The Pride of Parahumans (9 page)

Speaking of those clone families, I had been
scrolling through the list of jobs that were currently open on the
asteroid when I came across a listing from the Society for the
Preservation of Parahuman Species. Curious, I opened the entry and
found that it was for a position as a biotechnician in their
cloning facility. The pay was substantial, with negotiable hours,
but what really caught my attention was the line that stated, "All
insurances, health, property, and Protectors' Guild, covered
entirely." If that meant what I thought it meant, the job was as
good as 99% pure platinum for someone like me. I might even make
enough to pay for my friends' insurance. I applied immediately.

I was taken by surprise an hour later when I
received a call from the SPPS on my tablet. They wanted an
interview by video chat already. I opened the chat app and was
greeted by the image of a large brown creature that looked halfway
between a badger and a bear, a wolverine, I would later learn. I
could barely see more than his head but he seemed to be wearing
some sort of white lab coat or possibly a ceremonial robe of some
kind with intricate designs of DNA helixes patterned up and down
the lapels in gold. The interviewer directed his large brown eyes
at mine and introduced himself. "Good morning Argentum. My name is
Caleb Burns, and I'm here to determine if you're the type of
parahuman the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species
needs in order to continue our most worthy goal of ensuring the
survival of our culture."

That was an interesting question. "The type
of parahuman the SPPS needs?" What types of parahumans was he
referring to? Species of non-human genes? Skill sets? Body type? I
couldn't tell what he was referring to, so I started to talk about
my hobbies: "Well, I have been performing my own DNA tests using
the genetic material of myself and my crewmates for about four
years, attempting to find the genes that were modified to make me a
neuter instead of male or female."

This Caleb being was obviously not too
interested in my statement, probably because I had already listed
my hobby of messing with the codes of life. "Yes, yes, but what
exactly was it that persuaded you to apply for this position?"

I thought that saying "The insurance
coverage" wouldn't be particularly well received, so I chose to
share the other thing that had attracted me to the opening. "That
advertisement, with the human picking over the remains of parahuman
civilization after we've all died off. I thought it was rather
inspiring."

He stared at me with an expression of
surprise on his face. "Really? Those ads worked? I thought they
would never convince anyone. You know, the idea of family being too
foreign for most parahumans."

Family? Oh, the last scene with the clone
taking care of his ailing progenitor. "I suppose some things are
just embedded in our genes."

"Yes, yes, I suppose they are. The directive
to propagate those genes being one of the strongest, I suppose.
Would explain why the Guildmasters all rushed to support the old
man when he offered them additional clones." The wolverine suddenly
seemed to realize that he'd said something he hadn't intended to
let slip and covered his mouth with two pairs of hands, or rather
one pair of hands and one pair of paws; it seems he was a taur.
Slowly, he moved his hands and paws away and continued. "Anyhow,
speaking of clones, what do you think of them?"

I thought back to the vice president's clone
who attempted to kill us and the Marquez clone that threatened to
expose certain details of my and Aniya's lives. One's progenitors
had sought disproportionate retribution for his death and the
other's had apparently enabled him to extort extra money from their
customer base. But I also recalled the message presented by that
ad, as well as Denal's half-serious comment about our group getting
a bunch of clones once we had enough to commission them all. I
thought of the possibility of those powerful people's clones
becoming the entirety of parahumanity within the next century. They
might even become the majority within my own lifespan and make my
last few years a living hell before I broke down and ceased to be.
"I believe that we need to think about our future. And clones are
the future for our kind."

"That's good to hear," Caleb replied. "It
says here that you came to Vesta recently aboard a mining ship
originally from Ceres. And you're a registered member of the dense
metals miners' guild here. Why would you want to join the SPPS when
you're already employed?"

Not good. I couldn't tell him why I needed
more money; that would be the interview equivalent of suicide.
"They don't give very many jobs to new chemical analysts. They
didn't even allow me to do the purity control for my former crew's
hauls." I contemplated whether I should tell him a bit about the
high insurance rates I'd been subjected to.

"And I'll bet that the Marquez Guild has been
extorting a lot of qcoin from you since you just showed up on
Vesta, haven't they?"

I was instantly horrified at that statement.
How much did he know? "Maybe, a little." I tried to sound calm but
was finding it difficult.

"Well, don't worry about that." Caleb Burns
shot me a wink and smiled. "Jakob Griggs and Jerome Marquez are old
buddies. I'm sure if you sign on, he'll figure out a way to cut
your rates down a bit."

Cut my rates? How much influence did the SPPS
have? "I was under the impression that all insurances would be
covered."

"Well…" Caleb shrugged and slicked the fur on
his head back. I could guess that I had caught him in something.
"Technically, it's deducted from your paycheck, but we can usually
convince them to lower their rates significantly, and the pay we
offer is considerable in and of itself."

"How much is 'considerable'?" I found myself
asking.

He quoted me a rather respectable pay rate,
not quite enough for me to live on with the increased Marquez fees.
But if he was telling the truth about the Society's leader having
the ability to lower the insurance paid by his employees, I might
even be able to help cover my crewmates as well. I agreed to come
over to their facilities and take a look around.

***

The SPPS's headquarters was a five-story
building built into the cave wall of the cavern covered by the
Marquez Guild. The front face of the structure was halfway covered
with animated holograms similar to the one I had seen earlier,
along with murals of DNA helixes and parahumans in biofabrication
tanks and other stuff like that. I walked up to the front doors
made of stained glass that showed a nude male savannah cat with his
arms and legs spread out in a pattern that made it look like he had
four arms and four legs. Wonder what that was supposed to mean?

Caleb Burns was standing by the front counter
in the main lobby. My guess that he was a taur was correct, and he
had somehow managed to tie his robe slash lab coat in such a way
that it enclosed his hind legs without showing anything. He saw me
and gave a slight bow in my direction. I returned the gesture.

"Hello, Argentum. Welcome to our humble
cloning laboratory for the preservation of the parahuman clade. Are
you ready to begin the tour?"

I told him so, and the wolverine turned to a
sealed hatch next to the counter, marked "Decontamination Chamber."
He swung it open and gestured for me to follow. We found ourselves
in a room filled with light environment suits hung on racks in a
variety of shapes and sizes. Caleb removed his robe and wriggled
into a large taur-shaped suit. I did the same with my kilt and vest
and a medium-sized bipedal suit with enough tail space.

"Through this door is our main production
floor," he explained, speaking through an external speaker on the
front of his suit. "We have a lot of delicate equipment and
biological substances out there. The last thing we need is
contamination from loose fur or someone breathing too hard."

I supposed I could understand that. Though I
had to wonder about the state of my own experiments, seeing how I
hadn't bothered with airtight seals on my safety equipment. "Will
this be where I will be working?" I asked him.

"Part of the time. You'll probably be in
quality control, making sure there's no unforeseen mutations in the
cell cultures." He was speaking fairly quickly. "Most of your work
will be done in the side labs."

He opened the other door and we walked out
into a massive room that probably qualified as a cavern. There were
at least three stories' worth of machinery, all chugging along and
mixing some vat of cells or pumping some fluid into a tank like the
one the clone at the end of the ad emerged from. One of the tanks
had a bluish skeleton inside, which brought to mind the
long-decayed corpse in the same ad, while another adjacent tank had
a body that was almost complete, half covered in a layer of
skin.

"You'll mostly be coming out here to take
samples from the cell cultures." He pointed at a set of small vats
hanging suspended above one of the biofabrication tanks. "It's
almost completely automated. All we need to keep this running are a
couple of technicians who perform maintenance and repairs every few
weeks."

We came to a stairway leading upwards to a
large room with a glass wall facing the production floor. I could
see a half-dozen parahumans of various species in hazmat suits
fussing over a variety of beakers, test tubes, petri dishes, and
gene sequencers similar to the ones I had on our ship but obviously
much more expensive. As we entered, a tall male who appeared to be
a spotted cat of some sort, possibly a savannah cat like the one on
the front door, approached us.

"This is Maximus Griggs, supervisor of this
team." Caleb said. "Maximus, this is Argentum. Ze is interested in
the open position here."

"Good to see you, Silver." He gave me a
rather cat-like smile as he said this. I guessed that he knew
enough ancient Latin to know what my name meant. "You have any
prior experience with genetic testing and mutation screening?"

"I've performed some experiments on my own,"
I began to tell him, "trying to engineer nutrient algae that tasted
like bacon. And performing DNA tests on myself to figure out why
the parts shops can't make me a set of sexual organs."

"You're neuter then?" Max inquired
quizzically. Not that I didn't blame him; even without this baggy
suit, it was hard to tell my actual gender or lack thereof. I
nodded. "Well, we do some organ replacement and augmentation on the
side." My ears perked up, which I'm sure was noticeable even under
that suit of mine. "We found that we can give neuters a cock or a
vag, or even both, but unfortunately the gonads require genetic
alterations that cause the immune system to reject them without a
lot of drugs."

My ears flicked downwards in disappointment.
What good would a pole or a hole be without the sex drive to use
it? And I was still a bit in denial of the drive I had at that
point. "Well, I hope I have the chance to contribute to something a
bit more important here."

"You will. We're building the future for all
the diverse parahuman species here." He waved back at the
production floor we'd just left.

At that moment, something about his name
clicked in my head. "Are you by any chance related to Jakob Griggs,
the founder of the SPPS?"

Maximus snorted loudly at my inquiry. "Oh,
I'm related, all right. I'm one of his clones." I was afraid of
that. Would he act like two-thirds of the other clones I'd met?
"But Dad wasn't the founder; that was his progenitor, who was
simply named Griggs. He died in an accident a year before me and my
brothers were decanted."

He was a clone of a clone? "Sounds like he's
a bit young to be running something this important."

The second-generation clone smiled at me
before speaking further. "Maybe but we learn fast you know. Look at
me. I'm barely two years old and already I'm supervising an entire
lab."

So the same nepotism I'd seen on Ceres and in
the Marquez Guild existed here too. At least the one who would be
my boss seemed agreeable enough. And the pay and benefits package
were pretty good. "So, where do I sign?"

Chapter 9

I started work the next day. It wasn't
particularly difficult work, mind you, but I was being entrusted
with the well-being of the future people of Vesta. I started off
with detecting mutations in previously tested samples. On one
occasion, I found a deletion in the thirteenth chromosome that my
instructor hadn't found; he claimed that I had made a mistake and
started to go over the sequence again, only to notice one of the
codons was missing an adenosine. He changed my assessment and
mumbled something about how it must have happened after his own
analysis.

Regardless, I found myself making almost as
much as my share of a decent haul of ore back before we moved to
Vesta, and I was forced to leave the ship. The Society made good on
their promise to arrange for my Protection rates to be lowered. I
still paid more than I had my first couple weeks in the asteroid,
but it was now affordable. Unfortunately, there were only a couple
hundred qcoins left after expenses to help my friends pay their
fees. I sincerely hoped that they found some more valuable minerals
like the mascon we had found just before the incident.

My job wasn't simply to detect mutations; it
was also to determine whether a mutation was worth fixing. Many
mutations- a few extra letters in an intron here, an Alu element
deleted there-were harmless and would have no effect on the
parahuman being printed out. If something actually changed the
phenotype, such as hemophilia, we then had to decide whether it
would be more cost-effective to try to correct the defect with gene
therapy or throw out that batch and grow another one. Both would
add significantly to the customer's final bill for the clone, the
relative expense of either option depending largely on what stage
the mutation was caught at. Preferably the mutations were to be
caught early on, before too many nutrients had been expended
growing defective cells.