Double Helix Ch. 19

Nock

I shrugged at Norm. "I don't know, man. I guess she left a few details off of her resume."

"Yeah, well this is a big, big problem." He rounded on Stan. "We need to get our Agency contact on the phone right now. We have to send her back to wherever she came from."

"Martin?" the girl said, her voice unsteady. "Can't we talk about this?"

Stansy looked from Norm to the girl. "Norm, what do you mean she's a traitor? And your sister?"

Norm pointed an accusing finger at her. "She's the one who made me a refugee. And got twelve genemods and two other normals arrested doing it. On top of that, she's useless to you. She's no Gena. She already had her mods reverted."

"Only because you convinced me to, brother," the girl shot back.

"I was trying to protect you," Norm growled. He turned back to Stan. "She can't stay here. I don't know how she found me, but she'll betray us, the first chance she gets."

"She knows where the farm is," Stansy said. "It's a bit late to change our minds now, and I don't think the Agency will take her back, regardless."

Norm turned to her. "This is an extraordinary situation. We have to make them understand. I should have vetted the recruits myself. I've got to figure this out." He pointed at me. "Nock, keep an eye on her for me. Don't let her out of your sight and keep her away from phones and terminals." He stalked off towards the house, shaking his head and muttering profanity under his breath.

"Well," I said, stepping towards the girl, "that was interesting. So you really are Norm's sister?"

She looked after Norm. "Yeah, that's my brother, alright. You called him Norm? As in the Norm, of Node 1?"

I grinned. "Only one we've got."

"Wow," she said, sighing. She turned to me with a pained smile. "Well, it's nice to finally meet you in person, Nock. I don't know how long I'll be around, though."

I nodded. "Yeah, we're going to work that out." I had been in contact with her for over a month, and she had struck me as thoughtful, both in the sense of using her brain and in considering the needs of others and how she could help. Not too different from her brother, in fact.

Stan interrupted my thoughts. "Hey, Nock? I was going to take the newbies over to look at what I've got so far on the new network, but if she's supposed to stay away from terminals..." He spread his hands.

"Why don't you get started with Stanford here," I said, "and I'll give her a tour of the other facilities."

"Right, of course. Thanks."

"God, I hate that name," Stanford said under his breath as he followed Stan into the house.

"So what do we call you?" I asked, turning back to the girl. "Do you prefer to stay as Gena? Or would you rather go by your real name? Either one is fine, but we've pretty much stuck with tradition here."

She frowned in thought for just a second. "Gena, please. That's who I've been for the last six months. It would be weird to change now."

"Gena it is, then. Come on. I'll show you the greenhouse and some of the other projects our people have been working on."

I studied her discreetly as we walked. Her hair, straight and blond, was fashioned into a cute ponytail that fell just past the bottom of her neck. Meeting her gaze had been like looking into ice, the irises a brilliant shade of light blue. She had a cute, heart-shaped face, and the smooth, unblemished skin of a genemod. She was shorter than most of the other women on the farm, maybe just a couple of inches over five feet. The pale blue dress she had on was worn, though not patched, as commonly happened if you spent more than a few months in an Agency safe house.

She couldn't have been younger than twenty or so, but her energy and exuberance lent an innocence to her personality that made me instinctively want to protect her. Though she was a bit too thin, her body still curved enticingly, with the rear view just as intriguing as the front. "You have beautiful eyes," I said, almost without thinking.

"Oh, thank you," she said, turning a smile on me.

In my years as an entrepreneur, attracting the attention of women had come easily and naturally to me. I had never strayed in my commitment to Ariana, but I can't claim that I wasn't tempted on a regular basis. Now that I was unattached, I was free to pursue any woman I wanted.

I frowned at that thought. She was my best friend's kid sister, after all. That put her firmly off limits, as far as I was concerned. Fortunately, I had ways of dealing with such distractions. I focused on my reaction and imagined it fading into the background. In effect, I was exerting conscious control over my limbic system, rewiring my response to the stimulus of her presence.

The result was immediate. My heartbeat slowed a few beats per minute and my gaze was no longer drawn to her curves. I now felt no more attraction to her than I felt towards Tilly or Alice.

I didn't want to take her inside the greenhouse and have to go through the hassle of all of the sanitation protocols, so we circled the outside of the structure to the south and she pressed her nose up against the glass, expressing her delight and amazement at the dense growth of plants within. Those of us who were here from the beginning had grown used to the idea of growing our own food. To newcomers, though, it was always a fascinating sight to see such a bounty of edible plants thriving inside the protective bubble of the greenhouse.

On seeing the longing looks she gave our crops, I abruptly changed my mind. "You know what? Why don't we in and get a closer look?"

I led Gena around to the entrance on the west side of the structure, where the entryway and the showers were enclosed in frosted glass. I pointed to the closest of the showers. "Get in and seal the door behind you. You need to undress and place your clothes in the lower cupboard on the wall. You'll get to put them back on when we come out." I pointed to the spout on the ceiling. "When you hit the button, you'll get a pressurized mix of water and fungicide. Scrub down thoroughly. Get your hair really saturated and try to clean every crease and crevice."

She laughed. "Getting a bit personal, aren't we?"

I realized how that had sounded and laughed myself. "Actually, no, I'm dead serious. A spore can hide anywhere on your body, even there. So be thorough. Hit the button again and the spout will switch to a fine mist of more concentrated fungicide that should clear up any spores you might have missed on your skin or left on the inner surface of the shower. It will run for about a minute and then switch to pure water. The fungicide is slightly caustic, so make sure you rinse thoroughly or you could end up with eczema. Get a towel out of the upper cupboard and dry off. Hit the switch next to the inner door and it will unseal, giving you access to the next chamber. Place your towel in the laundry chute and put on a robe. I'll meet you in the final chamber."

"Okay," she said. "I think I got all that."

She got in and I went to my own shower, stripping quickly. I wanted to make sure she didn't try to head further in without me. Norm had told me not to let her out of my sight, but I would have heard her footsteps if she tried to sneak away, even over the sound of the water, and right now I could hear her humming quietly as she scrubbed. She called from the other side, not realizing that she needn't raise her voice for me to hear. "Do I need to worry about my nose and mouth?"

"You can wash out your mouth," I said. "The fungicide is toxic in large doses, so don't swallow a bunch, but otherwise you'll be fine. When you switch to the mist, breathing just a bit of it in should clear your throat and sinuses." I had grown used to following the protocols by rote and had forgotten how even an errant sneeze could end up infecting our crops.

I heard her switch to the mist and did the same, breathing in the slightly antiseptic smelling stuff while I stood still, letting it coat my body thoroughly. I rinsed, dried off, and stepped into the next chamber to put on one of the loose-fitting cotton robes. Gena was still humming inside the exit chamber.

"So what song is that?" I asked.

"Oh, I didn't think you could hear me. It's called 'Hang on Little Tomato'."

I laughed, "Seriously?"

She hummed a few more bars and started singing. "You gotta ho-old on, hold on through the night. Ha-ang on, things will be alright." Her voice didn't have the tonal perfection of Nissi's, but it was sweet and resonant, even in the enclosed space. She laughed self-consciously. "I heard it a few years back. It helps sometimes when things are looking bleak."

She stepped out a moment later, her wet hair now free of its ponytail and falling loosely down over her shoulders. "You have to do that every time you come in here?" she asked.

I smiled. "Oh, we're not even done yet. Come on."

I led her down the central access tube, the sealed compartments of the greenhouse visible on either side. I pointed to a set of stairs leading down into the ground about halfway to the end. "That goes into the utility room. All of the pumps and filtration equipment is down there. Important stuff, but boring. We're going here."

She looked where I had pointed, the airlock-like entrance to one of the compartments, and grimaced. "Another shower?"

I nodded grimly. "Tilly says this cuts down the chances of an infection event by two orders of magnitude. Trust me, it'll be worth it. Just follow the same procedures as before. When you're done, go on inside. There are sealed bags with clothes in there and a bench to change. Then go on inside the growing chamber and wait. I'll come in after you."

She got in and in a moment I heard the sound of the shower running. A couple of minutes later, I took my turn in the shower and changed into the plain, light clothing that we stocked each chamber with.

Gena was waiting just outside the door for me. "It smells so good in here!" she said. That had always struck me, too, when I entered one of these chambers. My sense of smell let me distinguish the individual scents of nearly everything we grew, and I had found that I could readily determine when certain plants were at or near full ripeness.

Feeling like some gardening version of Willy Wonka, I said, "Why don't you see how it tastes?"

She peered at me. "You're serious?"

I shrugged. "Sure. Most of the vegetables in here can be eaten raw. There's broccoli, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, whatever you like. We keep a kind of rotation going so something is always coming ripe. Take whatever you like."

Gena looked out at the tennis court-sized chamber filled with vines and bushes and back at me. "Really?"

I laughed. "Yes. Now go."

I watched her bend over and examine a tomato plant before carefully selecting two bright red orbs the size of golf balls. She moved to another row where vines coiled through a wooden lattice and reached to twist off a big cucumber. She wandered around for a minute, then spotted several rows of plants that grew low to the ground, sprouting a thick cluster of round leaves. "Is this spinach?" she asked.

"Yep," I said.

"What do I do with it?"

"It depends on how much you want. You can cut the whole thing off at the ground, or just trim some leaves around the edges."

She went for the latter, picking off about a dozen leaves. She made her way back over to me, cradling the little harvest in her cupped hands. "Do I need to wash it, or..."

"There are no pesticides or infectious bacteria on our plants," I said. "Try one of those tomatoes."

She bit into it and her eyes went wide. She chewed slowly, and I saw that a bit of the juice was flowing down to her chin. She caught it with a finger and put it to her lips. "Oh my God," she said. "I don't know when it was the last time I tasted anything like that." She popped the rest of the tomato into her mouth, along with a few leaves of spinach, still chewing with exaggerated slowness.

"You weren't getting enough to eat at the safe house, were you?" I asked.

She shook her head slightly and swallowed. "The Agency has been having supply problems all year. The house I went to was getting an allotment of 1400 calories per person, per day for eight people. They put in an order to add another 1400 for me, but there is apparently a waiting list. So we just ended up carefully splitting it between everyone. I got probably 1100 or so a day."

"You'll starve on that eventually," I said. "How long were you there?"

"Um, almost six months."

"Must have been rough," I said. "Try a bite of that cucumber."

She took a tiny bite from the end, chewed for a second, then took a bigger bite and sighed. "It's perfect."

"Before we came here, our host had a greenhouse," I said. "I guess we had it pretty good. That must have been hard, living off of nothing but Agency rations that whole time."

She shrugged. "Not much worse than government rations, just less of it. We had a few days now and then when the shipments were late, and we had nothing to eat for a day or two. That was hard."

"Well, you don't need to deal with that anymore," I said. "We keep two months' worth of potatoes, rice, and canned stuff stockpiled, just in case, but this greenhouse just keeps on producing more than we need, all the time, week after week."

"That's only if I get to stay," she said. "My brother seems hellbent on sending me away."

I shook my head. "I don't think we can do that. Like Stansy said, you know where the farm is now. We can't make you leave and risk that information getting out. Maybe you should tell me your side of the story, though. Norm seems to want to hold this close to his chest, and I need to understand what I'm up against."

"Yeah," she said. "You deserve to know that. You've been so nice to me, though, I'm not sure you'll like me after I tell you."

"I'm not very nice, most of the time," I said. "So I doubt it will make any difference."

She laughed. "Well, okay, but this might take some time."

I glanced at my watch. "I don't have to be anywhere for two hours. Come on, there's a place we can sit down further in."

I led her behind a trellis where our pea plants grew. There, a kind of stone bench had been formed by flat slabs of rock placed on top of a rectangular mound of packed soil. A few feet in front of the bench was an elliptical pool four feet wide, the bottom and sides lined with stones with a little brick walkway around it. Lily pads covered half of the surface, but you could see little glitters of red and gold in the spaces between, beneath the surface. "Oh, my!" Gena said, bending over to look down into the pool. "Are those koi?"

I smiled at her reaction. "Yep. This was Stansy's Christmas present to all of us, though she didn't finish it until April. She built it herself, and she comes in every day to tend to them. They were about this big when she got them." I held my thumb and forefinger an inch apart. Now they were three inches in length.

I sat on one side of the bench and patted the other side. Gena sat, crossed her legs, and folded her hands in her lap. "So you already know that Mar-that Norm is my older brother. I was born as a G, but when the Ban came down, I decided to turn myself in for reversion."

"Back there," I interrupted. "You said that Norm convinced you to."

She sighed. "He thought it would be best. There was no Agency to protect us there at the beginning and I couldn't imagine a life on the run. I was fifteen years old. My mind could do things that no one else around me could, but in a lot of ways I was still a kid. I took the easy way out."

She described the process in some detail. Reverting a mod like a Standard Upgrade mostly involved rounds of gene therapy to downgrade their enhanced skeletons and musculature and deactivate the mechanisms that combat aging, but in her case, it meant physically cutting into her brain to impair its function. A reverted genemod was also effectively sterile, since the pathways for the fertility drug that stimulated ovulation in females and sperm production in males were removed. The process wasn't perfect, and some genemods retained some theoretical fraction of their original enhancements, or in a few cases, found themselves considerably below average in ability.

"I ended up a little above average," she said. "I've never had it checked, but I would guess my IQ at something like 125. It killed my career, though. I couldn't understand half of my own research papers anymore. I moved back home and sank into depression and self-pity for a couple of years. Then, at a party, a friend introduced me to the wonderful world of crystal meth." She had been gazing at the koi pond as she said that, but her eyes lifted to catch mine. "Have you ever tried meth?"

I shook my head. "Never had any reason to use drugs. I tried weed in high school, but it just made me feel slow and happy. I didn't care for it."

"Meth made me feel smarter," she said. "Intellectually, logically, I knew that it didn't, that it couldn't, but when I was on the drug, my brain was tricked into believing it, which seemed to me to be just as good. After a while, I was taking it just to stay out of withdrawal. When my parents found out, they went ballistic and tried to get me into rehab. I refused, so they threw me out."

She shook her head at the memory. "Norm was far away in California, working towards a professorship at the time, or I might have gone to him. Instead I ended up on the street, surviving any way I could. I got a job from time to time, but it never lasted, so I turned to petty theft, a little dealing, stuff like that. Sometimes I would sell some of my food rations. Meth really kills your appetite. I considered prostitution a few times, but somehow managed to hold onto that part of my dignity. When I got really desperate, for the drug, I mean, I would borrow money from a loan shark. I racked up so much debt that I stopped thinking about it or I couldn't sleep. That's when I wasn't tweaking bad and unable to sleep anyway."

She took a moment to munch on the vegetables while I thought about what she had said. "I thought I was some kind of badass for a while. I was an idiot and a punk. I could have ended up something like you did if I hadn't changed course. I narrowly avoided juvie a few times."

She scoffed. "Yeah, jail. Been there, done that. Mostly for petty stuff, but I spent a month inside once for stealing. That was the year Norm started at UCLA as an associate professor. Over summer break, he decided to visit for mom's birthday. By this time, I was getting harassed daily by the loan shark. The guy had roughed me up a few times and threatened rape, and I figured it was only a matter of time before he really took it out on me."

She chewed at her lip, clearly reluctant to continue, but visibly steeled herself to go on. "They got word to me through my parole officer that Norm would be in town, and I called him to see if we could meet up. I had this crazy idea that my big brother could save me, maybe come up with the money to pay off my debt. But as we talked, I realized that he was working his tail off for next to nothing. Besides that, even though I was high at the time, I had the presence of mind to realize that if I told him about the loan, I would have to reveal my circumstances. When he told me that he was helping out at a safe house in LA, my mind focused in on that. I thought, if I made a report to the feds while Norm was still in Minneapolis, then he would be safe. I didn't know that he was flying out that afternoon."

"So it's true," I said. "You did betray him. And you did it for reward money." I might have been disgusted, if I wasn't already feeling pity. "Now I understand his reaction to seeing you."

She looked down, her cheeks burning crimson. "If I could go back and change it, even if it meant being raped or killed by that loan shark, I would do it. I wasn't thinking about the people I would be hurting. Somehow it didn't occur to me that all it would take was a little questioning for them to discover Norm's involvement. You can see why he wants me gone."