“What is it? Is she dying?”

Mavi looked at her gravely, “She may be dying, but not of vatsickness.”

“What?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in an onset before.”

“But her exposure...”

“The indications are all wrong. Patients always run a low grade fever by the time they start displaying other symptoms. Her temperature is dropping, rapidly. And those convulsions, I’ve never seen anyone do that before, not with vatsickness. It’s more like a straightforward, severe toxic reaction.”

“To the growth medium?”

Mavi shrugged and looked at her with flat, bleak eyes, “What else? I gave her a clonazepam epidermal, that seems to be keeping the convulsions down a bit, but her system’s in shock. I don’t know what else to do.”

From the couch, Helix let out one of those moans again. Chango shivered. “God, what is that noise she makes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Get it off me,” Helix groaned.

“What?” Chango knelt by her side. “What did you say?”

“The biocide, get it off me,” she croaked hoarsely, “It’s killing me.”

Chango stared at Mavi, who stared back at her. “But the biocide is supposed to help kill the growth medium, Helix.”

Helix closed her eyes in exhaustion. “That’s the problem.” she whispered. “Please, it hurts. If you don’t help me, I’ll die.”

Chango and Mavi looked at each other again, hesitating. “It’s not vatsickness...” said Mavi, “it could be a reaction to the biocide, but—”

“You know I’m not human,” said Helix, staring at Mavi with half lidded eyes, “or at least you should.”

“Let’s get her to the shower,” said Chango.

oOo

Water white with biocide ran down the drain of the tub. Helix rested her head in Chango’s lap, half conscious, comforted by Chango’s fingers on her scalp, scrubbing away the crusted powder. “I can see why you wanted this stuff off,” she said, “it’s nasty.”

Helix didn’t answer her. She was dreaming that she was swimming in a great green vat of growth medium, moving with the currents, and feasting on agules. Mavi had been right. She would die, but not from vatsickness, she would die because she had found what she’d never known she wanted, what she’d always wanted, and as soon as she did, it had been taken away from her. She couldn’t go back, to her pathetic existence as a sport. She wasn’t that, now she knew she wasn’t that. She’d been born to swim in the vats, harvest agules, and eat them. But she couldn’t do that either. After today, they’d fire her for sure.

Helix felt the last of the biocide rinse away, but still her skin burned, still the tremors washed over her.

“Fill the tub,” she said to Chango, “and get some salt from the kitchen and put it in.”

Chango did as she asked, and then sat on the edge of the tub, holding one of her hands. “Is it better?”

She nodded. It was better, better than being coated with poison, but it was a far cry from the velvet caress of the growth medium. She longed for it in her cells. She wondered if she would ever feel it again.

“It wasn’t an accident, was it?” said Chango. “You did it on purpose.”

“Yeah. I had to find out what it felt like.”

“So what did you find out?”

“It’s what I’m meant to do, and if I can’t, I’ll die.”

Chapter 12 — Creation Story

In the beginning was the dream, and in the dream Hector was in the laboratory, alone. It was late at night, he was in his pajama bottoms. Goose flesh stood out on the exposed skin of his arms and chest. Light came faintly from a single row of phosphorescents at the back of the room. He padded up and down the aisles on cold bare feet, walking past incubators and microscopes, biophages and growing trays. A multi-processor was awake, spilling holographic equations into the air with incomprehensible speed. Hector stopped, and watched the numbers and symbols stream past. He couldn't make anything out; they were moving too fast. As he stood and stared the equations flew at him, tumbling into him through his eyes, his ears, his mouth. His head was filled with them, he felt them working their calculations through his blood stream. He danced and jerked, an arithmetic robot, trying to rid himself of these numbers, these symbols. But it was too late now. They were in him. They were a part of him. He left the emptied screen of the multi-processor and moved towards the back of the room, where a large, rectangular tank lay beneath the round saucers of the phosphorescent lights. Inside the tank, like a corpse laid out in a coffin, lay a body, submerged in the faint opalescent sheen of growth medium. As he approached the tank, she stood up. She was tall and strong, with a long mane of black hair, generous breasts, four arms and gleaming white fangs. And as he stood there, staring, she began to dance. She danced like the Indian women he'd seen on a PBS special once; all rocking back and fourth, angular gestures, stamping of feet and bending of knees. She whirled around him, and he turned, trying to keep her in sight. She was a blur all around him now, and he was inside of her, being born by her dance. The equations that had infected him earlier were coming out again now. He spoke them into the whirlwind, and she stopped.

She stood before him, silent, motionless. She was beautiful. He would have liked to touch her, hold her, make love to her. She smiled slowly and nodded her head, once, and then walked towards him. But as she approached she got smaller. Smaller and smaller until she was no bigger than a gum ball, and she hung in the middle of the air, in front of his face. Hector opened his mouth, she climbed inside, and he swallowed her.

When he awoke the next morning, he knew what to do.

It took months of splicing and selective genetic engineering. For processing and control of the organism, he cloned and modified a multi-processor brain. Following standard animal physiology, he tied autonomic functions like breathing and heart reflex to the brainstem and put the hypothalamus in charge of instinctual drives such as sex and hunger.

For reasons he did not examine at the time, he grew the cerebral cortex beyond the demands of plucking agules from growth medium, leaving space for behaviors to evolve with the demands of the creature’s environment, leaving space for intelligence to grow on its own.

At first the double arms and fangs had been stubborn artifacts of the gene splicing, a side effect of manipulating homeobox genes, but he soon recognized their advantages, and gave up on trying to erase them.

Finally, in a rectangular tank beneath the phosphorescent lights of the laboratory, Lilith, the first tetra, was born. He had been lauded for his work on the brains, but he had never really considered them a work of genius. Everything was there, just waiting for him to come along and put it together. But this, this was something else again. A genetically engineered species with human cognitive ability. He hadn’t needed to make them that smart, but once he’d figured out the basic neural network of NMDA, glutaminergic, and GABA synapses and the balance between excitory and inhibitory neurons, it was only a matter of making space for the network to grow.

Following the sacred design that came to him in the dream, Hector directed the formation of synaptic connections with neural adhesion factors, chemoattractants and neurotrophins. But he designed the tetras with synaptic plasticity, taking advantage of Hebb’s rule of coordinated synaptic activity to reinforce useful connections and inactivate inappropriate ones. Rather than hardwire their behavior, he allowed their environment to mold and nudge them towards their intended function, leaving specific behaviors open-ended.

Despite the problems caused by his approach — the tetras’ insular social system, their uncooperativeness — he had never really regretted giving them choice, independence, intelligence. The concept of a creature of such complexity without those characteristics was an anathema to him, and he knew what GeneSys intended to do with them if they were successful. They wanted to get rid of the vatdivers because they were causing trouble; organizing, calling strikes, demanding rights. In fact, he realized now, the block he’d had on the project was not mental in nature, but moral. Until he saw Lilith in his dream and knew that she would be a person, not a machine, he could not allow himself to solve the puzzle of her creation. He remembered his mother, an inobservant Jew but one instilled nevertheless with the Reformed Jewish version of the golden rule, “that which is abhorrent to you, do not do.” It was a rule she’d taught to him as well.