Organo-Topia (9 page)

“Come on,” he said, and dragged the frightened Omale from the alcove.

The magnacar had pulled right onto the sidewalk, a black-and-white with blacked-out windows. Other units blocked the street.

He stopped the Omale a few feet shy. “Bend down.” He pushed the Omale into a crouch. Eyes quartering the street, Maris pushed the man into the magnacar and shut the door. “Subject secured,” Maris traked.

The black-and-white whined into the street, aux units leading and tailing. Their sirens Dopplered away, a half-octave lower.

He nodded at the approaching field commander. “You got any e-crew with you?”

“Kalnin,” she shouted over her shoulder and jerked her thumb at Maris. “Assist the detective. What we got, anyway?”

He ID'd himself. “Subject says he was threatened if he didn't poison me.” Maris looked at the e-crew. “Vial inside, at the wait station.”

“Got it.” The e-crew gloved up, fished an e-bag from a pocket, and went inside to collect the evidence.

“I thought Coalition took over that investigation, Detective,” the field commander said.

“Jerk the Coalition,” Maris muttered.

Peterson was late jacking into the auction. Reports did that to him. It was a mutual thing. He was late with reports, and they made him late for life. He decided to save time by jacking into the auction while en route to Telsai aboard the suborbital.

The spaceport was a crush of bodies so scentified he might have gone bodyshopping on aroma alone. He endured long registration lines, not wanting to blow his cover. Glasma panes set in a blasteel-girder lattice soared overhead, the chatter of wave-cancelers the dominant sound, muting the susuruss of suit and slack. Impassive faces of impatient passengers populated the boarding area, the boarding wait a boring one, most having jacked themselves elsewhere.

He filed aboard, cattle-herded, and squeezed into a seat near the back, right across from the latrine. Figured, Undercover's budget being what it was. The seat was tight even for his small frame. The obese jerk who sat next to him should have been charged double, since he took up half of Maris's seat too. The Detective didn't mind, knowing he'd be jacking out in a moment.

He jacked in to the Ohume auction as Maris Lacis, Certified Ohume Purchasing Agent, registered with the Board of Indenture Exchange, Bureau of Organofares, Community Diffidence Licensing Division. Only licensed purchasing agents were allowed to jack in.

In some slave markets, buyers gathered to gander at merchandise. Not so at the Ohume auction. Very little auctioning needed body time, virtually all of it done jacked into the neuranet. Through their purchasing agents, multiplanetary corporations hurled bids the size of gross domestic products at whole crèche cohorts, Ohumes on sale in minimum lots of a kilo each. All the major multiplanetaries bought Ohumes in bulk. Cheap labor, through and through.

For most Ohumes, sale of their indentures at auction meant being warehoused on some factory planet with a billion others, working menial assembly, rotating among five or so positions, changing locations every week or fortnight to discourage allegiances, alliances, or affiliations, being charged twice the market rent for half the space in leaky, vermin-infested shacks, food, water, clothing, and amenities deducted from wages, the food and water laden with limbic-system suppressants, leisure time severely restricted to minutes per day, sex prohibited.

Further, the corporation was sure to game the indenture, inflating charges, shorting hours, extracting taxes, reducing wages, demoting positions. Any Ohume might demand an accounting, but oversight was lax, the regulators often from offplanet and easily persuaded to overlook all but the most egregious of abuses, frequently bribed, drugged, sexed, or jacked into indifference. Recourse was laughable, complaints ignored, Ohumes abused daily. Physical punishment for slack or sloppy work was routine, flogging common, pay docked to compensate the flogger. Uprisings were frequent on worlds where such abuses were endemic. Few governments challenged the corporate exploitation, planetary budgets a pittance of corporate profits, the Coalition too heavily influenced by capital to enforce existing law.

On factory worlds, in the face of such obstacles, Ohume indenture “retirement” ran between ten and twenty percent, the remainder dying before their indentures matured. Retirees were released to find their own way, without severance pay, without fare for passage elsewhere, without roofs over their heads, without clothes on their backs. Since many planets were company-owned, most retirees had little choice but to return as employees, sometimes as overseers to brethren still under indenture, sometimes forced to inflict cruelties similar to those inflicted upon them. Floggers were frequently drawn from this pool, their pay dependent upon how many Ohumes they flogged. Very few retirees ever left the factory world.

But not all Ohume indentures were bought in bulk for factory work. Interstellar franchises bought line workers by the billions and distributed them to their franchisees. Restaurants, clothing boutiques, hotels, fitness clubs, night clubs, sports clubs—any type of business easily replicated from planet to planet requiring a reliable pool of labor might tap into the Ohume auction. Ohumes indentured to these franchises fared better than their factory-world cohorts, franchisees being typically smaller, subject to a higher degree of regulatory oversight, exerting less control over the minute aspects of their indentures' lives and less likely to exploit them. An Ohume's indenture purchased at the corporate franchise level became the defacto property of the franchisee, the Omale or Ofem frequently finding his or her own food, shelter, and clothing. Physical punishment was less common for franchise Ohumes, since the franchisee usually operated in an urban setting, in far less isolation. Government access to worksites was greater, and attempts to suborn regulators went awry more often, graft easier to catch and prosecute. Maris's colleagues in extortion at the Telsai Precinct often bandied about their more colorful collars.

Secondary Ohume markets sold indentures to smaller companies, none of them able to compete with multiplanetary corporations. The consolidated hospitality trades, for example, marketed indentures to local hotels, resorts, restaurants, bars, and spas. Among these secondary markets were the specialized Ohume auctions. The Ohume indentures being sold at these auctions had cell lines engineered to meet certain specifications. Mining, for example, relied heavily on a handful of genotypes emphasizing masses of muscle, short, dense endoskeletons, high endurance, and low intelligence. Ohumes of especially desirable characteristics went up for sale at the Idol market, mostly Ofems of jaw-dropping, prong-popping beauty, the majority of buyers male. A few glistening Omale hunks were strutted across the neuranet stage, ponderous prongs to their knees, invoking envy in buyers but provoking few bids. Among the specialized types of Ohume sold at Idol market were the sperm receptacle and ovum retriever models.

Maris watched the activity at the Ohume auction, billions of Ohumes sold each hour, the sums staggering. When broken down, the cost turned out to be peanuts per worker.

A neuracom channel opened while he watched, and the avatar of a pleasant-faced young person appeared on his corn. “Agent Lacis, welcome to the Crestonia Ohume Neura-market. I'm Shannon, your market assistant. How may I assist you today?”

A cybident, Maris decided. The face and voice were epicene, containing both male and female characteristics. A customer could decide the cybident was male or female, as preferred. Such compugen avatars rarely had the sophistication to master the nuances of language and expression, or to provide more than a modicum of assistance.

“Get outa my head.” He didn't derive near the satisfaction from insulting a cybident.

“Assistance declined. My name is Shannon, and you may call on me any time.”

“You gonna jerk me at three am?”

“I have an immersident available to provide satisfaction at any time of day, Agent Lacis.”

A pity they didn't understand sarcasm. “No, thanks.”

The com channel closed, and a chime sounded on his trake. Arrival at Telsai in ten minutes.

Maris sighed, knowing he'd need to come back.

* * *

Juris Raihman, Doctor and former lead researcher at Valmiera Nanobotics, looked around the restaurant, as though worried he'd be seen with Maris.

On arrival at Telsai, Detective Peterson had jacked in the ident of Maris Amantas, Chief Research Officer at Gulbene Neurogenetics, Valmiera's competitor-nemesis. En route to the restaurant, magnacar whines had shoved slivers under his fingernails. Sidewalk crowds had rushed at him, phalanxes of urban soldiers reenacting the charge of the blight brigade. Plasteel and glasma towers glared reprovingly upon the masses of humanity they'd enslaved to serve them.

Maris stopped at the restaurant entrance. Cotton-ball clouds padded a sultry sky. A watercolor sun now splashed the restaurant wall, dribbling up from the floor.

“How do I know we aren't being watched?” Raihman asked as Peterson slid into the booth across from him.

Maris shrugged. “No guarantees, but I got two plainclothes outside to see you home safely.”

“An investment. I must be important.”

“A temporary impairment.” Maris was intrigued that Lieutenant Balodis seemed to think Raihman's dismissal noteworthy. “Why'd they let you go?”

“That bug on your finger.”

It looked like a praying mantis with multiple heads, its stick body and spindly legs sprouting half-a-dozen extosensors, crawling up his extended finger to perch there, ever watchful.

The waitress, an Ofem with a bright smile, arrived and took their orders, too happy to have been at the job for long. A local establishment such as this one had probably acquired her indenture from the secondary market. She returned in a few minutes with their beverages.

Their coffees were black. “Could I have some cream in my coffee?” Raihman asked the waitress.

“Pseudo or the real deal?” she asked. “The good stuff's extra.”

“Real, please.”

“I'll put some in for you, dear,” she said, picking up his cup.

“You can't bring it to the table?”

“Can't do it, darling. Too expensive.” She was back in a moment with creamed coffee.

“It's illegal, you know,” Raihman said the moment she'd gone.

“Huh?” Maris was going to need a neck brace.

“Ever wonder why nanochine outbreaks aren't more common?”

Not an expert on disease, he didn't. He shook his head and spread his hands. “I'm no epidemiologist.”

“Organicity. Nanochine assemblies are powered organically. Adenosine triphosphate breakdown. They can't feed off inert or synthetic material. On your finger, you have a macroassembly of nanochines powered by a microfusion inductor, not ATP. One of the few in existence.”

“Why's it illegal?”

Raihman raised his cup but didn't drink, cradling the cup in both hands. “Why do you think?”

Once a nanochine was freed from its dependence upon carbonaceous matter to power itself and replicate… “They'll take over.”

“Entire planets wiped out,” Juris said. “Uninhabited and uninhabitable. And no way to quarantine them.”

Just make the planet off limits, Peterson wanted to say. The folly of human stupidity was sure to breach any quarantine. “So why doesn't this creature—” he gestured at the insect— “wipe us out and take over Tartus Nine?”

“This one isn't programmed to replicate itself.” The Doctor took a deep sip of his creamed coffee and set down the cup.

The Doctor's odd emphasis alerted Maris. “This one.”

Raihman's face froze. Then his upper body slumped forward, planting his face in his coffee. Cup and saucer clattered and brown coffee splattered.

The nanotector on his finger squealed, flashing red, and Maris leaped from the booth and backed up against the counter.

Raihman's head disintegrated into a bubbling mass of squirming jelly. The overhead nanotectors pinged, and white foam spurted from nanosuppressor nozzles in the ceiling. Panicked patrons cleared the restaurant.

Maris backed out the front entrance, staring at the flesh melting to the floor as nanochines ate their way through Doctor Raihman's body. The suppressant only kept the nanochines from spreading to others. The foam couldn't stop their progress through already-infected carbonaceous matter.

Shaking white foam off his coat and brushing it from his hair, Maris silenced the bug on his finger and reconnoitered with the two plainclothes. In the distance, emergency vehicles on the prowl howled their mournful tunes in off-time harmony.

“What happened, Sir?” one plainclothes asked.

“He drank his coffee, his creamed coffee.” He located the Ofem waitress and pointed her out with a glance. “Detain the waitress for questioning.”

The two plainclothes converged on her. Her eyes went wide and she shrank from between them, but they managed to hustle her off quietly to an unmarked.

Emergency vehicles hove into the street, painting the buildings blue and red, their howls ending on a discordant plunge. EMTs and Hazmat crews crowded around the door.

Forensics arrived, and with them the Coroner, Urzula Ezergailis. She stepped out of her magnacar and beelined toward him. “Undercover can't get you a better jerking disguise than that?”

“I begged them for an ident like yours, but they told me claws that sharp aren't legal.”

“Jerk you too, Maris. What you got?”

He told her what she'd find in the restaurant. “Test the milk she put in his coffee, Urzy.”

“All right, I will, Peterson, but don't call me that ever again.”

“Rhymes with 'cozy.' Go snuggle up in the muck while it's still warm.” He gestured at the crew-filled doorway and turned from the scene.

“Hey, Maris,” Urzula called.

He glanced over his shoulder.

“Watch your back.”

“Thanks, kid.”

Detective Peterson headed for the precinct, the waitress's interrogation likely to take half the night. He wouldn't get back to Ilsa until noon. He opened a neurachannel to her.

“Damn, I love you.” She stood in the kitchenette of their Crestonia flat, in nothing else, looking delectable.

A hot surge of desire flooded through him, exacerbated by delay. “Likewise, girl.” Absence made his prong grow longer.

After he told her the bad news, she pulled on a gown, looking disappointed.

“I'd understand if you jacked into an immersie and thought of me,” he said.

“Poor substitute. Just get your ass here so I can jerk you silly.”

“Yes, my love.” He disconnected as the magnacar whined to a stop in front of the precinct. He got out, so heavy he could barely walk.

Filip Dukur of the Crestonia Capitol Beat pulled a microphone from nowhere, dropping a glance to Peterson's trousers.

“Go ahead, ask. Is that a blasma pistol in my pocket? Or am I just happy to see you? Drop the soap to find out doggy-style. What're you doin' here, kid?”

“Best offer I've had in the last two minutes, Detective. Has Doctor Juris Raihman been eliminated as a suspect?” Dukur shoved the mike at Peterson's epiglottis.

Maris batted it away. “That's what I like about you, kid, asking the obscure question, seeking the oblivious answer.” He headed up the stairs toward the precinct door, leaving the kid scratching his head.