Accidental Creatures

by Anne Harris

In a near-future Detroit, the living polymer industry has the city in its grip. While vat-divers struggle to organize, the GeneSysCorporation works on making human workers obsolete. An escaped mutant, a con-artist and a techno-geek team up to unravel corporate blackmail, deceit, and murder. One thing is certain: the city and the world will never be the same once the latest R&D development is unleashed. Chapter 1 — Motor City Requiem

“This building is condemned by the WEB 9 Zoning Authority. Please vacate the proximity of this building. This building is condemned by the WEB 9 Zoning Authority,” droned a soft feminine voice. Chango paced the genelink fence in frustration. On the other side, the great brick bulk of the Russell Industrial Center loomed like a beached and lifeless whale.

Two days ago there was a rave-in here; fifty or more squatters partying, cooking, eating and sleeping. Loud music and vivid strips of celluplast streamed from the windows of the abandoned factory, announcing the presence of the rave to anyone in the neighborhood while electrical and coaxial line usage seeped into Cityweb’s awareness.

The squatters had picked up and moved on to another party, another building. They left a trail of condemned theaters, hotels and office buildings behind them in their travels through the city. They were supposed to leave before Cityweb got wind of them, but they weren’t always that fast. Scanning the genelink fence for gaps, Chango made her way around to the back of the Russell, to the parking lot and loading docks. It was no use trying to cut an opening, nothing could cut through genelink except for a molecular saw, and if she could afford one of those she’d probably be able to buy the whole damn building.

On the far side of the Russell there was a walkway bordered by a small strip of patchy, gravel dusted grass. Chango rummaged in her backpack and came out with a small shovel. Here the genelink had not been buried in the ground but merely stretched across it, and a hole could be dug. Not a very big hole, just enough for her to wriggle underneath.

Once inside, she didn’t worry much about sensors. They’d detect her, sure, but this was a condemned building, and clearly marked as such. The zoning authority wasn’t too concerned about whether or not it was empty when they came with the disintegrators.

The Russell Industrial Center was really a group of three brick buildings, each covering a city block. A concrete yard between them once gave trucks access to the loading docks, but now its barren expanse was just a home for the hardy weeds that sprang up between the cracks in the paving. Chango made her way along one wall, keeping to the shadows until she came to a blank metal door next to a freight platform. She yanked on the handle. It was locked, but the simple electromagnetic identification reader was no match for her inertial lock pick — an expensive little piece of equipment but it got her places. It bypassed the automation on most modern locks and went to work directly on the tumblers, so all she needed to do was keep the system busy or off line. She didn’t need to figure out the protocols of a system and then talk to it, she just had to shut it up. She opened the door and crept into a long, dark, tiled hallway. At the end of it was an alcove with a freight elevator and another metal door. She took the stairs. She never had trusted the elevators in the Russell, and she had even less reason to do so now. On the tenth floor she stepped out from the stairwell onto the vast floor of a machine shop. The large room was lit by sunshine from the windows all around. The rusting hulks of die-cutting machines striped the cracked linoleum floor with shadows. Chango wandered in this gallery of disused mechanisms, running tentative fingers across the dusty, corroded flanks of forgotten tools, their intricate purposes a mystery to her. The rave-in had been in the north building, they had never even ventured here, had never laid eyes on these arcane devices, had no knowledge of them nor desire to find out. To the ravers, an abandoned building was simply a place to hang out for a while. To Chango, each was a world unto itself, a landscape to be savored. At the far end of the floor she turned around, taking it all in with careful eyes, the angle of the light, the swirls of dust on the floor, the boxy lines of the machines in all their many shades of grey and brown. She absorbed every detail, burning it in her mind. She’d spent days exploring the Russell, and this was her favorite spot, or almost. In a day or so, it would be gone, but she would remember. She had already remembered so many of the old buildings in Detroit; the curving dome of the Bonstelle Theatre, the majestic columns in the lobby of the Fox, the murals on the third floor of the old library. All were gone now except for in her memory, where she kept them.

Chango climbed on top of a machine bench sitting against the wall and crawled out the window above it. An iron ladder was bolted to the outside of the building about six feet away. Gripping the upper casement of the window, Chango shuffled as close to the edge of the window ledge as possible, and then crouched and leapt. Unfortunately she struck the wall first, but managed to catch the ladder before she fell. Ribs smarting, she climbed six more stories to the uppermost roof of the Russell Industrial Center. From here she could see the city sprawling out beneath her like the recumbent body of a very old woman; the buildings and streets a map of scars, tracing her history. The clean black lines of maglev highways were fresh and dark against the faded webwork of paved streets. The areas they led to thrummed with activity, alight with cash and electricity. Elsewhere, whole expanses of the city languished in obscurity.

Once this city was a legend. The Motor City. Motor cars were built here, and for a while, a brief and fabled golden age, Detroit was the axle of industry around which the world turned. But the world moved on, and gasoline got expensive, and foreign manufacturers beat the Motor City at its own game. Even before the advent of maglev transportation, the auto industry in Detroit had fallen far from its glory days. And when maglev did come, it was the final deathblow.

But even industry hates a vacuum. Attracted by a cheap and available labor pool, GeneSys moved its headquarters here, to the old Fisher Building, and brought most of its production facilities with it. The green tipped tower of the Fisher, now known as the GeneSys building, rose up against gathering clouds. At night its peak would be lit gold, and red warning lights would flash from its spire. As a child she had called it the Gold Top Castle, and imagined grand parties held there. Several miles to the south, the towers of the downtown business district reared abruptly from the surrounding two and three story buildings like an apparition, the curving glass walls of the Renaissance Center and the Millenial Building its glittering centerpiece. Roughly eight blocks square, the district was so incongruous to the rest of the city that it had earned the name Oz. To the west she could see Vattown, once the home of one of the city's largest automobile plants, now the production center for GeneSys. Rows of vat houses shimmered their grey steel shimmer at the noonday sky. They took up several city blocks, and around them, huddling close to the warmth of industry, were the little brick houses of her neighborhood. It was meager nourishment, and dangerous. Vattown was a small pocket of working class living standards in the bipolar morass of the few rich and the multitudes of poor. But the workers paid a heavy price for relative prosperity. Swimming in growth medium did things to your genetic structure; things that would catch up with you, sooner or later. Like they had with her sister Ada. Her death had left a hole in the Vattown community that could be felt to this day. Though as a teenager, Chango had certainly not appreciated her sister’s leadership, particularly her efforts to raise her after their parents died.