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Authors: Paul Melko

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BOOK: Singularity's Ring
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None.
Dr. Baker created breakfast with the same scientific zeal that he spliced genes. The eggs sat atop a mound of some unknown grain. The milk had a perplexing thickness. The jam was made from unidentifiable fruit.
“Eat!” he said. “Eat! We’ve so much to do today.” He flicked on a monitor hanging in the kitchen. “The boys are already working.”
Working?
I asked.
Meda flushed.
We sort of agreed
—
—
to help Dr. Baker out,
Quant finished.
Without me?
I asked, remembering the last time they made decisions without me, we had found Malcolm Leto.
Meda shrugged.
Sorry.
I was angry, but I let it drop. I did not like Dr. Baker’s manner, but that was after only one meeting, and purely a superficial observation. Still, that the pod had made a major decision without me annoyed me.
After breakfast we found Strom and Manuel feeding the
bears in their pen. I could almost hear the bears’ depression at being limited to two hundred square meters. Yet they seemed to be relaxed.
“They should be out roaming,” I said. Meda glared at me.
I’m interface,
Meda said.
He’s not pod human. He doesn’t understand the rules,
I replied. I realized I was pettily undermining Meda’s role as she had mine while I was unconscious.
He’s looking at us,
Quant sent.
Dr. Baker harumphed. “Think amongst yourselves, don’t mind me.”
“We were just thinking the bears should be able to roam free,” Meda said.
“Not while we’ve got work to do,” Baker replied. “The male has a broken tooth. We need to cap it.”
“Papa,” Meda said.
“What’s that?”
“His name is Papa.”
“You’ve named them, have you? Don’t get too close to them. They are still wild animals.”
Meda came close to saying it was what he called himself before I sent,
Don’t say it!
“Yes, Doctor.”
“I’ m so glad you’re here. I’ m so glad you’re interested in the bears,” he gurgled. “I need someone to watch how they deal with being a trio. Bears are solitary by nature, except for sows raising their young. How does podlike faculties affect their solitary nature? I need to know. I’m just not as spry as I used to be. Field work hurts my knees.”
Why is he doing this all by himself?
I asked. My superficial impression of Dr. Baker wasn’t changing.
“We’d be glad to help. But really, you should contact the OG and share your research,” Meda said.
Dr. Baker looked at her with hooded eyes. He lost his
visage of lovable scientist, replaced it with a predatory gleam.
“The OG is no better than the damned Community. One and the same. One and the same.”
Better drop that subject,
I offered.
“Look at what they did to you,” he said, nodding at Quant. “Saddled you with broken goods. I’d like to test that one.”
“You are not testing me!” Quant said.
“Look how intelligent she seems now that she’s with the other two. Alone, she probably can’t understand a word I say.”
It was Quant’s turn to glare. “I can understand you fine!”
“Yes, yes, to you it would seem so.” He scratched his beard, yellow with egg yolk. “Why use a damaged human in a pod? What good?”
“I have my skills!”
“What was their goal in building you?” he mused. “Don’t you wonder?”
“Maybe we should see about Papa’s tooth,” Meda said, changing the subject.
 
Papa looked at the needle with trepidation.
Sharp.
I saw you take a hundred stings for a honeycomb,
I sent, stroking his ear.
Where’s the comb?
he asked. His thought was tinged with irony.
Your tooth hurts, doesn’t it?
He nodded. I stuck the syringe into his neck. After a moment his eyes glazed and his head lolled onto the table in the lab. It was so heavy, I could barely line it up with the MRI aperture.
“That was easy,” Dr. Baker said. “He usually fights the needle.”
Roam and Sleepy watched from a window, with the boys trying to distract them. It was no use; even from inside I could smell the concern.
“The three of them are very close,” Meda said.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “The last trio … only two of them came back. They have tracking chips, but I have no way of knowing what happened.”
“How old are Papa, Roam, and Sleepy?”
“Six years old. They’re my fourth pod of bears, the one that’s stayed together longest.” The machine hummed. It was old tech, big and clunky, yet the image of Papa’s skull was clear. “See the vomeronasal organ? See how big it is? This is one of the things I had to fix in your DNA.”
“What?” Meda asked.
“In you pods, the vomeronasal organ, on either side of your septum, is enhanced to receive the pheromonal scents that you pass between yourselves.”
“We know that. We’ve had biology.”
“Don’t get feisty,” Dr. Baker said, laying a hand on Meda’s shoulder. “Basically, humans used to have better pheromonal communication than they did at the end of the last century. Pod biology just took advantage of the capabilities that were dormant in the normal human DNA. Only not all of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Chemoreceptors in pod humans are about three percent as efficient as they could be. As they are in the bears.”
Purposely?
I asked.
“Are you saying that pod DNA is purposely sabotaged?” Meda asked.
“Yes,” Dr. Baker said, as he maneuvered a pair of plastic forceps into Papa’s mouth, one eye on the MRI screen, one on the bear’s mouth. “Where is it?”
Pod DNA is sabotaged,
Quant sent.
Purposely decayed performance. Conspiracy.
Hold on,
I replied.
We don’t know for sure. It could be simple chance. Maybe that’s the only deficiency for some reason lost to antiquity.
What else is masked? What else is deficient?
Quant asked.
“What else?”
“Oh, lots of things. Chemical memory speed. Weak ties to recessives. Things I can’t even begin to understand yet. It’s amazing that you pods are still around. Should have died out long ago. With the Community, which made you.”
Quant, Meda, and I found ourselves staring at each other.
We need to consense!
I sent.
Meda signaled the boys with her hand. They were in the pen, separated by glass with the sow bears.
Need you now!
she signed.
Strom caught it and nodded. He grabbed Manuel and they came in from the pen. The doctor didn’t notice when we slipped away.
He’s crazy!
Manuel sent when we replayed conversation.
Pods and the Community are utterly … different.
They’re fundamentally the same thing,
Quant replied.
Groups of humans.
The Community used silicon and computers.
The brain is a computer.
It doesn’t matter. My brain is nothing like a silicon-based computer.
How much do we really know about the origins of the pods?
I asked, diverting our argument.
We knew what we’d learned in school; the first pods had been built seven decades before, a duo, by two geneticists. They had simple sharing of feelings and moods with pheromones. The duo, caught in a feedback loop of anger and hate, had murdered one of their creators, their father.
One of the duo,
someone corrected.
The other of the pair had then committed suicide, immediately afterward. But that hadn’t stopped the genetic engineering. Triplets had already been pod-modified with rudimentary ability to share physical memories.
The Community AIs weren’t created until a decade after the first pods.
But that doesn’t mean the Community couldn’t have subverted the pod research.
Why?
And why did the Community disappear? If it created and needed the pods, why leave them behind?
We need more data.
More data.
The doctor was the source of that data. The question was how to get it and how to determine its reliability.
 
We helped Dr. Baker do physicals on all the bears. In addition to Papa’s broken tooth, we fixed a broken nail on Sleepy’s claw and stitched an old wound on Roam’s flank. The bears drowsed the day away, content to sleep in their paddock and have their meals brought to them.
“Lazy bears,” Strom said affectionately as we fed them dinner.
Yes,
Roam replied, yawning.
In addition to bear care and feeding, we tried to understand the bear genome and what Dr. Baker had done to it. He let us have time on his sequencer, but wouldn’t tell us the answer. It was as if we were back in school after a six-month hiatus. Dr. Baker treated us as if we had taken the position he’d offered as lab assistants, even though we hadn’t officially accepted.
Why shouldn’t we take the jobs?
Manuel asked.
What’s the downside?
Dr. Baker is the downside,
I replied.
Why?
Manuel shot back.
Paranoia, god-complex, delusions,
I ticked off.
He’s eccentric,
Manuel sent.
He treats the bears like animals.
Well, they are.
Sentient animals, just like us.
Quant was bent over the sequencer screen, listening only partially to the argument.
I don’t understand this at all,
she sent.
The rest of us shared her view, but even with all five of us analyzing it, the sequence made no sense.
We’ve asked Dr. Baker. He won’t explain this.
He’s forgotten,
Manuel sent. It might have been true. Dr. Baker seemed to forget many things. Nor would he discuss the pod-Community connection, waving his hand muttering how it was all in the past.
“Not important! Not important!” he said.
Our expertise was not genetic engineering. We knew the basics; after all, one summer we had built a duck pod on Mother Redd’s farm, a science fair project with unexpected results. But we had never meddled with human or mammal DNA.
I have no idea what these sequences do!
Quant sent.
They look like they build enzymes,
Meda said.
Obviously!
Don’t get snippy!
They must catalyze the conversion of chemical memories to brain memory,
Manuel sent.
Quant cut back her retort. We’d been studying the genome for hours, and we were all tired.
We need Mother Redd.
We could call her.
And she would call the OG.
She would not!
Enough!
I sent.
We need a break.
“Hello!” Dr. Baker’s voice issued tinnily from the box next to the door. “Would you be so kind as to lead the larger female into the examination room?”
Roam followed the boys from the paddock to the examination room, while we filled a syringe of anesthesia for Roam.
“We’ve got to abort her fetuses,” Dr. Baker said as he entered.
“What?” Meda said.
“No!” I shouted.
Dr. Baker looked at us, his bushy eyebrows raised.
“Yes, of course. We can’t let them breed yet!”
“But Roam wants her cubs,” Meda said.
“Nonsense, she doesn’t even understand she’s pregnant.”
The door opened and Roam walked in with Strom and Manuel.
He wants to abort Roam’s cubs!
I sent.
Strom stopped where he was, his face contorted. I felt anger from him.
“She does know she’s pregnant,” Meda said. “She does know.”
What does “abort” mean?
Roam asked, scratching her ear.
“Don’t anthropomorphize these bears more than necessary,” Dr. Baker said. “Yes, their descendants will one day rule the world, but these three are only a few steps away from being wild animals.”
BOOK: Singularity's Ring
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