Sims (36 page)

“How on earth did you find out about her?”

Might as well tell them the whole story, Luca thought. Well, most of it.

“It started with a phone call last month. A woman said she had to speak to Mercer Sinclair right away, said she had information that would affect the entire future of SimGen. That sounded like a security matter to me so I took the call and—”

“And pretended to be me?”

“Of course. The woman, whose name I later learned was Eleanor Bryce, a Ph.D. in microbiology, told me she was in possession of a pregnant sim.”

“You accepted that?” Sinclair-2 said. His color was returning along with his voice, but pure hatred gleamed in his eyes. “Just like that?”

Portero returned his stare. You want another try for a piece of me, fancy man? Next time I spread your nose across your face.

“Of course not. In an involved back-and-forth that took almost two weeks she sent enough information to convince our people that she could be telling the truth.”

“
Your
people!” Sinclair-1 now. “The ones in our Basic Research facility, I suppose. Why not ours?”

“We were going to bring in your people later, but first we had to secure this sim. The Bryce woman made enough slips during our communications to allow me to pinpoint her location. When she presented her ultimatum I decided it was time to move.”

“Ultimatum?” Sinclair-1 said.

That's not what you should be asking me, Luca thought. Why aren't either of you asking the right question?

Because he was dying to lay the answer on them . . . and watch both the Sinclair brothers' hair turn white before his eyes.

Luca said, “She wanted to sell us the sim.”

“
Sell
us? Sell us something that already belonged to us? What did you tell her?”

“Since I was pretending to be you, I said exactly that, then I asked her how much she wanted. She told me to bid. And she warned me not to be ‘chintzy'—her word—because there'd be another bidder: the Arata-jinruien Corporation.”

Sinclair-1 pounded a fist on his desktop. “
Those
bandits? Outrageous!”

“Wait just a minute,” Sinclair-2 said, holding up a hand. “Let's take a step back here.”

Here it comes, Luca thought. His gut tingled with anticipation.

“Let's just say,” Sinclair-2 continued, but he spoke to his brother, as if Luca weren't there, “that this Bryce woman, through hormone treatments or a recombinant patch, did somehow manage to induce a female sim to produce a fertilizable ovum. That will cause SimGen problems because it means people will be able to breed their own sims—and no one on this planet wants that less than I do—but it doesn't invalidate our patent on the sim genome. So—”

Not the question!

“She didn't do anything to the sim,” Luca snapped. “She's a microbiologist. Knows nothing about reproductive medicine.”

“How can you be sure?” Sinclair-1 said.

“She told me.”

Sinclair-1 barked a laugh.

Luca glared at him. “At the time I questioned her she was loaded up with a drug that made her incapable of lying.”

“The compound mentioned in the autopsy report,” Sinclair-2 said, his
tone dripping contempt. “Did you torture them before or after you had your information?”

“That was just window dressing, to muddy the waters while I eliminated everyone with firsthand knowledge about the pregnancy. I didn't know what the sims knew, but I didn't want any loose ends, so they were removed too.”

“Dear God, why?” Sinclair-2 said. “A pregnant sim, even if it were possible, opens up a can of worms, but it's not worth the lives of three people and a dozen sims!”

Here's the moment, Luca thought. Time to rock your world.

“It does if the father of the sim's baby is human.”

Silence, a moment of glorious, absolute silence in the office as the Sinclair brothers froze. Luca could have been looking at a photograph, or an elaborate sculpture. Then the thump of Sinclair-1 dropping heavily into his chair as if the bones in his legs had suddenly dissolved.

Luca inhaled the mixture of shock and terror filling the air. Moments like this made life worth living.

He's wrong! Mercer Sinclair thought, fighting a vertiginous sense of unreality. Portero's wrong! He has to be!

. . . the father of the sim's baby is human . . .

Those words hung in the air before him, almost visible. He sensed that if he reached out his hand he might touch them.

He looked at his security chief's smug expression and knew that Portero believed it, but that didn't mean it was true. Being a tough guy didn't mean you couldn't be scammed.

Mercer worked his lips, forcing out the words. “A hoax!” he cried, but it sounded more like a bleat.

Portero shook his head. “I have it from all three farmers: They all believed they were in possession of a pregnant sim that was going to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.”

“Then they believed wrong!”

“Wait a second,” Ellis said. “They believed. That's important. They may have been morally bankrupt, but they weren't ignorant. A globulin farm requires a fair amount of scientific sophistication. And if they were convinced that one of their sims was pregnant . . .”

Mercer stared at his brother. Ellis seemed to have shaken off the pain and humiliation of Portero's gut punch. But instead of feeling, as Mercer did, that his lips were encased in lead, Ellis seemed almost . . . energized.

And he was thinking the unthinkable.

“Ellis . . . it can't be. Read my lips: Sims. Are. Sterile. Want me to write it out on a piece of paper for you?”

“But a sim gene can mutate,” Ellis said. “Sims can't evolve, but they're as prone to mutations as any other organism. Murphy's Law, Merce: Shit happens, especially when it comes to reproduction. Nature abhors a dead-end species nearly as much as a vacuum.”

“Don't talk to me of ‘Nature' and what it abhors,” Mercer said. “
I
abhor teleological concepts. Life is chemicals, pure and simple.”

Ellis went on as if Mercer hadn't spoken. “I remember reading years ago about a woman who'd lost her left ovary due to a ruptured cyst and her right fallopian tube due to a tubal pregnancy. She was told she'd never have to worry about birth control, but years later she showed up in her doctor's office with a positive pregnancy test. An ultrasound showed that her left fallopian tube had migrated across her uterus to link up with her right ovary.”

“Apocryphal garbage.”

Ellis looked at Portero. “This Bryce woman who called, this microbiologist, did she tell you how she found out the sim—what was her name again?”

“Meerm,” Portero gritted. The name burned like acid on his tongue.

“Did she tell you how she discovered Meerm was pregnant?”

Portero made a face. “What difference does it make?”

“Humor me.”

A sigh, then, “When she first called she told me she'd been working up a sick sim—vomiting, pain. Couldn't find out what was wrong so she sent blood out to a commercial lab and ordered a preset battery of tests for abdominal pain. The battery was designed for humans, and one of those tests was for pregnancy. It came back positive. She repeated it at three different labs, and all came back positive. She rented an ultrasound rig and that removed all doubt. She overnighted me copies of the blood work and the ultrasound. I had our people go over them. They said it could easily be a hoax, but there was enough there to be worried about.”

Mercer said, “So you made a preemptive strike before the Japanese could get involved.”

Portero inclined his head a few degrees. “Exactly.”

Had to hand it to the man: His methods might be loathsome, but he got things done.

“But why invent this SLA group?”

“For cover. I didn't want anyone to guess the real reason for the raid, and a bunch of wacked-out sim huggers seemed perfect. The op would have gone down without a hitch if their security guy hadn't decided to take his job seriously. Four of us went in and the jerk started shooting, so we had to take him out. The shots must've spooked the pregnant sim who was being kept separate from the other cows. When I couldn't find her I figured she was hiding somewhere in the building; since I didn't have time to look for her, I fired the place.”

“But no sim remains were found,” Ellis said. “Which meant she escaped.” He shook his head. “I can see the logic, sick as it is, of killing the humans. But why the sims? Even if they somehow knew about Meerm's pregnancy, who'd believe them?”

Portero's eyes narrowed and his tone skirted with a snarl. “First off, I wasn't about to nursemaid a bunch of monkeys. Second, they could identify us. And third, our people over in Basic Research wanted to look at their gonads, just in case they'd undergone any changes like the pregnant one. I covered that by taking hearts and kidneys and livers too—made it look like a harvest.”

Mercer clenched his teeth and stared at Portero. You shit! he thought. Just yesterday you stood right there and played all innocent about organlegging and xenografts.

He wanted to throw something at him but feared Portero might return it with interest. Or worse, shove it down his throat.

“What ice-cold womb did you spring from?” Ellis said, still shaking his head.

Mercer feared Portero might react violently, but the insult seemed to roll off him. And Mercer realized that neither of them could insult Luca Portero, because Portero didn't care what they thought.

We're of a different species, and our opinions are irrelevant.

Mercer watched as his brother closed his eyes a moment, took a breath, then said, “How did the globulin farmers know the father was human?”

“They asked the sim and she fingered Craig Strickland, the farm's security guard—”

“The corpse that was found in the fire?”

“Yeah, him. Seemed he'd been spending some of his guard time diddling the livestock. Before he ate a few bullets.”

Mercer slumped back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. This can't be happening.

“You realize what this means, don't you, Merce.” His brother's voice.

It wasn't a question. Mercer lowered his hands to find Ellis staring at him. Yes, he knew exactly what this meant: the end of SimGen.

But only if somebody else found the sim first.

“Five million dollars,” Mercer blurted. “I'm raising the reward to five million for information leading to the successful ‘rescue'—and I want that term emphasized—of the missing sim. We'll say the reason we're willing to pay so much is that she can lead us to the killers of the twelve dead sims, and that nobody slaughters and mutilates our sims and gets away with it.”

“What if she's dead?” Portero said. “She can't be ‘rescued' then.”

Mercer thought about that a moment. “I want her to be worth more alive than dead, so we'll offer to pay just one million for her remains. But I want her alive, get it? Alive, alive, alive!”

Yes. Get their hands on this sim before anyone else. And once she's safely tucked away, find out how she became fertile. Then take steps to make sure it never happens again.

Somewhere, out there, walking around, was living, breathing proof that humans and sims could cross-fertilize . . . Mercer's worst nightmares had never even come close to such an apocalyptic scenario. If news of this ever got out, sims would have to be reclassified closer to human, too close to be property, too close to be leased . . .

Imagine having to announce that at the stockholders' meeting next week. SimGen shares would crash and burn . . . they'd be the Hindenberg of the NASDAQ. He'd lose everything.
Everything!

And so would SIRG.

“Find her, Portero,” Mercer said. “This is as important to your people as it is to me. All that SimGen stock they hold will be toilet paper if someone beats us to her. If you do nothing else in your life, you must find that sim. That is your number one priority.”

“Not quite,” Portero said softly. “There's another, equally pressing matter that requires my attention.”

Looking at the security chief's dark expression, and knowing his ruthlessness, Mercer was glad he was not that other “equally pressing matter.” He wondered who might be involved, then decided he'd rather not know.

“But don't worry about your pregnant sim,” Portero went on. “I've got a good idea where she is and I'll have men watching the area twenty-four/seven. You'll have your sim.”

NEWARK, NJ

Mans go way. Meerm hide in wall. Too fraid come out. Meerm feel something move inside. Not first time. Meerm feel before but nev so much. Move-move-move inside. What do that? Is why Meerm belly so big?

When sim come back work, Meerm climb out wall. Not leave closet because hear other man come. Yell-yell-yell.