TEST SIGNALS

by David Bartell

 

* * * *

 

New technologies create new moral dilemmas—but not simple ones.

 

I clicked the Promote Target icon on my desk and claimed another minor victory. “Just one more to go,” I said out loud, “and it’s vacation time!”

 

“What is it?” came the voice of Kaitlin from over the short cubical wall.

 

“Some kind of squirrel monkey,” I said, noting the genetic ancestry.

 

“I thought that was already a real animal.”

 

“This hybrid is different. Kinda cute. Wanna see?”

 

“Nah. Too busy.”

 

Me too. My job was to discover something by accident, and I had a quota to meet.

 

A lot of scientific discoveries are made by accident, like say, penicillin, or matches. The polite term is serendipity, but when you’re in the business, you understand that it’s half desperation and half luck. Sometimes you learn more from the botched experiments.

 

Our training video had an old black-and-white skit where Don Knotts was dressed up like a nutty professor. He kept stumbling around, knocking over test tubes racks and spilling chemicals all over the place. An interviewer asked what he was doing.

 

“I’m trying to discover something by accident!” he squeaked.

 

“Class D Serendipity,” a superimposed title noted, until the klutz tripped over that too.

 

We refined discovering things by accident to an art. Genie, our supercomputer, generated billions of genetic combinations, including the human genome, other organisms, and primordial mixtures of everything. The output was fed to a subsystem, the simulator, which would “grow” an organism to spec, and try to determine whether it was likely to have congenital problems that were “incompatible with life.”

 

The simulator was licensed to kill. The more they improved it, the more potential life forms it eradicated. The beauty of it was, when a test subject failed, no one cared or even noticed. It was just data. Of course, Genie lacked the ability to make final judgments, which is why they had openings for real people. They loved med-school dropouts—kinda smart, kinda cheap—which is how they found me. Because of my hands, my parents thought I would make a good surgeon, but during my first visit to an ER, I discovered by (car) accident that the sight of blood made me faint. I was a good fit here at Good Fortune Genetic Design.

 

I only needed one more target, and I’d get two weeks off, so I went back to work, not caring how dubious the targets in my queue were. I’d promote the first decent one and get my butt out of there. I’d already discovered four virtual species of potential interest. No cures for diseases like my pollutant-associated mutation syndrome (PAMS), no missing link, or Bigfoot. But my teddy panda had promising marketing potential, my frog-hog’s skin had useful properties for burn victims, and I have no idea what they might do with this squirrel monkey thing.

 

My call light came on, and the bell trilled my favorite guitar riff from “Love Slave.” I jumped a bit, thinking that someone had already returned my promoted target, rejecting it. Then I saw the ID. It was a lady who used to work on our floor.

 

“Tina Peshj?” I said out loud. She never spoke to anyone while she was here, much less me. Why a call now?

 

“That cow is calling you?” That was Kaitlin, in the next cube.

 

I laughed at that. The other women said that Tina had an udder on the back of her neck. I think it was really just a clump of huge skin tags, but it did look rather like an udder. That’s not why people called her names though. She was a bitch, and rumor had it that she had slept her way to a “comfy position” up in Special Projects. Who would actually sleep with that “cow” was beyond me—and I was pretty desperate myself.

 

“Yeah, it’s Tina. Want to come check it out?” Any excuse to get Kaitlin to pay attention to me.

 

“I’ll pass,” she said. I was tired of hearing that. “Aren’t you going to answer her?”

 

“Not for a five-dollar nickel.”

 

I freely admit to being an asshole. I’m very loyal when it comes to friends, though I haven’t many of those.

 

Tina’s message asked me to come up to her office to see an unusual target she’d come across. I told Kaitlin that Tina just needed some help because she didn’t understand how Genie worked, and I headed for the elevator. In fact, I was intrigued, partly because it was Tina and partly because I’d never been to Special Projects before.

 

Tina had actually asked me out once, when I first joined the company. I refused. I was queasy that way. It bothered me when she turned her head too quickly, because her blond hair would flip aside, and I’d see the thing on the back of her neck. She wasn’t all that hideous when her hair stayed in place, though. I might have actually gone out with her, but by then, I’d heard of her reputation as the company whore.

 

I found her office on the fourth floor. Not where the bigwigs were, but definitely a step up from our prairie dog village. Here the halls had long lights that reflected off the ceiling and nice textured wallpaper that had a pattern of endless double helixes. Tina had a real office with a door and a window that overlooked the half-empty parking lot. I entered quietly, and Tina did not turn to see me right away. Her hair covered her neck. From that limited view, she looked like any other girl, and I wondered why she hadn’t had that growth removed a long time ago.

 

“Hello,” I said.

 

She turned. She wore jeans and a black T-shirt with a Led Ventrickle logo on it. No makeup. The only thing she had fussed over was her hair, for obvious reasons.

 

“I requested an image,” she said, looking me over a bit, I think. “It ought to be finished any time now.”

 

Sometimes a creature would be so strange you’d want to render a detailed image. Some of them were just wrong. So messed up, like the human gastropods. Or the saber-toothed rectal worms. But most of the time, they were hilarious. We’d all gather in someone’s cube and laugh our heads off at the pictures. After a while, even the sick ones were kind of funny. We gave them stupid names, and then we’d get serious, and try to find something useful.

 

I looked her SmartDesk over, trying to figure it out. Everyone’s is configured differently, but hers was pretty jacked. It was completely level, not inclined at all. You had to lean over it to see past the glare from the window. Then, instead of stacks of windows tiled up everywhere, there were only two windows open, plus her touchpad and tele. One window was her work queue—a single target—and the other was a folder labeled “Next Week,” closed, with a virtual gargoyle paperweight on it. With so little, her monitor might as well have been an old upright.

 

“What have you got?” I said.

 

She dragged the target to flip it over, and the image appeared. I leaned over. It looked just as I thought it would, based on the data: Target 9381093—humanoid, hunchback, “slimb” (supernumerary limbs, non-Hedgehog protein) et cetera. The thing had two extra arms extending from a half-formed second collarbone on the chest.

 

What do you know, a four-armed freak. Just like me.

 

No, sorry. A natural-born surgeon, that’s what I was supposed to have become. Well, I had the hands for it all right, but not the stomach.

 

At first I thought it was a joke, but none of my friends were smart enough to pull off a hack like that. I flexed my twenty fingers and stared at the familiar four-armed image. The face was not rendered, but mine reflected faintly on the desk.

 

“What do you think?” she said.

 

“It looks like me.”

 

“Scary, huh?”

 

“What the hell is this thing?” I said. “I mean, why would it pop up like this?”

 

“I really don’t know,” she said, wrinkling her eyebrows in puzzlement. Then she looked at me—at my arms—awkward as it was. “Listen,” she said, “why don’t we go out and take a long lunch? We can talk it over.”

 

“Well, okay,” I said. “But first, I’ve got another idea. Let’s go ask Swami.”

 

Upstairs there was this guy, Ben Lebinsky, who everyone called Swami. Wheelchair bound, smart, independently wealthy—we all wondered why he bothered to work. Usually no one talked to him because he could be a real SOB, and you never could tell what he was thinking. But sometimes people are misunderstood, and I once had a good conversation with him about botany, of all things.

 

Swami was in his office, which, like Tina’s, had real walls and a door. The door was open, and Swami had his back to us. He was staring at his desk. On his window shelf were several bonsai trees, and a huge picture of a strange tree hung on his wall. It didn’t look like a real tree, but some kind of fantasy thing. A caption said, in a green vinelike font, “The Healing of the Nations.” There were other posters, too, done in throwback style. One had a gray Star of David made of heavy chain links on a black backdrop, with the cryptic title “80,000 Careless Ethiopians” in red. The Jewish symbol and obscure African reference made a curious combination. Another depicted a musical score, but when you looked close, the music was made of tiny DNA strands. You see a lot of DNA motifs around here, but otherwise Swami was a unique character.

 

“Hey, Swami. I’m Jimmy Tanner. This is Tina Peshj.”

 

He turned his chair halfway around, apparently unable to move his neck much. As soon as I saw him from the front, I remembered that he had cerebral palsy. He sat in his chair, head cocked, arms bent oddly, making me self-conscious of my own extra arms. He was about thirty, and had long, stringy black hair.

 

“Hey guys,” he said. His head bobbed a little when he talked, and he seemed friendly enough. “One Tree. What can I do you for?”

 

“Tina came across a weird target today, and we thought we’d see what you made of it.”

 

“Genie moves in mysterious ways,” he said. I knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t know why he pretended to be so superficial. “What ‘cha got?”

 

We hadn’t brought an ID for him to look up, but described the six-limbed target.

 

“You found Spider-Man,” he said, sounding very serious. Then he chuckled and lifted a bent wrist in my direction. “Your cousin!”

 

“It seems like a pretty big coincidence,” I said.

 

“There’s a difference between irony and coincidence,” he said with an air of condescension.

 

“Whatever.”

 

“Maybe someone wanted Tina to come to you.”

 

He tried to be friendly again, but I didn’t buy it. A smile faded. “So,” he said, “what are you going to do? Are you going to pass that target to the next round?”

 

“I don’t know,” said Tina, looking at me with uncertainty.

 

“Why would anyone go to the trouble of forging a target, just to get me and Tina together?” I said.

 

Tina scrunched her face in disgust, and Swami put an upright finger over taut lips. “I don’t know,” he said, turning to Tina.

 

“Don’t look at me!” she said.

 

Her face was getting red, so I decided to change the subject. Not that I don’t like seeing people squirm, but in her case, I’d rather see it in private. “So what’s with the trees?” I said.

 

Swami smiled genuinely this time. “I just love trees,” he said. “Did you know they have their own missing link?”

 

“No...” Sorry I asked.

 

“Man descended from some early form, and there are missing pieces to the puzzle. If you think about it, the same is true for trees. They didn’t just start out tall like that. They had to compete for sunlight with other plants, and different ones grew taller and taller. Still, the species are more similar than different, losing their leaves at the same time and all that, so there must have been common ancestors to modern trees. Maybe only one ancestor. The One Tree.”

 

I studied the tree mural on his wall again. It was a computer-generated image. The trunk was not straight but curvy, and the branches made it look like a bonsai—artistic, with oversized leaves. The leaves had wide, pointed fingers, with serrated edges.

 

Swami saw me studying it. “I’ll leave it as an exercise for the student to figure out the species of The One Tree.”

 

“I think I get it,” I said. “You’re rich, but you work here because of your interest in botany. You are using Genie to help you find your missing link, aren’t you?”

 

He smiled and nodded in approval. “You’re on the right river. Let’s leave it at that.”

 

Tina swung her arm back and forth at her side. “Okay. Thanks anyway.”

 

* * * *

 

I took Tina to lunch. That was the first date I’d had since starting the job and only my third since dropping out of med school. I actually hadn’t dated that much during college either, partly because I was too busy and partly because my mom never liked any of the girls I dated. There were two reasons they went out with me, she said. Either they did it out of pity for me, or else they were deformed themselves.

 

“It’s nice to have high standards,” I once complained to her, “but what the hell do you expect? I have four flipping arms, for God’s sake.”

 

“They’ll make a nice girl very comfortable some day,” she said.

 

That’s a mother for you—definitely not of this world. My dad was the opposite. He once advised me not to get married, but to always try to have affairs with married women. The theory was that if they were already married, they wouldn’t demand a commitment. Up to then, I thought my parents had been a happy couple, but I guess they were just stuck with each other.

 

“Your mother and I were raised to be happy and independent,” Dad explained. “Not values conducive to marriage, when you put them together. Thousands of years of family values and silly love songs, undone by one generation who thought it knew better!”

 

I felt really sorry for him, but he punched my shoulder and winked at me.

 

“Thank God,” he said with a chuckle.

 

Lunch with Tina was okay. We took the rail to a place on the other side of town that neither of us had been to. It was a New York-style Italian deli, and the obviously Italian New Yorker that ran the place was constantly yelling at all the obviously non-Italian immigrants that were carrying on his family legacy for him. No table service, so we had to wait at the counter while they fixed our orders. I had a pepperoni roll smothered in sauce, and Tina had a dish of some kind of pasta casserole. We went to sit by a mural where the Tower of Pisa threatened to collapse onto our lunch.

 

I hadn’t expected romance; neither of us are that type. That’s for perfect couples, of which there aren’t any. Some myths have outlived their usefulness. I did have the feeling that she was checking me out, though. She confirmed it by mentioning my arms.

 

“Why don’t you have them removed?” she said, locking her eyes to mine.

 

I forced a little laugh. “You’re a blunt instrument, aren’t you?”

 

“I wasn’t born a bitch,” she recited. “It’s men like you that made me one.”

 

That made me laugh for real. She smirked with satisfaction.

 

“Well?” she said. “Don’t the arms get in the way? I can’t imagine they were any fun to grow up with, and I should know.”

 

“Kids used to pick on me. Seriously, the first time I asked a girl out, I wore shin guards, in case she tried to kick me.”

 

Tina laughed. “I’m still wearing my shin guards. Not literally, but you know what I mean.”

 

I did. My shin guards had become the cynical facade I put on every day. But the kicking still hurt.

 

“My parents said my arms were a gift,” I said. “You know, like I was deformed for a reason.”

 

Tina laughed out loud. “Gawd! How stupid can people be?”

 

“I know. A gift, right. My mom thought that with four arms, I would be a brilliant surgeon. How she thought a pair of useless claws could perform surgery is beyond me.”

 

Her eyes had a twinkle in them. “Well, couldn’t they hold the clamps or something?”

 

“That’s exactly the sort of thing she used to say. It was ridiculous.”

 

“Are your parents still around?”

 

“They both flipped off a couple years ago.”

 

She didn’t say she was sorry to hear that, because she wasn’t. There’s nothing more sickening than fake emotions. “So now you can get rid of the arms.”

 

“Oh. I don’t know. I’m just used to them, I guess.” She had a point though, getting me thinking that I sure didn’t need to keep the damned arms just for my parent’s sake. “Why don’t you get your growth removed?”

 

I tried to lock her eyes, they way she had done to me, but this time she looked at the floor. “I’m afraid to.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I don’t really know. My parents were, so I am too.”

 

“Do you think they had a good reason to be scared?”

 

“I think my parents thought something bad would happen to me, like I’d lose my strength. Maybe there’s a hormone secreted.”

 

I made the shape of a letter omega, my hand approaching one ear, arcing over my head, and out the other ear. She’d gone over my head.

 

“You know, like Samson,” she said.

 

“Samson. Wasn’t he some old super hero?”

 

“Yeah. When his main squeeze cut off his hair, he lost his strength.”

 

“So you really don’t know why you shouldn’t cut it off,” I said as I got up to dump our lunch trash.

 

“No.”

 

“Then why don’t you?”

 

“That’s a dumb question,” she said. “Just who would take care of me if something went wrong?”

 

“You have friends, don’t you?”

 

“If only. Do you know how hard it is to take care of someone when their health is really, really bad? I don’t have those kinds of friends.”

 

“Well, maybe there’s nothing that’s going to really happen.”

 

She looked at me with disdain. “Well, maybe there is. What’s with you anyway?”

 

“Why don’t you ask your parents?”

 

“Why don’t you leave me alone? No one has heard of my mom in years, and my dad’s in jail.” She pushed the table away enough to fold her arms in defiance.

 

“Perfect,” I said, not letting her get away with that. “So we’ll start with your father.”

 

“You’re such a jackass,” she said, failing to suppress a smile.

 

“No comment.”

 

“None taken.” This girl was good.

 

“I’ll pick you up Saturday morning,” I said.

 

* * * *

 

Prisons haven’t changed much since those old black-and-white movies. The prisoners are still low-lifes, the walls are still bare and smell of painted cement, and the wardens are still ugly people, most of them. Tina’s dad was in that kind of place, not one of those white-collar suites. He had been caught hacking a government system, she told me on the way there. It wasn’t a habit of his to break the law, but when you do something innocuous in the wrong place, it can be a federal offense. Like saying the word “hijack” too loud on a passenger jet. Her dad, Tyler, got himself fifteen years for peeking at the personnel folder of his boss at Homeland Security. That was the story, anyway.

 

We were scanned and taken to a visiting room. Tina was very anxious. She kept fixing her hair. I couldn’t tell whether she was excited or disgusted to see her father. She hadn’t told me so, but I could tell there was something more than his conviction between them. Tina sat in a hard plastic chair with metal legs, along a wall with a thick Plexiglas window, like banks had. The hole to talk through was made with clear baffles, so you couldn’t make contact or pass anything through. I stood behind her.

 

Presently, her uniformed father was escorted to the other side. Tyler Peshj was a man of average build, with greasy brown hair that was combed to an artificial perfection. He looked to be about fifty, but had a worn expression that was littered with the scars of acne. When he saw Tina he perked up. The escorts let go of his shoulders and departed through a back door.

 

Tina had completely dropped her bitch persona and was trying not to sob. “Daddy,” she said.

 

“Christine. It sure is good to see you.”

 

To avoid further sentiments, she quickly introduced me as “just a friend.” Then they didn’t say much to each other for a while. It was more like they were caressing each other with words. Nothing mushy at all, but it was the way they spoke, the way they looked at each other.

 

Tina looked uncomfortable, and she said, “Jimmy has a computer question for you.”

 

“Yes, sir,” I said, surprised at my politeness. I must have been trying to put some structure to my own discomfort. “We work for Good Fortune, as you probably know, and I was wondering whether it would be possible to hack into the computers.” I outlined the situation of the four-armed target, and trailed off, not knowing how much detail Tina’s dad needed.

 

“Not a problem,” he said without a thought. “Might take time, is all.”

 

“Okay.” I hadn’t prepared anything after that, and his answer was too easy.

 

Tina wanted me to keep talking, and she was still fiddling with her hair. Tyler looked at her, pretty much ignoring me. “Why did you come here, honey?” he said.

 

“Daddy,” she said, faltering. “It’s just that I was thinking of having this removed.” She breezed a hand halfway to her neck. He knew what she meant.

 

“I’m surprised you haven’t done that long ago.”

 

“Really? That’s funny, because I remember that Mom was really scared to do it. I always assumed that there was a good reason for that.”

 

“Of course there was a good reason. Your mother was an idiot.”

 

“Where is she now? Do you know?”

 

“Not a clue, kiddo. If I were you, I’d stay away from that woman. Then again, I wouldn’t blame you for looking her up. If you do, don’t tell her where I am, okay? I got nowhere to hide.”

 

They talked a little more, and Tyler tried to be polite and ask me a few questions. He obviously thought Tina was bringing her man to meet her father, even though we both denied it. I couldn’t tell whether he was happy or indifferent about the idea.

 

Time was up and the escorts returned. Tyler looked hard at his daughter. “I have one last question for you,” he said. “Can you promise to tell me the truth?”

 

She made a fake smile and then sneered. “I love you too much to lie to you, Daddy.”

 

“Oh, then this will sound silly,” he said, mimicking her sarcasm. “Do you hate me?”

 

“Of course I do.”

 

Then something very strange happened. Tina must have blushed, I thought, because her cheeks became really red. Tyler sat up in his chair and drew close to look at her face. She realized something had happened and turned away from him. Then I saw it.

 

Her cheeks each had a bright red heart tattooed on them. It took me a minute to figure out what it was: mood makeup. She never wore makeup that I’d noticed before, but there was no mistaking this. Mood makeup is some gunk that reacts to your skin temperature, or electrical resistance or some jack like that. It changes color depending on your mood.

 

She was so embarrassed that her chair fell over as she got up. She gave me a shove toward the door, the metal chair legs clattering loudly on the floor.

 

“Come on!” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

 

I shrugged with my hands to Tyler, who just sat there perplexed. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye?” I said to her.

 

“Good-bye, Daddy,” she called, holding her hair in place. She didn’t turn back.

 

* * * *

 

We stopped at the bank to make a withdrawal on the way to the clinic. While waiting in the car at the drive-through, I learned that the rumors about Tina being the company whore were all lies. She hadn’t slept with anyone. I believed her; guys spread those kind of stories when there is a girl that they think somehow threatens their sexuality. They do it when someone is so hot that they all want her, but can’t have her. And they do it when someone is so unsavory that they’re embarrassed to admit that, yes, there are females out there that even their super-libidos must reject. So they spread lies, to create the illusion of legitimacy to their rejection. I figured that one out from being rejected so often.

 

People buy into it, too, even other women. I’d heard Kaitlin call Tina a cow, for example. That was her way of fencing off the livestock from “real” women, so that guys could more easily tell which side she was on.

 

It was hard to find the clinic because it wasn’t on any of the computer maps. Those places that are “guaranteed 100% sterile” don’t usually want to be listed. After missing several turns, we found it—a dubious establishment in the low-rent part of town.

 

Before I was born, the spiraling costs of health care nearly bankrupted the country. They had a big depression. People tried to socialize health care, but couldn’t quite pull it off politically, so for over twenty years, we’ve had a hybrid system that doesn’t work at all. You can’t get good care in the government facilities unless you’re uninsured, and you can’t get good care in the private sector unless you’re rich. Of course, insurance was one of the causes of the problem in the first place.

 

Another cause was pollution. A lot of kids were born with defects, like Tina and myself. After a few business, were flipped off by lawsuits, a law was passed that basically let the others off. Too many would be put out of business, which would throw things deeper into economic ruin. They were still working on it, but at the time, a lot of middle-class people went to unlicensed clinics.

 

The people we met were just in it for the money, and since the job didn’t pay them well, they had pretty poor service. I could tell by the way they treated Tina that they didn’t believe in what they were doing anyway.

 

I waited for over an hour, until a semi-professional nurse brought Tina out of the operating room. Tina had a white towel wrapped around her head, held in place with a pink Velcro strap. It looked like she’d just come out of the shower, and I didn’t see any blood at all. This nurse, a black lady with an African or island accent and a badly repaired harelip, was the one person who seemed to care about Tina. She gave us painkiller and antibiotics, instructions for care, checked one last time for bleeding, and saw us to my car.

 

“How do you feel?” I asked.

 

“If only you cared.”

 

“Of course I care. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

 

She gave me a strange, pained look.

 

“Does it hurt?”

 

“The muscles in my neck are sore.” Tina exhaled a big breath, as if she’d been holding it all these years. “Wow,” she said. “I can’t believe I just did that.”

 

I took her to her apartment, offering to stay for a while. I’d have spent the night on the couch if she’d wanted, but she would have none of that. I’d seen how vulnerable she could be, but she was a proud lady, that one. She barely thanked me for helping her, as if that would somehow compromise her independence.

 

“Do you mind if I check on you?” I asked.

 

“No.”

 

Then, as she chained the door behind me, she opened it as far as it would go, and called me through the crack.

 

“Yeah?” I said.

 

“Sorry about the mood makeup.”

 

“Well, I’m not sure, but I think he appreciated it.”

 

“You’re really dense, aren’t you? It was meant for you.”

 

She slammed the door in my face. There is nothing more confounding for a guy than having a door slammed in your face, except maybe a slap in your actual face. With the door slam, you know you have to get back inside to overcome the insult, but you also know that you should let it go. It could have been classical drama, me yelling at her through the door like in some old movie. Only it wasn’t, because I’m not dramatic. She slammed the door in my face, so the hell with her.

 

* * * *

 

Neither of us would apologize, so we went on for a while like we were just co-workers. I sometimes had to keep my distance. While she had always been a bitter pill, she now seemed more acerbic, more in your face. I supposed that with the healing of her amputated growth, other scars were itching. I decided to let things cool for a while.

 

As it happened, Swami sent us both an interesting e-mail, and we met in his office to discuss it. Tina wouldn’t talk to me, and I only granted her a nod. I’d be damned if I was going to apologize to her for not being able to read her mind. You don’t slam doors in people’s faces for that.

 

“One Tree,” Swami said, apparently as a greeting. He backed his wheelchair into his office, and we sat in chairs to either side. “I think I figured out what’s going on with your four-armed target. But first, I have to ask you something. Either of you ever smoke herb?”

 

“No,” we both answered, both taken aback. It wasn’t the sort of question you asked someone at work. “What’s that got to do with anything?” I said.

 

“You may recall,” he said in an exaggerated haughty voice, “in our last lesson, that I spoke of the One Tree, so you know what that is.”

 

“The missing link of trees, right?”

 

“Correct-o-mundo. What I didn’t tell you was that the One Tree might as well be mythical at this point. I’ve done a lot of research, and I think it’s too far removed genetically from anything alive today to ever recreate.”

 

“I’ll bite,” I said. “What’s the missing link for marijuana?”

 

“Hey, I like you. You’re sharp!”

 

“I got talent, sidecar.”

 

He chuckled. “Anyway, you’re on the right river. I can’t recreate the One Tree, as I used to think. But I’m onto one of its descendants: Sinsemilla, the mystical mother of Mary Jane. She’s attainable, and her medicines hold many cures.”

 

I made spooky fingers and went, “Whoo!”

 

“Shut up, jerk,” Tina said. “I want to hear what Swami found out.”

 

“So you’re in?” Swami said to her.

 

“In what?”

 

“My little club. There’s too much research for me to do alone. Anyone who helps me reincarnate the ancestral herb will reap in like kind.”

 

“You must be smoking the good stuff,” I said.

 

“Funny,” Swami said with a bemused smile. I liked Swami, because he tolerated me. People often fight back, which just tells me that their ego is threatened. Swami had his act together, and I respected that. “Think about it. Man’s been growing and smoking herb almost since fire was harnessed. So herb evolved along with the human brain, in symbiosis. As man became more conscious, he needed herb less, so Mary Jane became relatively barren. And we became less spiritual.”

 

“Whoa.”

 

“Today’s herb is weak, giving only a bit of euphoria. But Sinsemilla, now, she would restore man’s full consciousness, a direct link to the original spirit breathed into the Garden of Eden. I don’t expect you to buy all that right away. But if you want to help, hey!”

 

“I promise, I’ll think about it. Now what about Tina’s target?”

 

“Fair enough,” said Swami. He paused for effect. “It’s a test signal.”

 

“A test signal.”

 

“It’s sort of like calibration. One way to do science is when you know the result you are looking for and set up a careful test for that result. But sometimes that so-called methodical purity is impossible to achieve. In our case, we don’t know the result at the outset, so we can’t afford to ignore data just because it isn’t rigorously attained. Our management needs to make sure that Genie identifies the targets that he should, and then they need to make sure we report them properly. So they inject an artificial target into the raw data. A test signal. The real rigor of our process happens at the back end.”

 

“Test signals.” Tina was uncertain. “Testing me, you mean.”

 

“Partly, yeah.”

 

For once, someone said something about that four-armed target that made sense. Since it was no coincidence that it hit me so close to home, it had to be that someone had deliberately planted it. Until now, I just could not figure out why. This was some kind of ethical test.

 

“So what should I do?” said Tina. “I mean, should I tag it for follow-up or trash it?”

 

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

 

“But what’s the right answer?”

 

“Not your problem. Your job is to identify Genie’s best targets. It’s up to someone else to be critical of your choices. The old scientific method was too critical up front. By the turn of the millennium, this negativity, posing as critical thinking, was killing science by feeding anointed lab coats and starving creativity.”

 

“I don’t know. I don’t want to do the wrong thing and blow my chances at my new position.”

 

“What chances? If you had a chance, would they treat you like a cog in a wheel? Allow me to quote Neville Livingston, aka Bunny Wailer. ‘We aren’t organizations, we are organisms.’ All these corporate types are part of a system, and a system doesn’t care about its parts. They’re replaceable.”

 

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Stupid of me to forget that. See ya.”

 

“No, seriously. If someone treats you like part of an organization, they don’t care about you. If they treat you like an organism, then they do.”

 

“That’s actually true,” Tina said, smirking at me.

 

Swami beamed. “Of course it’s true. If you don’t believe me, go check out who’s on the board of directors.”

 

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, turning to go, making praying-Gandhi hands. “See you around, Swami.”

 

“One Tree,” Swami said, waving over his head as he rolled to his desk.

 

“Thank you,” Tina said to him. Then she followed me out. “Good God, get me out of here,” she muttered.

 

* * * *

 

If Tina was being tested, why did the target resemble me? Was it originally intended for me? Did Tina’s promotion have anything to do with it? Swami had put us on the right river, but we still didn’t know much. I was damn well going to get to the bottom of it all, though.

 

Something else Swami said had made sense too, and when I got back to my desk, I looked into the company’s board of directors. There wasn’t one. The shareholders had voted to replace the old board with a computer. At the time, it was pretty controversial stuff, so it was not hard to find information on it.

 

The idea was that today’s business environment—which included local policy, local and federal law, oversight by several agencies, high investment costs, high risks, insurance nightmares, and more—was too complex a maze for humans to negotiate quickly enough to turn a profit. With a highly adaptive program tracking the myriad variables, creating and simulating strategies, the company had turned around and was four times more profitable than our nearest competitor. The owners plugged in the broad business goals, and let the machine figure out how to achieve them. For example, that’s how the current quota system got started. The board figured out that the way to maximize profit was to focus on certain metrics, such as the worker productivity measured as a ratio of qualified targets per month. It didn’t matter that there was nothing we could do to generate the targets—it was just a way of pulsing the company’s efficiency.

 

There was a management team that directed operations from this output. In that, they had a lot of leeway, but if the company fell short, it was that team that was fired, not the computer. All that made some sense of Swami’s warning about being treated like a machine part.

 

In a rare excursion, I went to my boss’s office to ask him about it. Dave Deale was a handsome guy, brown hair with graying temples. Deep, commanding voice. The kind that did well in front of customers, but not necessarily his employees. He was broad and muscular, but hobbled from some football injury, like he had blocked a field goal with his butt, and they never got the ball out.

 

“In the final analysis,” Dave said, after I asked about the board, “our company is just another flavor of mint.”

 

“I don’t get it.”

 

He smiled at his private joke. Some people are like that. They amuse themselves, and if no one else is amused, they are amused even more. “I mean the kind of mint that makes money. Of course we don’t print it; it’s all just numbers. But we’re nothing more than another kind of money-making apparatus. Another flavor of mint. See?”

 

“Yeah, Dave, now I get it. Doesn’t that make you feel like a cog in a wheel?”

 

“What do I care? I get paid, just like you and everybody else. Sometimes I’m proud of what we accomplish around here.” He shrugged. “It’s a job. Then I go home to my family, my kids climb all over me, and I’m someone important to them. You ever take a kid to Disney?”

 

I shook my head. Actually, I’d been one of those kids taken to Disney, when I was written off as a terminal case. I hated it. All those fantastic things to look at, but nothing was real—you couldn’t even touch most of it. It was a great monument to the imagination—but whose imagination? Whose dream was to take a vacation with a bunch of afflicted seven-year-old biological losers? Not mine, that was for sure.

 

“I forgot, you aren’t married,” he said. “You won’t find much love at work, ‘fraid to say.”

 

“You got that right.” I left his office, trying to find my way back to Walt Real World.

 

* * * *

 

I made an overture to Tina via e-mail, asking what she was going to do about her four-armed test signal. She made a brief reply that basically said it was none of my business. “Bitch” was my single-word response, to which she returned, “XOXO.” I was going to reply “Same to you,” but hesitated. Tina wasn’t as introverted as she was when I first got to know her. Before her operation, I don’t think she would have e-mailed things like that.

 

Something about that new assertiveness attracted me. If she was out to stick it to the world, to make them pay for the way they treated her, I wanted to be there to watch. We didn’t have to be lovers, but we didn’t have to be enemies either. She must have been thinking the same thing because after a couple of days with me not e-mailing back, I received another message from her.

 

She asked me to dinner and a movie. I made her promise not to slam any more doors in my face, and she went along, joking that she reserved the right if I called her a bitch or a cow. It was nice, the two of us having a laugh like that. Nothing like reminiscing over old insults to break the ice.

 

Dinner was okay, the movie sucked, and then she said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you want to make love?”

 

I laughed. I was into that. Since her neck healed, she actually looked hot. I made villain eyebrows, rolled a make-believe mustache in my fingers, and said, “My place or yours?”

 

“Not tonight,” she said. “There’s something you need to do before the rubber hits the road.”

 

“I’m all ears.”

 

“No, you’re all arms. Lose two of them, and I’m yours.”

 

I stared at her. She was all veneer. I hadn’t learned to see through that yet, and until now, I hadn’t wanted to. “You’re serious,” I said.

 

“Completely. I had my neck fixed because of you, so now it’s your turn.”

 

“That was just cosmetic surgery. Arms, that’s a whole different animal.”

 

“Exactly. And I’m not going to make love to an animal. To be honest with you, Jimmy, I don’t think anyone else will either.”

 

She had a point there. I instinctively clutched my smaller hands together, which was about the extent of their range of motion. They had good feeling though, and when they held each other, the damn things felt precious. I hated them.

 

Tina had me wanting her right then, but I wasn’t going to be manipulated like that. So I abruptly called it a night. No door slamming though.

 

I had recently made my semiannual quota at work, so I had two weeks coming to me. I had entertained the idea of asking Tina to go on a trip with me, but I wasn’t sure I could stand her for that long. But two weeks might be about enough time for a double amputation. Maybe it was time to get those meat hooks out of my life.

 

Cutting off your extra hands is like buying a new car. Once you make the decision to do it, you can’t get your mind off it until it’s done.

 

* * * *

 

I’d chosen the government hospital because of the complexity of the operation. It wasn’t like having a giant wart removed from the back of your neck. Besides, it would cost a lot less this way, and if something went wrong, I wouldn’t have to worry about suing anybody; the government would make good. They always did—not millions of dollars for pain and suffering, but enough to keep people happy. The alternative for them would be to admit that the social program was a failure, and there were plenty of political machinations to prevent that from happening. It’s funny how nothing fails anymore.

 

Tina played the role of sympathetic friend, but I could tell there was more to it than that. I didn’t fool myself into thinking she really liked me, but it was tempting. Love is dead, but it still haunts this pitiful world. Hell, Tina herself was the one who got me listening to the new “love is dead” stream, and though anyone can care for someone else, there’s always something else behind it. I was nervous as hell and was grateful for her being there, whatever the reason. My eyes couldn’t focus on the paperwork, and she was almost eager to help me get through that.

 

I had a perverse idea to keep my arms in a jar of formaldehyde, as a souvenir, but she talked me out of it. “You should donate them to research,” she said. “It’s your moral obligation because they might be used to advance medical science and help others in need.”

 

“Since when did you care about others in need?”

 

She just gave me a fake hurt look. Anyway, I signed the forms, just to get on with things.

 

We were both quiet while I was being prepped. When the nurse moved out of the way, I saw that Tina was looking at me intently. I thought maybe she was worried about me, but then she said, “Do you mind if I use you in one of my stories?”

 

“What stories?”

 

“I write dark fiction, mostly horror.”

 

That was news to me, but it did sound like her. A hint of post-Goth. She seemed like the kind who would write for therapeutic reasons. “What’s the story about?”

 

“It’s about these Siamese triplets.”

 

I stifled a guffaw.

 

“I know,” she conceded, giggling. “Asshole.”

 

“I’m sorry. Seriously, go on.”

 

“So this one triplet—the most viable one, the one in the middle—decides she’s had enough of her parasitic sisters, so she kills them in their sleep.”

 

“Ouch.”

 

Tina smiled a wicked little smile and giggled again. “It gets better. So she has to, like, carry them to an unlicensed chop shop, which is really hard to do, of course. She pays some flapjack doctor to cut her dead sisters off. So he does, and everything goes fine, until the sisters start haunting her. They’re like phantom limbs, you know?”

 

“Like when a person loses a leg, but it still itches?”

 

“Exactly. Except the sisters don’t itch. They beat her up, over and over. For real. They do other nasty stuff, too, but I don’t want to give it away.”

 

“So what does she do?”

 

“There’s nothing she can do. She’s too much a coward to kill herself, so she just lives like that for the rest of her life.”

 

“That’s really scary,” I said. It was, but what I was thinking was that Tina was pretty scary herself. Given the way people treated her for her entire life, I couldn’t blame her.

 

“You really think it’s scary?” Tina smiled again. “Thanks! Don’t tell anyone about it, though. You’re the only one I’ve ever told one of my stories to.”

 

For once I knew a real smile on Tina when I saw it. It was a good feeling, to have broken her veneer, and it was a good time for that to happen. I immediately forgave how inappropriate her story was, under the circumstances.

 

“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “But what’s that story got to do with me?” Well, I’d almost forgiven her.

 

“Nothing, really. Your arms gave me the original idea, that’s all.”

 

The nurse returned and chased Tina out. They wheeled me to the OR, where I thought I would count down to unconsciousness, but I fainted the moment the gurney bumped the doors open.

 

* * * *

 

I had disturbing dreams. My parents were conjoined twins, literally joined at the hip. Then I was born, but not the normal way. I grew from them like another parasitic twin. Even growing up, I was still attached to them. The three of us were fused in a big, grotesque lump. After Mom and Dad died, they were still there, dried up and shriveled. I had to carry them around, one on either side, no matter where I went. And they were like those phantom limbs, itching and aching.

 

I remember waking up and falling asleep several times, looking at the recovery room ceiling. I lay there, very still, mad at myself for being afraid to look at my chest. One night I awoke and lay there a long time, building up courage. I tested my good arms and found I could pull them out of the sheets. They looked normal, and I turned them over and over. Then I put them firmly at my sides, afraid to let them get near my extra arms. I didn’t want to feel that they were there or that they were missing. In the morning, I told myself.

 

That night I was dismayed to discover my parasitic arms still attached. They started to move by themselves. They tore off some bandages and pulled down the sheet. I tried to sit up, but they slammed my chest back down. Then they began choking me. I couldn’t breathe, and even my normal arms could not pull those wretched things from my neck.

 

It’s horrid having nightmares when you’re alone.

 

Tina never came to visit, which I thought strange, and I didn’t call her either. I was the patient, damn it, and I wasn’t about to call anyone for sympathy. I was in the hospital for almost two weeks, which seemed like forever, especially when you have to eat crap like Honey Smackerels every morning and dry soy burgers every night. All day, every day, I suffered through a marathon of a British soap opera, “Bag Enders,” on the Hobbit Channel.

 

The doctors removed the bandages and showed me my new chest. The parasitic arms were gone for sure. They had done a good job of covering up the holes, and once the scars healed, you might not even notice. It felt strange to touch the scars where my little crooked arms had been. I had mixed feelings, since they had been a familiar part of me. It hurt to touch there, which proved that I was wounded, as opposed to healed. My upper chest was now flat, like a normal person, and that made me feel a way I had never felt before: like a man.

 

I marveled, my fear mostly gone, and wondered what my parents would think if they could see me. I liked to think they’d have been pleased to see their son looking normal for the first time, even if it meant I would finally never be the super-surgeon they had once imagined.

 

It was nearly three weeks before I could return to work. I’d overextended my leave and now owed the company some time. If I accelerated my quotas, I could make up for it. It felt good to be back in the office, and I got a sense of what Tina must have felt to go in with her growth removed. I felt taller and more confident. I walked right by Kaitlin’s cube and sat at my desk, as if nothing was different. I wanted people to remark to me first, rather than me parading myself around. I sat and caught up on some things. Midmorning, my chest started to ache. It hadn’t hurt like that in several days.

 

No messages from Tina. At break, I went up to at least pass by her office. She wasn’t in. I didn’t want to ask about her, but when I happened on another coworker who had been promoted to her floor, I asked anyway. Apparently Tina had been granted leave, but was overdue getting back.

 

It was serious enough that I convinced someone to call the cops. The police turned up nothing in her apartment. Evidence was that she’d left. Her car was gone, and her bank accounts showed a big withdrawal that suggested a trip.

 

I felt abandoned by Tina, just when things between us might have taken a good turn. My chest ached more often, and while the two wide surface scars below my collarbone were healing, there was some swelling.

 

I had a recurring nightmare that phantoms of my discarded arms were trying to strangle me. I’d wake up, and my chest would hurt. I called in a couple times, but the doctor said pain was normal at this stage and that the dreams would eventually go away. Amputated limbs itching or aching was normal, too, he said, but I wasn’t experiencing that.

 

Another week passed, and I began to really worry about Tina. That was when I received an e-mail from her.

 

* * * *

 

Jimmy ~ hope your ok. sorry to leave while you hospital, but i had to get away. I did something very bad to you and I’m sorry. Its my fault, but mostly the company. You can sue them for a brazillian dollars. I’m serious you can put the basturds out of business for cannibalonialism. They knew all the time and one tree was on the right river too. Test signal was to see if I would and I’m sorry I did it. ~T 

 

* * * *

 

It wasn’t from her company address—there was no return address—and it wasn’t signed, but it had to be her. My arms were gone, and so was Tina. What the hell was going on? Whatever it was, I had to do something. Getting a lawyer seemed like the thing to do, but I needed advice from someone I could trust.

 

The state penitentiary welcomed me with iron bars.

 

“Well, well!” said Tina’s dad, eyeing me through the Plexiglas.

 

“Yeah,” I said, still self-conscious. “I had them cut off.”

 

“Good for you.”

 

“Tina cut her growth off too.”

 

“How does she look?”

 

“Oh, great.”

 

He didn’t know she was missing, so I told him. I handed him a copy of her message and watched his face for reaction. His best guess was that she had gone off to find her mother. It made sense, especially if I was right about her having more self-confidence lately. As to where her mother was, he had no idea. We ran out of visiting hours talking and arranged another meeting. Since he was in a hacker’s prison, he wasn’t allowed computer access, so we couldn’t correspond by e-mail. Phone was okay, but monitored, and we decided to just meet in person.

 

By the end of our third meeting, Tyler (as I called him) slipped me a closed envelope through the window slot. He was allowed to do that. I took it, and he held up a hand to mean not to open it yet.

 

“Are you a religious person?” he said.

 

“Well, a little.” Right, if they still made pennies.

 

“Me too.” He winked.

 

* * * *

 

“Tina has disappeared,” I said to Swami in his office. “I think she’s in hiding because the company is after her for some reason. It has something to do with me. I need your help hacking into Genie to try to figure out what this is all about.”

 

I filled him in and showed him Tina’s message. He nodded sympathetically.

 

“I can’t help you in any case,” he said, “because I don’t have a clue how to hack into the computers around here. I’m not smart enough.”

 

“What if we had help from someone who can do it?” I told him about Tina’s dad and his reputation as a master hacker.

 

Swami turned that over and looked up at me from his wheelchair. “Maybe,” he said. “One condition.”

 

“What?”

 

“If we get in, you help me target the mother herb.”

 

That figured. I stalled, my eyes falling onto one of Swami’s tree posters. “Hey,” I said, “do you like that new tune by Got 2B Shvat?”

 

“Who?”

 

“You know, the Hasid Rock group? They have a big tree on their video. Shvat is some kind of Jewish arbor day, isn’t it?” Blank stare. I’d been curious since I first visited Swami’s office, and curiosity got the better of me.

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“So ... you’re not Jewish?”

 

“No.” He smiled a deliberately mysterious smile. “Rasta Nova.”

 

“Oh.” That made sense of all this obsession over drugs, Jah being the god of marijuana, and all. “Too bad. The ‘I’ve got friends who are Jewish’ card might have come in handy to play some day.”

 

“Jimmy, you’re a jerk.”

 

I bowed facetiously, then agreed to help him find his almighty weed.

 

* * * *

 

The trouble with Tyler helping us hack into Genie was that he was imprisoned for hacking. The whole place was set up to deny him any kind of online access. All lines in and out were screened, and he wasn’t allowed to have a computer of any kind. His phone calls were monitored, his mail read, and I don’t know what else. The plumbing was isolated, so that signals couldn’t be transmitted through the pipes or the water itself. The only places he had any privacy were in the bathroom and the chapel.

 

“The law provides for privacy of religion,” he said, “so there’s no monitoring in prison chapels. I bribed the company that supplied the windows.”

 

Swami and I called up Celia, a woman named on the note Tyler had slipped me. She was a craftswoman who made the stained glass windows in the chapel. Moreover, she was part of Tyler’s little crime syndicate, and the windows were part of a larger plan that revolved around his being able to hack systems from prison. They weren’t ordinary windows. They had a layer of some kind of thin gel with unusual properties. The gel would compress slightly when hit with sound waves, which made it change color. Thin film interference, she called it. “It’s actually a rather old and crude technology,” Celia told Swami and me. “A poor man’s secure receiver.”

 

Another property was that the window glowed briefly when hit by light. A computer-controlled laser could draw letters on the window. Tyler would read them, and they’d fade away in a few seconds. This apparatus provided two-way text messaging, leaving no artifact in the prison.

 

Celia and Tyler had conspired to rent an apartment that was in the line of sight with the prison chapel. The idea was that Tyler would pretend to pray, and a telescopic color analyzer in the apartment would detect the color changes in the special windowpane. It then translated the changes back into sound, and we’d hear what Tyler was saying. Then we could laser messages back to him. Or plug into another system at our end, and Tyler could operate it remotely from prison.

 

“It gives a lot of deniability, because there’s no direct linkage,” Celia explained. “It’ll be really hard for anyone to even figure out what we’re doing.”

 

“Why?” said Swami. “The Pentagon used to have countermeasures for this sort of thing. They were afraid spies would read the vibrations from windows of rooms where classified meetings were taking place. They’d have radio speakers up against the glass, to wash out the vibrations from the voices.”

 

Celia smiled knowingly. “You’ve done some homework. But I don’t think the prison will be expecting that sort of technology. They’ve been too busy worrying about subcutaneous nanochips and wireless sets hidden in tooth fillings. This ancient history stuff is mostly forgotten. We could have tried reading direct sound off the glass, but using light turns out to be better, and it gives two-way communication.”

 

Tyler had already used this system to hack around some, and was keen to try something bigger. Swami was no hacker, but he knew a lot about Genie, and the other systems in the company—the ones used for e-mail, networking, and all that jack. With a little help from a master, he could be dangerous. We were ready for some test signals of our own.

 

The eighth-floor apartment was dark and almost totally unfurnished. A single table lamp sat on the floor with a dim fluorescent tube and no shade. There were a few water bottles in the musty fridge, and cheap blinds on the window facing the prison. Two devices sat on heavy tripods by the window, the laser and the telescope. I couldn’t tell the difference between them. Some notebook computers and other stuff sat on two collapsible tables, all connected together by a pastafest of wires. Celia explained that they never went wireless on this kind of risky job. Closed circuit was much safer.

 

According to plan, Tyler went into the chapel, turned on the lights, and started to pray. Swami, Celia, and I sat in the darkened apartment, the scope trained on the chapel window and wired into the color analyzer. Celia showed Swami how to jog the scope around a little until he found the most active spot. We recorded some very clear color changes, and the analyzer showed a lot of structure not visible to the naked eye. The modulated frequencies were translated into audio, and Tyler’s voice rang tinny out of a speaker.

 

“Test prayer number nine, number nine, number nine ... For score and seven years from now, when I shake loose the surly bonds of prison, free at last, free at last...”

 

“It works!” Swami remarked.

 

Celia smiled with satisfaction and did some fine-tuning.

 

Tyler’s voice became clearer. “Now is the time for all good men to come Watson! I need you!”

 

We typed a response, and the laser jittered invisibly, scrawling words on the window, or the finger of God writing on the wall, as Swami preferred to call it.

 

“My prayer has been answered,” Tyler said.

 

“Now it’s time to pray to the system,” Swami quipped.

 

I found it ironic that I was going to fight the technology that had been working so hard to prevent or cure handicaps like mine. We owed Tyler and Celia, and I promised to pay them well, if any fruit fell from the trees.

 

The next time we met in the apartment, Swami was ready with a connection from the apartment to the office network. That link was wireless, but encrypted. The apartment was old enough to have landlines, but they were analog. Swami was going to rig a converter at the office before we went much further. Now we needed to steal an administrative password. There were all kinds of ways to attempt that, we learned, and most of them were detectable by security. There was a simple one that Tyler always tried first. Once set, I phoned Tyler and told him to go and say his prayers. In a few minutes, we were reading him.

 

“Get yourself to a login prompt,” he said.

 

“Ready.”

 

“Okay. Type the following credential.” Tyler then recited a login ID that included some kind of prefix and a suffix. Only the middle part was like my own ID, which I never had to use unless my biomatch was on the fritz. He waited a little bit, then gave us a complicated password.

 

Swami’s face lit up like a reefer. Or so I assumed. “I’m in!” he said, laughing. “I’m really in!”

 

“I’m confused,” I said. “Why did we need the windows, scope, and computers, just for that?”

 

We hadn’t. What Tyler had given us was simply a super user account and password that shipped with the company computer. No one had ever changed the default, a stupid oversight, but common.

 

“Getting in is just the start,” Tyler said. “You’re going to need my help breaking other barriers, mining data, and a lot more.”

 

I couldn’t really follow what Swami and Tyler were doing most of the time, and I gave up participating in the conversations. I was just a middleman between them in an already awkward process.

 

After a week and a half of working a little almost every day, they began to piece together a picture of what was going on. They began to ask questions about the company, about patent law, and other things. My job became to research these things. Sometimes the information was readily available, especially the more controversial items, since the debates filled public records. Details about the company were harder to come by, but with a few assumptions here and there, things became clearer.

 

* * * *

 

Meanwhile something significant happened, and something else significant didn’t. What didn’t happen was anyone hearing from Tina again. What did was that my parasitic arms began to grow back. What had started as aching became swelling, and then skin breaking. I guess my chest cells weren’t able to change into knuckle cells, so the fists had to punch their way through. I didn’t go back to the hospital to have it checked out, for many reasons. Besides, the skin cracked and healed all along, so it never got messy. But it itched like hell.

 

Obviously my arms had some kind of regenerating tissue in them, something unheard of in humans. Like an amphibian growing a new tail, I grew new arms. It even occurred to me that my “baby arms” might have been cut off when I was a newborn, and when they grew back, my parents might have given up. The only reason I had to suspect that was my mother’s overcompensation, always telling me that the arms were a gift of some kind.

 

I’d worked at the company long enough to know the value in self-regenerating bones, muscles, skin. It would be worth a fortune.

 

Several things led us to conclude that the “test signal” that Tina found, the one that looked like me, was not only deliberately injected into her queue, but it was also a viable target, an organism with unique stem cells, probably. It was impossible to trace who put the target in her queue or where the target originated, but clearly Tina was set up to contact me about it.

 

Her e-mail told as much. The company was doing something bad to me, she’d said, and she had helped them. What had she done? She had convinced me to cut off my arms, that’s what. Not only cut them off, but donate them to research. It seemed as though that was part of the plan—to get me to sign over my discarded tissue.

 

Without knowing why I was interested, my boss Dave linked me to some interesting reading. Companies like Good Fortune were crippled by patent law. They can’t patent drugs or organisms that are common to living beings. Long back, labs tried to patent genes sampled from Third World tribes. Someone even tried to own the whole human genome. Vampires, people called them. Still, the demand was high for cures, longevity treatments, and other innovations. In this semisocialized industry, how could one make enough money for the expensive research?

 

That’s where Genie came in. It was legal to patent nonhuman organisms that were extinct, since there were no living stakeholders. If you could regenerate a dinosaur’s DNA, you could either own it and keep it proprietary, or patent it and make money off it. Another thing you could patent was a transgenic organism that was composed of more than one species, spliced together. Those two were what most of our targets turned out to be. The problem with transgenics was that it was illegal to “instantiate” them because of potential biological risks. Extinct species were also controlled, but less so. One school of thought said that because they had once lived, they were not mutually exclusive of modern life-forms, while another view was that they might well be. The uncertainty left loopholes in the law.

 

I was trying to figure out whether I was a solitary example of a species, in which case there were no applicable laws, or whether I somehow fit one of the categories typically handled by Genie. Time to consult a patent lawyer.

 

Her name was McKenzie, and her office in a high-rise had one of those views you see on TV. The office itself wasn’t so glamorous. The furniture looked cheap, and you couldn’t read anything on her SmartDesk because of the books and papers piled up on it. McKenzie was a handsome woman of about fifty, blond hair tied back tight, wearing a brown pantsuit. She made me nervous, and I sat in a worn leather chair, rubbing my chest and hoping my scabs wouldn’t bleed.

 

McKenzie hit the nail on the head immediately when I told her what happened to my amputated arms. “When you sign away tissue samples,” she said, “they become the property of the owner, so long as they are used in accordance with the terms of the agreement.”

 

“Which means?”

 

“If your tissue does not occur normally in nature, and if it has the potential I think it does, it means that your company can patent it. They can develop treatments and cures with it and own the profits. You’d get nothing.”

 

She went on to explain with excitement some precedent cases, both failed and successful. Moore. Slavin. York versus Jones. Glamorous names like that. Kilroy versus George Washington. University, that is. It all came to a head when they realized that all the data they needed to cure several nasty diseases was available for free. Decades of detailed military medical records held reliable data that could correlate all sorts of diseases with genetic history, eating habits, exposure to hazardous materials, and more. All one had to do was to mine the data in a meaningful way, and a medical revolution could pop out. Department of Defense doctors fought for patient privacy—and they are good fighters—until someone found a way to use the information anonymously.

 

It wasn’t enough to simply strip the names. They had to build a completely different data set, using not only made-up names, but made-up places of birth, made-up medications, and made-up diseases. This sanitized data was sold, and places like my company used it all the time. When we found some correlation, we’d have to submit the finding to DoD, which would translate the result to the real world using a codec. We paid a fee, and they gave us exclusive rights to the finding.

 

But this business about someone patenting my tissue samples hit me from left field. I must have looked puzzled because she put down her pen, folded her hands, and sighed. “Let me try to be clear,” she said. “If the laws were just a little different, you would be patentable yourself. This isn’t exactly true, but let me say it this way for simplicity. A deformity can be patented because it’s not a normal human condition. You are the only stakeholder, so you can patent your bad genes, or good stem cells, or whatever makes you unique. What seems to have happened here is that your company’s computer came up with a—what did you call it?”

 

“Target.”

 

“A target like you. Only someone realized that you already existed.”

 

“I’m pretty hard to miss.”

 

She nodded politely. “Or they knew your arms would regenerate, so they created your test signal as a trap. Either way, they contrived a situation to get you to cut off your extra arms and sign them over to them.”

 

“They did a damn good job of it too.”

 

“Your Genie system alone wouldn’t let them patent anything. To be patentable, an invention has to be proven to be useful. They have another system that does that.”

 

“The Simulator. A system that creates a virtual organism, and monkeys around to see if it cures cancer or whatever.”

 

“They’ve covered all the bases.” She smiled. “Now, about that agreement, when you signed over your discarded tissue. What were the terms?”

 

“I didn’t read it.”

 

“Do you have a copy?”

 

“No.”

 

“I’ll dig it up,” she said. “It will be on file. All you have to do is sign a release so I can get it.”

 

I rubbed my chest where two new sets of knuckles were kneading their way through from the inside. “If I signed away all my rights, doesn’t that mean that I don’t have a case against the company?”

 

“Not necessarily,” McKenzie said. “Can you prove that you signed the papers at a time when you didn’t have the benefit of your full intellectual faculties?”

 

“Maybe,” I said, thinking. My mind had been in a haze that day. “Yes, I think I can.”

 

“How so?”

 

“First of all, I was being prepped for surgery. They had an IV in me.”

 

“God only knows what was in that,” she said. Of course, there were probably medical records that someone other than God had access to, but she sounded like she was rehearsing her case. I liked her.

 

“Then there was Tina. She was the one who talked me into signing. She practically held the pen for me.”

 

“Fraud and coercion,” she said. “Anything else?”

 

“I think Tina will testify on my behalf,” I said.

 

She smiled briefly, then grew serious. “You have a very strong case, Mr. Tanner. You stand to make many millions when all is said and done.”

 

“How many millions?”

 

“Let me work that up. The more I think about it, the higher I think we can go. Hundreds of millions, without a doubt.”

 

My head swam and my chest ached. “You’re kidding.”

 

She put down her pen and closed her notebook. “This company is going down.”

 

“That’s great,” I said, not so sure.

 

* * * *

 

McKenzie assembled a legal team covering the necessary disciplines. I received a call from her the next week. No one at the hospital could back my story, she said, so my case hinged on having Tina testify. McKenzie sent a private eye my way, a guy named Lund. He was tiny but stout, with muscles. He had a shriveled scalp with short, sparse hair that stuck up in different directions, like the way my dad’s generation used to spike their hair. I took him to visit Tyler in the pen.

 

“Lund thinks that Tina has probably gone to find her estranged mother,” I said.

 

Lund focused his eyebrows at something invisible, then brightened and looked at Tyler through the window. “We thought you might be able to help track down your ex-wife.”

 

Tyler’s mouth turned down, and he looked like he was going to spit. “It’s been twenty-three years.”

 

“A few good guesses are all I need to get started.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“Favorite places, alternate names, family ties, old dreams. How long were you married?”

 

“We weren’t. Lived together for seven years.”

 

Tyler proceeded to throw out some random ideas. Tina’s mom liked Broadway, disliked cold, and had enjoyed Atlantic City. Therefore, Las Vegas? Other possibilities for other reasons were Baton Rouge and SoCal. Lund was good to go, but I had something else to discuss with Tyler.

 

“Any luck with Swami’s magic weeds?”

 

“Not specifically, but we’re making progress.”

 

“That’s better than we’re doing finding Tina.”

 

“Not to worry,” Lund said.

 

“And how are you doing with Genie?”

 

“I’m all over her,” Tyler said. We pretended Genie was a person, so the wardens wouldn’t suspect Tyler was wired into anything. “If you can’t sue the panties off of the company, I can at least stuff Genie into a bottle.”

 

“You sound like you’ve done this before.”

 

Tyler hummed Beethoven’s “dit-dit-dit-dah,” musically pleading the Fifth. I looked over at Lund, who was making no pretense at respecting our privacy.

 

“Okay, Lund,” I said, “Let’s get out of here so you can find Tina.”

 

The next day Lund called to say that he had all the inside information about Tina’s car that was in any system. The vehicle did not have a transponder, and there was only one data point logged. Tina had passed through a tollbooth entering Delaware a couple of days after my operation. Not much help. Lund said it didn’t mean she was still in Delaware. She could be anywhere.

 

He had also tried to check her bank records but was unable to buy or steal anything useful. “Your friend has really covered her tracks,” he told me.

 

“That isn’t like her,” I said. “Is it possible that she just hasn’t made many tracks?”

 

“Yeah,” he said, miffed. “Very possible.”

 

* * * *

 

I went by Tina’s office, not expecting to find her, but I was just drawn there. No sign of her. Bored and lonely, I stopped by to see Swami.

 

“How’s the search for your herb coming?” I asked.

 

“The proceeding is so painful, and so slow, slow, slow,” he said, apparently quoting something. He brightened and wheeled his chair full around. “But we’ll find it. Tyler helped me get into the targeting algorithm. I can also bypass the simulator’s kill function. That’s a lot of help, but it creates a hell of a lot more targets to look at.”

 

“How long do you think it will take?”

 

“Me no know. Could be years.”

 

“Whoa.” It occurred to me that Swami had conflicting goals. He needed Tyler to help him with his project, but that meant involving me—and I was in the process of jacking the company. “Let me ask you something, Swami. You said something once about us being organisms, not an organization, right?”

 

He smiled, pleased that I’d remembered. “Yeah, right.”

 

“Why would someone like you work in a place like this?”

 

“Because there’s no revolution that can turn this country around. Fighting the system is a waste of time. The only way to change anything is from the inside, using the same ways that got us here to get us to somewhere else.”

 

“Fight fire with fire, eh?”

 

“Well, yeah, you could say it’s the means to an end. The company’s not the enemy, you know. I share a common goal with it: healing the sick. It’s disappointing that I’m sincere about it, while the company has an ulterior profit motive. But if you’ve got a better way, I’d like to know about it.”

 

* * * *

 

The lawyer called, and I went over to meet with her. It sounded like there was some big news already, and we couldn’t talk freely on the company phone. McKenzie leaned forward in her chair. Though she still sat higher than me, and her dress was as tidy as ever, her informal posture made me feel more like a partner than a customer. She had two piles of paper on her L-shaped SmartDesk, which also had a lot of virtual stuff strewn around.

 

“Have you ever heard of biocolonialism?” she said with a gloating air.

 

“No.”

 

“The government owns patents on people’s genetic material.”

 

“I think you spoke of that once before.”

 

“Yes, but this time there’s a lot more to it. They started with minority races in shrinking populations such as island cultures, ostensibly to preserve vanishing peoples. But it got ugly.”

 

She went on to tell me that I was part of a class-action lawsuit they were developing. It went beyond my case, and would take a lot longer, but it would bring justice to a lot more people. I didn’t like the sound of all that. I’d thought we had a clear case, I’d easily win, and life would go on. I could be generous to those who’d helped me and make a better life for myself. But the more she talked, the more it sounded like harder work than what I was used to and it would involve more people. I was all for justice, but slowing it down wasn’t my idea of progress.

 

The lawsuit had become grander than just someone tricking me out of a patent. First, she had done some research, and there were a lot of potential cures possible from my tissue, not just regrown limbs. My nervous system was different from normal people’s, and it was possible that cures to spinal and brain injuries and disorders could be derived. If I happened to suffer one myself, I’d have to pay to license the patent.

 

“Don’t you see what that means?” she said.

 

“Yeah. I could get ripped off again.”

 

“Think broader than that. This is a very exciting area for us. In the business, we call it hyperownership.”

 

“Whatever.”

 

She smiled knowingly. “I know it sounds technical, but during testimonies, we’ll call it by its real name. It doesn’t matter if you own all of someone’s body or just a part—if you use it for gain without permission and compensation to the rightful owner, it’s slavery, pure and simple!”

 

That made me laugh uncontrollably, until it made my breastbone burn. Then I coughed and coughed, my chest wracking from deep inside, all the way out to my cursed bony knuckles.

 

McKenzie had laughed along, then winced, but didn’t know what to do. “Are you all right?”

 

“Yeah,” I said, gasping. “Ouch. You’re serious?”

 

“Totally serious. We will prove that your company, through manipulation, fraud, and duress, tried to enslave you for profit. We’ll also get them for malpractice, coercion of unwanted radical surgery, deliberate dismemberment in particular. So you’ll get a bundle for that too. And there’s more.”

 

“What’s this class-action business?”

 

“You aren’t the only victim of this sort of thing. We are gathering evidence that there are others in similar situations. I have a partner who would also like to speak with you about your mother’s medical background. There may be a possible settlement there too. A big one.”

 

Everything had become big, and I went back to work with a big headache.

 

I went right to Swami and told him most of what was going on with the lawyers. I thought that the promise of explosive justice would be music to him, but he dismissed it.

 

“That just means that the law firms would own you, instead of this company. They’d be controlling the case completely. Your job would be to make them a lot of money, wouldn’t it?”

 

I couldn’t deny that.

 

“You either own yourself outright or you don’t,” he said.

 

“For a hundred million bucks, what do I care? The lawyers can own me.”

 

* * * *

 

Lund scored. He found Tina’s mom and made contact with her. She was married and living on a lake in Tennessee. She said she had not seen her daughter in over twenty years, and Lund believed her. He put a call in to a private eye in that area to make sure.

 

Lund suggested I e-mail Tina again. She might be monitoring messages, and though she had ignored me before, if I sent just the right message, he said, she might be compelled to reply. I sent a secure message from one of those untraceable, single-use accounts. I indicated that we were ready to sue for hundreds of millions, and that we needed her here. Against my better judgment, I lied that her father was gravely ill. Lund was the expert.

 

To my surprise, I received a reply within minutes.

 

* * * *

 

Jimmy ~ you are such a bad liar. Attached is my horror novel, the one I told you about. I would never have finished it without hiding out. I need you to try to sell it for me, so please promise you won’t give up until it’s published. Don’t let the basturds tell you it’s no good, because it is. Also, you should go ahead and sue the company without me. TTFE ~ T 

 

* * * *

 

The attachment was a book called Malignance Aeterna by Christine Peshj. I couldn’t focus on it long enough to make sense of it. Maybe it explained what “TTFE” stood for. The message had me really scared. I couldn’t stand it, so I left work early and went by her place. With her book done, maybe she’d returned from wherever she’d been hiding.

 

Her car was out front. I shuddered and my heart rammed at the inside of my chest. My little forming hands twitched in reflex. The door was locked, and Tina wasn’t answering. I threw myself against the door until my hip practically broke, but it was made of metal, and I remembered the bolt and chain. So I broke a window around back, not caring that it was daylight. I climbed in, called out, and ran around like an idiot, not knowing where to start.

 

The apartment was dark and musty. There were lights on, and the table in the breakfast nook was covered with junk mail. A few dishes sat in the sink, stained with spaghetti remnants, and there was a metallic purple handbag on a chair in the living room. I walked quietly into the living room, afraid to call out for some reason. Some of the lights were glowing on her theater set, but there was no picture or sound.

 

“Tina?” I said, almost under my breath. More lights on in the bedroom, shining through a wide crack in the doorway. “Tina?” I had never been in her bedroom, and going in, I felt like I was violating something sacred.

 

Then I heard a drip. Tina was in the bathroom, but all I saw was red. The sound of a thousand urgent voices rushed into my ears. It sounded like angry water, and I felt myself going over Niagara Falls.

 

I woke up cold and shivering, my head light, sweat running from my forehead into my hair. The voices had faded to echoes. I tried to sit up, but nearly fainted again. I stayed down, in the bathroom doorway, afraid to look in.

 

I spent the night there on the floor. In the morning, I called the police and crept out of the place, without looking in the bathtub again. The police arrived before I got away, and when they started questioning me, I felt strangely hungry and fainted again.

 

* * * *

 

Swami came by my office to offer his condolences. His electric wheelchair was pretty compact, but it didn’t fit through my cube door. So he sat there, saying something expected, but not helpful. I felt trapped because he blocked the door. I could tell he wanted to talk about something but was uncomfortable bringing it up. He looked down, rolled his chair back and forth a few inches, then sighed through his nose.

 

“Look, Jimmy,” he said, checking to see if the hall was clear. “How is it going with your target? You know the one I mean.”

 

I nodded and made eyes at the wall separating us from Kaitlin’s cubicle. He nodded.

 

“I’ll come by,” I said.

 

Later, after verifying the privacy of his office, I told him how the lawyers were now saying that I could still win my case easily, even without Tina to testify. Simply signing those papers in my condition, combined with the resulting legal situation, created a clear case of hyperownership by fraud. They were calling it slavery.

 

“So you’re going to sue?”

 

“The only delay now is for the lawyers to determine whether Tina’s parents have any grounds to sue also.”

 

Swami made a grim line with his mouth and nodded. “I guess I’d better start looking for another job, then.”

 

He was playing me, but I was too tired to fight him. “You really think the company will implode?”

 

“Sure. That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

 

“So what do you want me to do?” I said, raising my voice. “I’ve got these stupid arms growing back, everything will be just as bad as before, except that Tina is dead—not that anyone cares—and you want me to stand by while the company gets rich because of all that?”

 

He just sat there looking stupid in front of all those posters of trees.

 

“Either they own me or I own them,” I said. “You said as much yourself. And look what they did to Tina. Damn right I’m going to sue.”

 

* * * *

 

When you’re out for blood, you don’t usually aim for the wound that bleeds the most. You take any and all of them.

 

“After I get my settlement,” I told Tyler through the glass, “I’m going to put Good Fortune out of business.”

 

“No more cures discovered by accident?” he cautioned.

 

“No more stolen tissues or patenting people’s misfortune,” I said.

 

“What about Swami’s tree?”

 

I exhaled impatiently through my nose. I didn’t have an answer for that. Revenge on the company was revenge not on an organization, but on the people who worked there, and I really didn’t think Swami’s trees were complete crap. I’d found a few good targets myself, and that had felt good.

 

“Tyler,” I said, heating up again. “These guys are to blame for what happened to your daughter. What would you suggest?”

 

“It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.”

 

* * * *

 

I had an irrational hope that with my extra arms gone, Kaitlin might finally go out with me. Besides, there was something important I wanted to ask her.

 

“No, thank you,” she said, pursing her lips in what was intended to be a polite smile but had nothing friendly about it.

 

“It’s just lunch,” I said.

 

“Jimmy, I told you a long time ago that I’m not interested. How can I make that clear to you?”

 

“News flash. I’m not asking you to lunch because I’m interested in you. We can go Dutch if you want.” Her expression fell into confusion. She probably didn’t know whether to be happy or feel insulted. “There’s something I want to run by you, and I can’t do it here at work.”

 

“Is it about Tina?”

 

Good guess. Not right, but close enough, if that would get her to say yes. I nodded.

 

Her eyes scanned me like some kind of lie detector. “Okay,” she said.

 

I decided to take her to a nearby diner, so she wouldn’t think I had ideas of hauling her off somewhere. Our coworkers often went there, which should have made her feel safe. It made her nervous. I guess she didn’t want to be seen out with me. I was nervous, too, keeping my jacket on so she wouldn’t see the little bulges where my arms were growing back. Hey, I didn’t have ulterior motives, but I wasn’t against some ulterior outcome. The waitress came, smiled, and looked me over.

 

“We’re having a working lunch,” Kaitlin said hastily.

 

I smiled in confirmation and we ordered. The waitress left, and Kaitlin got right to business.

 

“So what’s so important?” she said.

 

“Actually, I want your advice.”

 

She just looked at me, waiting for me to speak, as if she wasn’t even going to offer pleasant conversation.

 

I’d shown interest in Kaitlin for a long time and asked her out several times before. She could be chatty with me, but never on a personal level. Mostly it was always about some crazy target someone came up with or other work stuff. I remember once when I’d fooled myself into thinking that she did like me, only to realize that she only wanted some images of a target I’d found, in order to make a funny greeting card out of them. Something about a shriveled Easter rabbit with no fur. Now I was finally having a kind of date with her, and I felt like a bag of ice.

 

“Do you think it’s right,” I said, “for someone to sue the company they work for?”

 

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

 

“I can’t say exactly, but suppose the company makes a ton of money by exploiting an employee? Several employees.”

 

“Of course they should sue.”

 

“That’s what I thought too. But my friend, who works at this dump, is afraid he’ll put it out of business.”

 

“So what?”

 

That was too easy.

 

“You don’t look happy,” she said. “Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?”

 

“Maybe not. I guess I’ve slanted the story, and I really wanted an honest answer.”

 

She frowned at me, and her voice became low and deliberate. “How do you honestly expect me to give you an honest answer when I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

 

“You’re right.” I made a conciliatory study of my lap. “It’s just that I can’t tell you about the whole thing.”

 

“This is about our company, isn’t it? They did something to Tina, and her family is trying to sue, aren’t they?” Her eyes widened with shock, and she inhaled loudly. “Are you saying she didn’t kill herself?”

 

“She did. I was the one who found her.”

 

“Oh.” Kaitlin looked at me with a pained expression. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That must have been awful.”

 

“It was.”

 

“Well, if Good Fortune is somehow responsible for her death, then a lawsuit over that just might put it out of business.”

 

“I know.”

 

“It wouldn’t really solve anything, though. And what about our jobs? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get work these days?” She was tearing up, waiting for my answer. I’m not the most sensitive guy, but seeing her like that tore at me. “Well, do you?”

 

“I guess not. To be honest, I’ve never had any trouble getting a job.”

 

“Oh,” she said, understanding. She may not have known that my handicap was caused by my mother using salamander neurotrophic stem cells to treat nerve damage in her spine, but everyone knew about the placement programs that gave people like me almost a guarantee of a job. “But it’s just so dark to sue the life out of a company, get rich, and leave everyone else totally unemployed.”

 

The food came, and Kaitlin chewed almost angrily. I didn’t think she was mad at me, because she didn’t know I was the one suing. Still, I didn’t want to let her stew like that because of me.

 

“Have you seen the new Wizard of Oz refake?” I said, trying to brighten the meal. “They aged Judy Garland down by eight years and gave the good witch some cleavage to compensate.”

 

“The women in that movie are all complete idiots,” she said.

 

Ouch. You try for small talk and you hit a nerve. Anyway, I guess I got what I was looking for. I didn’t like it.

 

* * * *

 

The next day, I got a courtesy call from McKenzie. No news, just checking in. She was professional that way, but it made me nervous. My life was just another business transaction to her. She sensed a problem and asked. I hemmed and hawed, but didn’t really say anything.

 

“It’s normal to have cold feet with this sort of thing,” she said. “I have a great idea. Can you join me for lunch?” Man, was she slick.

 

“You paying?”

 

“My pleasure. I’ll pick you up at work. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

 

McKenzie must have really wanted to make a point, because we went to an expensive restaurant. I rode in front. In the back was a frumpy lady in her thirties named Maysie. After a quick introduction, she became sullen and didn’t speak a word. When we got to the restaurant, a man in a tux opened our car doors, while a valet took the car. Maysie was very slow and out of it, like she was only following us because she was stuck in our wake.

 

We sat at a round table in the middle of the fancy dining room. The windows were darkened and glazed with gold lights that seemed to run downward like streaks of rain. The other walls had dark gold drapes covering them, and from the ceiling hung huge globe lights that were very dim, despite their size. McKenzie and I made small talk, and we all ordered. I had no idea what some of the food was, so I just ordered a T-bone.

 

“I wanted you to meet Maysie,” McKenzie said, “because she is one of the plaintiffs in our class action suit. Is it all right if I describe your case to Jimmy?” Maysie nodded, so McKenzie continued. “Maysie recently lost a baby during childbirth. Like you, she signed some papers at an inopportune moment, without being given a clear and full understanding what they meant. I don’t need to paint the picture for you.”

 

“No,” I said. “When you go to have a baby and have problems, I don’t expect you’re in the mood for fine print.”

 

McKenzie made a saccharine smile. “Very perceptive of you. Unfortunately, the papers she allegedly signed gave Good Fortune’s parent company full rights to what they called ‘discarded tissue.’”

 

“It was my son.” That was the most Maysie had said up to then. “I held him in my arms. I knew he wasn’t going to make it, but I gave him a name....” Her jaw dropped and quivered, a string of saliva hanging between her lips. A tear shot out from each eye when she blinked, and she couldn’t continue. I just looked at where one of the tears made a spot on the table linen.

 

“They made a major breakthrough concerning the disease that killed her son,” McKenzie said, “and they did it with that little boy’s body that she was coerced to sign away. The cure will be worth hundreds of millions.”

 

Maysie collected herself. “I’m truly glad that this disease may be cured,” she said. “But sometimes I just wish I could have buried him.” She struggled for words. “It’s like he’s still out there somewhere, being exploited by strangers.”

 

“So you see, Jimmy? It’s not just about the money, and it’s not just about ownership. It’s about fundamental human rights. Maysie’s case is not atypical. But your case is different, because you’re still alive. You can make a strong testimony. We need you to fight for your rights on behalf of a lot of people just like Maysie.”

 

She locked me with a concerned stare, like a teacher glaring when you don’t have your homework to hand in. When the platters of food came, I was in no mood for steak.

 

* * * *

 

I had the dream of my extra hands strangling me again. My parents were dead, but still conjoined to my body, like the previous dream. As the hands choked me, the last fragments of my parents finally fell off. Then Tina came, like a ghost, and the hands fell motionless.

 

“Are you going to take my parents’ place?” I said to her.

 

She didn’t answer, but pointed to my little arms. “I know how to make them stop strangling you.”

 

“I already tried cutting them off. That didn’t work.”

 

She just laughed and started to glide away, the way ghosts do. “TTFE,” she said over her shoulder. “Ta-Ta For Ever!”

 

I woke up sweating and feverish, maybe from cutting new knuckles. I flexed the tiny fingers, which were not hard bones yet and were still partly submerged under scabs that itched like mad. I contemplated what Tina might have meant about knowing how to make them stop strangling me. I didn’t like her way of ending problems.

 

* * * *

 

They were planning a memorial service for Tina in the prison chapel, so Tyler could be there. Even Tina’s mother was coming. I didn’t want to think about all that, so I kept myself busy continuing to hack into Good Fortune’s systems. I didn’t care why anymore, but I wanted to know exactly who sent that target to Tina. I went to Swami’s office for help, but somehow he ended up lecturing me on the rapid evolution of the sativa species of pot, caused by something called polymorphism.

 

“The prophet Ezekiel and some priests used a matriarchal strain called pannag, but mostly the herb was reserved for use anointing the Ark of the Covenant,” he informed me. “If we could only reverse-engineer the DNA that far back, that would be good enough.”

 

“You’re twice the med school drop-out I ever was,” I said.

 

“I didn’t go to med school.”

 

“I know, I know. Listen, I need you to look into something. See if you can get some access certs for something on the administrative side of the house, instead of the technical. You know, where the money is.”

 

“I don’t think I want to do that,” Swami said. His eyes betrayed his intrigue.

 

“Listen, Tyler’s good. No one will ever know what happened.”

 

“It’s not that. Look, Jimmy, if you take down the company, you are ruining the chances of finding some important discoveries.”

 

“What, like your holy ark polish?”

 

His brow furrowed, and he leaned on his chair’s control arm. The chair lurched around and crawled across his office toward me.

 

“You think I do all this for myself?” he said. “What I do is for the healing of the nations. That means everybody, including people like you. People with extra limbs, or malformed limbs, or no limbs at all. People born with their intestines hanging outside their bodies, kept alive by some heartless science that thinks it’s doing a good thing.”

 

He might have gone on, but my feigned gagging motions took him aback. “Spare me,” I said. “I told Tyler to wait until you had a fair chance to find your blessed tree. Or at least Mary Jane’s grandmother. Are you going to help me or not?”

 

“Not.” He rolled back.

 

“Look,” I said, “I need you, man. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.” I was thinking about Kaitlin, something she had said, and something Swami had said about organisms. “Maybe we can mess around a bit without jacking the whole place.”

 

“You’re not making sense, Jimmy. Exactly what do you have in mind?”

 

Some dormant thought awoke in my mind, something about the company’s administrative systems. “I know exactly what to look for!” I blurted. “Can we get into the virtual board of directors?”

 

Swami gazed at one of his trees for a long time, then turned to me again. “That’s a tough nut to crack. I have no idea—” Instead of finishing his sentence, he turned to his SmartDesk, and began to surf.

 

* * * *

 

Though Tyler had been out of his daughter’s life for many years, their recent reunion and then her sudden death had been a shock to him. He insisted on a service in the prison, where he could have a little more time with her. The Freedom of Religion Act meant that they almost had to allow the funeral in the prison chapel.

 

I’d been in church before, dressed up, for my grandmother’s funeral. The church felt like a prison to me then. I think I was about nine. Strangely, this church, which literally was a prison, felt completely free, as if being there was like being in a heaven imagined by that nine-year-old boy.

 

It was also strange to be on the same side of the Plexiglas as Tyler. It was strange imagining Tina’s ashes in the colorful urn before us. The urn was cloisonné, with lots of little geometric shapes that looked like the stained glass window above the simple altar. It was strange to stare up at that window and imagine Tyler hacking our computer from there.

 

A few of Tyler’s inmate friends came, patted Tyler’s shoulder, and then sat down, leaving him alone. I was the only outsider in the chapel until Tina’s mother showed up.

 

“Look there,” Tyler said. “The devil in a deep blue dress.”

 

She was a worn but attractive woman with heavily teased blond hair and a beauty scar on her lip. She cried when she saw the urn. Then she loudly informed Tyler that he was in prison. Other than that snide remark and his raspberry reply, they did not speak to each other. I sat on the front bench, next to Tyler. I didn’t want to look at anyone because if I saw someone cry, I might choke up too, so I fixated on the urn.

 

“Why did Tina do it?” I found myself asking while we waited for the preacher to arrive.

 

“I think she was looking for love, but couldn’t find it,” he said. “There’s an old Beatles song where the singer refuses to live in a world without love.”

 

“I don’t know. That’s pretty old-fashioned. Love, I mean. I happen to know that Tina thought so. She thought love was impractical, unenlightened, unattainable, and all that jack. It’s a sign of weakness, to need someone, isn’t it?”

 

“Ah, I see. She told you all that?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Tyler had a twinkle in his eye. “She must have loved you quite a bit then.”

 

“Very funny.”

 

“I’ve heard that some Asians don’t like to show affection because it places a burden on the one you love, making them feel indentured. Some people have to love like that, in secret.”

 

“That’s jacked,” I said. “If love has to take a back seat to all that, what good is it?”

 

Tyler didn’t answer, but he squinted slightly, looking pained.

 

“No, man,” I said. “Love is dead.”

 

It was true, but it was the wrong choice of words. I pursed my lips in apology, just as the preacher came in from the back.

 

We had to be quiet when the service started. I pretty much ignored the sermon because I was afraid I might actually cry. So I fixated on the windows that made a colorful pattern that reached to the top of an A-shaped frame that pretended to be a vaulted ceiling. No one there but Tyler and I knew what the windows really were. And only I knew that Swami was tuned in at the receiving end of a prayer.

 

“Send and pray,” they called it, when you sent a message, not knowing whether it was received. The phrase fit my little scheme, only in this case it was more of a “pray and send,” like putting a five-dollar nickel in a slot machine and hoping you hit the flapjack.

 

The service ended and everyone left, just like that. No one really cared. Tyler and I lingered, and then he was ready to go too, but I stopped him.

 

“Do me a favor,” I said.

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Pray to the system.” He looked confused, so I said, “The great Swami in the sky is listening.”

 

“Oh ho!”

 

The two of us knelt at the altar, acting as serious as could be, me with my hands folded and my head “upfull,” as Swami called it. Tyler started chanting passwords, glancing up at the stained glass window with each one. Three of the colored panes were pulsing with oily patterns, but the one at the apex remained sky blue. After several attempts, pale letters appeared on the blue window: CREDENTIALS AUTHENTICATED.

 

“All set,” said Tyler.

 

“I’ve got a little prayer of my own,” I said, pulling out a paper note from my pocket.

 

My boss, Dave, had once sent out copies of a book called The Pharaoh’s Headstand, which was all about employee empowerment. The idea was to turn the corporate pyramid upside-down, hence the “pharaoh’s headstand.” Obviously, the book was propaganda to make us think the company cared, when all they really did for us was to buy the lousy book. “Employees are the most important stakeholders,” and crap like that. Well, if that’s the way they wanted it, I was more than willing to put them on their heads.

 

My notes were a carefully worded set of parameters to the board of directors program. I prayed for a new profit paradigm. I prayed for a new definition of human capital, one that would make us assets that more than paid for ourselves. I prayed to reverse hyperownership and to reassess the priorities of Good Fortune. It was my own test signal, injected into the most vital organ of the company. Maybe the results would project more profit in the long run. Who knows?

 

Tyler was gazing up at the window. “Look,” he said. “The writing on the wall.”

 

It was the return display, and as I watched, words appeared: INPUT ACCEPTED.

 

Tyler looked at me like a proud father. “Still sure love is dead?” he said.

 

I shrugged. Well, I sure as hell wasn’t feeling any love. I was just thinking that it would be good if Kaitlin could keep her job, if Swami could find his holy grail, and if I didn’t take all the company’s money.

 

It would also be good to discover something really important by accident. I was getting the hang of that.