science-fiction-saga-galactic-adventures-book

A Science Fiction Saga

Galactic Adventures Series by Scott Michael Decker

Series excerpt

"That thing? You want to trade it in? I got a rowboat in back worth more than that!"

Fred was glad Kate dragged him away, the humiliating laugh following him out of the building and echoing in his head long after they left the space vessel dealership.

Fred and Kate stood on the tarmac at Alcheusk, both wondering how to get a hold of another ship. He was convinced the garbage scow would soon report their tug stolen, so they'd come to Alcheusk, renowned for its shady, used-ship dealers, hoping to trade it in for something slightly less conspicuous.

"It was a long shot," Kate said, looking their tugboat up and down.

"Problem is," Fred said, "this thing doesn't look like a tugboat for a garbage scow. It just looks like garbage." Dented, dinged, stained, and crusty, the tug looked ready for the scrap yard.

Kate met his gaze. "That's it! The great garbage dumps of Garlivka! We could sell it there, pick up an old junket that needs some work!"

"And who'd do the work?"

"Well…I'm good at surgery."

He snorted and shook his head. "Come on, let's go. I don't have any better ideas, so we might as well get off this rock."

They boarded, something niggling at Fred. Through the launch sequence and tower coms, Fred couldn't shake the idea that something was awry.

Once they were at escape velocity, the old tug clattering beneath them, Fred turned to her and asked, "How'd you know about Garlivka?" It was a conversation they'd started and stopped multiple times en route to Alcheusk.

Inevitably, one would ask the other, "How'd you know—" And though the other would search his or her memory, neither could summon the context in which he or she had learned about the topic.

Kate shook her head and shrugged, again.

"We'd better stop for fuel, soon," he said, seeing their fuel reserves getting low. His piloting was one such topic. He knew all of Ukraine and its two-thousand plus constellations, and a significant portion of their eastern neighbor's geography as well, but he couldn't have said how he'd acquired the knowledge. "You know, they'll eventually be able to trace us through those illicit fuel-depot hacks."

"Eventually," she said, nodding.

His ability to decrypt the security on just about any type of computerized piece of equipment was another such topic. With that ability, he'd filled their tank at no cost, the fuel-station transaction systems all computerized. Where he'd learned cryptology was a mystery.

After their escape from the garbage scow, they'd discussed the dangers they'd be facing.

"Anyone could decide to rape either one of us," she'd said flat out, articulating his worst fear. He was worried what such a rape would do to her, being so fresh from the uterpod. Himself, he'd be able to deal with it, or thought he might, anyway. At the asteroid factory, the staff had subjected him a variety of abuses, most of the normavariants contemptuous of their manufactured employees. As mutaclones, neither Fred nor Kate had any right to redress. The only time an owner was held accountable for abusing a mutaclone was when the treatment damaged some other normavariant's property.

And for either of them to retaliate—or even defend themselves—was tantamount to defiance. Owners might harm or kill their mutaclones if they so chose, to mutilate, rape, and dismember their property if that were their wish, to dispose of their property in whatever way it suited them, be there purpose or cause in it, or not. Owners could do whatever they wanted, for some imagined slight or none whatsoever, for any reason or no reason at all.

"And after we get another ship? What then, Fred?"

He'd grinned at her mischievously. "We'll pick an asteroid that's uninhabited, settle down, break out our Petrie dishes and test tubes, and bake ourselves a whole batch of our very own mutaclones."

They'd laughed for hours, but the question hung between them unanswered.

One fact Fred was sure of: Kate was unlike any mutaclone he'd ever encountered. He'd never known one with such sharp wit and wherewithal right out of the uterpod. Having been a sector monitor for five years, where mutaclones matured in uterpod, he'd seen them being whelped and had guided them gently toward neonatal, too disoriented to know which way to go, and then had returned to his duties. He'd heard that in the neonatal pens, they weren't any more aware for weeks or months after being whelped. But once they could use the sanistall on their own, dress themselves, and feed themselves, they were shipped off to their prospective owners or off to auction.

But even then, Fred had observed, watching armies of newly-whelped mutaclones on the asteroid tarmac being marched aboard transport ships, they still looked stupid. Insensate, lacking any awareness of their surroundings, having little or no initiative, their stares dull and flat, their limbs hanging listlessly at their sides, their faces without expression.

Kate had been nothing like that even before the uterpod had spat her onto the lift. He'd watched her struggle inside the uterpod, terror and dismay contorting her features as she'd fought the tough, flexible derma, aware.

The one feature all the newly-whelped mutaclones didn't have. Awareness.

Fred glanced over at her and smiled.

"What?" she asked, looking somewhat embarrassed at his attention.

"I was just thinking how different you are from all the other mutaclones. Alive even before you were whelped, while none of them exhibits a shred of liveliness until they're months or years out of the uterpod. I like that about you."

She smiled demurely. "Thank you," she said meekly.

"I imagine it must've been the same for Greg, when I was whelped. He said he could tell I was different. I guess I really didn't know what he meant until I met you."

"You're full of surprises," she said. "And I like that about you. He's right, you know. You are different."

"How would you know?"

That vacant look, the one she always had when she searched her memory, took a hold of her face again. She shook her head. "I don't know, but I do know."

I don't know, but I do know.

The whole conundrum of their circumstance.

"How do you suppose we find out?" Fred asked.

"I don't know," Kate replied, frowning at him.

Dr. Sarina Karinova introduced herself and then gestured at her bugsplat. "And this is Leon."

"I'm Doctor Petro Chachula, Chief of Design here at Clones-For-All Industries. We have a clone to help with all your calamities."

She snorted at the company by-line, having heard their commercials a hundred times.

"You'll forget that we visited," Leon said, his smile sending a shiver down Sarina's spine.

"I see you've brought a calamity," Dr. Chachula said. "Not much I can do to fix those teeth."

Sarina sat at his bidding and accepted the small schnapps he offered. One of those acquired tastes that most newly-whelped mutaclones didn't have a palate for.

"How may I assist you, Doctor Karinova?"

"First, how might I obtain a mutaclone built to spec?"

"What are you in the market for? Another hundred thousand of him?" Dr. Chachula hiked a thumb in Leon's direction.

"In general, Doctor, say I wanted to malign my neighbor, and to do that I need a doppelganger of her?"

Dr. Chachula laughed. "I wish it were that easy. If you brought me a still, I wouldn't be able to replicate her. Even a vid wouldn't be sufficient either. What I would need would be a sample of her flesh, a full psychosocial history, and several thousand hours of vid. As precise as gengineering is these days, building a clone from an image or even reverse gengineering is still next to impossible. Once the genome is reverse-gengineered and the mutaclone is grown, then the nanostim neuralinguist interventions begin. And after that, there's no guarantee that your mutaclone will be mistaken for your neighbor."

"Why is that?"

"We humans have such incredible situational dependency that getting a mutaclone to mimic us with any degree of accuracy requires years of nanostim programming with nearly full-time in-situ modeling. Hasn't been done to any degree of efficacy and probably never will."

Sarina sighed, relieved he was able to defuse her worst fear before she'd even articulated it. "You're sure?"

"When you come home to your husband disturbed by something at work, he notices, doesn't he?"

"She, but yes," Sarina said.

"She instantly notices that slight change in your manner that you use to communicate something's wrong. Of course, she notices, probably more so being female, men usually not quite as intuitive. It's precisely those subtle changes discernable only to our intimates that are impossible to replicate within any sort of program. To do so, we'd need a camera to record the most private moments of a person's life. And no one's going to consent to that."

"No, no one would consent to that." Sarina chewed on the inside of her cheek.

"But something else is on your mind."

"I'd like the process described anyway, from raw DNA to usable mutaclone. If you wouldn't mind."

"Oh, not at all. I might bore snaggletooth there but he's fast asleep already."

She glanced at Leon, whose open maw invited mischief. She giggled at the thought.

"Now, there's a sublimated hostility that no mutaclone could imitate. Anyway, here at Clone-For-All Industries, we pride ourselves on crafting the finest fleshware possible for every customer's need. We're adamant that our development process be as organic as we can make it. This means tailoring the design to best suit the customer. For example, we have our stock templates: laborer, factory assembler, saniclone, groundster, phalangiform, escoriant, and then all the custom templates. On these basic frames, we can then specialize to the task at hand. A laborer might work well for a mutaminer, building clone, loadaclone, or simply a brute clone, which your friend Leon appears to be. A phalangiform might have multiple extensor hands on each limb, each hand filled with fingers so varied in shape, size, and range that its owner might task it with a variegated set of routines. We've even made models with thousands of nanotendrils on each phalange. A groundster might be customized to the terrain, having long gangly limbs for low gravity, or short, stubby, indefatigable legs for extremely high gravity. A saniclone might be specialized for dusting or scrubbing, one with light feathery phalanges, the other with caustic-proof dermas for durability."

"So you have a number of base models that might be customized to suit?"

"Exactly. And that's ninety percent of our business. The one or two that needs genetic customization is relatively rare."

"Tell me about those one or two clones."

"Here—" Dr. Chachula waved his hand, and an image appeared on Sarina's corn—"we have a titraclone." Multiple mammaries sprouted from a thick, generous torso, each mammary as perfectly formed as a peach. "Each mammary produces and extrudes a chemical compound ready to pipette into a solution. The beauty in this model is the innovative digestive system, designed to assimilate the most noxious of raw chemicals and channel them to the appropriate mammary.

"Now this—" he projected another image—"is the domestic variation, whose teats extrude standard household cleansers, including oven cleaner, the most caustic. Now, you notice they're both female, of course—"

"And quite voluptuous, besides."

"But they do come in male models as well. The number of homemakers requesting them with activated gonaticulating sequences is rather titillating. We've even had a few requests that the ejaculate be—"

"How often do you get requests for build-from-scratch models?" she interrupted, trying to put out of mind the images he'd conjured.

"Not often. Keep in mind that despite the advanced state of mutagenics, we're still in the infancy of discovering exactly what neuropeptide sequence articulates what specific characteristic. Thousands of neuropeptides located amidst several different strands might be responsible for the shape and size of something as simple as a fingernail. Think of it as a brick wall. Each brick provides a piece of the structure, and it's only through their aggregation that we get a brick wall. Each time we change the size of a particular brick, it introduces instability. Every time we build a mutaclone from scratch, we're trying to patch together a wall out of bricks of a million different sizes. Once we put all the bricks together, the chance of our assembling a stable wall is one in several billion.

"In other words, we might aggregate several billion zygotes from a stew of neuropeptide sequences, and we get anywhere from a dozen to a hundred viable mutaclones."

"From several billion?"

Dr. Chachula smiled. "And that's before they're gestated in the uterpods. It's much easier to work from an existing line of viable pre-propagated clones, splice in the variants we want, and see if the result is viable."

"How many do you make of these pre-propagated variants?"

"That's the ninety percent of sales. There is one other category, made by a wholly independent affiliate of ours."

"Oh? What's that?"

"The straight clone. Someone takes them a tissue sample. They grow a replica. Completely unconscionable in my opinion. But it can be done."

"You're right, completely unconscionable."

"Doctor Karinova," Feo told her, "I want you to ink this app."

On Sarina's com appeared his traked message, a clip indicating an attachment. She inked the attachment, and looked at him. "Ok, I've incorporated it. What does it do?"

"Emergency evacuation. If you have to leave the city, the planet, or even the constellation, activate the app, and a vehicle will appear within moments. This same app has been inked by the Premier and her cabinet, all the legislators, and all the top administration officials. Perhaps three thousand people on Tantalus have access to it. Your use of it is confidential. No one but me and my security staff will be alerted to its use. Every planet in Ukraine has a small fleet of yachts secreted on spaceports around the planet in case of emergency. Each ship is capable of transporting a person the width of the galaxy without refueling."

Sarina looked at Feo. "This is really serious, isn't it?"

"The Premier has asked me to provide you with the highest degree of protection possible. Do you need Leon's crèche-brothers? I can get you three more in moments."

She blanched. "Leon is quite enough, thank you." She looked at the app on her corn, hoping she never needed it.

"I hope you never need the app," Feo said.

"Just what I was thinking." Incorporated into all the other apps, she wondered how she would remember it was there.

"It's connected to your adrenocortex, so if there's any danger, it will flag you on your corn."

"So it'll remind me that it's available. You've thought of everything."

"The Premier really needs your help on this, Doctor Karinova."

Then he'd left.

Moments later, she received a trake from the lab with the imaging results. Sarina had requested the testing to ferret out any sequelae from Tatiana's bone loss.

For a few minutes, she stared at the results, dumbfounded.

There was no evidence that Tatiana had ever broken her wrist, and the analysis indicated an above-normal bone density. No evidence of incipient osteoporosis, at all. As if the condition had been removed from her genome. The results confirmed what she'd been thinking.

I'll have to tell Feo tomorrow, she thought, seeing how late it was already.

Sarina looked around the small suite buried somewhere in the palace, guest quarters for diplomats, she guessed, the suite richly appointed with silk brocade doilies, satin wallpaper, conditioning furniture, intelligent appliances. It had also come with three saniclones, one for cooking, one for cleaning, and one for overall household management. Sarina had dismissed them, of course, preferring to do all the work herself, but no matter how much she admonished them, they always returned when she wasn't there and cleaned the place until it was immaculate.

The other thing Feo had done was to divert her expenses to the administration. Now, when she ordered a hovertaxi, ate a meal in a restaurant, bought a suit, read a newsie, or researched a topic in a journavid, it was charged to the administration, and not to her personally. No amount of protest on her part could get Feo to change that.

"You're in this predicament because I asked you to examine the Premier's daughter. All your expenses will be taken care of until your wife is safe. Even if you want your family and your wife's family to travel here to Tantalus."

She'd let her in-laws know that Anya had been abducted, and she'd commed them every evening. The investigation appeared to have stalled, no leads or clues having turned up in either the kidnapping or the bombing. The police hadn't been told of Dr. Karinova's examination of the Admiral's son, Fadeyka, as thus far it appeared to be immaterial. If as Feo suspected the two scions had been compromised similarly, then the kidnapping and bombing may have been perpetrated by the same miscreant.

Oh, Anya! Sarina thought, dropping into an armchair, exhausted after her long day, feeling her despair rising inside her, hopelessness beginning to seep through Sarina's soul like some insidious cancer, eating away at her hope, its corrosive force chewing through her moral strength. She fingered her wife's ring on her pinky.

I have to eat, she thought, forcing herself from the chair. Its nanotendrils retracted into the fabric with a slurp, their massage keeping muscles toned. Adapted from early spaceflight technology, such musculoskeletal-conditioning fabric was incorporated into nearly all sitting or reclining surfaces, their conditioning similar to that of the condicoon, used almost universally for sleep.

Sarina dragged herself into the kitchen. The thermafreeze was kept full by the saniclones in spite of her admonition not to, and she saw they'd prepared several servings of her favorite meal, varenyky, a dumpling stuffed with potatoes, onions, ground beef, topped with sour cream. Looking among the servings, she saw piroshky, holubtsi, and blintz, each looking as delicious as the varenyky. She cursed the servants at the same time as she blessed them, knowing she didn't have the energy to prepare a meal herself.

Something her wife had always done for her.

Despair and hunger battled for her attention. Sarina heated up the varenyky, ravenous. She belched when she finished, and recalled Anya's admonishing her for doing so. Sarina wished Anya were here to admonish her now, and Sarina bit back her tears.