Deadstock

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE deadstock

"This is a prime example of Black Angus cattle," John Fukuda said, pointing to the specimen in question. "A thick neck and straight back, a wide brisket and round rump, a thick rib eye, and perfect intramuscular fat."

"And no troublesome head or legs," Stake added.

"Unnecessary parts. But if you like to dine on heads and legs, maybe I'll grow a special breed just for you," Fukuda joked. "Do you want me to throw in tails, too?"

Stake took a step closer to examine the animal, if it could still be thought of in that way. It occupied one of many narrow pens lining both walls of a long central hall, each creature in this section identical. Several hoses were inserted into the blunt stump of the thing's neck, and one hose emerged from its back end. It rested upon its belly and the flipper-like vestigial limbs that were all it had for legs. It did not stir or shift its body in any way, and its sides did not even rise and fall in the act of breathing. Stake wondered if he would even hear a heartbeat if he were to put his ear against it.

"We use better, more up-to-date processes than what Alvine Products was using," Fukuda boasted, as they continued on down the high-ceilinged hallway. "And we're always experimenting with new ones."

Stake stopped short when he heard a loud burbling sound from one of the headless cattle. He turned to see a young woman in a white uniform making adjustments to a support system on a small rolling cart. On its bottom shelf was the pump that circulated the animal's fluids. The worker looked up and smiled apologetically at Stake for distracting him. To him, it had sounded like the creature had just been decapitated and blood had been gurgling out of its neck. However, the great living carcass appeared undisturbed in its blissful, dreamless state of oblivion. Stake commented to Fukuda, "You should breed office workers like this. Corporations would love you."

"What do you think I have working in my administrative department?" Fukuda took Stake by the elbow. "Kidding." They continued on. "By the way, last month I had an entrepreneur of sorts approach me with the request that I design a headless, limbless breed of human female for a brothel he was hoping to establish at an asteroid mining outpost. His staff, as such, would need a minimum of care. And no pay, of course. 'The perfect woman,' he joked to me. 'No head to complain with, no legs to run away.'"

"What a fuckbag," Stake murmured. "Huh? The clones, or him?" Stake gave Fukuda a look. "Him. So what did you tell him?" "I declined."

"Out of a sense of outrage, or because you thought it might make you look bad?"

"Outrage?" They had come to the end of the hallway, and a transverse corridor offered them a choice of directions. Fukuda gestured to the right. "Would you like to see our pork pigs? They come from a fine heritage, a very old breed-extinct in its natural state, actually-called Gloucestershire Old Spots. Very moist meat, with a fine texture. Or are you in the mood for chicken?"

"If I see much more, I might become a vegetarian."

"I didn't take you for being squeamish. And you seemed to enjoy that steak I treated you to in the Bioforms cafeteria."

"I'm just anxious to talk to your man, Fujiwara."

"Of course. I'll cut the tour short, then." He indicated they should go to the left. "This way."

As they walked down this narrower connective hallway, Stake asked, "So Fujiwara works here, instead of at your main building?"

"He keeps a lab here and another at Bioforms, as he has projects going at both facilities. He's one of my best researchers and designers. He has imagination. That was why the owners of Alvine were so keen on hiring him."

"He was never charged for what their cult was trying to do?"

"What they were trying to do is open to speculation, since it never happened. One could say the creatures they were secretly breeding were an army of monsters for some apocalypse they saw coming. Or one could argue they were an experimental brand of meat product. Anyway, the owners are all dead now. Pablo was just one of their team, doing as he was instructed. He was questioned, but not prosecuted in any way."

"But did he reveal all of his research to the authorities?"

Fukuda smiled over at Stake. "Of course not. People have to pay for such knowledge. And pay others not to ask too much about it."

They arrived at the Research and Development department; specifically, lab suite RD-3. A recognition scanner appraised Fukuda and buzzed him in. Trailing him into the brightly lit series of large, interconnected rooms, Stake wondered idly if the scanner were good enough to have seen through his mimicry had he presently been imitating his employer.

The two men passed work counters covered in computer systems, arcane equipment, printed documents, petri dishes, and the scattered remnants of take-out food and coffee. A holographic model of living cells had them hovering and crawling in the air above one counter, each individual cell as big as a tea saucer.

They found Pablo Fujiwara alone in the farthest room. Stake didn't know where to look first-at the man or his specimens. Both were equally eye-grabbing. Fujiwara was a slight man with close-cropped hair but a great, curling and waxed Salvador Dali mustache. He was wearing a Buddy Balloon T-shirt, featuring that VT show's star, the 150-pound sphere that was Buddy Vrolik. Beneath his image were the words: SOMEBODY KILL ME. It was Buddy's catchphrase, and he said it at times of duress (as when his family members were having one of their frequent arguments) and at times of overwhelming pleasure (as when a visiting comely female dropped something in front of him and bent over to pick it up). Fujiwara's pants were of a peach-colored leather. Stake realized they were like Janice's bed sheets: living human skin cells. He saw a small support pack clipped to the waistband, to keep the cells alive. A matching leather jacket was draped over the back of a chair.

When they'd come in, Fujiwara was sprinkling something that looked like fish food into a tank filled with a greenish solution, in which writhed a mass of large, fat and lazy eels. They had gill slits but no fins nor even eyes, nothing more than a soft little beak-like mouth, which opened blindly to catch the raining feed. Fujiwara smiled at the approaching men. "My new pets," he explained. "Do you like boneless chicken?"

"Those are chickens?" Stake said.

Fujiwara was as enthusiastic as an artist at a gallery showing. "A step backwards in deadstock evolution, maybe, but it's all about building the better mousetrap. Or better mouse. I know there are those markets that wouldn't purchase this breed or even its meat, because they have brains and the animal lovers will be barking, but these cuties would actually be easier to set up and harvest than the plugged-in battery chickens. So we'll still find our buyers."

Stake tapped on the glass as he watched them, then motioned toward a much larger eel-like creature that rested in a long tank dominating a counter against one wall. The tank was so narrow that the thing had no room to move, lying at the bottom like a pinkish log. Stake was reminded of a jumbo-sized shawarma in a Middle Eastern restaurant, ready to be shaved for a sandwich. The living cylinder had a mouth and gill slits but again, no other features. "And what's that? The king of the boneless chickens?"

"Boneless pork," Fujiwara said proudly. "I call it my five-foot-long hotdog."

"Yummy," Stake commented.

"Pablo, this is the investigator I told you about," Fukuda cut in. "Jeremy Stake."

Fujiwara shook his hand, and his expression became a bit more serious, maybe even a little wary. "Hi. You want to know about Dai-oo-ika."

"Him, and Alvine Products. What were you doing for them?"

Fujiwara picked up a take-out coffee and sipped it, avoiding Stake's eyes in the process. "I was doing my job. Following orders. Designing and developing."

"Monsters?"

He snorted. "What a word-monsters."

"Well, what were those things they had you making?"

Fujiwara hesitated, still not looking at him. "A kind of life form unfamiliar to us in this dimension." Then, he admitted, "A kind of army."

"To bring about some kind of apocalypse?"

"I didn't see the whole picture, you know-I wasn't part of their cult. I was just one blind man, with his hands on one part of the elephant. But yeah, they seemed to think some big cosmic event was nearing, or else they were going to set it off, and the army was a part of that."

"But how much havoc could this army create in a colony like this, no matter how big and dangerous the creatures became? If I wanted to bring about a local Armageddon, I think I'd make microscopic creatures instead. A plague."

Fujiwara met his eyes at last, and looked very grave as he said, "They would have gotten very big, my friend. And I didn't understand everything about them, but if they'd been allowed to develop fully and mature, it seemed like they were going to have some powerful attributes. Gifts. A range of psi abilities."

"You say another dimension. So you didn't design these life forms from scratch."

"I was given a very unusual DNA sample, and some very unusual information on a chip. They called this chip the Genomicon. I was told the DNA was from an extradimensional life form, but not from any dimension the Earth Colonies have had interaction with, to my knowledge. I don't know if the Kalians bought it on the sly from a Theta researcher, or what. And they sure as hell weren't about to tell me that much. Anyway, the DNA was degraded-prehistoric, actually-and I had to sort of extrapolate. Patch it back together."

"Is Dai-oo-ika the same kind of life form you were growing for the Kalians?"

"Oh no, but related. Another extrapolation. I consulted the Genomicon in making him, too. No, the creatures for the Kalians weren't as anthropomorphic, though they had some similarities, of course. The Spawn, as they called them, had gills like sharks and just two forelegs, and they were a dark purple color, though like Dai-oo-ika they were eyeless, with only sensory organs like tentacles for a face-a little bit like the eyes of Tikkihottos, I suppose, but I think these were also the creatures' psi organs."

Stake turned toward Fukuda with deliberate slowness. "Again, nice pet for your sweet young daughter. You should have made a plague, too, and put it in a locket for her."

Before Fukuda could say anything, Fujiwara continued, while beginning to nervously twist one end of his mustache around and around his finger. "Look, Mr. Stake, you've got to be discreet with this information, okay? The cultists that didn't die in the earthquake got themselves assassinated by a rival group called the Children of the Elders, who want to make sure this apocalypse never happens. I don't want these Children coming after me, too, thinking I'm part of the Ugghiutu cult."

"Mum's the word. I just want to find this doll, this Dai-oo-ika, for your boss here. Did he tell you my suspicions? That Dai-oo-ika might have harmed the girl who stole him, and ventured off on his own power?"

Fujiwara began pacing, twisting and twisting his mustache. "I thought I'd inhibited his growth. And limited his intelligence."

"He's a precocious child."

The bio-designer made a little groaning sound. "How do you think he harmed her?"

"One of the monsters at Alvine Products consumed a rescue worker like an amoeba would. Could Dai-oo-ika do that?"

"Dai-oo-ika has light harvesting complexes, for photosynthesis."

"I'm asking you, do you think he could do what that Alvine monster did?"

"How should I know? I didn't even know they could do that, let alone Dai-oo-ika!"

"Scientists," Stake said.

"The best thing you can do, in my opinion?" Fujiwara looked up at Fukuda while he paced. "When you find our friend Dai-oo-ika, you should destroy him. If you're still able."

Stake and Fukuda looked at each other grimly. Fujiwara himself had just echoed Stake's earlier sentiment. Would that be enough to make Fukuda listen?

Stake returned his gaze to the bio-designer. "Maybe you ought to destroy that Genomicon, too."

Fukuda spoke up. "It's in my possession now,"he said. "And I'll consider it."