Rock On (54 page)

“You still there, buddy?”

“Yeah, I’m still here.” I’d given Jake enough time to think I’d hung up on him. Let the bastard sweat a little. Why not? Over the roar of the scramjet’s ballistic re-entry profile I said: “We’re gonna lose comms in a few moments. Why don’t you tell me what this is all about.”

“Not over the phone. But here’s the deal.” And he gave me an address, an industrial unit on the edge of Helsinki. “You’re flying into Copenhagen, buddy. Take the ’lev, you can be in Helsinki by evening.”

“You have to give me more than that.”

“Like you to meet the future of rock and roll, Fox. Little friend of mine by the name of Derek. You’re going to like each other.”

The bastard had me, of course.

It was winter in Helsinki so evening came down cold and early. From the maglev, I took a car straight out into the industrial sticks, a dismal warren of slab-sided warehouses and low-rise office units. Security lights blazed over fenced-off loading areas and nearly empty car parks, the asphalt still slick and reflective from afternoon rain. Beyond the immediate line of warehouses, walking cranes stomped around the docks, picking up and discarding shipping containers like they were colored building blocks. Giant robots. I didn’t need to be reminded about giant fucking robots, not when I was expecting an Interpol arrest warrant to be declared in my name at any moment. But at least they wouldn’t come looking here too quickly, I thought. On the edge of Helsinki, with even the car now departed on some other errand, I felt like the last man alive, wandering the airless boulevards of some huge abandoned moon base.

The unit Jake had told me to go to was locked from the road, with a heavy-duty barrier slid across the entrance. Through the fence, it looked semi-abandoned: weeds licking at its base, no lights on in the few visible windows, some of the security lights around it broken or switched off. Maybe I’d been set up. It wouldn’t be like Jake, but time had passed and I still wasn’t ready to place absolute, unconditional trust in my old partner. All the same, if Jake did want to get back at me for something, stranding me in a bleak industrial development was a very elaborate way of going about it.

I pressed the intercom buzzer in the panel next to the barrier. I was half expecting no one to answer it and, if they did, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to explain my presence. But the voice that crackled through the grille was familiar and unfazed.

“Glad you could make it, buddy. Stroll on inside and take a seat. I’ll be down in a minute. I can’t wait to show Derek off to you.”

“I hope Derek’s worth the journey.”

The barrier slid back. I walked across the damp concrete of the loading area to the service entrance. Now that I paid proper attention, the place wasn’t as derelict as I’d assumed. Cameras tracked me, moving stealthily under their rain hoods. I ascended a step, pushed against a door—which opened easily—and found myself entering some kind of lobby or waiting room. Beyond a fire door, a dimly illuminated corridor led away into the depths of the building. No lights on in the annex, save for the red eye of a coffee machine burbling away next to a small table and a set of chairs. I poured a cup, spooned in creamer and sat down. As my vision adjusted to the gloom, I made out some of the glossy brochures lying on the table. Most of them were for Gladius Biomech. I’d heard of the firm and recognized their swordfish logo. Most of what they did creeped me out. Once you started messing with genetics, the world was your walking, talking, tap-dancing oyster. I stroked one of the moving images and watched a cat sitting on a high chair and eating its dinner with a knife and fork, holding the cutlery in little furry human-like hands, while the family dined around it.
Now your pet can share in your mealtimes—hygienically!

The firedoor swung open. I put down the brochure hastily, as ashamed as if I’d been caught leafing through hardcore porn. Jake stood silhouetted in the dim lights of the corridor, knee-length leather jacket, hair still down to his collar.

I put on my best laconic, deadpan voice. “So I guess we’re going into the pet business.”

“Not quite,” Jake answered. “Although there may be merchandising options in that direction at some point. For now, though, it’s still rock and roll all the way.” He gestured back at the door he’d come through. “You want to meet Derek?”

I tipped the coffee dregs into the wastebin. “Guess we don’t want to keep him waiting.”

“Don’t worry about him. He’s not going anywhere.”

I followed Jake into the corridor. He had changed a bit in the two years since we’d split the firm, but not much. The hair was a little grayer, maybe not as thick as it used to be. Jake still had the soul patch under his lip and the carefully tended stubble on his cheeks. Still wore snakeskin cowboy boots without any measurable irony.

“So what’s this all about?”

“What I said. A new business opportunity. Time to put Morbid Management back on the road. Question is, are we ready to take things to the next level?”

I smiled. “We. Like it’s a done deal already.”

“It will be when you see Derek.”

We’d reached a side-door: sheet metal with no window in it. Jake pressed his hand against a reader, submitted to an iris scan, then pushed open the door. Hard light spilled through the widening gap.

“You keep this locked, but I’m able to walk in through the front door? Who are you worried about breaking in?”

“It’s not about anyone breaking in,” Jake said.

We were in a room large enough to hold a dozen semi-trucks. Striplights ran the length of the low, white-tiled ceiling. There were no windows, and most of the wall space was taken up with grey metal cabinets and what appeared to be industrial-size freezer units. There were many free-standing cabinets and cupboards, with benches laid out in long rows. The benches held computers and glassware and neat, toylike robotic things. Centrifuges whirred, ovens and chromatographs clicked and beeped. I watched a mechanical arm dip a pipette into a rack of test tubes, sampling or dosing each in quick sequence. The swordfish logo on the side of the robot was for Gladius Biomech.

“Either you’re richer than I think,” I said, “or there’s some kind of deal going on here.”

“Gladius fronted the equipment and expertise,” Jake said. “It’s a risk for them, obviously. But they’re banking on a high capital return.”

“You’re running a biotech lab on your own?”

“Buddy, I can barely work out a bar tip. You were always the one with the head for figures. Every few days, someone from Gladius stops by to make sure it’s all running to plan. But it doesn’t take much tinkering. Stuff’s mostly automated. Which is cool, because the fewer people know about this, the better.”

“Guess I’m one of them now. Want to show me what this is actually all about, or am I meant to figure it out on my own?”

“Over here,” Jake said, strolling over to one of the free-standing cabinets. It was a white cube about the size of a domestic washing machine, and had a similar-looking control panel on the front. But it wasn’t a washing machine, obviously. Jake entered a keypad code then slid back the lid. “Go on,” he said, inviting me closer. “Take a look.”

I peered into the cabinet, figuring it was some kind of incubator. Blue, UV-tinged lights ran around the inside of the rim. I could feel the warmth coming off it. Straw and dirt were packed around the floor, and there was a clutch of eggs in the middle. They were big eggs, almost football sized, and one of them was quivering gently.

“Looks like we’ve got a hatcher coming through,” Jake said. “Reason I had to be here, actually. System alerts me when one of those babies gets ready to pop. They need to be hand-reared for a few days, until they can stand on their feet and forage for themselves.”

“Until
what
can stand on their feet and forage for themselves?”

“Baby dinosaurs, buddy. What else?” Jake slid the cover back on the incubator, then locked it with a touch on the keypad. “T-Rexes, actually. You ever eaten Rex?”

“Kind of out of my price range.”

“Well, take it from me, you’re not missing much. Pretty much everything tastes the same once you’ve added steak sauce, anyway.”

“So we’re diversifying into dinosaur foodstuffs. Is that what you dragged me out here to see?”

“Not exactly.” Jake moved to the next cabinet along—it was the same kind of white incubator—and keyed open the lid. He unhooked a floral-patterned oven glove from the side of the cabinet and slipped it on his right hand, then dipped into the blue-lit interior. I heard a squeak and a scuffling sound and watched as Jake came out with a baby dinosaur in his hand, clutched gently in the oven glove. It was about the size of a plastic bath toy, the same kind of DayGlo green, but it was very definitely alive. It squirmed in the glove, trying to escape. The tail whipped back and forth. The huge hind legs thrashed at air. The little forelimbs scrabbled uselessly against the the oven glove’s thumb. The head, with its tiny pin-sized teeth already budding through, tried to bite into the glove. The eyes were wide and white-rimmed and charmingly belligerent.

“Already got some fight in it, as you can see,” Jake said, using his ungloved hand to stroke the top of the Rex’s head. “And those teeth’ll give you a nasty cut even now. Couple of weeks, they’ll have your finger off.”

“Nice. But I’m still sort of missing the point here. And why is that thing so
green
?”

“Tweaked the pigmentation a bit, that’s all. Made it luminous, too. Real things are kind of drab. Not so hot for merchandising.”

“Merchandising what?”

“Jesus, Fox. Take a look at the forelimbs. Maybe it’ll clue you in.”

I took a look at the forelimbs and felt a shiver of I wasn’t exactly sure what. Not quite revulsion, not quite awe. Something that came in at right angles to both.

“I’m no expert on dinosaurs,” I said slowly. “Even less on Rexes. But are those things
meant
to have four fingers and a thumb?”

“Not the way nature intended. But then, nature wasn’t thinking ahead.” Jake stroked the dinosaur’s head again. It seemed to be calming gradually. “Gladius tell me it’s pretty simple stuff. There are these things called
Hox
genes which show up in pretty much everything, from fruit flies to monkeys. They’re like a big bank of switches that control limb development, right out to the number of digits on the end. We just flipped a few of those switches, and got us dinosaurs with human hands.”

The hands were like exquisite little plastic extrudings, molded in the same biohazard green as the rest of the T-Rex. They even had tiny little fingernails.

“Okay, that’s a pretty neat trick,” I said. “If a little on the creepy side. But I’m still not quite seeing the
point.
”

“The point, buddy, is that without little fingers and thumbs it’s kind of difficult to play rock guitar.”

“You’re shitting me. You bred this thing to
make music
?”

“He’s got a way to go, obviously. And it doesn’t stop with the fingers. You ever seen a motor homunculus, Fox? Map of human brain function, according to how much volume’s given over to a specific task. Looks like a little man with huge fucking hands. Just operating a pair of hands takes up
way
more cells than you’d think. Well, there’s no point giving a dinosaur four fingers and an opposable thumb if you don’t give him the mental wiring to go along with it. So we’re in there right from the start, manipulating brain development all the way, messing with the architecture when everything’s nice and plastic. This baby’s two weeks old and he already has thirty per cent more neural volume than a normal Rex. Starting to see some real hierarchical layering of brain modules, too. Your average lizard has a brain like a peanut, but this one’s already got something like a mammalian limbic system. Hell, I’d be scared if it wasn’t me doing this.”

“And for such a noble purpose.”

“Don’t get all moral on me, buddy.” Jake lowered the T-Rex back into the incubator. “We eat these things. We pay to go out into a big park and shoot them with anti-tank guns. I’m giving them the chance to
rock.
Is that so very wrong?”

“I guess it depends on how much choice the dinosaur has in the matter.”

“When you force a five year old kid to take piano lessons, does the kid have a choice?”

“That’s different.”

“Yeah, because it’s cruel and unusual to force someone to play the piano. I agree. But electric guitar? That’s liberation, my friend. That’s like handing someone the keys to the cosmos.”

“It’s a goddamned
reptile,
Jake.”

“Right. And how is that different to making corpses or giant robots play music?”

He had me there, and from the look of quiet self-satisfaction on his face, he knew it.

“Okay. I accept that you have a baby dinosaur that could, theoretically, play the guitar, if anyone made a guitar that small. But that’s not the same thing as actually playing it. What are you going to do, just sit around and wait?”

“We train it,” Jake said. “Just like training a dog to do tricks. Slowly, one element at a time. Little rewards. Building up the repertoire a part at a time. It doesn’t need to understand music. It just needs to make a sequence of noises. You think we can’t do this?”

“I’d need persuasion.”

“You’ll get it. Dinosaurs live for meat. It doesn’t have to understand what it’s doing, it just has to associate the one with the other. And this is heavy metal we’re talking about here, not Rachmaninov. Not a big task, even for a reptile.”

“You’ve thought it all through.”

“You think Gladius were going to get onboard if there wasn’t a business plan? This is going to work, Fox. It’s going to work and you’re going to be a part of it. All the way down the line. We’re going to promote a rock tour with an actual carnivorous theropod dinosaur on lead guitar and vocal.”

I couldn’t deny that Jake’s enthusiasm was infectious. Always had been. But when I’d needed him—when I’d taken a big idea to him—he hadn’t been there for me. Even now the pain of that betrayal still stung, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to get over it that quickly.