Maybe that had been a mistake. A shiver ran over her skin as his eyes raked her blazer, blouse, and skirt. She’d seen eyes like that before. On a crocodile. She felt naked.
“You’ll want this next, I suppose,” she said, fumbling for her OPRR ID card and handing it to him.
“You read my mind,” he said as he took the card. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth but didn’t quite make it to his eyes. “That could mean trouble.” He handed it back. “Welcome to SimGen, Ms. Cadman. I’m Luca Portero, Chief of Security here.”
“The head man? Should I be flattered?”
She’d read up on a number of the key people in SimGen, and Luca Portero was one of them. She’d never seen him, but knew his folder: Army Special Forces, decorated in Afghanistan, honorable discharge with the rank of sergeant after twenty years in; hired by SimGen within weeks of his discharge.
“A visit from OPRR is an occasion.”
“Get used to it,” she said. “If I have my way, we’ll be here every week.”
His smile froze, then faded. “We’ll use the copter to take us to the center of the campus. It’s faster.”
“I’m here today as vanguard for the full inspection team; to do that I must see the facilities firsthand—from ground level.”
“Of course. We’ll pick up a car at center campus and continue from there.”
Once inside the helicopter, conversation was impossible, especially with Romy in the rear and Portero up front next to the pilot. The security chief spent the time talking into his headset, and did not look happy.
So Romy took in the scenery. The trees were showing off their vivid fall colors but she could not let that distract her. She was looking for concealed roads, hidden installations, anything not visible in the aerial photos that might escape OPRR inspection. But she saw nothing.
Romy caught her breath as the copter cleared a hill and the center of the SimGen campus flashed into view. The glass sides of the buildings, none taller than six stories, picked up the hues of the neighboring hillsides and made them their own, integrating the manmade structures into their surroundings. As much as she hated the company, she had to admit it appeared to be a beautiful place to work.
She knew the layout of the campus by heart and immediately identified the taller executive and administration buildings. She wasn’t interested in those; her inspection team would be focusing on the natal center, the sim dormitories and training centers, and the two research buildings—general and basic.
Zero had told her he was particularly interested in the basic research facility. He’d mentioned mysterious shipments in and out of an enclosed loading dock near its northwest corner, and that only a select few were allowed anywhere near the place. But was that all he knew? Was the basic research facility so secret even his high-up contacts didn’t know what went on inside…or wouldn’t tell him? Or did Zero already know and want OPRR to expose it?
What could they be doing in there that was so sensitive? Her mind flashed lurid images of experiments on human subjects, or Doctor Moreau–type vivisections, or hideous failed splices, locked in cages with their claws or tentacles reaching through the bars. She doubted it was anything that exciting. And she’d find out soon enough, wouldn’t she.
Squinting against the glare of the morning sun, she located the building and spotted a medium-size delivery truck backing into a shedlike structure jutting from its flank. She reached for the binoculars in her shoulder bag—the set with a spycam concealed within—but changed her mind. She might find a better use for them later—no sense in letting Portero know now that she’d brought them along.
As she watched, a corrugated steel door rolled down, sealing the truck in the shed.
Romy could understand the need for an enclosed loading dock on a windy winter day, but the weather was positively balmy this morning. The only other purpose would be to conceal what was being loaded or unloaded.
When the copter landed, Portero led her to a blue Jeep Geronimo, one of many wheeling through the campus.
“Do you buy these by the dozen?” she asked.
“Four-wheel drive is not a luxury here, especially in the winter. When it snows in these hills, itsnows .”
Once they were seated within he gave her another penetrating up-and-down look. “Are all the OPRR investigators so beautiful?”
Puh-leese! Romy thought. She wanted to tell him to save his imagined wit and charm but decided it might be best not to acknowledge the compliment.
“I’m considered OPRR’s plain Jane,” she said brusquely. “I’d like to begin with the research facilities.”
Portero started the engine. “They’re not ready for you yet. We’ll start with the natal center.”
“I prefer research first, then natal. It’s a more natural progression.”
“If it was up to me, I’d take you anywhere you want to go,” he said.
Why don’t I believe that?
He went on: “And if you’d arrived at your scheduled time, I’d be wheeling us there right now. But the powers that be say that if you insist on starting with research, you can wait in one of our empty offices until one o’clock and start then. But if you wish to get to work immediately, natal is available.”
Score one for you, Romy thought, hiding her frustration. After all, she was a professional.
“Very well. Natal it is.”
But don’t look so smug, she thought as she watched Portero put the Jeep in gear. The game has just begun.
14
The Natal Center—intellectually she’d been prepared for it, but emotionally…
Anne Twerlinger, associate director of the center, was a reed-thin middle-aged redhead who stank of cigarettes, wore retro pointy-framed glasses, and spoke with what Romy could only describe as a sniff in her tone, as if convinced that at any moment her nostrils might be assailed by a noxious odor.
Portero had stayed behind in Twerlinger’s office, making phone calls, while she started the tour by leading Romy down a narrow corridor. The right wall was glass from waist to ceiling, and looked in on the natal center’s cloning lab.
“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about the sim genome,” Twerlinger said, then proceeded to do just that. “As everyone knows, it consists of twenty-two chromosome pairs—one fewer than humans, two fewer than chimps; much of the junk and non-functioning genetic material has been removed, leaving it one of the cleanest mammalian genomes in existence. Sims don’t mate, mainly because we’ve genetically reduced their sex drives to nil; but even if they did, no offspring would be produced because their ova cannot be fertilized.”
“Why not have just one sex?” Romy said.
“Because we’re all conditioned to view work as gender specific: We’re comfortable with females cleaning houses, males loading trucks. And SimGen is nothing if not sensitive to the marketplace.”
“Why should the females have ovaries at all?”
“We’d rather they didn’t, of course, but we’ve found that a regular hormone cycle is necessary to their accelerated maturation process.” She waved tobacco-stained fingers at the masked and gowned workers on the far side of the glass. “New sims are cloned by nuclear transfer from a bank of identical cells, and implanted in a special class of females we call breeders. Breeder sims are as sterile as their sisters, but exist for one purpose: to incubate new sims.”
They came to the end of the corridor. Twerlinger pushed through into a much larger space: wide, long, its low ceiling studded with recessed fluorescents. The place was huge—the size of a football field at least, and filled with beds. It might have been the world’s largest homeless shelter except that it was filled with sims instead of humans.
Pregnant sims.
“My God,” Romy said. “And you have three floors like this?”
“And two more identical buildings with a fourth under construction. We can’t keep up with the demand. We’ve begun building natal centers abroad now. The one in Poznan is almost complete.”