But it didn’t happen. Yet another sim approached, this one in the shape of a slightly-built dark-skinned woman. It wore the same jeans-and-work-shirt outfit as the males, and its hair was tucked under an identical cap. It stepped fastidiously over the body of its colleague.
“Dr. Iverson, I apologize for what happened here. We don’t want to frighten you or hurt you. We want to talk to you.” The sim took a pair of handcuffs from its belt. “I apologize for this, too. Please put your hands behind your back.”
26
ANTOFAGASTA
CASSIE AND THOMAS AND BETH CAME into the kitchen, staring at the syringe and the disposable needles on the table. Nerissa wanted to stare too, but she forced herself to look away. “What do you mean to do with those?”
“Calm down.” Beck’s expression was impassive, his face the same assembly of clenched muscles and coolly evaluative eyes that had always made him seem so naturally authoritative. “I need to perform a test. It’s not hard to understand. May I explain?”
You’d fucking better! She waited for him to go on.
“After the first round of attacks I had an opportunity to perform an autopsy on a simulacrum. A sim isn’t much more than a human body with a core of green matter running through it, concentrated in the skull and the trunk but extending into the extremities. A hypodermic needle in the calf muscle of a sim will aspirate a small amount of that green matter. The same penetration in a human being just kicks back a few drops of blood, less than you’d lose to a sample at the doctor’s office.”
“You are not,” Nerissa said, “sticking a needle into me or any child I’m responsible for.”
“I’m afraid I have to. Ethan and Leo were almost ambushed at the mail drop in Mazatlan, even though that location was known to just a few of us. Before we set out into the Atacama—or before you fly back to the United States—I need to know that no one in this room has communicated our plans to the hypercolony.”
“What, you think I’m a sim? Or Cassie? Or your own son?”
“I don’t think so, and I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I just want certainty. Isn’t that worth a little inconvenience? I got the idea from you, Mrs. Iverson.”
“From me!”
“From what you told me about your interview with the mother of the sim in Pennsylvania. Given that sims gestate in human hosts, the fact that we all have well-established family histories means nothing.”
“We all have long histories with the Correspondence Society, too. Doesn’t that count?”
“Of course it does, but not in the way you’re suggesting. Society researchers have been working with cell colonies ever since Ethan isolated the Antarctic samples. We’ve cultivated them in quantity, and with what seemed like reasonable caution, given that there was no obvious risk of infection. But we were wrong about that. We were almost certainly exposed. Any of us could have been infected, and we might have passed that infection to our families.”
“Ethan and I have no children.”
“No. But your sister did.”
Nerissa saw Cassie’s eyes widen as she worked out the implication. Thomas just looked puzzled.
“You are not doing this.” Nerissa took her niece’s hand, her nephew’s hand. “Cassie, pack what you need and help your brother do the same. We’re leaving.”
“I can’t allow that,” Beck said.
“You think you can stop us?”
“Eugene?” Beck said. “Mind the door.”
Dowd smiled thinly and moved to block the entranceway. He tugged back his shirt to reveal a pistol crammed into the waistband of his jeans, a gesture that looked to Nerissa both laughably theatrical and insanely, creepily threatening. “What, he’s going to shoot us?”
“I surely hope not. There’s absolutely no need for it. But we’re at war, whether you like it or not. Declare your objections, but please cooperate. We’re talking about a momentary discomfort. Do it and have done with it. Then Eugene will drive you and the children to the airport and you can forget about all this.”
“Is this why you sent Ethan away? He would never let you get away with this.”
“If you like, you can watch me perform the test on myself before you submit to it.”
Nerissa thought about Eugene at the door. From what she had seen and heard of Dowd’s behavior toward Beth, he was callous and potentially violent. But she doubted he’d shoot an unarmed woman. Unless he thinks refusing the test means I’m not human. Dowd had killed sims in the desert, according to Beck. And he was anxious to kill more. Was it worth the risk of testing his conviction?
She wished she had even a moment more to think this through. But Beck was already reaching for the box of syringes.
“Aunt Ris?” Cassie said.
Leo stepped forward.
“If you have to do this,” he said to his father, “you can start with me.”
Beck carried the syringe, the disposable needles, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a package of adhesive bandages into a small room at the back of the house. The room, probably meant for storage, had been fitted with a wooden desk and two chairs. A narrow door, locked, faced onto the alley behind the house. There was no window. A fluorescent ceiling bar washed the room with pale, uncertain light.
Beck took the chair behind the desk and gestured his son into the chair opposite him. He would have preferred to start with the Iverson woman, since she was the main stumbling block. But Leo had volunteered, so Leo it would be. He took a pistol from the top left drawer, examined it to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire, then put it on the desk next to the syringe.
Leo looked from the pistol to his father and back again. “Really?”
“Before we get started, let me ask you a question. Have you been sleeping with Cassie Iverson?”
Leo stared and said nothing.
“At this point you’re allowed to tell me it’s none of my business.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I ask because I know your loyalties might be divided right now. You want to protect Cassie. Naturally enough. But she doesn’t need your protection. There’s nothing dangerous about this. I’ll show you. You can see how it works. Maybe you can help when we do the others.”
Beck pulled his chair away from the desk and rolled up the cuff of his pants. Then he dampened a tissue with alcohol and swabbed a patch of pale skin on the calf of his left leg.
“The body of a sim has to appear fully human, and it has to be able to pass as human even after trivial injuries, bumps and scratches and so forth. That’s why the largest deposits of green matter are protected by the skull and torso. At the extremities, the green matter runs thinner. It forms a kind of sac around the bones of the leg, for instance. So the needle—” He extracted a sterile needle from its package, screwed it into the barrel of the syringe, flicked off the protective cap. “The needle has to reach the bone.”
He pushed the needle into his leg. The penetration was painful but not unbearable. “The green matter is protected by a membrane where it interfaces with human muscle and fat, so I need to make sure I’ve actually penetrated the sac, if it exists. It takes a certain amount of pressure.” He pushed until he felt the electric scrape of the needle against his femur. “If you want to make sure I’m not cheating you can do the rest yourself—pull back the plunger and aspirate a little blood—”