14.
Tuesday: I’m Back
Chimeras took many forms. Many of them hideous and all dangerous. The hobby geneticists of twenty years ago had moved from the making of odd-looking pets in a garden shed to the work of a younger elite who called themselves “Gene Hackmen.” They’d make anything for kicks and giggles, and generally did. Famously, FunBoy-6 built a centaur from spare parts. It was a good effort and galloped elegantly, although due to having the cerebral cortex of a pig, it was prone to oinking. Stig had dispatched the creature without mercy. The Hackmen hated Stig, and he hated them. And that from a neanderthal, who thought that hate, like greed or envy, was the emotion of a species doomed to failure.
James Crick, Hobby Geneticists: The New Dr. Frankensteins
My eyes flickered open, and Stig’s and Landen’s familiar faces swam into view. My leg had a dull throb of pain from the hip to the knee, and I was cold—but then I was lying on concrete in only my underwear. It felt uncomfortable and pleasant all at once. I was broken, but I was me.
“It smells of cat’s piss down here,” I said. “And, Landen: Nothing should disturb that condor moment.”
I saw Landen let out a gasp of relief and brush away some tears.
“Thank the GSD,” he said. “I thought you were gone for good.”
“Not at all—the worst that would have happened to me was cramp, thirst and hunger—and probably the release of waste products, given time. I was simply waiting for the return of my id. My clothes? I’m freezing.”
“You won’t want your own back,” said Landen, “but she must have arrived dressed in something—here.”
He pulled out some quality-looking threads from a carrier bag pushed beneath some Daphne Farquitt boxed sets.
“Chimera,” said Stig to the retail staff, who had popped their heads into the stockroom to see what the gunshot had been about. “Nothing to see.”
“She was different from the rest,” said Landen as he helped me on with the clothes. “She was actually convinced that she was you—and had tapped into your memories.”
“Landen, she was me. I was there. I was inside her. I was becoming her, or she was becoming me—or we were becoming each other.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Did she seem like me? More than the others, I mean?”
“By a factor of ten. But I don’t buy into this whole ‘transfer of consciousness’ shit. It’s impossible for a whole bunch of reasons.”
I grasped his forearm. “The note I scribbled down for you, just before I told you I loved you and you killed me. It says, ‘Two minds with a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.’ ”
Landen pulled the piece of paper from his pocket and stared at it.
“Okay,” he said, “I totally buy into this whole ‘transfer of consciousness’ shit. But what does it mean? That Goliath is out to replace people with copies of themselves, just better and faster an
d stronger, with an increased libido, a good head for figures and origami skills to die for?”
“It looks that way. As to why, I’ve no idea. But she probably did.”
I nodded toward where the body of the new and improved and now very dead Thursday was lying on the floor of the loading bay. A long trail of dark blood was pooling near a stack of remaindered Lola Vavoom conspiracy books.
“We need get her back to lab,” said Stig as he pulled out his cell phone, “find out more.”
“No one move,” came a voice.
It was the police. A sergeant I recognized named Kitchen and two constables.
“ SO-13,” said Stig, holding up his ID. “This chimera. Our jurisdiction.”
They stared at one another for a moment. The friction in the air was tangible. SpecOps and the police didn’t really get along— mostly because SpecOps had seniority, and the police had a better canteen and a final salary pension.
“ SO-13 was disbanded thirteen years ago, Stiggins.”
“From midday today back in business.”