The Pride of Parahumans (15 page)

As the seconds on the clock ticked down, Olga
went through the last couple steps to start the stream. She'd start
with her usual black screen accompanied by voiceover and subtitles
explaining the video to come and then switch over to me. I would
tell her viewers everything. "We are starting in three, two..."
Olga's announced, then she switched on a distortion unit that would
make her sound like the net revolutionary's distinctive gravelly
tones.

"This is HoundOfGod. It has been over a week
since our last broadcast and no doubt some of you are wondering why
I haven't been covering the recent disturbances surrounding the
revelation that parahuman sterility is easily fixed. You may have
concluded that the complete disappearance of Argentum, known by the
net aliases DarwinRevolution and GoldFoxie, the author of the paper
detailing the gene the corporations used to prevent us from
reproducing, had something to do with it. Or you may have concluded
that when I failed to make a baby with my partner, I hid myself
away in shame like many of others who tried the treatment did. To
those who believe the latter, I recommend reading some basic
information on how meiosis works and waiting a month like we're
doing. The former is closer to the truth. You see, Argentum did not
completely disappear."

A map of the Marquez cavern's sensors
appeared in the field of view. A clearly defined path was utterly
devoid of sensor sweep symbols. "For about twenty minutes on the
day of the riots, a set of Marquez sensors went dark. As you can
see, the specific sensors were too convenient to be coincidental,
as one end of the path they form is at Argentum's apartment
complex."

The image changed to an interior view of my
apartment, the sheets disheveled and the appliances thrown around
and broken. There were even a few splatters of blood. "Zir
apartment was later reported by the landlord to be in a state of
disarray. He found blood staining the floor and a 3D printed M1911
semiautomatic pistol, similar to the one Argentum was known to
carry."

A pic of me at the time of the bounty hunter
incident appeared alongside the apartment, with a circle and arrow
around my holster. The apartment view zoomed in on the same gun
lying on the floor. "There were also two bullets of the caliber
used in the firearm embedded in one of the walls of the apartment,
as well as three spent casings on the floor near the gun. This
suggests that Argentum had been attacked and managed to pull off
three shots before ze was captured, one of which hit one of the
aggressors. The other end of the path was just as interesting, it
turned out."

The still images changed views to a gaping
metal hole in the side of the planetoid, going down into darkness.
"The mass driver, a never-used project of the old corporations that
would have saved them billions on shipping back to Earth. I drew
the obvious conclusion and took a ship out along the trajectory the
driver would have fired upon. What I found was no less than
miraculous."

The view now changed to a still of open
space, which zoomed in on a tiny spot until the screen was filled
with my furry black and white ass. "The broken and bleeding body of
our great unsung hero, Argentum. Imagine my shock to find zir all
the way out there without so much as a spacesuit."

The view then changed to me being pulled into
the cargo bay with the help of a suited Olga, conveniently cut off
above the harpoon in my gut. "Imagine my relief to see that ze had
held onto life for that long."

Now it showed me unconscious, lying on the
medical bed with a gas mask over my face and the autodoc reaching
into the assorted holes in me. "Regardless, ze was in critical
condition and required extensive surgery and organ replacement
before ze could return to Vesta. But now ze is ready to make zir
first public appearance. I am transferring the feed now to zir
hospital bed on board my ship so ze can tell zir story and later
answer your questions."

The video changed to me, and I straightened
up suddenly, which shot a surge of pain up my torso, causing me to
reflexively clutch at my side with my right hand. Unfortunately, as
that hand was now a barely functional prosthesis, that only made it
worse. Self-conscious that I was being watched by possibly hundreds
of parahumans, I slowly moved my hand back down onto the bed.

"All right," I began. "For those of you who
didn't obsessively look me up and go over every little detail of my
life I'll give you the basics." I retold the whole story, how we
had fled Ceres, how we found difficulty paying the Marquez Guild's
rates and I sought employment with the SPPS. How I'd discovered the
mutation and how Jakob Griggs had convinced me to keep it secret.
And then my friends had been killed or framed for murder.

As I began to wrap up my tale I turned back
to pry open my new hand and held it up to the camera. "As for this,
well, when I returned to work Jakob threatened to kill me, but I
convinced him that killing me would help validate my claim that
parahuman infertility was easy to fix. Then I suppose I did the
stupid thing and uploaded the video of him threatening me. That got
him angry enough to try to make me 'disappear' in the most painful
possible way."

I shook my wrist waving my fake hand around.
"My right hand was crushed in the process of cramming me into a
giant railgun cylinder." I leaned forward and pointed a finger down
my ear. "Both eardrums burst when the cylinder exploded in open
space causing rapid decompression." I swept my gown to the side
showing off the bald spot where the bulk of the organ transplants
had taken place. "Liver, pancreas, gallbladder, and five
centimeters of intestine; wrecked when HoundOfGod, a.k.a. Olga
Wolf, the rebellious clone princess-"

"Now wait a second!" Olga cut in, not even
bothering with the distortion this time.

"You expose me; I expose you. It's only
fair," I told her, motioning to the right of the camera where she
sat. "Now, as I was saying, my internal organs were destroyed when
Olga was forced to reel me in with a harpoon through the gut. Now,
I want to make it clear that I do not blame her; the ship didn't
have any other methods of grabbing a small, fast-moving object such
as myself. But still I was resigned to a slow death from anoxia
followed by an impromptu cremation in Earth's atmosphere when I
felt a massive stabbing, no, impaling pain."

I moved my gown back into place and lay back
on the bed. "So that's my story. Any questions?"

Within seconds of the comment box going
active, the feed was loaded with questions, as well as the usual
troll comments that inevitably appear on any online discussion. I
ignored the ones that didn't actually ask a question.
Unfortunately, the first real question that I could answer happened
to be "Why are you so obsessed with sex you neuter?"

"Obsessed with sex?" I replied incredulously.
"Well, I can't say that I'm obsessed with sex. But I do believe
that it will become necessary for us to survive as a species. Not
only does reproduction by cloning give tyrants like Jakob a focal
point to seize, but it reduces the ability of our kind to
evolve."

I prepared for another long lecture,
recalling what Maximus had told me. I explained the basics of
sexual reproduction in relation to evolution. "In addition, cloning
is expensive and therefore limited to a narrow percentage of the
population. This means that within a few generations, the parahuman
population would be limited to a few dozen genotypes rather than
the hundreds of thousands we have now. Jakob Griggs actually told
me that he took measures to make sure that only the extremely
wealthy could continue their genelines."

As I glanced over the rest of the comments,
one stuck out in particular. "Speaking of sex, why don't you share
some of your nocturnal activities with that wolf-possum 'friend' of
yours?"

I read that over and over again in disbelief.
Who would know about that? I glanced at Denal who was fussing over
a computer readout. He shook his head and showed me the circuitry
diagram displayed on his tablet. Then I remembered someone else who
knew.

"Nocturnal activities? Wait a minute. Is that
you, Derrick Marquez?!" I yelled at the camera, my voice full of
fury. "Why don't you share your own nocturnal activities with
Aniya, like pumping her full of cellular poison and dumping her
limp carcass into the back of your van?!"

Immediately, the other commenters turned on
the "guest " who had brought up my and Aniya's proclivities- things
like "Wait, she was zir lover?" and "You killed zir girlfriend, no
wonder ze hates the Guild feudal system so much" and "Run an ISP
trace on that bastard so we can beat him up!" The one I was
positive was Derrick by now tried to deflect the net rage by going
into detail on the things he was accusing me of, but that mostly
served to attract more sympathy, especially once the video he had
threatened to post was linked to and people saw me retreat into
Aniya's pouch out of fright. Apparently, it gave many of them the
impression that me and Aniya were a loving couple rather than just
a pair of perverts.

Then, amongst the flame war, there appeared
one question that I found myself having difficulty answering. "If
you are neuter, than how can you benefit from reversing sterility?
You have no reproductive organs to repair."

"Well, I might be able to find a way to print
and graft fully functional reproductive organs to myself someday,"
was my immediate answer. "Failing that, I might make one last clone
who has been modified to have a sex."

"You should clone Aniya," stated another
comment.

Clone Aniya.
I thought to myself.
I
do have samples of her DNA, but what would I do with a clone of
her? Raise her as my daughter and slip into her pouch every other
night? That sounds a bit creepy, don't you think?

There were many more questions, but I don't
believe there was anywhere near that much drama at any other point
during the rest of the video, and I didn't care to remember any of
it.

Chapter
15

Derrick Marquez was jumped by a smart mob as
he attempted to leave the apartment he had been using to access the
network. He tried to slip past in a camosuit, but the mob was too
large and he brushed against too many people. Before they swarmed
him and tore the suit off, he managed to shoot a few mob members,
fortunately with normal paralytics, but they did find several darts
loaded with cyanide and nastier toxins such as sarin, which, rather
than simply disabling them like the tetrodotoxin favored by Olga,
destroyed nerve endings and condemned parahumans to a slow,
lingering death from asphyxiation like the one I had faced in the
vacuum of space, or at best a life of drastically limited
mobility.

Regardless, many considered the mere
possession of such toxins ample justification for the rather
creative hanging they gave him, dropping him off the roof of a
ceiling-scraper with some weights tied to his ankles and a rope
just two meters short of the building's height around his neck. It
would have been considered overkill anywhere with even one percent
of Earth's gravity. Derrick's death was but one of many suffered by
the Protectors' Guilds all over Vesta. Unfortunately, the Guilds
responded in kind, enforcers brutally bashing in the skulls of
protestors and filling them with neurotoxins, sometimes of the
fatal variety.

Amidst all this chaos, Jakob Griggs had
withdrawn the SPPS into their headquarters and fortified it with
armed guards and auto-turrets. After the first few rioters were
gunned down, they generally left the place alone, the king in his
castle under siege.

Meanwhile, we ourselves hunkered down at the
spaceport. Olga had apparently been planning to hide us in Wolf
territory but now that her Clan knew that she was the notorious
blogger HoundOfGod, they had made it quite clear that she was no
longer welcome at home. Guess I'd screwed up a bit there. Olga had
modified the ship to include a pair of retractable mini-turrets
flanking the primary airlock to either side. They fended off the
first attempt at invasion by a Marquez SWAT team quite
adequately.

The turrets did not need to face a second
invasion, though. Shortly after that first attempt, a group of
supporters began to gather around the entrance to our ship, most of
them heavily armed with a wide variety of different weapons,
everything from improvised clubs made from pipes to automatic Gauss
rifles. With the abundance of hardware and people between us and
the Guilds we decided it was necessary to disable the auto-fire on
our turrets. We kept the manual override in easy reach, but now we
could get someone to remove the bodies from the first assault.

There were two more attempts by what appeared
to be mostly Marquez troops to gain entrance to our sanctum, but
the improvised militia before us drove them back both times. I'm
sorry to say that there were losses incurred on our side, among
them a ferret who caught a stray bullet in the neck and a bull who
took a cosh straight through his lower jaw and into his brainpan.
Still, this seemed to bolster their resolve. More and more flocked
to our side, setting up fortifications and portable shelters in the
cave that served as the main reception area of the port. It was
starting to resemble a military encampment as the population of the
spaceport reached the hundreds.

Every so often, I left the safety of the ship
to walk among the followers I had never intended to gather. I'm
sure they thought it was like the messiah himself had risen from
the grave to see them. For my part, I did my best to smile and
tried to remember not to shake hands with my right, though
inevitably I forgot and cracked some fingers. I would apologize,
they would say that it was no problem and that they understood that
I still hadn't recovered fully from my injuries, and the next of my
fans would come up to meet me.