Ken grunted, scrolling through Taka's results on the main display. "What's this?"
"What? Oh, yeah. It's polyploid."
"Polyploid?" Laurie repeated.
"You know, haploid, diploid, polyploid. Multiple sets of genes. You mostly see it in some plants."
"Why here?" Ken wondered.
"I found some nasty recessives," Taka admitted. "Maybe they were deliberately inserted because of some positive effect they'd have in concert with other genes, or maybe it was a rush job so they just slipped through. As far as I can tell the redundant genes were just layered on to eliminate any chance of homozygous expression."
He grunted. "Not very elegant."
Taka shook her head, impatient. "Certainly it's a ham-fisted solution, but it's quick and—I mean, the point is it works! We could beat ßehemoth!"
"If you're right," Ken mused, "it's not ßehemothyou have to beat."
"The M&M's," Taka suggested.
Something changed in Laurie's stance.
Ken looked unconvinced. "Possibly. Although the counterstrikes appear to originate with the North American defense shield."
"CSIRA," Laurie said quietly.
Ken shrugged. "At this point, CSIRA effectively is the armed forces on this continent. And there don't appear to be much in the way of centralized governments left to keep it in check."
"Shouldn't matter," Taka said. "'Lawbreakers are incorruptible."
"Maybe they were, before Rio. Now, who knows?"
"No." Taka saw scorched landscapes. She remembered lifters on the horizon, breathing fire. "We take our orders from them. We all—"
"Then it's probably just as well you kept this project so close to your chest," Lubin remarked.
"But why would anyone—" Laurie was looking from Taka to Ken, disbelief written across her face. "I mean, what would be in it forthem?"
More than confusion, Taka realized. Loss, too. Anguish.Something clicked at the back of her mind: Laurie hadn't really believed it, all this time. She had helped where she could. She had cared. She had accepted Taka's interpretation of events—at least as a possibility—because it had offered her an opportunity to help set things right. And yet, only now did she seem to realize what that interpretation entailed, the large-scale implications of what it was they were fighting: not ßehemoth after all, but their own kind.
Odd, Taka reflected, how often it comes down to that…
It wasn't just the end of the world, not to Laurie. It seemed somehow more—more intimate than that. It was almost as if someone had betrayed her personally. Welcome back, Taka thought to the vulnerable creature peeking again, at long last, from behind the mask. I've missed you.
"I don't know," she said at last. "I don't know who would do this or why. But the point is, now we stop it. Now we culture these babies, and we send them out to do battle." Taka pulled up the stats on her incubators. "I've already got five liters of the stuff ready to go, and I'll have twenty by morn…"
That's odd, she thought as a little flashing icon caught her eye for the first time.
That shouldn't—that looks like—
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. "Oh, shit," she whispered.
"What?" Ken and Laurie leaned in as one.
"My lab's online." She stabbed at the icon; it blinked back at her, placidly unresponsive. "My lab's online. It's uploading—God knows what it's—"
In an instant Ken was scrambling up the side of the van. "Get the toolkit," he snapped, sliding across the roof towards a little satellite dish rising somehow from its recessed lair, pointing at the sky.
"What? I—"
Laurie dove into the cab. Ken yanked against the dish, breaking its fixation on some malign geosynchronous star. Suddenly he cried out and thrashed, stopped himself just short of rolling off the roof. His back was arched, his hands and head lifted away from the metal.
The dish stuttered back towards alignment, stripped gears whining.
"Fuck!" Laurie tumbled out onto the pavement. The toolkit spilled its guts beside her. She scrambled to her feet, yelled "Shut it down, for Chrissakes! The hull's electrified!"
Taka stumbled towards the open door. She could see Ken wriggling back towards the dish on his back and elbows, using his diveskin as insulation. As she ducked her head to hop past the trim—Thank God we disarmed the internals—a familiar hum started up deep in Miri's guts.
The weapons blister, deploying.
GPS was online. She killed it. It resurrected. All external defenses were awake and hungry. She called them off. They ignored her. Outside, Ken and Laurie shouted back and forth.
What do I do—what—
She scrambled under the dash and pulled open the fuse box. The circuit breakers were clunky manual things, unreachable to any demon built of electrons. She pulled the plugs on security and comm and GPS. She yanked autopilot too, just in case.
A chorus of electrical hums fell instantly silent around her.
Taka closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself a deep breath. Voices drifted through the open door as she pulled herself back up into the driver's seat.
"You okay?"
"Yeah. Skin took most of the charge."
She knew what had happened. What happened again, she corrected herself, grabbing the headset from its hook.
She was no coder. She barely knew how to grow basic programs. But she was a competent medical doctor, at least, and even bottom-half graduates knew their tools. She'd spared the med systems from disconnection; now she brought up an architectural schematic and ran a count of the modules.
There were black boxes in there. One of them, according to the icon, even had a direct user interface. She tapped it.
The Madonna hung in front her, not speaking. Its teeth were bared—a smile of some kind, full of hate and triumph. Some distant, unimportant part of Taka Ouellette's mind wondered at what possible selective advantage an app could accrue by presenting itself in this way. Did intimidation in the real world somehow increase fitness in the virtual one?
But a much bigger part of Taka's mind was occupied with something else entirely, something that had never really sunk in before: this avatar had capped eyes.
They all did. Every Lenie she'd ever encountered: the faces changed from demon to demon, different lips, different cheeks and noses, different ethnicities. But always centered on eyes as white and featureless as snowdrifts.
My name's Taka Ouellette, she had said an eternity ago.
And this strange cipher of a woman—who seemed to take the apocalypse so personally— had replied Le— Laurie.
"Taka."
Taka started, but no—the Lenie wasn't talking to her. This Lenie wasn't.
She slipped off the eyephones. A woman in black with machinery in her chest and eyes like little glaciers looked in at her. She didn't look anything like the creature in the wires. No rage, no hate, no triumph. Somehow, it was this expressionless, flesh-and-blood face that she would have associated with machinery.
"It was one of—it was a Le—a Madonna," Taka said. "Inside the med system. I don't know how long it's been in there."
"We have to go," Laurie said.
"It was hiding in there. Spying, I guess." Taka shook her head. "I didn't even know they could run silent like that, I thought they always just—automatically tore things apart every chance they got…"
"It got a signal out. We've got to go before the lifters get here."