“Thank you,” she said, being sure to favor him with a grateful smile. She had been cultivating in him a subtle attraction, should she ever need it, manipulating him as surely as Wu had moved his forces on the satbox. Now that attraction was manifesting as a desire to protect her—a typical response for a man in authority, and one that worked to her advantage. Not that she was in any real danger from the “devil army”; already she could sense the Partials below, linking with them as they entered the first floor of the building. They were winning handily, and she relayed her location back to them, warning them away. Her orders had been specific: Do not let the generals be taken yet. Do not let yourself be exposed. The order made no sense, but she followed it anyway, as she always did. As she had been engineered to do.
Her name was Heron, and she was a Partial spy.
PARAGEN BIOSYNTH GROWTH AND TRAINING FACILITY, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
January 5, 2058
Her first sensation was sound.
She didn’t know it as sound, because she didn’t know anything; her life was the barest essential minimum to qualify as life. An unborn child in its mother’s womb feels warmth and motion, hears sounds and voices, sees light and dark through the thick red filter of its mother’s own body. Its brain begins to process these sensations before it even finishes developing, an insatiable learning machine that is already defining the world months before it understands, on any conscious level, that the world exists. An infant human becomes so accustomed to its mother’s voice, for example, that it cries with its mother’s accent mere seconds after birth.
A BioSynth brain can do so much more.
The sounds she perceived were meaningless to her, but they were constant, and that made them comforting. If she had the words, she would call them voices, beeps, and the gentle wash of water in her growth vat. Doctors came and went, vital signs were scanned and reported and recorded. Machines hummed and buzzed and beeped and swished. Her father was a genetic sequencer, and her mother was a tube of carefully calibrated nutrients. They were her world, and she listened to them with a consciousness no human fetus could ever imagine.
Her vision developed next, clusters of photoreceptive cells forming rapidly in the backs of her eyes. She saw the world not in red but in blue, the translucent walls of her growth vat letting in just enough light to give her a sense of darkness. Shapes moved beyond the dark blue walls, coming and going with the voices, but she didn’t know what they were, or who, or why. Her muscles developed soon after, and she found that she had arms and hands, feet and legs, each one seeming to act independent of her own thought and control. Over time she learned to move them—her arms drifting back and forth in the growth fluid, her fingers opening and closing. With her hands she discovered her face; when she accidentally poked herself in the eye, she discovered pain. As her control over her limbs grew stronger, more precise, she poked her eye again, on purpose this time, just to see if she could. It hurt, and she didn’t like to hurt, but it was new. In a vat in a lab where everything was done for her—and to her—it was the first thing she had ever done for herself. Her pain was her statement of identity.
She had been growing for nearly three months. She was thirty inches long, and nearly twenty pounds. The vat’s inner membrane expanded, and she continued to grow.
Her hair was already long for an infant, but soon it grew long enough to float in the tank before her, wafting in the currents of her own subtle movements. Her arms lengthened, her legs thickened, her chest and abdomen filling the space until they pressed against the warm, solid sides of the vat around her. This, too, was new, but it didn’t alarm her; the tight press was comforting, keeping her safe and protected. By six months she was nearly five feet tall, if she’d been standing up, and as her body approached its full size, it began to change in shape as well; what a human girl would call puberty became, for her, simply another stage of in-vitro development. Her limbs grew long and slender; her hips swelled; her chest grew from tiny bumps into round, curving breasts. She would later learn that this was also when a human girl would begin to bleed, but she had been designed sterile, like a living doll. This was neither a comfort nor a bother to her, for she knew nothing else.
At five feet eight inches she stopped growing, and her skeleton solidified into its final shape and size: her skull plates closed and knit together; her adult teeth tore through the virgin flesh of her gums. She had been growing in the vat for nine months, but her body, by any objective measure, was nineteen years old.
She had the mind of a child, and the knowledge base of a helpless infant.
On September 24, in the year 2058, a man in a rubber jumpsuit popped the seal on her growth vat, raised the lid, and slapped open the dump valve in the bottom. The warm water she’d grown up in swirled away with a roar; the membrane that held her, now unsupported by the fluid, tore open, and she tumbled out in a tangle of flailing limbs. The rubber man caught her and laid her on a plastic cart, and a swarm of people in suits and masks clustered around her, strapping her down, probing and prodding and poking. She shivered in the sudden cold; her limbs, full size but never used, were too weak to protest. She vomited up the last of her amniotic fluid and breathed air for the first time, new and painful and horribly insubstantial. The people spoke the same words and language she’d listened to for months, but without the tank of water to alter the sounds, they sounded harsh and terrifying.
“This one’s not a pilot one,” said a voice.
She knew the words, but not their meaning.
“She’s espionage,” said another. “Group Theta.”
“Figures,” said the first voice. “She’s gonna be a looker when she fills out.”
“Looker or not, be careful,” said the second voice. “Thetas don’t have the empathy package.”
“You’re kidding.”
The man shook his head. “A body like that and a brain like a snake. Scary as hell.”
The probes and tests were done. A man grabbed her cart and wheeled her away, and suddenly the entire room seemed to move around her, vast and bright. The other doctors stayed behind, and as she passed they moved to the next vat in the line, popping the seal and dumping the fluid and sprawling another wet, shivering body on a low plastic cart. The girl’s lungs labored, struggling to breathe, and she forced out her air in a long, ragged scream.
The man pushing her whistled idly as he walked.
ZUOQUAN CITY, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA
June 3, 2060
SECURE CONNECTION ESTABLISHED, read the phone. Heron turned on her local scrambler—a small lapel pin that would disrupt any surveillance equipment in the area, making her conversation impossible to overhear—and spoke. “Agent Six reporting.”
“Good evening, Heron,” said the familiar voice. She had never been told who her commanding officer was, and she had never asked, but she could decipher from his voice that he was old, and that he was undeniably human. Partials relied so heavily on the link for communication that without specific training, such as Heron had received, their voices carried an identifiable flatness one might call “inhuman.” That her handler was human marked him as a high-level strategist, for most of the other human soldiers and officers had already cycled out of the Isolation War and gone home. The Partial infantry fought, and the Partial generals led, but the humans still called all the shots. Her handler spoke with easy authority. “What do you have to report?”