hand me the other.” No sign of pursuit, the magnacar taking a zig-zag route.

“There's wigs, creams, bandages. Maris, what's going on?”

He took his eyes off the rearview to look at her. “We're goin' down.”