Forewarning: This story concerns adult fantasy topics, especially
in the area of (big surprise for this site) breast enlargement. It
also hopefully contains characterizations and a plotline
interesting enough to make the reader briefly forget about where
the sex scenes went to. (Answer: later. Honest.) Since all of
the above are considered to be adult topics, especially the idea of
plot, you have to be over the age of discretion in your home country
to read further. Sorry about that.
This is part I, which contains chapters 1 through 6. Make a note of
it. It might be important later.
Comments and correspondence can be sent to sam_tuirel@nac.net, with
the understanding that the tone of the missive will be the tone of
the reply.
Minor note: in the absence of text tricks, I use < > to indicate
thought and { } for typed or written communication. _ _ underlines
words in between. There will be an RTF version uploaded immediately
after WordPad stops crashing my hard drive.
Once upon a time...
In Sequence
1. 32: Dramatis Presentationae
Kyle Nigilo automatically glanced up at the track lighting as
he entered the presentation room. "First time speaker?"
"Yes," Carmody started to reply -- and Nigilo pulled a chair
away from the conference table, dragging it beneath the lights. He
hopped up with an ease that belied his bulk and started to adjust
the lamps -- then paused.
"Carmody, could you stand over here?"
His assistant complied, and Nigilo started swiveling the
cones. "I want you to stare forward, as if you were watching for a
response. Let me know when the light is in your eyes." Carmody
focused on the last GenTree executives straggling in through the
single door, mumbling and rubbing the last of their three-hour,
six-martini lunches from their eyes. "Anything yet?"
"Not quite, sir. Keep going."
Another adjustment, and Carmody stared into a field of glaring
white. "Now?"
"Blind as a government inspector, sir." A few snickers
floated up from the table.
"Okay." Nigilo jumped off the chair and pulled it back to the
table. Carmody sat down on his left. "We've got about three
minutes. Briefing, please."
Carmody looked at the table. There were ten people
altogether, eight of whom looked extremely unhappy: the meeting
had been scheduled for 4:30 Friday, destroying their chances to
sneak out early. "The presenter is Sadira Archer --"
Nigilo coughed. "Say what?"
"Archer, sir. A successful graduate from our
scholarship/bonding program, twenty-two, in her first year with us.
Genetic engineer, R&D, currently assigned to the 21:3-TGA-178
project -- the editor. She's using Section 24-C of her contract to
call the meeting."
"Very good, Carmody." Nigilo arched his back and gave his tie
a quick shift to the left. "But what kind of name is Sadira
Archer?"
The first answer that came to mind was the smart-ass one.
Also the only one. "It's Sadira Archer's name, sir." More
chuckles, which were silenced with a quick glance from the boss.
"I've never met her."
"She spends a lot of time in the labs, sir." <And you never
venture outside your office unless you smell something through the
door -- money or cunt. Preferably both.>
"Understood. And she called us in because...?"
"She didn't say, sir. It's in her contract: she doesn't have
to say. One conference per year, no questions asked."
Nigilo adjusted the tie again -- to the right this time, to
where it had started from -- and folded his hands on the table.
"Very well. And we'll go over the language of that contract later,
correct? There's no point in being bothered with these meetings
unless we know why we're wasting our time."
Carmody winced. "Yes, sir."
The door swung inward, and Nigilo saw Sadira Archer for the
first time. The initial part to come through was the rear -- a
rather nice one from what he could see of it: she was wearing the
long gray (slightly stained) lab coat GenTree Research assigned to
employees, and it tended to obscure nearly all of the feminine
figure. (He'd been trying to get it changed for months.) This was
followed by long black hair, falling to the middle of the back in a
chaotic sprawl, as if _down_ was simply the most convenient
direction to go. The thick folders piled high in cradled arms
followed the suggestion and cascaded to the floor. She dropped to
her knees, scrambling to recover the folders. Carmody twitched
slightly, but kept his seat. No one helped.
"Sorry," she muttered in a curiously accentless voice.
"Sorry, be with you in a minute..."
The non-helping continued apace.
She finally got the files back into her arms and stumbled
around the perimeter of the table, letting each slide from the pile
onto the table in rough proximity to the seated executives. Nigilo
watched her dispassionately. She looked much younger than twenty-
two, the dark hair framing a slim, line-free face. Narrow nose,
nice lips, skin shaded into a perpetual dark tan from what had to
be extremely mixed heritage, medium height, flat-chested, gray-
eyed, and sweating visibly.
Good. She was nervous.
She moved to the presentation area, looked out towards the
audience, and blinked several times in discomfort. Nigilo smiled.
"Whenever you're ready, Ms. Archer."
Sadira blinked. Voice by Mr. Freeze, lighting by KGB. <"We
will have the secret of the genome, Ms. Archer..."> "One moment,
please --" Wonderful. That sounded professional. She fumbled in
the huge coat pockets, driving down past wadded notes, crumpled
bills, and numerous Life Savers -- they had to be here somewhere --
"Ms. Archer?" The fifty-below voice again. "We're waiting."
<There!> She pulled the sunglasses out and gave the lenses a
few futile sleeve wipes before slipping them on. She clearly saw
three faces fall.
It only took a moment more to locate the program disk in an
upper pocket: she slid the smooth square into the table slot and
turned to face the lit screen on the wall. The room darkened --
except for her own personal lightshow. "You're looking a computer
simulation of the CTGX27 sequence on what is conventionally
referred to as the X chromosome." Several people began flipping
through the folders, feigning interest: one seemed to actually be
reading. She fumbled with her chest pocket protector and pulled out
a thin cylinder, pushing the small stub upward. "The sequence
begins here --"
It wasn't a laser pointer. It was a Bic pen, the cap of which
was now on the floor. The coughing fit behind her was in stereo.
Sadira took a deep breath and searched again, this time
successfully. "-- begins here and terminates here. It appears on
every single copy of the X chromosome, male and female. Dis --"
<Damn!> "This sequence directly below it --" a few taps on the
embedded keyboard "-- also appears on all variations, but needs a
combination of factors to become active."
"Ms. Archer," the frost man -- the only one who had spoken --
broke in, "Your point."
<I was just getting started!> She jabbed the pointer at the
screen. "These sequences control breast development and growth,
respectively. Without the first, the breast tissue cannot form
properly. The second tells formation to commence. There has been
evidence of the occasional accidental activation in males, causing
gynecomastia, which is surgically corrected." A small shudder ran
across her shoulders. She hoped no one had noticed. "These areas
were identified three years ago by a group of drunken fraternity
students who decided to make a lasting contribution to science and
managed to make the identification before they sobered up." The
first honest laugh of the day came up from the table, and Sadira
allowed herself a smile.
"They also managed to identify this sequence here." The
screen shifted down to another innocuous section of the helix.
"This recessive, in combination with other factors, causes varying
degrees of virginal hypertrophy -- macromastia. Their theory on
the effects of alcohol consumption on penis size are still
undergoing testing -- also on college campuses --" More laughter,
and her spine finally unlocked. "However, these three sites have
been conclusively determined to control those functions.
Generally, the sites activate at puberty and shut down at
maturity." Time for the point. "I propose to activate them
deliberately."
Silence for a moment, and then a low murmur began to work
clockwise around the table. She spoke above it. "This would
result in _natural_ breast enlargement, with none of the risks
associated with either <brace, brace> surgery or implants of any
time. No silicone or saline leakage, no threat of rupture, and no
accidents with anesthesia -- safe and natural."
An eager voice spoke up from near the door. "You have a
theory on how to activate the gene?"
Sadira nodded. "I've been studying gene typing and blood
workups from girls entering puberty. I believe that I've
identified the factors which activate the development and growth
sequences, and can genetically engineer a virus which would trigger
them in an adult female." <Time for the bad news.> "The only real
disadvantage over the conventional method at the moment is time:
growth would occur at the normal pubescent rate -- at most, a few
inches or so a year. The average surgical enlargement of one cup
size might take six months. I'm confident that a way can be found
to speed this up."
"What about using the macromastia gene to speed the growth?"
someone else asked.
Sadira nodded: it was a fair question. "The gene is a
recessive, and occurs in a very small percentage of the population.
Normally, all it does is ensure that the breasts will reach a
larger than average size during puberty. In some cases, however,
it _does_ cause vastly accelerated growth. It might be possible to
induce a _controlled_ hypertrophy in those women with the sequence
-- but the vast majority of them wouldn't want the procedure. I'm
looking for a way to accelerate development in the majority
population, so the current model doesn't consider that sequence
interacting."
She triggered the computer again: the genome was replaced with
a computer representation of a female torso in profile, with
numbers superimposed to indicate the underbust/overbust
measurements. The numbers were identical -- and then the breasts
started to slowly swell. "When the breasts reach the desired size,
the patient is given another virus that triggers a "stop" command -
- and the procedure is over. Again, completely safe." The on-
screen mammaries stabilized at 32/35 and rotated to face the table.
She gave them a moment to study the simulated results, then turned
the screen off. "Questions?"
The murmur intensified, excited -- and then the frost
descended. "Exactly when did you identify these factors?"
She looked closely at him. A large man, blond hair, perfect
teeth, expensive suit, and an attitude that said "My benefits
package is worth more than your entire life."
"On my own time --" it couldn't hurt "-- sir, after working
hours. My contract says I'm allowed to use the lab for projects
that might prove beneficial to the company at a future date -- on
my own time." <Wonderful. On the defensive already. Impressing
everybody...>
"Of course, Ms. Archer. But why?"
She stared at him. "I just explained that, sir. Safe
enlargement without need for --"
"Surgery, yes. A noble idea. But how would you test it?" He
steepled his fingers and surveyed her, scanning from waist to face
and back again. "Only humans have that particular genome, and only
human females are suitable for testing. You are, in your regular
hours, working on a cure for a fatal disease. We can test your
results there with relative freedom -- there's no shortage of
volunteers who wish to be cured of leukemia. But small breasts,
while perhaps damaging to self esteem, are not fatal." He was
looking through the lenses into her eyes. "We would never be
permitted to test it on humans, no matter how many volunteers came
forward, and we can't test it on animals. Even if you came up with
something, how would we know if it worked?"
"I came to ask for more backing," Sadira said, a hint of
desperation creeping into her voice. A very strong hint, waving
heavy signs in the cold air. "I've gone as far as I can with the
equipment I have access to in my lab. I need clearance for use of
the central computers: if I can run simulations on them, I can
determine the exact effects --"
He raised a hand, and her voice cut out. "But that's no
substitute for actual experience, is it? All the computer
simulation in the world can only suggest how your virus might react
with an actual subject -- and _again_, for something as trivial as
cosmetics, we'll never be allowed to find out for ourselves. I'm
sorry, Ms. Archer, but we're going to have to turn you down."
He didn't sound sorry.
He _did_ sound right.
She removed the disk and tried to keep her eyes on the nodding
people at the table. They really wanted to look at her feet, which
were nervously scraping the floor. She felt like a little girl
caught at mischief, an exceptionally stupid one. She hadn't
considered the testing, hadn't thought of it at all.
"It was a nice dream, Ms. Archer, and a profitable one. I'm
aware that there are millions of dollars in the breast enhancement
industry -- you make that very clear on your Page 12 chart. But
it's also an unworkable dream. The only thing we can do with your
research is find a "stop" for virginal hypertrophy -- and the
testing pool is limited and reluctant to proceed when surgery is an
proven alternative."
This time the shudder ran across her body. <No, it's not.
Sometimes they grow back...>
"Don't let this discourage you from further work, Ms. Archer,"
he said, and there was more than a hint of insincerity in his
voice. "You just have to think things through." He stood up, and
the rest of the room went up with him, as if attached by strings.
They filed out quietly, most of them leaving the briefing folders on
the table. Sadira stood in place, waiting for the door to swing
closed and the sound of footsteps to vanish. She glanced at the
ceiling: the soundproofing looked good.
"Stupid," she muttered, then, "Stupid, stupid, STUPID!"
The soundproofing was _very_ good. She didn't even get an
echo.
Nigilo motioned Carmody over with one hand as they started
back towards the executive wing, flipping through his folder with
the other. "What's your final impression of our little impulsive?"
Carmody considered carefully. "Shortsighted, but intelligent
despite that."
"Do you think her research is valid?"
"I don't know enough about the field to say, sir."
"I know you don't," Nigilo said smugly. He also had no
technical expertise with genetic engineering, but he didn't have to.
"Find out. I want a thorough background check on Ms. Archer by
Monday, cube the intensity of the scholarship hunt. I want to know
her social mores, her religious beliefs, and her favorite underwear
color. I want this research shown to our best people and I want
their opinion. And --" he paused as they reached a T-branch "-- I
want to go home. Stay here and get things rolling. Keep me
updated."
"Understood, sir."
"Good." He started to turn left, then, still looking down the
hall, said, "She seemed rather distressed at not being able to
continue her work."
"I'm not certain whether it was at your refusal or her own
lack of foresight," Carmody carefully replied.
"I'm hoping for an emphasis on the former," Nigilo answered.
"Find out." He headed down the left branch.
Carmody took a right.
Jason intercepted her on the way back. It wasn't intentional.
She ran him down in the hallway.
They sorted out arms and legs among a hail of confused
apologies, and wound up helping each other up, which nearly sent
them to the floor again.
"I wasn't looking where I was going," she explained
unnecessarily. "It was my fault."
"Okay, your fault," Jason agreed, smiling as he brushed the
shaggy brown hair out of his eyes. He looked as if he'd been
designed by a sculptor with too much material and a stepladder: he
was classically proportioned in body and passably handsome, but all
the mass was spread over two meters of height: it always gave her
the impression that she was looking at him through a funhouse
mirror. "Not like you could see where you were going. My ribs
will accept the apology later." He got up. "We both agree this
was an accident, then?"
"Yes," Sadira agreed, getting to her feet.
"You're not going to get revenge by reprogramming my speakers
to play Chopin at 78 rpm again?"
She smiled. "No. I never _repeat_ a prank."
Jason nodded nervously and leaned back against the wall just
in time to avoid an exiting employee: the workday had finally
reached an end. "The presentation went badly."
"Very." Sadira finally removed the sunglasses.
"Then will you tell me what it was about now? Since there's
no bonus money, there can at least be a satisfaction of curiosity."
Sadira sighed and told him. Exhaustively.
Jason nodded. "They were right, Sadira. No testing."
"I know that." She looked at her feet and scraped one across
the floor. "Now. I was so eager to get this done -- I just didn't
think of the consequences. Three weeks of preliminary work and not
one brain cell bothered to consider the next stage."
"And they reached up and bit you."
"Clamped solid on my ankle." She shook her head. "I've had
enough with feeling stupid for one day. It's the weekend: I'm
going back to my lab to grab material and then I'll spend six hours
feeling like a melting ice cube in a bubble bath." She started
past him.
"Sadira?" She stopped and turned. "Did you really solve it?"
"Most of it."
"How long did you say you worked on the project?"
"Three weeks. Most of that was encoding."
Jason stared at her, then flopped against the wall. "Three
weeks," he said tonelessly. "Imagine if it were something
important. People died of cancer because you couldn't get your
priorities straight."
Sadira spotted the grin. "Well, I just don't care about the
cancer patients," she replied in the same register. "They choose,
they smoke, they die. This was about something more important than
saving suicides. Besides, curing cancer is thousands of sequences.
This was two. Much simpler."
"Regardless." They both smiled, and she started moving again.
"Why breast enlargement?" She stopped again, beginning to feel
like a car with a bad clutch.
"Why...?" She shrugged. "Can I use your computer?" Jason
nodded in faint confusion and led the way into his lab. She
stepped up to his disgustingly clean workstation. "I'm just going
to use the LAN to tap into my computer. Hang on..." A few
practiced taps brought up the right file. "There. My
inspiration."
Jason leaned in to examine the picture. Sadira knew it by
heart. The family had gathered in front of the Christmas tree,
with her at the far left of the photo, looking uncomfortable
against the icy window. At the far right, as if placed there for
balance, was a young woman with a strong resemblance to Sadira --
except for one area.
"Who?" Jason managed to get out after a second.
"Apology accepted. She affects a lot of people that way."
"Your sister?"
Sadira nodded slightly and continued, deadpan all the way.
"Fraternal twin: I'm older by three minutes. She developed and I
didn't. I got boyfriends and she stole them. I worked thirty
hours a week as a waitress for spending money during college. She
went straight from high school to seven hundred a day at the strip
clubs. She's working as a feature dancer now. The photo is from
when we were seventeen. She got bigger."
"Out of curiosity only," Jason asked, "how big?"
"I stopped glancing at her bras after she passed "Q". We
haven't even spoken in years. I'm rarely home and -- she never
is."
Jason examined the photo more closely. The family resemblance
was strong: the younger sibling had lighter skin and fairer hair,
but they shared the same smoky grey eyes and basic features: a
good makeup artist could turn them into identical twins with an
hour's work. But this Archer had her breasts pointed forward like
a weapon about to be fired, a faint smirk on her face accompanying
the most subtle side glance towards her sister. He had to
concentrate to see that: it was hard to look away from the bust.
"So you developed this horrible hatred of large-breasted women and
decided to create more of them?"
"Not exactly." She adjusted the brightness of the screen. "I
used to feel that way -- the hatred -- but I roomed with
a girl in college who taught me personality isn't determined by
build. Jasmine is incredibly competitive, and she used every
weapon she had. I had grades, she had breasts." She looked up at
Jason. "Our genetic structure is so close -- but she did and I
didn't. I got curious."
"And you decided to find out why," Jason concluded.
"Ya -- yes. Stupid, right?"
Jason leaned against a high-backed chair. "I have three
brothers, remember? We -- _compared_ everything. No, not stupid.
At least you found an answer?"
"I examined my own chromosomes, and I have the macromastia
sequence -- no great surprise: most of the females in my family
wear a D-cup or larger. If you think Jasmine is built, you should
see my cousin Kay." Sadira leaned forward and looked at Jason's
rapidly glazing eyes. "Then again, maybe you shouldn't." Jason
hurriedly wrenched his gaze away from the screen. "I don't have
hormone logs for my body from puberty, but I figure I was one
trigger short." Sadira shrugged. "Test subjects. If I thought it
was safe, _I'd_ be the first test subject."
Jason's thick eyebrows went up, and he turned back to the
monitor. "That big?"
A half-playful "No!" and another shrug answered him. "I don't
believe I'm telling you this..." She couldn't quite muster the
embarrassment: too far into honesty for that. "Look, when we were
growing up, she was a Polaroid Instamatic -- blink and she'd
develop. With me, it was 'something close to nothing, no different
from the day before.' I'd just like to have -- something."
"There's always implants."
"No," Sadira said firmly. "There isn't."
"Then there's always a bubble bath. Go home, Sadira. Start
again Monday with a fresh attitude and wrinkled toes."
She smiled and headed for the door. "Good advice. Why does
no one else give me good advice?"
"You listen to no one else?" he suggested as she left, closing
the door behind her.
"Is the bath big enough for two?" he asked the door, then
turned and looked at Sadira's image on the monitor screen.
"Later, maybe," he almost convinced himself, and shut the
system down.
Someone had put a new sign on her door. This one read,
"Warning! Chaos theory testing in progress!" Sadira left it there
and placed her palm on the reader. The machine decided that she
was still herself and unlocked the door.
The lab wasn't really that bad. She knew approximately where
everything was and on a good day, could find most of it: that pile
was mutation data and the one next to the soda cans was genome
reaction during chemotherapy and the one half-hidden beneath the
layered Hershey's wrappers contained some of the breast research...
Sadira picked her way across the room to the computer and
turned it on, plucking a zip disk out of the morass surrounding the
keyboard. She placed it in the proper slot and set the computer to
download the enhancement material to it -- no sense having it
clutter up memory now, and she couldn't bear to erase it completely
-- then walked over to the sample case.
A puff of misty air washed into her face as the environments
met, and she stared into a refrigerator full of virus tins. The
vast majority of them were proto-viruses with virtually no genetic
code of their own, ready for grafting and mutation. On their own,
they couldn't even cause the sniffles, but they could get into the
body and penetrate cell walls: handy for carriers, test runs, and
working on her grafting skills.
The minority consisted of one specimen, all the way at the
back. She reached in past the harmless cases and pulled it out
carefully, cradling the small transparent tin in her palm.
"Hello," she said softly to the case. The BE-1 virus sat
placently against the red film of the tin bottom. The new
containers were based on the old strep throat cultures: viruses
placed on the surface, even airborne ones, bonded to it and were
given some limited nutrients. She could open the lid and safely
regard the contents with a microscope without worrying about
infection unless she came in contact with the surface -- and not
even then for this one: the virus she had bonded her factors to
was a blood agent.
It had been an experiment, something to do on an afternoon
when the data she'd requested from Bethesda was taking a year to
download, and she'd had access to the practice equipment. She'd
just wanted to see if the activation codes would properly bond, and
three hours later, the tin was filled with a happily replicating
organism. She hadn't put it in the briefing report because doing
anything more than study work with viruses without a pile of
paperwork was against company rules.
Sadira had been curious. More than that, she'd been bored,
and the two together formed a deadly combination.
BE-1 was proof that the triggers she had isolated could be
grafted -- but not that they would work. And any virus that was no
longer needed had to be destroyed.
"So," she asked the tin, "What do I do with you? Fire, flood,
or famine?" Burning would destroy the culture, as would acid, or
just leaving them in the tin until they ran out of nutrients in
three years...
The computer beeped at her: download complete. Put together
with the files and handwritten notes strewn about her apartment,
she had it all. She carried the tin over to the desk and set it
down while she deleted the information from the central directory,
then removed the zip disk --
-- tried to remove the zip disk. It didn't want to come out:
the ejection mechanism wasn't working properly. A small fraction
of the disk was visible: the rest was stuck. She gripped the nub
between short fingernails and pulled _hard_. The disk was abruptly
released, and her hand flew back, pulling against a loose folder
and starting an avalanche that knocked the tin off the desk.
She quickly looked down: the tin was rolling across the
floor, going behind her. Sadira spun, trying to get a visual bead
on it, and somehow managed to lock her feet into each other.
The crash was muffled by the papers strewn across the floor.
The fingers of her left hand tapped against a bit of exposed
tile with annoyance. The right was against something cold.
Sadira pushed herself up to a sitting position, reached out
with mostly-faked dignity, and recovered the virus tin, which had
been stopped by her hand.
She stopped.
She looked closely at the tin.
The lid was missing.
She looked around and found it lying against the door.
Her right hand stung. She set the tin down and brought the
hand up for closer examination.
The paper cut, she decided, had come from the scrape with the
folder.
Slowly, she gathered the lid and tin together, then set them
both in the small flash-disposal oven. The cycle was automatic:
one button to press, and she was freed of the need to think about
anything but putting a Band-Aid over the cut, taking the disk,
and leaving.
She didn't think about much of anything all the way home.
Every often so often, she would almost have a thought. It
would start to press in from the back, something like <I have just
been infe-->, and then it would be muffled by comforting layers of
thick wool as the shock settled in again. The one thought which
did get to finish was <I'm not contagious>, which should be the
absolute truth: the virus was designed to trigger and die, nothing
else unless she had completely flubbed the graft, which she
couldn't have -- and the fog closed again.
Somehow, she got home and mechanically prepared a huge dinner
-- Sadira had a nasty habit of forgetting to eat anything beyond a
few sugar supplements at work and trying to make it all up later.
She microwaved, broiled, and consumed the whole thing within an
hour, not really paying attention to what she was eating, or how
much it was taking to make her appetite recede.
She did remember the bubble bath, but it failed to soothe, and
she simply went to bed. An hour later, she settled into deep,
dreamless sleep as the last of the shock wore off.
Her first truly clear thought, and the last of the night, was
<I'll check my blood sample -->
2. 34: Rude awakenings
<-- first thing in the morning.>
Her mind stretched and reached, trying to find her body.
Sadira drifted far during sleep, and was usually reluctant to come
back. For a second, she felt as if she was floating as pure
_presence_, without a body, with no want for one, and then she
began to slowly settle back in, feeling the fingers of her right
hand gently flex. She tried a toe wriggle: check. "You sleep
like you were dead," Jasmine had told her years ago, and since then
she had checked things in sequence as she came back, making sure
everything was still alive.
Knees: no problems. Jaw -- a deep yawn -- working fine.
Upper joint test meant it was time for the morning stretch, so she
gathered together every working part she had and tried to move the
entire unit up --
-- something gently shifted on top of her rib cage.
The memories of the previous day, as usual, came in last.
Sadira sat up in the bed as if driven by pistons, but the
sheets she had cocooned around her body stayed with her as if she
had been cast in a sitcom, refusing to fall below her shoulders.
Frustration overrode fear, and she struggled out of the confining
cloth, finally shifting the wrapper to her waist. She steeled
herself and looked down.
Her vision was very slightly impeded.
She swung her legs off the bed in a single smooth motion and
pushed away from the mattress, ready to run for the bathroom --
-- her feet had still been in the cocoon.
The floor was carpeted and cluttered, but there was less to
fall on than in the lab. Her ribs hurt -- something on her ribs
hurt --
-- and somehow she was on her feet and moving for the bathroom.
Sadira didn't wear underwear to bed: just a one-piece, full-
length pullover nightgown. As soon as she reached the bathroom,
she reached to her waist, bunched the material, and pulled it up
and over.
A shocked and pensive face stared wildly at her from the
reflective surface for a moment before shifting its gaze down.
The swelling started a short distance below her collarbone,
going out and down in a smooth curve before dipping back inwards to
rejoin her torso. Smooth, rounded protrubances with a darker
surface in the center, and an even darker, slightly raised surface
in the center of _that_...
"Breasts," Sadira said slowly, then reached over to the small
makeup tray and took an eyebrow pencil. She lifted the lower
surface of the small mound <breasts. _My_...> and placed the
pencil below it, then let go of both.
The pencil stayed in place.
Slowly, she reached out and thumbed the nipple. It seemed the
same as ever. The new surrounding surface was warm -- warmer than
the rest of her body. She pressed down with one finger on each
breast and felt tissue clump underneath. She remembered the unique
feel very well, but she had never had it on her own body. Just
with --
She squelched the thought and cupped them. Her hands smoothly
covered the surfaces. Sadira took her hands away and they were
still there.
"I'm _not_ dreaming," she said slowly, "and I _am_ awake.
Therefore, this _is_ real, and that means --" the positive built
first, overwhelming the growing subconscious realizations and
blasting out in a shout of joy "-- the virus _works_!"
She ran out of the bathroom, the wild energy carrying her back
onto the bed for no particular reason -- no, because she was
feeling giddy, she was feeling like she should have felt when she
was twelve and finally getting a chance to catch up to Jasmine and
then she would have jumped up and down on the bed for sheer
delight, because she was twelve and that was what she was
_supposed_ to do.
A decade had passed, but it still wasn't too late. She
bounced and jumped and failed to do a backflip, which made her
bounce some more, hair whipping around her body like a mad Maypole,
bounding with full awareness of the corresponding movements and
vibrations of her breasts, _her_ breasts, until she fell back on
the mattress, laughing, exhausted, exhilarant.
"It works," she laughed, eyes closed and hands moving back up
for another feel. "The activation virus _works_!"
<But it's not supposed to work this fast.>
The laughter stopped.
<No,> she argued back. <The virus activates within seconds of
entering the bloodstream, dies, and the message is cell-to-cell
afterwards. That was the design.>
<But the _growth_ isn't supposed to be this quick,> came the
quiet reply. Sadira sat up and curled her legs up to her chest,
elbows on knees, chin in hands. <Normal growth rate: I never
modified that. It would have taken months to reach this size. I
grew --> She opened her eyes and looked down, then got up and went
looking for a measuring tape.
Three minutes later, she remembered she didn't own one: she
didn't sew, didn't do carpentry, and had just generally never
bothered. It just seemed like something she _should_ have had in
the house. She quit her search of the kitchen junk drawer and
looked up to see the remains of microwave dinner boxes piled high
on the counter, surrounded by a wall of chocolate pudding cups and
boil-in-bag box instructions, Sadira being one of those people who
_always_ had to read the label no matter how many times she made
the same dish.
"How much did I eat last night?" she wondered. A tangle of
emotions and thoughts rolled through, carrying an unwanted
passenger. She was hungry. Very hungry, and much too hungry
considering the amount of food she had eaten the previous night.
She felt her abdomen. Flat, empty.
<Think. Food equals calories, cells need energy to divide, so
I was eating to power the growth. If I eat less, I can slow this
down.> The hunger pangs intensified slightly: she winced and
glanced at the clock. <Ate, slept about ten hours, didn't feel
anything -- but I wouldn't notice a bomb when I'm out. Growth is
not proceeding normally, but growth _is_ proceeding. What makes me
different from the norm?>
All the factors of the equation settled into place, and her
brain dashed to the solution.
The fog began to close in --
-- a burst of will forced it back. She wasn't going to blank
out, not now. She was going to solve this problem. Somehow.
She was going to need help.
Sadira turned on her computer and logged into the company
system. Sure enough, it had an employee directory with addresses.
She got dressed, gathered up all the data she could find in
five minutes, and headed for the car.
Sadira was becoming increasingly hungry as she drove, and it
was taking more effort to ignore. She turned up the radio to full
volume and stared fixedly at the road. When the blast of Smashing
Pumpkins proved worthless, she pulled over to a hardware store and
managed to buy three minutes distraction along with a measuring
tape.
The hunger got worse as she resumed driving. It was becoming
hard to focus on the road: the pangs had increased to a nearly
physical pain, and the only way to stop it was to eat, and if she
ate, then --
The road tilted and jerked to the left, and she jerked the
steering wheel, trying to get the little Rabbit back on level
ground. Fortunately, there were few other cars on Helena's roads on
the chilly Saturday morning: she didn't hit another vehicle in her
two-lane crossover before jumping up onto the curb.
The brakes brought the car to a stop just before the street
sign would have. Sadira leaned across the steering wheel,
breathing heavily until the dizzy spell passed.
<Low blood sugar.> She lifted her head. Her body didn't seem
to come with it. <Okay. Eat something.> She backed onto the
shoulder and drove very slowly to the first available fast-food
outlet.
One McMuffin didn't reduce her appetite. A large McMeal
didn't blunt the edge. It took three more plus two large glasses
of orange juice before she felt well enough to drive.
Jason looked through the peephole and saw a distorted nose
warping back towards distant, dwindling features. Skin tone was
his only real clue. "Sadira?" he ventured.
"Yah." Jason moved to open the door: she heard the chains
rattling on the other side. "Jason, wait."
He paused. "Something wrong?"
"Kind of. Just -- just let me talk when you open the door."
Sadira unzipped her jacket, letting it fall open at the front.
He shrugged and pulled back the last lock, then swung the door
in and looked down.
He kept looking until Sadira said "Finished?"
"You didn't."
"Not intentionally. That stupid I'm not."
"But you designed the virus."
"That stupid I am." She sighed. "Can I come in?"
He stood aside and let her enter.
Nigilo answered the phone on the first ring.
"Carmody, sir. I have the information you requested on Ms.
Archer."
"Quick work."
"There wasn't all that much to learn: our prior files had
most of it. Shall I fax it to you now?"
"One minute: I'm low on paper." Nigilo opened the front
panel. "Give me some of the basics in the meantime."
He could almost hear Carmody's slight nod. "She's from
Brooklyn -- you may have heard her "slip" a few times in the
presentation. IQ 169, a dedicated student who works best on things
she cares about most. She was assigned to the leukemia project
because she had the disease when she was eleven: treatment was
successful thanks to chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant from
her only sister. She's been in remission since and can be
considered cured at this point."
"Twin sister?" Nigilo inquired. He knew the odds were against
a match even within the immediate family: it had been one of his
central points when he'd argued for government funding.
"Fraternal, but they're very close -- genetically. The social
relationship isn't nearly as strong."
"Any other scientists in the family?"
"The mother is a nurse -- physical therapy. Her father works
as an auto mechanic."
"The sister?"
"Exotic dancer."
Nigilo pushed the paper into the feeder. "All right. What
about personality?"
He heard paper shuffling. "Quiet type, doesn't date much, but
she has a love of practical jokes. She's something of a legend in
the Desmond science halls for her rewiring of the temperature
controls in the teacher's lounge."
Nigilo snapped the panel closed. "Paper's in. Go ahead, but
keep talking."
His fax beeped, and data began to flow as Carmody said "Other
than that regrettable character flaw, she has a clean reputation
with her professors: high recommendations from all. No broken
laws, not even a speeding ticket. Methodist. Basic white panties.
There's a rumor that she "experimented" with a roommate, but that's
fairly normal these days. She's very impulsive, tends to leap
first, but builds a parachute before she hits the ground."
"Indeed." The fax finished printing, and he began reading.
"You'll be at the office today?"
"I will now, sir." There was no sarcasm or regret detectable
in the thin voice.
"I'll join you." He hung up and continued to read.
Sadira finished her hasty summary of events and leaned forward
in the chair. Jason was still sitting quietly, one finger laid
across his upper lip, pondering.
"The thing is," she said, "I only got ta do haf the work
before the presentation." She paused and got her accent back under
control. "There's lots of research on the hormones and chemical
that are generated when puberty starts, but very little on what
happens to make the process _stop_. I found the factors that start
the growth, but not the ones that end it."
"So exactly what is happening to you?" Jason carefully asked.
Sadira's eyes focused on a place beyond his sight. "I have
the macromastia sequence. I also had leukemia before I went
through puberty: radiation, chemo, and bone marrow treatments."
Her voice became very soft. "The repeated trauma could have
damaged something or neutralized a hormone: I went through
puberty, but I never developed."
"But that just means that if the gene had activated, you would
have grown to a larger than normal size over several years."
"Yes. But -- there's a variation that sometimes hits women at
puberty or during pregnancy, where the breasts grow considerably in
just a few months. There's reports of growth as fast as an inch a
day when the spurt was at its strongest -- and the body's
priorities shifted to funnel energy for the growth."
Jason leaned in: she was nearly whispering now. "So with me,
with the genes active, with my having the macromastia sequence, I'm
getting an analog effect: extremely fast growth necessitating
large amounts of energy, to the point where I have to pig out just
to stay even. High acceleration of metabolism." She peeled the
Band-Aid off her hand and briefly glanced at the smooth skin.
"Thought so. This was a paper cut yesterday. One small side effect
for womankind."
"But the speed is so high --"
"And just barely possible, theoretically. As long as I power
it, and if I don't, it'll eat me alive." She paused. "I needed
more research, I needed to find out exactly what factors ordered
the halt of breast growth. I needed the central computers for the
processing power and funding to gather samples. I didn't put it in
my report because I wanted to impress them with what I'd done and
talk them into the rest."
"But it should end naturally," Jason pointed out. "When you
reach the size they should have reached --"
She cut him off, her voice louder and higher, the words coming
faster. "What good is dat? Why activate a gene if it can shut
down any time it wants? Dis stays on 'til somethin' tells it ta
turn off! More control!" Some part of her knew she was shouting;
the same part didn't know how to stop. "An' I measured myself in
da fast food joint: two inches in twelve hours, dats four inches a
day, and I'm still growin': I can feel it. An' it's not gonna
stop, an' the weight is gonna start gettin' worse, an' what happens
wen I get too big ta stand up? What about wen I can't even move
from the weight, and dere's only so much weight the heart can
support, only so many miles of blood vessels it can pump through
before the pressure drops too low, dat's one of the problems fat
people have, not enough oxygen from the lungs for der mass, and
what if I get so dam' big that I just go an' DIE...!"
Jason slapped her.
Sadira's eyes widened and she gasped, a small choking sound,
as if the words had been pushed back down her throat, then pulled
back her right arm and slugged Jason in the face. He fell back
into his chair, hands flying up to his head.
Sadira finally blinked. "Jason, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to
do that!"
"I meant to," he said through his fingers, massaging his jaw.
"I didn't expect to pay for it." He brought his hands partway
down, then wiped a trickle of blood away from his lips. "No good
deed goes unpunished. You feel better?"
"Calmer," she semi-lied. She'd been knocked down to a more
outwardly controlled level of panic. "I don't believe I just lost
it like that."
"I don't believe you held it together that long," he replied
as he stood up. "I'm going to get a drink. Do you need anything?"
"Some fruit, please. I'm hungry..." She trailed off.
"All right," Jason said reassuringly. He rubbed his jaw
again. "Was gonna go to the dentist next week, anyway... I assume
you want me to help you work up a cure?"
Sadira nodded. "If one geneticist can do it in three weeks...
"Then two take a month, and four never get anything done." He
stepped behind the counter that divided living room from kitchen
and started peeling an orange. "But where? Right now, we can
still disguise you with heavy clothing, and we can strap you down
for a day or two after that, but then it's going to be pretty
obvious. And if anyone spots you, then we're in trouble."
"Before the presentation, I might have been able to plead
spontaneous macromastia. Pregnancy or something," Sadira agreed.
"Afterwards -- well, they'll figure it out fast enough."
"Coincidence won't cut it. And, being bureaucrats, they'll
panic and isolate you to prevent a crisis that isn't coming. I was
looking through the folder: I don't think there's any way to
spread it normally. Even with a mistake, the only chance would be
blood to blood. But by the time they believe that -- if they do --
you've lost time, and you can't work with a partner in isolation."
"Are you sure about that?" Jason looked at Sadira's shocked
face. "I wanted you as a personal partner, but I thought GenTree
would let us head something up. If someone caught a disease, they
wouldn't let them try and find a cure?"
"Sadira, I've been working for our benefactors a year longer
than you. If it was a disease, they might let you die because if
you worked out a cure and lived, you might blab to the media and
ruin their precious reputations. This -- I don't know how they'd
react, but the odds are against good." She still looked
unconvinced. "Sadira, they bonded me, same as you: they pay for
school and I work for them one year for every year I was in school.
I would have left after a week without that, but I signed on the
line, and they have copies. Genetic engineering is still seen by
the public as risky, and our bosses are very paranoid, very edgy,
and very media-conscious."
Her eyes narrowed. "But when someone is suffering --"
<You poor naive kid.> Jason came around the counter and
pushed the small coffee table back so he could kneel down in front
of her. He did so, placed the orange in her lap and took her hands
in his. "Sadira, if we work together, then we can stop this. But
if you go to them for help, then we risk -- we risk you, and that's
something I'm not willing to do." She looked at him with a
combination of surprise, confusion, and bemusement, as if she
expected the ring to come out of his pocket at any second. "Please
trust me." She kept looking at his face. On impulse, he stuck out
his tongue, pulled his arms up with the hands loosely dangling from
the wrists, and began panting.
Sadira's face twitched into a smile, and then she started
laughing, doubling over with convulsions of mirth.
Jason kept begging.
"Okay, okay!" she finally got out. "I do trust you." He
assumed a more human posture. "But we have to work fast, and where
do we go --" Her eyes went searching again, and found something.
"Pamela."
"Who?"
"Pam. My roommate. She runs her own genetics lab back in
Manhattan. She'll give us all the help we need."
"Your roommate is rich enough to own her own lab, and you work
here?"
"I signed on the dotted line," she explained with a slight
smile. "But we're good friends, and she's a hell of a geneticist.
We'll have equipment and resources, plus a third partner to work
with."
"Okay. Montana to New York, and then we work like blazes."
Jason stood up and quickly walked to the front closet, threw the
door open, reached in, and extracted a suitcase. "You and I are
about to become very sick. We don't know how long it'll take to
feel better. Can't make it into the office at all." He threw a
travel kit into the now-open case. "It'll take a week or more
before your size becomes --" he paused "-- inconvenient, and you
can still work after that: I'll help you with whatever needs to be
done. Once we stop the growth, I get better, you stay sick and
have reduction surgery, then you get better, and --"
"I can't have surgery." Jason looked at her: she was
standing up again, facing him from across the room. Her breathing
was fast and hard. "I can't go into a hospital for this, Jason: I
can't."
"Once we cure you, they can't pick up anything from your
blood. It'll be safe."
"Jason." The word was firm and unyielding. "I can't have
surgery."
He didn't know the cause, but he _did_ know a phobic response
when he saw one. "We'll talk about it later," he said. "But if we
don't work very, very fast, then you're going to have to convince
people that you either had spontaneous, non-initiated growth or
went in for one _hell_ of an enlargement, and I don't think people
are going to buy either one."
"I've got to go home," she said suddenly. "I have more notes
at my apartment: studying what turned the sequence on might give a
clue to the off signal. And I think I left some print files back
at the lab. You can't go: you don't have my handprint."
"That'll be everything?" Jason asked, packing faster.
"The rest of it is on the disk --" she patted the jacket
pocket "-- and it stays with me."
Jason considered. "Okay. Wear a thick coat to work: it's
still cold for March and you can conceal what you've got now, but
don't let anyone see you. The labs are pretty empty on a Saturday,
but be careful anyway. Go in, get the files, drive to the airport,
and I'll put us on the first flight to New York. Two hours good?"
"Maybe three. Traffic around the airport might be bad."
"I'll go there directly and allow for pileups. Start
driving."
Sadira got up, pocketing the orange. "I'll drive fast."
"Not too fast: we can't afford a speeding ticket."
"Got it."
"Sadira." She looked at Jason. "Be careful. The clock is
running."
"I will," she said softly, and left.
3. 35: The effects of American cinema on young adults
Sadira was trying not to think about Ultimate Consequences
again, but that meant she was constantly remembering exactly what
it was that she wasn't supposed to think about. Which, of course,
constituted thinking about it, dropping Tolstoy's Paradox squarely
on her skull. So, as she ran around the cluttered apartment trying
to find her notes, she concentrated on sub-aspects. Like running.
Sadira had been an excellent base stealer for her college team.
There hadn't been an ounce of extra weight to slow her down, and
she could slide in on her stomach without bruising anything. Now,
every time she moved, she felt subsidiary movement from her bosom,
bounces and shifts and vibrations, oh my, distracting enough for a
first-timer so that she found most of her work by falling over it.
That was another thing to notice: the weight. Only a little
so far, a couple of pounds at most when put together, but it was
there, and it was going to get worse. Sadira was naturally clumsy
-- Jasmine had described her as moving like a fawn three seconds
after birth -- but how much worse was it going to be when she had
ten, fifteen, twenty or more pounds of weight constantly pulling
her down?
The generated image of step/crash/stand/step/crash/etc was
distracting enough to get her through the kitchen hunt, recovering
a Post-It from the refrigerator door {Double check Q74-CTG29
relationship on CH19}, and into the bathroom. She grabbed a file
folder from its resting place next to the toilet, two more from the
magazine rack attached to the bathtub, straightened up, and saw the
mirror again.
She'd taken Elementary Chaos Theory in her junior year of
college, fulfilling the requirement for a science elective outside
her major. The teacher had begun the first class with a quote on
the blackboard: "You can never step in the same river twice."
Because the water molecules would have moved, and the banks eroded
a bit, changing the flow, and a million other factors which said
that the universe was predictably unstable.
It followed that you could never look in a mirror twice and see
the same person both times. With her, it was just becoming more
noticeable.
She had grown a bit more since that first glance, probably the
result of the McRefueling, no more than another inch -- but the
difference was startling. At that moment, she had achieved the
Cosmo proportions: the build which every fashion and beauty
magazine said she ought to have. The one all the clothing
designers seemed to be working for. The one which society seemed
to punish women for _not_ having. She was _there_, to the
millimeter.
No more buying shirts in the extra-large pre-teen areas so
there would be no sagging of material at the front.
No more growing her hair ridiculously long just so she could
claim something extremely feminine about her appearance.
No more soft snickers and snide meant-to-be-overheard comments
from other women while changing, first in the locker room in high
school, and now at the health club.
No more quiet remarks overheard when leaving the dance floor.
"She's a cute girl, but..."
And, within a few hours, the achievement of that standard would
be no more. She would have moved past it, into a new realm of
clothing perils, snide female remarks, and rude male ones.
Despite the time factor, despite everything, Sadira spent three
minutes staring at the image, firmly memorizing it, before finally
resuming her hunt.
In the end, she thought she'd gotten it all. In the last few
minutes, she'd just started grabbing any loose paper and shoveling
it into the trunk of her car. She'd also packed a few changes of
clothes -- mostly panties, socks, and pants: there didn't seem to
be much point in bringing many of her blouses. The one she was
wearing had become slightly uncomfortable. The fabric wasn't
expanding as fast as she was.
On the way to the lab, she made two run-and-gun stops: a
convenience store, where she emptied out the chocolate bar racks,
and a Sears, where, armed with her underbust size and a decent
working knowledge of bra theory (from proximity to Jasmine and
Pamela), she bought one bra in each size between where she was now
and where the department store's range ended. This turned out to be
all of three bras: C, D, and DD/E -- Sears wasn't sure what to call
it. The sales clerk gave her one weird look at the request and
another when she asked to wear the first one out, giving the clerk
the tag for scanning.
She was wearing the C when she drove past the security
checkpoint, pulled into the GenTree parking lot and screeched into
her first-year spot at the back out of habit before relocating
right next to the entrance. Sadira checked the heavy coat as she
got out of the car. It did bulge a bit, but it bulged all over:
she had never really gotten the hang of cleaning down.
"Okay," she whispered. "_Go_ --" and ran into the building.
She skidded to a halt in front of the handprint scanner, pulling off
the winter glove as she braked.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
She froze and spun around, trying to keep the fear off her
face, and then she saw who had spoken. "Hi, Stan."
The older man waggled a finger at her and dropped his voice out
of the basso-profoundo he'd used to startle her to a more nasal
tone. "You know the rules, Ms. Archer. You Monday-Friday types
can stay here twenty-four a day then, but come the weekend, you go
home and rest so you don't burn out. Only us Wednesday-Sunday
types are allowed in now. Unless you've screamed "Eureka" and came
in with a cure for the common cold --" he sniffled "-- then go home
and rest."
"It's okay, Stan. I just forgot a few things on Friday."
Friday, the fifteen of March. She should have been bewaring Ides.
"I'll just grab them and get out."
"You're going to work at home, aren't you?"
"No, Stan. I'm not going to do any work in my apartment."
That was the truth. "This is personal stuff." That was, too.
"Okay. But if I catch you working, you're in trouble."
<No kidding.> "See you later." She put her hand on the
scanner and waited for the elevator.
"Sadira?" She turned to see Stan examining her closely, a hint
of confusion on his weathered features. "Did you do something with
your hair?"
"I jumped around a lot," she admitted as the elevator door
opened.
It all seemed to take so long. Five floors up to her lab, and
she could count the millimeters passing. Time passing...
The elevator door finally opened -- it only took an hour -- and
she ran into the hallway, following the gray line straight towards
her lab. The sport bra kept things reasonably in place, but she
was still too aware of the shifting masses.
Handprint. Enter. Grab everything. Drop most of it and re-
grab. When <if?> she got this problem solved, she was going to
invent file folders with a heavy friction base on the outer
surface. You'd need a crowbar to get them apart, not the smallest
puff of air or shift in balance. More files. No real time to
check the contents: just rely on memory for which piles contained
what and keep moving. Sadira kept working until she had a stack
which she could barely see over, then opened the jacket and rolled
a few small files into the inner pockets. She scooped the
teetering pile off the workstation and somehow managed to clear the
door without losing anything, holding them close to her body for
balance.
The file at the top kept catching the air from her forward
movement, opening to block her sight. She had to keep stopping to
let it settle, and she couldn't spare a hand to twist it around.
If she put the pile down, it would most likely collapse, and she'd
lose more time...
"Do you need a hand?"
She managed to get a small glimpse in over the edge of the
manilla. There was an average man standing about fifteen feet
away. Completely and utterly average, height, skin tone, hair
color, dress, posture. Even if she memorized his appearance, she'd
barely be able to pick him out of any crowd. He could blend into
practically any city in the world.
"Carmody," he responded to the unasked question. "I was at
your conference yesterday. You might not remember me. I don't
speak up a lot at meetings."
"It seemed like only one man was doing the talking," she
replied, carefully inching a little farther down the hallway.
"Yes. Well -- Mr. Nigilo does that a lot. Can I take a few of
those?"
Sadira thought about it: extra speed, less risk of dropping
things, small chance of his opening the files and seeing what she
was taking, good shot at talking her way out of that. "Please. I
just have to get them out to my car."
Carmody smiled and stepped forward, reaching for the pile. She
smiled gratefully -- not that he could see it behind the file --
and looked down to see where he was grasping: maybe he was
chivalrous enough to take the entire burden. She saw the edges of
her jacket. Her open jacket. She'd never zipped it closed after
stuffing the files inside...
"Just free up my neck," she said quickly. "I can handle the
rest."
She saw him hesitate in momentary confusion before redirecting
his hands to the top of the pile. A man who was used to doing what
he was told: he just took a few inches worth.
All right: she'd left the car unlocked to save a split-second
or two. _He_ opened the door and dumped the stuff on the passenger
seat while _she_ went around to the trunk, opened it -- hiding
herself -- and closed the jacket. Still solvable.
They walked down the hall together.
"Is this the breast enlargement research?" Carmody gently
inquired.
Sadira stumbled slightly and managed to recover before the pile
went down. Carefully edited honesty was the safest policy: after
all, what else would take up so much material? The leukemia data
had to be kept on the computer so others could access it. "There's
no point in having it clutter up the lab now," she said truthfully.
"True." They kept moving. It was taking forever to get to the
elevator. "But I hope you're not planning on throwing it away:
the political climate may change someday, and you might get to use
it."
<I'm one step ahead of you there.> "No, just relocating it."
<Walk carefully. Don't be clumsy now, don't trip, keep it
together...> The elevator was getting close. Carmody stepped
ahead of her.
"I'll get the button," he offered, and reached out, his hand
vanishing from sight. Sadira automatically leaned forward to see
what he was doing, her breasts pressing harder into the pile with
the motion --
-- and the folders cascaded down in a rain of manilla and
fallen hopes.
Carmody instinctively dropped, hands sweeping loose papers into
a pile, then glanced up to see if she was going to help.
The moment passed.
"Sadira," he said carefully, as if talking down a suicide.
She spun and ran all of twelve feet to the emergency stairway.
Sadira pulled at the door, trying to get the lock to disengage.
<This _is_ an emergency,> her mind said inanely, but the door
refused to open. <Computer controlled. Opens for fires or
elevator breakdowns, but not for this.>
Carmody was getting up. Sadira ran.
She didn't know where she was going. This was the only
elevator bank in the research wing, and the executive wing wouldn't
recognize her handprint. The windows didn't open -- not in a place
where people messed around with viruses -- and it was fifty feet
down to the street. There wasn't even enough snow left in the
parking lot pile to aim for.
She reached her lab in what seemed like seconds and waited a
year for the handprint scanner to work. Her door clicked open, and
she dived inside, slamming the door behind her.
Maybe he wouldn't look for her here.
Like hell he wouldn't. What other room on this floor could she
get into? Grafting was on three, the scientists' conference room
on seven...
The bathrooms. Maybe social teaching would have kept him from
searching the ladies' room.
All she'd accomplished was to buy some time -- he couldn't have
missed hearing the door slam -- and lock herself in. (It would
have been nice if she'd bothered to _think_ in the middle of the
panic.) She had to leave the room eventually: even if by some
miracle, she was able to develop a cure in the next five minutes,
she'd never get down to Grafting to put it to use. Not if Jason
was right.
But if Jason was wrong --
She heard the handprint scanner begin its cycle. She relaxed:
Carmody couldn't get into her private lab.
The door began to open.
Unless, of course, he could override the security codes
immediately, which he wasn't supposed to be able to do.
She looked wildly around the lab. There had to be something --
Carmody stepped inside. Sadira brought her arm back, syringe
at the ready. Carmody froze, looking at the needle. It was all
that was visible of the sampling cylinder enclosed in her right
hand: she used them to get those few viruses that were held in
liquid mediums.
She couldn't let him see that it was empty.
"Don't move," she told him. "Yell for help and you're dead.
_This_ virus is fatal."
"Sadira --" he started, taking a small step forward. She
brought her arm a little farther back, as if to throw. He stopped
moving.
"I said, _don't move_." She was starting to feel like a movie
character, something with lots of shooting which was supposed to
pass for meaningful dialogue. Sadira used the template. "I was a
pretty good baseball player. I could put this in your face from
twenty feet."
"Your defensive skills garnered you the honored position of
guarding the lineup card. Designated hitter," Carmody replied,
still not moving.
<Great, and how the _hell_ did he know that?> "Yah, but I
_could_ hit," Sadira admitted defensively. "And as far as that
goes, as a target, you're a lot bigger than a glove."
"So," Carmody said carefully, "you expect me to believe that
you were crazy enough to develop a fatal virus. I've seen your
psych profile, Sadira. It's a little hard to swallow." His left
foot ventured forward an inch.
<I have to say something that would make this bluff
_credible_...> In her best Brooklyn-tough voice, Sadira replied
"'ey, I wuz crazy nuff ta infect myself with _this_ shit --" using
her left hand to indicate her chest "-- so whut makes ya think I
wouldn't kill ya ta buy some time?"
<That was probably the wrong thing to say.>
Carmody moved. Backwards.
"Hold it." He held. "You're gonna help me. Back in the
hallway, and if you run, you're gone."
She followed him out, both moving slowly, back down to the
elevator bank. There was no one else on the floor: all the rooms
on the fifth were occupied by the Monday-Friday shift. They
reached the elevators without further incident. "Pick those up,"
Sadira ordered, jabbing the needle at the files. As he worked, she
tried to re-zip her jacket with one hand and still keep the needle
pointed at Carmody. She failed.
Carmody stood up, virtually invisible behind the folder pile.
"I'll get the elevator," she said, and hit the button. "You are
politely walking me out to my car. Say a word to Stan and you're
dead. In fact, do anything besides walking me out to the car and
you're dead. Got it?"
"Understood," Carmody replied as the elevator door opened. She
stepped in directly behind him, keeping the needle point near his
back.
"When we hit the lobby, we're going to stay very close
together. Let's walk." The door opened again, and they stepped
into the lobby, Carmody first, Sadira just behind at an angle where
he was shielding Stan's view of her torso.
"That's a lot of personal stuff, Ms. Archer," Stan noted. "Are
you sure that's not work?"
"Maybe a little work," Sadira confessed. "Carmody, be a dear
and open the door?" He did so. "Goodbye, Stan."
Once outside, "The light blue Rabbit. Door's unlocked. Dump
them on the passenger seat."
"Sadira, it's not going to work."
"What's not?"
The portion of his face that she could see in the rear-view
mirror seemed to be confused. Apparently he was just reciting what
he thought were his lines. "Whatever it is you're planning."
"Got it," she said flatly. "Get away from the car. No,
farther back." She saw Stan watching from his post behind the door,
starting to stand up as he caught the glint of the sun off the
needle. "A little more..."
She dropped the needle and dived into the car, somehow getting
the keys out of her pocket on the first try. It took three to ram
the right one into the ignition, enough time for her to hear the
shatterproof needle bounce on the pavement, to see Stan start
moving for the door, and Carmody starting forward again.
She slammed the door and hit the autolock as Stan hit the front
steps, and had the car started by the time he reached the bottom.
Carmody wisely dived back as she gunned the motor and sped out of
the parking lot, heading for the security gate.
The exit didn't have a scanner: if you were allowed in, you
were allowed to get out. The barrier raised when the sensor
spotted a car approaching.
Sadira hoped it worked fast.
It didn't work fast enough. She rammed through the gate,
the barrier, a small portion of it bouncing off the windshield,
which was _not_ shatterproof: a network of cracks spread across
the surface as she made a screeching turn onto the access road and
sped away.
Seven minutes and five miles later, when her car coughed and
stalled out, she was driving through Central Helena, heading
towards the airport. Sadira glided to a halt next to a parking
meter, then tried to re-start the engine. It caught -- and stalled
out again.
No one had been following her. More from curiosity than any
real confidence in her ability to fix the problem, she got out of
the car to take a look.
The trouble, such as it was, was pretty obvious. Few cars run
well when a large fragment of barrier punches through the radiator
grille and, with the subsequent vibrations of normal driving,
continues to work its way inwards until the splintered edge severs
several vital hoses and punctures the radiator.
It did explain why all those cars had been honking at her.
"Shit," Sadira said, then "Shitfuck!" which seemed to sum it up
a bit better.
If she called a cab and went to the airport -- well, by the
time the cab showed up and got her there, then GenTree could have
gotten some people to watch the airport, and if they caught her,
then --
That was thinking too much like a movie character. They might
be able to work that fast, but... But "somebody's on the run:
check the airport" was a pretty fundamental assumption. And what
if they called the police? And what if they contacted some sort of
biological control agency? They'd lock her in a room for a few
months while they worked things out, especially after her little
assault on Carmody, and by the time they were done, she'd have
filled the room...
"No way," Sadira muttered. She looked up the street: maybe if
there was a cab company right there --
-- no. Something potentially better.
She had gotten all of the material into the suitcases, even
through she had to sacrifice some of the clothing (but none of the
chocolate). So she had several reasons to keep a wary eye on the
bags as she gave her message to the answering machine, finishing
just as the attendant called for departing passengers to get their
rears in gear.
Sadira was the last person on the bus.
4. ???: Jason hears a "What!"
It was getting very late. Sadira was even later. She had left
his house at 10:30, agreeing to meet him by 1:30. At the worst,
two o' clock, maybe three. He'd been to the main counter several
times to page her, and a few more to ascertain that traffic
conditions around the airport were perfectly clear.
Helena International Airport barely qualified for the name:
the only direct out-of-country flights that landed there came from
Canada. Everything else was a transfer or minor stop-by, which
meant that the huge complex pictured with an _international_
airport turned into one medium-sized building with lots of gates.
Jason had already memorized the map and the timetables of all
planes leaving for New York: there were two more, one at seven,
three hours away, and a red-eye at one a.m.
He'd marched up and down the length of the lobby and car-
unloading zone. He'd called Information and then her apartment.
He'd bought and read every newspaper he could find, and now knew
far more than he wanted to about the price of plums in Pakistan. A
grandmother had picked him out of the crowd to tell about her
ungrateful children and he'd _listened_, just to pass the time.
He'd made one interesting discovery. One of the magazine
stands carried X-rated material, and the cover of a flimsy rag
called _Gent_ had Jasmine Archer on the cover. It had taken a
moment to recognize her, and that based on her resemblance to
Sadira: Jason had only looked at her _face_ on the monitor screen
towards the end. The face was not the part the cover was trying to
draw attention to, and it didn't have to try very hard. The name
didn't help: she was identified as Princess Pirou -- probably
short for Pirouze, a character from _The Arabian Nights_. <And why
not Princess Jasmine? Because You Don't Fuck With The Mouse.>
The previous question of "How big?" got a partial answer: the
magazine listed her at 150 ZZZZ, which sounded like the gene site
controlling bullshit. A visual inspection only gave him "Damn big."
No one else in the magazine came close.
He only looked at one picture in her layout: the first one, a
clothed shot, with Jasmine standing in semi-profile to the camera,
wearing an overly-tight sweater. Her arms were held level from her
shoulders, bent backwards at the elbows, pushing in on the
flesh between. The edge of her right breast overlapped the
forearm, and the forward projection within the bra reached close to
the elbows, with the lower reaches between the lowest rib and the
navel.
Two things kept him from looking further: the sudden nagging
feeling that it would somehow be demeaning to Sadira, and the
expression on Jasmine's face. It was haughty, demanding, a
dominatrix out of costume. It said that she thought absolutely
nothing good of the person who took the picture, much less those
who might look at it. Jason suspected there were men who got
aroused by that. He wasn't one of them.
He did read the bit of text that accompanied the picture. It
was suggestive, generic, and uninformative.
At least he knew why Sadira had never mentioned her sister
until Friday. He'd brought up his three brothers (Heracles,
Castor, and Pollux -- which had taken some explaining) on about the
fifth of roughly sixty snack breaks together, when he'd been able
to drag her away from her work, reminding Sadira that even geniuses
needed food to live. Having an extremely busty sister was
certainly nothing to be ashamed of, nor was having one who worked
as a feature dancer. But if he had someone in his family tree who
could summon up the expressions he'd seen on screen and photo
without effort or awareness, he wouldn't talk about them, either.
At 4:00 p.m., he bought the tickets.
"Two for the seven o' clock to New York," he told the ticket
agent, "and two for the red-eye. If I don't use them, refund them
to my credit card number."
"Sir, purchased tickets cannot be refunded if they are not
used. All I can do is credit the purchase towards another flight."
The agent seemed to take a lot of pleasure from telling him this.
Jason leaned in, letting his height loom over the seller. "Are
you sure about that?"
The agent stood firm behind his paperwork and the knowledge
that there were a lot of bored airport security guards around.
"Changes only. No refunds."
<And if she shows up and I'm not here, she probably won't be
allowed to change them.> Jason resumed a completely upright
position. "Fine," he lied. "And I want to leave two of those here
for pickup. The name of the traveling party is Sadira Archer." He
spelled it. "If I'm not here when she comes in, tell her to leave
without me, and I'll catch up."
The agent looked up at him, then said, "That's a lot to
remember." A hand crept up from behind the counter, palm up.
Jason looked at it, then at the agent. "And you get off shift
in an hour and wouldn't be here to tell her anyway, right?"
"I get off in four hours. I intend to split the funds with my
replacement if I can't do my job by then."
Jason sucked in a breath between clenched teeth, and the words
went out the same way. "And both of you will, every fifteen
minutes until she shows up, page her to the ticket counter."
"I think that might be possible." The hand wriggled. Jason
slowly lowered bills towards it until they were snatched out of
sight as if by a cheap novelty bank.
Jason grabbed his suitcase, resisted the urge to swing it at
the agent's face, and ran for his car.
Jason's intentions in going to GenTree were to 1. Find out if
Sadira had made it there -- there could have been complications
from the virus. 2. Make sure she'd managed to leave without
getting caught and isolated somewhere -- in which case, he was
about to study the fine art of the breakout. 3. Get her address
from the employee directory.
Traffic was clear, with no one rubbernecking the wreck of a
blue Rabbit: he took it as a good sign and got to GenTree in
forty-five minutes.
"Hi, Stan," he said automatically as he headed for the
elevator. "Just picking up a few things."
"Yeah," the older man grumped. "That's what _she_ said."
Jason took his hand off the scanner and turned to face the
security guard. "That's what _who_ said?"
Stan's right hand moved to cover his face. "Oh, darn it -- Mr.
Pterros, I wasn't supposed to say anything about this. You won't
tell anyone, will you?"
"I can't," Jason said frankly. "I have no idea what you're
talking about." He _did_ have several horrible worries.
"Thanks," Stan told him sincerely, and went back to studying
the front door with great intensity.
Jason moved very quietly when he got off the elevator, without
being sure why. It's naturally hard to sneak around when you're
6'6", but he tried it anyway, moving slowly, scanning the
environment. There were no signs of a struggle -- which for him,
meant there were no neon lights flashing "A struggle took place
here!" The hallway was oddly quiet: the weekend was the near-
exclusive work time for Marketing and Sales, and the off-time for
Research. There was a good chance he was the only person on the
floor.
He reached his lab without incident and placed his hand on the
scanner --
-- voices. Not too far off, maybe eight, nine doors down.
Right around where Sadira's lab was.
He removed his hand from the scanner before it could beep and
very, very slowly made his way down the hallway, arching his back
to avoid the scanners, trying not to get hypnotized by the quiet
shimmer of fluorescent lights on white walls.
The door to Sadira's lab was partially open, but the voices had
stopped at just about the point when he would have been close
enough to make them out. Jason wondered if he could risk a peek
inside --
"What!" Strident, angry, a man who didn't like the word "No"
unless he was saying it. "The entire drive?!"
"Not the whole thing, sir." Colorless, submissive. "There are
no files on the drive pertaining to breast enlargement."
"And you watched her take the print files out." Jason briefly
smiled: whatever had happened, Sadira had cleared the building.
"Hell, you helped her _carry_ them." Not without incident,
however...
"It's not a total loss, sir. While she's deleted the files from
the hard drive, she doesn't seem to have taken any special
precautions after that deletion."
"Exactly what are you trying to get across?" More controlled,
but even angrier: man on verge of a nervous break-neck -- someone
else's -- and he had the voice: Nigilo, Project Viability
Director, among other things, and certainly among those whom Sadira
had presented to.
"That the files were removed with the Delete function, and
nothing else. Any good file utility should be able to recover most
of it."
"So we can get the computer data back." Calmer still, but
Jason could feel the anger running like an undertow inside the
ocean. "Will that give us enough without the print?"
"I can't say until I've gotten it back, sir."
"Then get it back, Carmody," Nigilo ordered. Footsteps came
closer to the door, and Jason got ready to move -- then reversed,
getting fainter. The pattern repeated: Nigilo was pacing the
floor. "And start working on a way to get _her_ back."
The pacing was driving Jason nuts: from the tone of the
conversation, he didn't think Nigilo was going to wait around for
the file recovery. He could break for the door at any second, and
when he did -- well, most of the other employees knew Jason hung
around with Sadira. If Nigilo knew, he might not be able to clear
the building. He started to inch back down the hallway.
"Oh, Carmody," Nigilo off-handedly mentioned, "I had someone
test the contents of that syringe Archer held on you. One hundred
percent pure bona-fide air. I suppose you could have had an
embolism or something if she'd injected it --" Nigilo's voice
acquired a honey coating "-- so you shouldn't feel bad about
letting her get away."
Jason blinked, then headed for his lab.
He held his left hand on top of the scanner to muffle the beep,
then turned his lights on at the lowest possible level, just enough
to find the computer.
Sadira had been caught, seemingly by Carmody, then gotten away
and not headed for the airport. Had she been followed, and tried
not to lead them to him? Had she, in confusion and with base
instinct, gone home?
In order to discover that last, he was still going to need the
employee directory. He moved to turn on the computer --
-- his message light was flashing. He'd cleared it before he
left on Friday, and he could think of only one person who would try
to call him on a Saturday. He picked up the phone and held it as
close as possible to his ear before triggering the playback.
"Jason," Sadira said softly, and he nearly collapsed in relief.
"If you're hearing this on Saturday, then you got worried and went
to work to see if I'd gotten trapped, _and_ I correctly recalled
your extension number. I'm clear, but nothing else is working out
too well." A quick summary followed, with Jason raising eyebrows,
widening eyes, sucking in air, exhaling in relief, and suppressing
groans as the words required. "When the car went down, I was less
than a block from a Greyhound station. I'm calling from the pay
phone there. There's a bus leaving for Billings in five minutes,
and I'm going to be on it. I'll catch a flight to New
York from their airport."
There was a long pause. "If anyone tries to follow my car,
they'll probably follow it to the impound yard, but if I'd tried to
get to the airport -- well, it was the most logical place for me to
go, and they might have caught us both." Another pause. "If it
sounds like that little paranoia lesson you gave me rubbed off,
bingo: I don't like that Carmody had immediate access to my
'private' lab..." A deep breath. "If you can, head for New York:
don't try and meet me in Billings -- use a Canadian airport if you
have to. _You_ still have a car. Make sure you're not followed --"
A sigh. "You know the drill."
"I'm not sure I gave you Pam's full name: it's Pamela Anne
Shaw. I don't know exactly where her lab is in Manhattan, but her
home number is -- grab a pencil if you can -- " He did and
wrote it down. "Tell her what's going on and try to recreate as
much of my work as you can: you're both brilliant and hopefully
motivated." He could hear the smile. "I should join you pretty
soon. If I can get ahold of a computer, I'll use Pam's new Net
address and send over the contents of the disk." A very long pause,
and he could hear a summoning announcement in the background.
"Don't worry about me. I'll get there." A soft, terminal click.
He erased the message --
-- the machine beeped as the tape cleared, gunshot-loud in the
paranoid silence. Jason jumped, spinning as he came down to face
the door.
No voices, no sounds of movement.
He allowed himself one very brief, very quiet "Whew!", checked
Sadira's address, and quietly left the building.
He drove by Sadira's apartment building and looked up at the
third floor: there were lights on, and he could see several people
moving inside.
There were no similar lights at his own building, and no
obviously ominous cars, but he didn't risk a trip inside:
eventually, someone was either going to look at the security tapes
or ask Stan who else had been in the building, and _then_ they'd
look. They might be in the building without having reached his
apartment yet -- he drove away.
By the time he finished sneaking out and surveying the
landscape, he'd missed the seven o' clock flight. A quick call to
the quasi-local airports confirmed that he wouldn't be able to reach
any flight _but_ the Helena red-eye unless he wanted to wait until
nine a.m. Sunday.
Somehow, he killed six hours, writing down what he could
remember from his quick flip through Sadira's notes, speculating on
where to begin looking, and drinking coffee by the gallon.
Finally, at midnight, he pasted on the bad fake mustache he'd
purchased at the novelty shop before reaching Sadira's building,
and drove to the airport. After parking, he put on sunglasses,
pulled a hat low over his eyes, and, for a last desperate disguise
step, ran hunched over through the terminal.
No one stopped him, and, afraid that he'd be kept off the plane
for looking like a suspicious moron, he dumped the mustache before
reaching the gate.
The last thing he heard before boarding the plane was "Sadira
Archer, please report to the main ticket counter. Sadira
Archer..." It seemed he had gotten good value for his money.
5. 36: Conspiracy theories
There are 240 miles between Helena and Billings, most of which
is taken up by picturesque scenery -- if you happen to like endless
amounts of dead grass and barren trees, with the occasional dead
shrub thrown in for variety. Sadira didn't, so spent most of the
ride reading through the files in her jacket pockets, with the
occasional check of her watch and mile markers thrown in, just to
make sure time and distance were actually passing.
What little time was left over was invested into wishing the
driver would go faster. The wish was not fulfilled: the bus kept
to the speed limit all the way through and made two stops for snack
food.
None of the previous activities went as well as they could
have, because Sadira also had to deal with her seatmate: a five-
year old girl named Olivia whose parents had allowed her to do this
marvellously grown-up thing called Traveling Alone. Olivia was
very proud of this, and talked about it at every opportunity.
Olivia frequently went to the bathroom, and she had the window
seat. She wanted a piece of Sadira's chocolate, which she wound up
getting under the theory that she couldn't talk while eating it
(wrong). She wanted to know what Sadira was reading, and Sadira,
who had reached the point of desperation at the 115 marker, told
her, using the longest words and most convoluted, incomprehensible
technical terms she could think of, until neither she nor Olivia
had any idea what she was talking about. It bought her all of five
minutes and, towards the end, one bad moment.
"Does your chest hurt?"
Sadira stared at the sincere brown eyes for a second, then
looked down at her left hand, which was rubbing the base of a bra
cup -- which was starting to get a little tight. "Not really," she
said, and pulled her hand away.
"You look a little different," Olivia observed.
Sadira, who didn't have a tremendous amount of experience with
children, said, "I look different from a lot of people."
"No," Olivia insisted. "From when you got on."
Sadira tried to remember if the girl had actually had her eyes
resting in one place long enough to get an impression. "I'm
older now," she said, suddenly inspired. "I'm going to get
wrinkles -- and if you sit too close, my hair's going to fall out -
- on you!"
Olivia giggled and scrambled over Sadira's lap, knocking files
to the ground, then ran to the bathroom again.
Sadira recovered the papers, then leaned over to the window and
looked out at the greying sky and leafless trees. "Hurry," she
whispered, and wasn't sure who she was saying it to.
She stayed in the window seat until Olivia got back and
promptly demanded it. Sadira, who had been waiting for the moment,
offered it up only after Olivia had sat down -- and Sadira
scrambled as awkwardly as possible over her, heading for the
bathroom. It was about time to change bras.
The D was still a little loose as they pulled into Billings at
six p.m. Most of the passengers were meeting people at the
terminal -- Sadira spared a minute to make sure Olivia's aunt
picked her up, afraid the woman wouldn't be there and she'd be
granted custody -- but with typical geographic logic, there was an
overpriced taxi stand outside the terminal to pick up the overflow.
Sadira walked up and asked for a ride to the airport.
"Can't," the burly man said.
Sadira glanced inside the three available cabs. Empty. "Are
these reserved?"
"Naw, they're available. I just can't take anyone to the
airport. You're not press, are you?"
She decided to be direct. "Would being a member of the press
get me to the airport?"
"Naw. A lot of reporters have been calling the company. I was
wondering if you were another one. You're gorgeous enough to be on
the air."
Sadira, who was still trying to puzzle out the airport problem,
almost missed the last comment -- then, when it registered, had to
clamp down on all possible responses. Cute, yes, she got that.
Good-looking, on occasion. Beautiful, once. Gorgeous, never. She
could feel her face fighting to twitch as she said "And why can't
_anyone_ go to the airport?"
"The NextMen."
Sadira quickly looked around for the hidden camera, didn't find
one, decided she wasn't going to be on "America's Most Frustrated
People," and said "Who?"
"One of those radical groups who bought a parcel of land out by
the airport. You know, peace, justice, kill everyone who doesn't
agree with peace and justice? Airport's expanding, tried to buy
their land, so they planted a bomb."
"They planted a bomb." Sadira was starting to feel like a
parrot.
"Well, they said they did, so the cops closed down the airport
and surrounded their place. Hey, only in Montana, right? FreeMen,
NextMen, branch-Branch Dravidians, Dykes on Bikes -- weirdos give
the state a bad name."
Sadira, who was thinking of several bad names to call things,
managed a slow, tight nod. Montana: land of the free, home of
the brave, refuge of the lunatics. "Look, I need to get to New
York, tonight if possible. Where's the nearest airport that's still
open?
"Well, if you head west, you're got Helena --"
"Not an option."
The cab driver scratched at his stubbly chin, thinking. "Well,
if you want direct, and you can't afford to hire a charter, the
closest place to head for is -- let's see -- Buffalo or Bismark.
Cheyenne would have more flights than Buffalo, but it'll take less
time to get to Buffalo. Bismark's a capital like Cheyenne, so
there'd be lots of flights, but you're looking at --"
He stopped abruptly, staring at her face. Sadira wondered what
expression was on it. "Wyoming. _North Dakota_. Those are the
closest places to catch a flight to Nu Yawk?"
The driver suddenly smiled. "Far from home, ain'tcha? Hey, me
too!" He leaned against the cab. "Sweets, it ain't like home.
They don't got three airports in thirty miles around here. If
you're flying, it's two hundred miles to Buffalo, about four
hundred to Cheyenne and Bismark -- and by the time you get there,
you're looking at red eyes. Besides, it'll all be closed by then,
anyway."
Sadira blinked -- almost said something -- took a deep breath -
- noticed the driver watching the breath. Speaking slowly, editing
every syllable for negative content, she got out, "And _why_ will
it all be closed?"
"The snowstorm. Bad one coming through tonight, hits us and
points east and south. Not Helena, though. Should get in around
nine, and then they'll ground the flights. The charters won't even
carry then." He smiled widely: Sadira saw several cavities.
"'course, a cab could cover some ground, maybe drive fast enough
to beat the storm."
<And there was no possible way you could have mentioned that
earlier.> "I can't afford two hundred miles worth of cabfare,"
she said, and turned away.
"Hey, Beautiful," he called after her, "who said I wuz gonna
charge ya _money_?"
Sadira practically ran back into the terminal.
A few fast checks confirmed that:
A. The NextMen weren't going anywhere, and even if they pulled
out in five minutes, the police would still keep the airport closed
until morning so they could make sure it was clean.
B. The storm was going to dump up to eight inches by morning
before leaving -- normally not too much for Montana residents to
deal with, but it had been a hard winter, and salt reserves were
low all over. Accumulation in the south and east could be much
higher.
C. There were no buses or trains leaving for Points East before
morning. Nothing was heading back for Helena, either.
D. Sadira's current bra size, subject to increase -- the
longer it took to get to Manhattan, the farther she'd reach into
the alphabet.
Sadira decided she hated Montana. There were just as many
psychos in New York -- but at least there, she'd known to look for
them.
Her hunger pangs reached another peak, and she found herself
considering the problem over a large meal at a nearby dinner.
<I can rent a car, but driving to New York, as non-stop as I
can make it, would take at least three days. If I rent and drive
to one of the other airports, the storm will hit by the time I get
there. I can head back for Helena, but that puts me back in the
high-risk category.>
She called for a second helping of pie and came to the
inevitable conclusion during her third salad. <I've lost the day.
There's no way I'll get anywhere tonight, but even with Sunday
schedules, I can catch a train to a major transit point tomorrow --
maybe Chicago -- and go from there if the local airport isn't open.
Or I can drive out to one of the other airports and wait for things
to clear there, if I don't have another sugar fallout on the
way...>
Having reached the inevitable conclusion, Sadira spent fifteen
minutes in a valiant attempt to think her way around it. But the
near-continuous process of consumption-growth was wearing her out,
and she finally admitted to herself that she was in no shape to
drive, five minutes after her body had burrowed into the hotel bed,
half conscious and fully clothed. It was the last thought of the
night.
As Carmody retrieved the files, Nigilo went about retrieving a
work staff, placing calls to every scientist he had under his thumb
to remind them that if they didn't do _exactly_ what he said, he
was going to press _down_. Within an hour, he had a full research
team gathered on the fifth floor, sworn to secrecy, examining each
bit of data Carmody resurrected. This gave him very little to do
but pace the floor, which he did in abundance. He also ordered a
loitering intern to clean Archer's lab, both to look for left-
behind files and to give him more room to pace.
All of the reports were in by two a.m., and he sat down with
Carmody and two of the scientists to discuss the situation. For
irony's sake, it was the same conference room Archer had given her
presentation in: Carmody even checked the disk drive in vain hope
that she had left the original behind, before inserting the
reconstructed one.
Jonas went to the presentation area and began working the
keyboard. Nigilo had "gotten" him two years ago: the man had a
fondness for animal testing, and when the animal supply was a
little slow in coming, he used whatever he could find. Stray pets
were a special favorite. Nigilo had curbed him (he hoped) and
hidden the negatives well.
Carmody looked around the table. "Recovery of the data was
roughly 95 percent successful: what few dropouts occurred are in
areas that could be filled in later with some deduction." He
motioned to Jonas.
The scrawny man continued to bring his full weight down on the
keyboard, operating it like a punching bag, (a nervous habit -- he
could barely type) for a full seven seconds before he became aware
he had been addressed. "Yes," he started with a cough. "Well,
from all I've seen, the theories are perfectly valid. Everything
Ms. Archer has reasoned makes sense to me: the process she proposed
should indeed cause breast growth."
"She's logged a significant amount of time in Grafting,"
Temperi noted. His scientific specialty was mutation: his
personal specialty was usually around 14 years old. "It's quite
possible that she could have constructed the virus --"
"Which means nothing," Nigilo tensely breathed. "We _know_ she
built the virus, we know she infected herself with it, and
destroyed the rest -- if that tin in the sterilizer is what we
think it is. Can we recreate the work ourselves?"
"No," Temperi said, looking as if he wanted to catch the
traitorous word which had escaped from his lips. "We might, in a
few months, be able to build an enlargement virus: there's
certainly enough here to start with." He stopped, searched for
words, got interrupted.
"What do you mean, _a few months_!" Nigilo shouted. "I saw the
dating on the files: she got it done in three _weeks_!"
Jonas looked up from the keyboard three seconds off synch, the
first to speak in the descended silence. "Because we're not that
smart," he admitted. "She's a genius and she was focused in a way
that I can barely imagine: given the available starting data, I
could construct the enlargement virus, operating alone, in about
six months. With Fred here --" he pointed a skeletal finger at
Temperi "-- maybe four, three at best. And there aren't that many
of us qualified to graft who --" he swallowed tightly "-- you can
rely on. The crew would be small."
"And we only have half of a half," Temperi put in, rescuing his
partner in guilt. "All of Archer's data points to the eventual
construction of _two_ viruses: one to initiate growth, the second
to halt it. Everything we have concerns the creation of the first.
We might be able to _start_ the growth, but we have no way of
_stopping_ it."
Nigilo glanced at Carmody. "You said she appeared to be about
a B or a C cup -- in your expert opinion." Carmody nodded. "Then
we also have to consider that we've been lied to. She told us that
much growth might take a year, and she's obviously sped that up.
All of the data on the computer may be a false trail." Carmody
focused on his eyes, but Nigilo didn't notice. "We may have to
come up with the whole thing from scratch because the bitch decided
to throw us a razor-edged loop. Just like a woman --" He became
aware of Carmody's expressionless stare. "What?"
"Nothing, sir."
"Then look somewhere else." Nigilo steepled his finger. "Just
like the woman. Lies to me, then gives me more lies to follow.
Assume none of the information can be trusted until verified."
"That'll slow us down --" Temperi started to protest.
"Then work faster," Nigilo barked.
Carmody stood up and joined Jonas at the keyboard. "The search
of Ms. Archer's apartment has thus far revealed nothing, but the
place is in such poor condition that it may take us days to go
through every scrap of paper. From the guard and security tapes,
we have the knowledge of Mr. Pterros' unexplained presence in the
building a few hours after Ms. Archer, and his sneaking around on
Five." He looked at Nigilo. "It's very likely that he heard some
part of our discussion. He has not returned home, and we are
currently gaining access to his apartment."
Nigilo stood up. "Do you two have anything vastly intelligent
to add beyond what you've already said?" They blankly looked at
each other. "Then go learn something." The scientist fled.
Nigilo came around the table and sat down on the surface, next
to the keyboard. "There is a second virus. I don't believe Archer
would start something she couldn't stop, impulsive or not."
"Sir," Carmody hesitantly began, "there is the possibility that
the infection was accidental --"
"I don't believe that, either." He tapped his fingers against
the edge of the table. "Why build a virus unless you meant to use
it? And you're dismissing what she told you."
<She was under pressure...> "True, sir. At least the virus
doesn't seem to be spreadable."
"Good. If she had something that could wipe out the world, she
already has too much of a head start." The smile was thin enough
to be starving. "Of course, if she did, I still wouldn't alert the
biohazard control agencies. It's too late, after all, and why die
with the blame?
"Well, then, Carmody, this is what I think. I think that
Archer had the project complete and ready to go at the time of the
presentation. I also think that when I had to publicly reject her,
she decided to sell the information to someone else, and what
better proof could she give them than a functioning test subject?
And Pterros -- they talk a lot, they eat together, they concoct a
little plan to make some money -- search his lab, too."
"I've already gotten an intern to start," Carmody assured him.
Nigilo nodded approvingly. "But she forgets some things, comes
back for them, and you play your part in a hostage drama. So: who
is she going to sell to, and where are these people located?"
"Sir, we have limits." Nigilo's approving face collapsed into
a holding pattern. "This is going beyond industrial espionage. We
hire people to break into homes and raid sites for information.
That's in the company budget. We do not have the resources to
search through five billion people to locate _two_. Wherever they
have run to, they are going to be exceedingly difficult to find."
"Bullshit," Nigilo snarled, pushing himself slightly away from
the table. "They haven't had long to run, and there's only so many
companies that have both the resources and the connections to begin
marketing this before we could build the first virus. They can't
have the resources to produce it themselves --" He glanced at
Carmody.
"I'll check their finances," the assistant replied.
Nigilo nodded again -- then stood up completely, adjusting his
tie. "Do either of them have company-backed credit cards?"
"Archer does. Pterros turned his in six months ago."
"There's a slight chance she's still using it." His fingers
caressed the corner of his lips. "_Genius_, Carmody, does not
always mean _smart_. Get a list of the last purchases: one might
be an airline ticket."
"One detail, sir." Nigilo waited. "Ms. Archer's college
roommate was a geneticist: there is a chance that she's headed to
meet her."
Nigilo thought it over. "Does this roommate have the resources
and connections to carry through my proposed operation for the virus
on any significant scale?"
"Not the resources. I haven't been able to learn her
connections, but her operation is very new."
Nigilo shook his head -- then reconsidered. "But she may be a
third partner, or make friends easily. Check it out. And I have a
detail of my own." He brushed Carmody aside and put several
commands into the keyboard, activating the screen.
They both looked at the picture until Nigilo said, "This is why
I wanted you to search _all_ the directories. Fortunately, she
forgot to delete this. I think it gives a pretty clear indication
of her state of mind, don't you?"
"Sir, I'm not sure what you mean --"
"It's obvious, Carmody -- but then, you were an only child,
correct? Sibling rivalry is a powerful force. With the right
minds, it can move careers -- or lead to a foolish act." He
gestured at the image of Jasmine. "You saw Archer: you see her.
Try to imagine that you're a young girl, Carmody, and you're
growing up with her for a sister."
His voice dropped, softer, a slight hiss creeping into the
words, the ones he was convinced were completely correct. "What's
the real reason she developed the virus, Carmody? Jealousy taken
to the point of insanity, where even if the virus wasn't perfected,
wasn't tested, she'd try it on herself, and that lovesick fool
Pterros only to happy to help her? Is the profit motive primary or
secondary? Oh, she's lining her pockets, but she's filling out her
blouse as well. I don't think the C you saw is anywhere near the
end of the process.
"And the sad part -- the real tragedy -- is that if she'd just
waited a few days, or even been a little more involved in office
politics, I would have come to her with _my_ plan, and she'd have
status, money, and her new body. But she had to jump the gun and
screw me.
"Well, I still want those viruses, and I want the money and
status, and I want her to pay for even _thinking_ she could cut me
out." He stared at the screen, all expression gone. "Find her,
Carmody," he said quietly. "Pull resources from other areas: I
know you can make the accounting work. Hire detectives, alert our
friends. If we have any spies in labs where she might go, tell
them to be on the lookout. Try to get records from any other
credit cards they might have -- but don't report anything stolen:
they're an excellent means of tracking. Don't involve the
biohazards, don't involve the police. I want both of them back
here alive, and I want her in condition to work. Give all our
people full descriptions."
He focused on the young woman in the picture, shying away from
the cold. "You and I are now heading the search for Sadira
Scheherazade Archer; English-Saudi, twenty-two, black hair, grey
eyes, five-five --" his face momentarily quirked in the slightest
of smiles "-- bust size and weight variable upon request."
6. 38: City mice, country mice
The plane landed at six a.m. Sunday -- Montana time: Jason set
his watch ahead two hours as they touched down. It took several
painful minutes to work his way out of the plane: the economy red-
eye flights didn't have seats which were kind to tall people. He'd
frozen into a cramped package of knotted muscles in the third hour,
and if he'd had a sword with which to try the Gordian solution, he
would have considered using it. When he could finally move for
more than three seconds at a time, he limped over to a phone and
dialed the number on the torn bit of DNA printout.
It started ringing. After the fourth bell, he started waiting
for the answering machine. By the eighth, he was hoping for a
neighbor to break in and answer, and he got his miracle in the
middle of the twelfth.
A loud click, and then a female voice, deep, somewhat throaty,
a little tired --
"Well, obviously you're too stupid to count. That's as good a
reason as any to remove you from the gene pool." A brief pause.
"But then, you woke me up before twelve on a _Sunday_. That's an
even _better_ reason." Another brief pause, during which he could
hear buttons being pressed. "Okay, I've got you on Caller ID:
could you hang on while I use a reverse directory to get the
address? After that, it's two minutes to get the gun, and then you
just wait around until --"
-- and quite serious.
Somehow, Jason found his voice. "Ms. Shaw?" His brain was
another matter.
A yawn. "Ah, you can talk. Still not a good reason for
chancing your being able to procreate and make a new generation of
morons." Shuffling sounds. "How presentable do you want your
corpse to be? .22's make smaller holes."
"Ms. Shaw --" the words came in a rush, as if by saying them
fast enough, he could block the bullet from coming through the
earpiece "-- Sadira asked me to call!"
A long, long pause, then "I'm listening."
Jason summed up the situation in fifty words or less.
He got dead air for a response, then, "Tell Sadira -- no, she's
probably listening on an extension -- Ebs, I know you too well, and
when I show up and you trigger a CO2 capsule under your shirt, I'm
not going to be surprised. The set-up was a little too
unbelievable. But according to this area code, you're in town and
I'd be glad to see you, so where can I pick you up?"
"Sadira isn't with me," Jason said desperately. "She was going
to use the Billings' airport. She hasn't called you?"
Was it possible to _hear_ a puzzled look? "Well, _duh_, no,
she hasn't."
"Ms. Shaw --"
A sigh mixed into another yawn. "Great, now I'm my aunt. If
you know Sadira well enough to have her put you up to this pitiful
stunt, then Pamela or Pam."
"Pamela --" An inspiration. "I swear to you by all that I
hold sacred that everything I told you is the complete truth, and
that Sadira needs your help."
"I see." The doubt came through clearly. "Exactly what do you
hold sacred?"
He could adopt the begging posture again, but it was a little
hard to pick up over a phone. There had to be words, something
that would convince her -- "Pamela, she's in trouble, and she needs
your help. Isn't that enough?"
Another sigh. "If this is a practical joke --"
"It's not."
"I have no intention of laughing. Where are you?"
"I'm at the airport."
She laughed, higher and merrier than her voice had led him to
believe possible. "_Which_ airport, country mouse? There's a
choice of three."
"Kennedy. The Trans-United terminal."
"Okay. You wouldn't happen to have a weather forecast handy,
would you?"
He did: there were several monitors arrayed above the phone
bank presenting various sorts of tourist-helpful information.
"High of forty-five, sunny."
"How sunny?"
Jason blinked and stared at the screen. "Just sunny."
"Great." The word was not said with sincerity. "How do I spot
you?"
Jason quickly described himself. "All right. Be at the front
of the terminal. I should be there in less than ninety minutes if
the traffic gods are with me." Her voice was getting fainter: she
was taking the phone away from her mouth.
"Wait! We should try to spot each other. How do I recognize
you?"
"Oh, that one's easy," she told him, voice clear, bemused.
"I'm the Invisible Woman."
She hung up.
The Invisible Woman picked him up at 9:15.
Pamela Shaw was about 5'10". She was probably also the girl
whom Sadira had roomed with in college who taught her that
personality (definitely the best word from some bad choices) wasn't
determined by build. There was a very impressive bustline pushing
out the front of her coat -- not quite on a par with the _Gent_
photo of Jasmine, but Pam's arms swung free at her sides instead of
pushing the mammaries forward. Her movements were sure and
confident, strolling through the crowded airport with complete
assurance that the few people who were staring, frozen, _would_ get
out of the way in time, but ready to shift away if they didn't.
There were very few of those: everyone else cleared a path for the
apparition.
Every other detail of her person was covered in cloth. She
wore a hooded jacket with a headband and scarf over her face, so
the only exposed area was her eyes -- and those were concealed by
skier's sunglasses. She wore gloves that blended into her sleeves,
and long pants that shifted to reveal thick socks. There wasn't a
millimeter of skin visible.
"Hello, country mouse," said the muffled voice as she strode up
to him. "_Big_ mouse. Is that all your luggage?"
Jason looked down, tried to make some sort of eye contact,
failed dismally. "That's the lot."
"Follow me. There should be a nice clear trail." The last was
said with the faintest hint of rancor.
There was, all the way back to the car, a black Neon with tinted
windows. "Feel free to mess with the passenger seat until you're
less uncomfortable. You should be able to straighten your legs if
you work at it." Jason spent a futile three minutes fiddling with
the controls, managing to get his knees to a thirty-degree angle.
Pam reached up to her face with both hands, removed the
sunglasses -- then, before he could try to see her eyes, pushed
back hood, headband, and scarf in a single practiced notion.
Her hair was white -- not light gray or platinum blond, but
_white_, devoid of any other color, styled short and curling over
small ears. Her skin was the same, without even the blue and red
tracings of blood vessels to lend it hue. She turned to look at
him, and he saw nearly invisible lips pursed in an ironic little
smile, accompanied by dancing blue eyes. "Blink anytime you're
ready," she said, "but I can't drive with all that stuff blocking
my vision. Or I could put it all back on, and you could watch the
road instead of me." She examined his face. "That's a question.
Let's hear it."
"I thought --" He stopped, then went ahead anyway. "I thought
albino eyes were pink."
The smile got a little more sincere. "Contacts, country
mouse." She started the car.
Sadira ran her morning check. The first thing she found was
discomfort.
She rolled over onto her back -- which alleviated some of the
feeling -- unwrapped herself from the blankets, and looked down.
"Damn," she said. It didn't seem to cover the situation.
"Wow." That didn't work either.
Without another word, she carefully got up, went to one of the
bags, fished out the measuring tape, then headed for the bathroom
and pulled her shirt off in the front of the full-length mirror.
She had just been filling in the last crevices of the D-cup bra
when she'd gone to sleep: her breasts were now uncomfortably
squeezed into the cups, extra flesh protruding from top, bottom,
and sides. She had bought a sports bra: completely elastic, with
no hooks to give way. The undergarment had stretched as far as it
could. Sadira reached down and, with some work and even more
discomfort, got the bra off.
"Well," she finally said, "that was a waste of fifteen
dollars." Freed from the compression bra, her breasts seemed to
have expanded instantly. They were still quivering on her chest,
and she put her hands up to stop the motion -- then found her hands
could no longer cover them completely. The DD/E was not going to
fit.
Sadira explored. The areola had expanded without fading, but
they remained in proportion to the remainder of the breasts. Her
nipples, which were rapidly becoming erect from the tactile
inspections, had grown to a similar degree.
She placed her hands underneath them and lifted: now, she
could feel real weight, a few pounds for each hand. She let go and
watched them jiggle back to a full stop.
They were high and firm -- gravity had hardly had a chance to
dig its claws in. The warmth generated into her hands seemed
stronger -- but then, there was more mass to generate it.
The nipples were _very_ sensitive (<more nerves,> said some
detached portion of her mind): there was a delicious tingle from
the rubbing, something that felt like it was going to be very hard
to stop --
-- she stopped --
-- then reached down and lifted her left breast, orienting the
nipple so that it was pointing roughly straight up, lowering her
head towards it. She couldn't quite reach herself, but it was a
near thing. <Another six hours ought to do it,> thought the same
part, which had nothing better to do.
Finally, she used the measuring tape. Thirty-eight inches.
Sadira went to the little writing desk the hotel had provided
and sat down. Hard. Her breasts jiggled to a stop.
"Maybe I could build a virus that would _reduce_ bust size,"
she mused, then started laughing. "Right. How? Matter to energy?
Three weeks and they could drop me over Nagasaki!" The image
wouldn't go away: being lowered out of the belly of a World War II
plane, the most buxom atom bomb on record --
-- the bombardier said to the pilot, "Don't worry. If we miss
and she doesn't detonate, she'll bounce back to us."
Sadira laughed until she cried, tears staining the small note
pad on the desk, and then went to the window to look at the snow.
The world looked back at her, white, pure, renewed. She thought
of Pam, a snowball fight in their junior year, and Pam threatening
to go naked into the battle, becoming an invisible target --
-- more laughter, and she took a shower.
The hot water felt absolutely delicious.
They reached Pam's apartment in sixty-seven minutes. Traffic
was horrible. Pam was worse. She drove with absolutely no regard
for laws: local, state, federal, physics. The Neon shifted lanes
into spots feet too small for it, merrily cascaded around the edges
of curbs, and at least once, attempted a pole vault. Jason, in
those few moments when his eyes weren't squeezed shut in terror,
looked at Pam's face and found quiet concentration. She was neither
trying to scare him or show off. She was just driving. What
_really_ scared him was that most of the other cars were being
piloted the same way. The ones that weren't were either parked or
wrecked...
He had never been so happy to get out of a car, leg cramps and
all. Dead men couldn't feel pain. Pamela re-wrapped before
getting out, then shed the layers again when they entered her
apartment.
Pamela lived in a small brownstone in what his television
memory said was SoHo. The apartment was basically one divided
room: a small bedroom, a high counter, and a tiny kitchen, with a
miniscule bathroom visible at the back. It had been furnished with
economy: there seemed to be plenty of room for the hundreds of
thick books which lined the shelves. The rest consisted of a few
stools, a huge bed with a dozen pillows, and a good computer system,
all painted in dark shades. Pamela marched in and sat down on the
lush, low bed. The sheets looked like velvet.
"Okay," she said. "Off with the clothes."
Jason said the most intelligent thing that came to mind:
"Huh?"
"The clothing." She shifted her jacket off. The padding it
provided had not been enhancing her bustline: the material seemed to
have been stretched thin in that area. It had been stretched in
the black ribbed sweater she was wearing, and he could see the huge
masses quiver with every motion. "From the smell I was enjoying in
the car, you've been wearing them well over a day. The shower's
over there."
Jason blushed -- and saw surprise wash across Pam's face.
The phone rang.
Pam dived across the bed towards the little nightstand, coming
to a stop with one hand on the phone, the other on the floor, and
her breasts dangling over the edge of the bed. She suddenly rolled
over and slid down at the same time, so that her legs were visible
from the knees up, with the rest of her body vanished into the
space between bed and tinted picture window. "Still not twelve.
What do you want on your tombstone?" Then, "Sadira?"
"Still trying to solve the overpopulation problem?" Sadira
asked dryly.
"Actually --" Sadira could hear the blush in her friend's
voice " -- I was in the middle of unintentionally embarrassing your
friend into a coronary. I wasn't going to intentionally get him for
another hour."
Jason stepped closer, looked down, and kept looking despite
himself: from his angle, he couldn't see Pam's face: just a rise
of sweater with a phone cord vanishing behind it. "Is she okay?"
"I'll check: Sadira, the country mouse wants to know if you're
okay."
"You nicknamed him?"
"All the better to get his attention with. Answer the
question."
"Fine -- all things considered. I'm snowed into Billings, the
most local airports haven't opened, and one of them is under siege.
The trains are still running, though: I'm heading east in about an
hour. At least Jason found you."
"This isn't a joke, right?" Pam briefly raised the phone and
regarded it with a mixture of worry and humor. "Actually, tell me
it _is_ a joke. It's easier to believe."
"Thirty-eight. And growing."
Pamela awkwardly propped herself up on her elbows, cradling the
phone between left shoulder and ear. "Damn. Wish I could see
you." She blew a tight burst of air from an extended lower lip.
"You know what I mean."
"I know." A tapping sound came through the line, fingers on
plastic. "The reality barrier is bruised, but holding."
"It's probably better if I saw your data. How many files did
you tie to his tail?"
Sadira winced at the phone, and knew Pam felt it. "None."
"None? You were paranoid enough to set up this whole Escape
From Montana and you didn't split the information? What kind of
runner are you?" Jason, between gasps of terror, had provided some
additional information.
"A rank amateur. Got a new Email address yet?"
"Whiteout@erl.net. What have you got?"
"Computer access. Billings has an Internet cafe, and I'm
sitting in it."
Pamela noticed Jason's questioning face and relayed the news
before saying "Nice work."
"Not really: I was looking for food. The computer was a
nice surprise. I'm going to send you my zip data: the modem's
fast enough to give us _just_ enough time."
"Fax?"
"Got a week? I don't."
"Disk."
"I'll send now." A pause. "Going through."
"Okay. I've got twitching whiskers here: let me put him
on." She passed up the phone: Jason virtually snatched it out of
her hand.
"How are you feeling?"
"Passable. Hungry."
"Any other effects?"
"My temperature is up a bit, but that's just from the higher
metabolic rate. No trouble sleeping, but I've eaten so much before
bed the last two nights that even with the blast furnace, it still
takes until morning to get hungry again."
"You haven't been able to curb your appetite?"
"I can't. It's eat or shut down, and given the alternative..."
Sadira gently sighed. "It'll take too long to reach a clear
airport by car, so I'm taking a train to Minneapolis and then
flying from there: the time consumption will be about the same.
I'll call in whenever I can."
"We'll be at the lab?" This with a glance at Pam, who nodded.
"Take down the number." Relay: Pam to Jason to Sadira.
Pamela reached out for the phone: he ignored it. "Just keep
your eyes open, okay? I was in GenTree after you were, and you
left no one happy." He summed up. Silence was his response. "I
_hate_ being right."
"I'll be careful." But there was uncertainty at the edges.
"Put Pam back on." He handed the phone down.
Pamela took it and said "Just remember the applicable rules,
kid. This is a _Complex_ situation."
A moment of quiet, then, "Right. Stay alert --"
"-- trust no one --"
They chorused "-- and keep your laser handy!"
Sadira whistled softly. "Now if only I _had_ a laser..."
"I'll build you a plasma rifle. Get here safe, Citizen."
"Yes, Friend Gamemaster. See you in a day or so."
Pamela smiled. "I just thought of something stupid. We made
each other up, did each other's hair, studied, traded pranks -- did
we ever trade clothes?"
She knew immediately that it had been the wrong thing to say:
Sadira replied "Once," and Pam remembered. "Start working,
Citizen. I'll be there soon."
Pamela slowly worked her way back to a standing position, then
hung up the phone.
Jason's face held anger and control in equal measure. "I
wanted to say something --"
"She hung up first, Mousey." Pamela stretched. "The best
thing we can do for her is start working on this problem. I'll
turn on the computer. You --" she pointed to the bathroom "--
shower."
Carmody stepped into Nigilo's office. He didn't look as if
he'd slept on the floor. He had. Nigilo did look like it, and
he had commandeered the chair. "My apologies for the delay, sir.
It's difficult to get information out of a bank on Sundays."
Nigilo rubbed his eyes and sat up a little straighter.
"Where?"
"A bus ticket to Billings, yesterday at one p.m."
Nigilo's eyebrows went up. "A _bus_ ticket?"
"That's what the agency said. Admittedly, it's not a place
most people think to look."
"No, it's just too slow..." Nigilo's brow furrowed. "Any
major genetics companies in Billings?"
"One minor one. I'll investigate it, but the probability is
very low."
"And Billings was snowed in last night... Well, at least she
hasn't thought to dump the credit card." He reached for the phone.
"Track the options."
"Yes, sir." Carmody left.
Nigilo picked up the phone and hit an autodial setting. As
always, he got a pickup on the first ring. "Ron? Need some work?"
He smiled. "Then you've got some. There's a little trap I'd like
you to set..."