Nexus

22 THE BAZAAR OF THE BIZARRE

Sam kept her eye on Narong as he led them on a winding zigzag path through the narrow alleys. A pair of burly toughs lounged at one intersection, leaning against brick walls, heedless of the rain, improbably huge muscles bulging in their arms and chests. Narong nodded fractionally, kept walking.

One more turn beyond the toughs and a much wider alleyway opened. Stalls and shops lined both sides, neon and LED lit the air, scores of people moved down the lane, hundreds of people. They paused at the stalls, talked quietly, inspected wares and price sheets, haggled in low voices. Everything had a furtive air. Collars were turned up, hoods pulled over heads and down over faces. Two more inhumanly muscular men loitered at the intersection, glowering.

Muscle grafts, Sam thought. Inefficient, draining, but intimidating. They'll probably die of enlarged hearts trying to support all that mass.

Narong led them down the street. Sam let Kade and the Thai student share the umbrella. She walked a few steps behind them. The rain felt good on her face. Her tactical contacts snapped every face, recorded every gait, uploaded them for analysis and identification.

• • • •

Kade's eyes were everywhere. The wide alley was bustling with people, with woks going over open fires, with sights and smells, and with vendors offering their wares.

The first few stalls were reproductive services. Sex selection. Ova fusion to make a child from two mothers, no father necessary. Tri-fusion to create a child with genes from two fathers and a surrogate mother. Gene tweaks for your kids. Height, eye color, hair color, muscle mass, weight, health, IQ, charisma. "Other services by request."

Reprogenetics gave way to bio-cosmetics. Semi-nude men and women modeled the wares. A petite copper-skinned beauty in a skimpy bikini posed in front of a shop advertising skin color transformation viruses. Less dramatic melanin therapy was on sale to make Asian skin lighter, Caucasian skin more tan, or whatever the customer might desire.

The semi-nude woman at the next stall showed living tattoos. A bioluminescent dragon crawled up from below her navel, climbed its way up her chest, a claw gripping her left breast. The tattoo snaked around her neck and returned on her right side. Its eyes glowed amber. She tensed her muscles and it moved, tail swishing, scales changing colors, glowing flames erupting from its mouth and nostrils.

Fat cutters. Fat boosters. Nordic cheekbones. Square jaws. Almond-eye shapes. Golden eyes. Cat-slit eyes. Hair curling viruses. Hair straightening viruses. Forked tongues. Prehensile tongues. Height therapy. The signs and models promised it all, no surgery required. However you wished to alter your appearance, from mild to wild, the gene hackers of Sukchai Market could reprogram your cells to make it happen, provided you had the cash.

"Are these things all for real?" Kade asked, voice hushed.

Narong shrugged. "Probably some scams here. But mostly, yeah. Is it safe? Different question."

"What do you mean?" Kade asked.

"Gene hacking. Sometimes they miss the gene they want, you know? Break something else. Cancer, maybe. Or worse. You hear stories."

"But don't they test this stuff? Safety trials, that sort of thing?"

"There's no FDA on this street, man. You wanna try something? You ask around about the shop, make sure there's no horror stories, make sure they have a good reputation, a clean reputation."

Bio-cosmetics gave way to bio-erotics. Booths offered viral gene injections to deliver enlarged or firmed "natural" breasts, larger penises, enhanced orgasms, porn star feats of stamina and recovery.

A banner advertised female arousal superchargers with a choice of delivery vehicle. Transform virus for permanent changes. Tasteless odorless liquid for short-term effect. The booth was thronged, the customers entirely male. Large bundles of cash changed hands for syringes and small vials. Kade was simultaneously agape and aroused.

"Tasteless and odorless…?" Kade wondered.

"…so you can spike someone's drink with it," Sam answered for him.

His revulsion overwhelmed what arousal there had been.

Bio-neurals followed bio-erotics. Stay-awakes. Sleep reduction hacks. Extroverters. Dream recall enhancers. Dream suppressers. Love injections. Heartbreak erasers. Viral pair-bonding therapy. Monogamy shots. Sexual orientation shifters in temporary and permanent varieties. Savant drugs claimed to put the customer in a hyper-productive or hyper-creative trance. A superbright LED sign offered viral injections to boost musical ability. Another to remove guilt. A third to intensify religious faith and spiritual experiences. There were customers perusing and discussing at all of the booths.

• • • •

Sam hardened herself. These were the worst. These were the ones that could be used as weapons, to control and degrade and enslave. She captured every face she saw, searched for any sign of Communion virus, of DWITY. None in sight. But who knew what could be provided if you asked the right person? She thought of Chris Evans, physically and mentally crippled in busting a DWITY ring. It made her angry.

Kade sensed her mood. He sent her a sense of curiosity, an unspoken question.

Sam ignored it.

Extreme medicine came next. A tall glass cylinder housed human organs in clear, bubbling fluid. Hearts, livers, kidneys, available for transplantation. Cloned organs from your own cells speed-grown in just a few days. Another stall offered viral therapy it claimed would trigger regeneration of severed digits or limbs.

"Why is this stuff down here?" Kade asked. "Shouldn't this be in a mainstream hospital?"

"Probably non-human genes," Narong said. "The super fastgrowing organs are hacked way outside human parameters. And the regeneration hacks use genes from some lizard: newts or geckos or something like that. Not legal to insert into a human."

Sam wondered if any of this would be of use to Chris Evans. Could it get him back on his feet faster? End his isolation more quickly?

She glanced back at the bio-neurals. Such vile stuff.

Chris risked his life fighting shit like that.

Was it possible to separate the mind control from the cloned organs and regeneration? To embrace one and not the other?

She pushed the thought out of her mind. She had a job to do. She had laws she was sworn to uphold.

The modifications on offer became progressively more extreme as they neared the end of the market. Muscle grafts, like those the local thugs sported. Genetic gender reassignment. Supercharged hemoglobin with ten times the oxygen capacity. More.

"You have to be careful of a lot of this stuff," Narong commented. "Change one thing in the body, it has ripple effects on a dozen other things. Let alone the brain. What kind of side effects are you going to see ten or twenty years from now? Who the hell knows?"

"You seem to have thought a lot about this, Narong," Sam observed.

Narong was silent for a while. "It's hard not to. We'd be better off if this was all legal. It's all wink-wink, nudge-nudge now. The law's not enforced. But no one studies the safety either. People come here to shop, but can they even be sure they're getting what's advertised? And even if they are, no one knows the longterm effects. Keeping it gray leaves it in limbo, makes it sketchy. We oughta pull this stuff up into the light of day, regulate it, test it for safety and quality."

Sam could feel Kade's agreement with Narong's sentiment. She had a different view.

Lock them all up and throw away the key. Hold the line, make it real. Don't let this stuff sweep our humanity away.

She kept her opinion to herself.

Sam looked down at her own hand, strong beyond any human possibility, reformed by science into a superhuman weapon to better hold the line against superhuman technologies.

And me? Where does the non-human DNA in my cells fit in? Where does the Nexus in my brain fit in?

A line from Nietzsche came to her, one Nakamura liked to quote in his more cynical moments.

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you.

Here she was, staring into the abyss again. Here she was fighting dragons. Here she was part dragon herself.

She shook her head to clear the melancholy. She was a soldier. She'd made compromises to protect others. This stuff needed to be kept under control.

One raid could clean this place out, she realized. They could round up hundreds of these sellers and buyers in one swoop.

And another market would spring up the next day somewhere else. Is there any real solution?

They came to the end of the market. Two more enforcers leaned against the walls, deliberately casual, their grotesquely huge muscles sending all the message that was needed: Don't fuck with us. They eyed Narong and Kade and Sam as they passed, made no move to stop them.

"That's Sukchai," Narong said. "The party's a few blocks from here. Come on."

Kade turned the things he'd seen in Sukchai over in his head as they walked. Narong was right. They'd be safer if these technologies were legalized, regulated, tested for safety…

Holtzmann's offer came to him unbidden.

You could come work for me, here at the ERD, the scientist had offered.

He'd rejected it out of hand, but was there some merit in it? Could he change the system from the inside? Could he help nudge them towards a better way to treat these technologies? Holtzmann was a scientist, surely he wasn't a knee-jerk prohibitionist too?

Kade wandered a maze of choices as Narong led them through the maze of alleys.

Wats paced them across the rooftops, leaping lightly from one to the next. No one below looked up to see him. If they had, they would have caught only a faintly darker patch against the dark backdrop of rain and cloud.