The last half of the brochure talked about the Partials directly, though it referred to them as BioSynths, and there were far more “models” than she had expected to find. The military Partials were presented first, more as a success story than an available product: one million successful field tests for their flagship biotechnology. You couldn’t “buy” a soldier model, of course, but the brochure had other, less humanoid versions of the same technology: hyperintelligent Watchdogs, bushy-maned lions rendered docile enough to keep as pets, even something called the MyDragon™, which looked like a spindly, winged lizard the size of a house cat. The last page at the end promoted new kinds of Partials—a security guard based on the soldier template, and others to be looked up online. Is that what I am? A security guard or a love slave or whatever kind of sick garbage these people were selling? She read through the brochure again, looking for any clue she could find about herself, but there was nothing else; she threw it down and picked up the next, but it turned out to be the same interior with an alternate cover. She threw that one down as well and cursed.
I’m not just a product in a catalog, she told herself. Somebody made me for a reason—Nandita was staying with me, watching me, for a reason. Am I a sleeper agent? A listening device? An assassin? The Partial scientist who captured me, Dr. Morgan—when she found out what I was, she nearly exploded, she was so nervous. She’s the most frightening person I’ve ever met, and just thinking about what I might be made her terrified.
I was made for a reason, but is that reason good or evil?
Whatever the answer, she wouldn’t find it in a company brochure. She picked one back up and stowed it in her pack, just in case it ever came in handy, then hefted her rifle and walked to the nearest door. There wasn’t likely to be anything dangerous this high up, but . . . that dragon in the picture had made her nervous. She’d never seen one alive, not the dragon or the lion or anything else, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. This was the enemy’s own lair. They’re artificial species, she told herself, engineered as dependent, docile pets. I’ve never seen one because they’re all dead, hunted to extinction by real animals who know how to survive in the wild. Somehow, the thought depressed her and didn’t do much to calm her fears. She was still likely to find the rooms full of corpses—so many people had died here that the city was practically a tomb. She put a hand on the door, summoned her courage, and pushed.
The air on the other side rushed in to meet her, fresher and more rich than the dead air in the lobby and the stairs. The door opened into a short hallway lined with offices, and Kira could see at the end long banks of windows broken out and open to the air. She peeked through the door of the first office, propped open by a wheeled black chair, and caught her breath in surprise as a trio of yellow-brown swallows took sudden flight from their nest in a bookcase. A warm breeze from the glassless window touched her face, stirring the wisps of hair that weren’t tied back in her ponytail. The room once had floor-to-ceiling windows, and so was now like a recessed cave in the side of a cliff, and she looked out warily on the overgrown ruins of the city below.
The name on the door said DAVID HARMON, and he had kept his workspace sparse: a clear plastic desk, a shelf of books crusted over with bird droppings, and a faded whiteboard on the wall. Kira shouldered her rifle and stepped in, looking for some kind of records she could search through, but there was nothing—not even a computer, though she wouldn’t be able to search it anyway without electricity to power it. She stepped close to the bookshelf, trying to read the titles without touching the excrement, and found row upon row of financial reference guides. David Harmon must have been an accountant. Kira glanced around a final time, hoping for a last-minute revelation, but the room was empty. She stepped back into the hallway and tried the next office.
Ten offices later she had still found nothing that shed any more light on her mysteries: a handful of ledgers, and the occasional filing cabinet, but even those were either empty or filled with profit statements. ParaGen had been obscenely wealthy: She knew that with certainty now, but almost nothing else.
The real information would be on the computers, but the office didn’t seem to have any. Kira frowned, disturbed, because everything she’d heard about the old world said that they relied on computers for everything. Why didn’t the office have any of the flat screen monitors or metallic towers that she was used to seeing nearly everywhere? She sighed and shook her head in frustration, knowing that even if she found the computers, she wouldn’t know what to do with them. She’d used some at the hospital, medicomps and scanners and so on when a treatment or a diagnosis called for one, but those were mostly isolated machines with a singular purpose. Computers in the old world had been part of a vast network capable of communicating instantly, all over the world. Everything had been on computers, from books to music to, apparently, ParaGen’s vast scheming plans. But these offices didn’t have any computers. . . .
But this one has a printer. She stopped, staring at a side table in the last office on the floor—a bigger office than the rest, with the name GUINEVERE CREECH on the door: probably the local vice president or whatever their ranks were called. There was blank paper scattered around the floor, wrinkly and discolored from past rainstorms blowing through the broken window, and a small plastic box on a side table by the desk. She recognized it as a printer—there were dozens in the hospital back home, useless now because they had no ink, and she’d been tasked once with moving them from one storage closet to another. In the old world they’d used them to write out documents directly from a computer, so if there was a printer in this room, there must have been a computer as well, at least at one time. She picked the thing up to examine it more closely: no cord, or even a place to put one, which meant it was wireless. She set it back down and knelt on the floor, looking under the side table; nothing there. Why had someone gone through and removed all the computers—was it to hide their data when the world fell apart? Surely Kira couldn’t be the first person to think of coming here; ParaGen had built the Partials, for goodness’ sake, and they were the world experts in biotech. Even if they didn’t get blamed for the Partial War, the government would have contacted them about curing RM. Assuming, of course, that the government didn’t know that the Partials carried the cure. She pushed the thought away. She wasn’t here to entertain conspiracy theories, she was here to uncover facts. Maybe their computers had been seized?
She looked up, scanning the room from her hands and knees, and from this vantage point saw something she hadn’t before: a shiny black circle in the black metal frame of the desk. She moved her head and it winked at her, losing and catching the light. She frowned, stood, then shook her head at the stupid simplicity of it all.