Tonight, however, he was pretty impressed with this full-color Martin Scorsese movie from 1976. They watched it with subtitles. “It’s strange how they were dealing with the same shit we are,” Threezed remarked, picking at a scab on his knee. “You always hear about how people were so diseased back then, and everything was really slow and backward, but I’ve totally known guys like that. I mean, I’ve totally known cab drivers like that.”
“Yeah, I guess people don’t change that much from century to century.” Jack shrugged. Now that the movie had him in a decent mood, it seemed like a good time to bring up their next move. “So, we’re going to get to Inuvik in a day or two,” she said. “I can drop you off there.” A bustling port town on the Arctic coast, Inuvik was the perfect place to get lost. Threezed could catch a fast train from there to dozens of big cities in the Zone.
“Inuvik? What am I supposed to do there?”
“Don’t worry—I’ll give you some credits to get you on your feet.”
“But how am I supposed to get on my feet when I’ve got this chip in my arm?” Threezed passed his hand over the fleshy part of his left upper arm, where the indenture tag was implanted.
“I killed your tag a couple of days ago. Nobody will be able to tell it’s there.”
“You killed my tag… without telling me?”
“It’s not safe for you to be trackable after what happened. Did you really want to be broadcasting your identity to the world?”
“Well, I…” Threezed trailed off. His hand tightened over the place where his dead tag would probably live forever in its teardrop of surgical glass.
Jack was about to suggest that he catch a train to Vancouver when her perimeter fizzed under the skin of her right hand. She had a message.
“Sorry… I’ve got to check this.” Jack shot Threezed an apologetic look. She crossed the bridge to her chair near the control consoles and gestured up a window that only she could see. Its dark rectangle perfectly blocked the angry expression that was slowly distorting the shapes of Threezed’s mouth and eyes.
One of her search programs had found an uptick in news about drug-related accidents and crimes.
It seemed that the homework fiend was part of a small epidemic of workaholism. First came an elderly man who refused to stop mowing his lawn. Doctors restrained him, but he kept roaring and twitching, demanding the mower controls. Next was a woman who only wanted to walk dogs. There was a city worker who had unleashed a fleet of autonomous road foamers with orders to spray new sidewalks in seemingly random locations downtown, during rush hour. The vehicles injured several people, cementing their feet and legs, before her supervisor was able to shut down the fleet. Then came a nanny, weeping and incoherent, nearly arrested after spending ten hours in the park just to push children on the swings.
Unsettled, Jack gestured through a few more news stories. At least five people were dead, mostly from dehydration, and dozens hospitalized. The more she read, the more convinced she was that her reverse-engineered Zacuity was to blame. These reports were just from Calgary, so who knew what was going on in smaller cities like Iqaluit and Yellowknife? There could be dozens more people with these side effects, with far less access to medical help. This was the kind of pharmaceutical disaster she’d vowed to fight against, and now she’d caused one, for the exact same reason the corps did: money. Pharma deprivation death machine, indeed. Digging her nails into the palms of her hands, Jack forced herself to focus. She needed to stop this thing from getting a lot worse.
But Jack didn’t have much time. Somebody was going to have to pay for those deaths, and a radical anti-patent activist who sold pirated drugs would be high on the IPC’s list of suspects. When Zaxy connected the dots and figured out her role in this shit show, she would be on their hit list. Not because they wanted justice, or even to make an example of her. Jack was the only person alive who knew it was Zaxy’s patented molecular structure for Zacuity that was killing people. The company had to cover up the connection between their new drug and these meltdowns. Killing her was by far the easiest way to do it.
Threezed chose that moment to amble over, kneel at her feet, and squeeze her knee, his hand warm through the canvas of her coveralls. He looked up at her through the map projection that defined her future, his eyes wide with feigned innocence. The clean fluff of his hair framed the graceful lines of his face and neck, making him look like a yaoi character. “I’d like to repay you for what you’ve done for me,” he murmured.
Threezed was a practiced flirt. Maybe he was trying to manipulate her, or maybe his indenture had trained him in this specific form of gratitude. Both options were depressing, but Jack hardly noticed through the distortion field of her own depression. Something cracked inside her, then broke. Wiping the display out of the air, Jack stared into Threezed’s almost-black eyes and wondered if Zaxy was actually going to assassinate her. Wondered if maybe she deserved it.
The sub thrummed into motion, bringing them closer to Inuvik, second by second. Threezed leaned forward and gently brushed his cheek against her inner thigh. It was tempting to take the easy way out and just go into hiding with this coquettish young man for a few months, but the instant she thought about it, her unhappiness grew so acute that the temptation was over. Zacuity was coring out people’s minds, and she was responsible. There was no way she could live with herself if she didn’t warn people about how dangerous this drug really was. When Jack got to the mainland, she was going to call in a favor that might save hundreds of lives… but probably not her own.
She ran her fingers through Threezed’s hair and thought about dying wishes. “Are you sure?” she asked.
He bowed his head in an ambiguous gesture of obedience and consent.
SUMMER 2114
Thirty years ago, when Jack was Threezed’s age, she spent every afternoon in a climate-controlled wing of the university genetics lab. She had an internship that mostly involved organizing sample libraries of proteins and obscure bits of RNA. When she wasn’t tagging test tubes, she dreamed about becoming a synthetic biologist who could stop genetic diseases with perfectly engineered therapies. She knew without a doubt that one day she was going to do Good Science and save millions of lives. She just needed to find the right protein or DNA sequence that would undo whatever molecular typo made a mutated cell keep living when it should have died. That summer, Jack learned the art of apoptosis, or making cells extinguish themselves.
In the fall, she matriculated into a PhD program at one of the top bioengineering departments in the Free Trade Zone. Franklin University was near an old port city and military base called Halifax, right on the North Atlantic. Jack had never lived near the ocean before, and she rented a tiny room whose advantages included a perfect line of sight to the local high-speed antenna array—better than the free mote net—plus, a tremendous sea view. She joined the well-funded Bendis Lab, designing custom viruses for drug delivery.
But then something unexpected derailed her promising academic career.
It happened on a warm Friday afternoon. Wandering down the wide foam road into town, Jack ran into a guy named Ari who was in her protein folding seminar.
“What did you think of that last lab, eh?” she asked. He’d been pissed in class about something their professor had said about the direct relationship between proteins and human behavior.