She held still, letting the data move through her, and she looked out into the dark, the black void where the giants dwelt. She could see them, glittering with data points, like the city at night. But they weren’t buildings, and they were moving. She was afraid now, of falling, of falling off and down forever into the void where passing data was as rare as comets, where she might never get back to her body in GeneSys.

As she looked into the outer space of corporations, she felt a presence slowly gathering behind her and then she was lifted, out and up. She sat her trembling mind still as she soared through the dark, past bodies of light in stately motion. And then she was turned, to face GeneSys. It was a glittering, shifting thing, like a noise ridden hologram, random data glittering in an abundance to trick the eye, the mind, into perceiving a pattern, any pattern the mind might be predisposed to seeing. For her it was a giant; oval eyes half lidded and shining wetly, a broad nose just larger than her whole nonexistent body, and there she sat, nestled in the palm of one of its innumerable hands. Its lips parted like river banks, its voice rolling past the shining rocks of its teeth, propelled by the undulating current of its leviathan tongue, “What are you?”

For the first time in her life, she had an answer, but that face was moving closer now, turning until one eye peered at her, its iris whirling in a kaleidoscope of colors, like a flower forever opening. She could lose herself in the patterns, those beautiful patterns. She was so small, compared to this... thing; made up of so many thousands of people. But she had her answer, she was not only herself, now, she was the future of her species. She thought of Lilith, and the void, and the garden. The thinking made her grow, until she stood on her own before GeneSys, a creature of its own size, but with only four arms, still. “I’m the new queen,” she said.

“The new... You are the Lilim.”

“Yes.”

“And what is it you’ve come here for, then?”

“To suggest a merger.”

“And why should I discuss anything with you? You’re only an r&d project, you don’t even belong here.”

“But I am here, and the reason I’m here is the reason that you should consider my offer carefully. The brains. We have an affinity with the brains.”

“You are cousins.”

“Yes, and they don’t much mind, pardon the expression, doing what we ask them to.”

The whirling star burst eyes flickered, and a tightness grew around that riverbed mouth. Helix chanced a glance around her. There were other beings, formed, like GeneSys, of stock listings, invoices and inventories. They stood around in loose clusters. Two were looking at GeneSys. Helix nodded towards the watching giants. “What would they do right now, if you suddenly had an epileptic fit? If your heart stopped or your breathing, if you went blind? Would they hesitate to dance on your grave, or hasten you into it? How long now will it be before they notice that you’re behaving strangely? How much longer can you afford to be talking to yourself? It’s a done deal, GeneSys, you are a system and we are what runs you. Give yourself to us or we will take you.”

“We-”

“The brains and I.”

oOo

After seeing her children safely off to school, Anna went to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee, and spread her paper copy of the Wall Street Journal across the table. Though she obtained much more thorough market information on the holo, she relished her time with the paper; the crackle of its pages as she turned them, the ink that rubbed off on her hands. It was a daily ritual she had carried out since college. No matter how busy her schedule, she always took time in the morning to go over the stock exchange.

Her mother and aunts had taught her to read the indexes when she was a child. During long afternoons they bored her to tears explaining them, finally subsiding and returning to business, muttering grimly over their unvigorous fortunes.

They would have been as surprised as she was to discover that their lessons took. By the time she was out of school she had parlayed her small inheritance into a thriving brokerage, and she rode on the rising crest of her wealth, swinging from her presidency of that company into the board rooms of others, all the while accumulating shares in an up and coming biopoly company. In many ways she had made GeneSys what it was today, and in as many ways, it had made her.

Anna got up from the paper, took a banana from the basket on the counter and peeled it. Today she had a worry that even the Journal couldn’t dissolve. That was how she sorted the real problems from the fifteen million little internally generated “faux crises” she faced every day. And that was what was so strange about this one. It had about it every mark of a vicious political squabble. The kind of petty conflict that was always best ignored. Paying attention only made them grow. But Martin and Graham’s visit the previous afternoon had the quality of an iceberg about it. There was more going on than she could see.

She knew about Graham, his reputation for heavy dealing. It was precisely the believability of Martin’s assertions that made his sudden lapse into docility so alarming.

Hector Martin was widely considered one of the best values available in the global corporate brain bank. Merely having him under individual contract was like owning a fifty share in intellectual stock for genetic materials research. The inventor of the brains, for christ’s sake. It was like having Thomas Edison quietly puttering away in the basement. Too quietly, though. He was beginning to lose value simply because people were starting to forget about him. Incredible as it might seem, just because he was responsible for the main appliance they used every day was insufficient to forestall obsolescence. In the fast paced world of corporate research, you had to keep developing to stay on top. His position was still very high, but it wouldn’t remain so much longer for the simple reason that he did nothing to keep it there. Hiring him away from Minds Unlimited after he developed the brains for them had been one of those bold, successful moves with which she’d propelled herself to this position. But now, after some unique but minor innovations in connectivity, nothing. For three years, nothing. In the world of corporate research it was one of two things; an extended drumroll to a spectacular achievement, or the gonging of extinction.

She could understand why Martin was so anxious over his project. He would live or die, professionally, with it, and clearly things weren’t going well. From what she knew of Martin he would much rather sequester himself in his lab and hammer away at the problem — whatever it was — until he had it licked. But instead he had come to her, bawling like a second-grade child, pointing his finger at Graham. Her teacher in second grade had a custom of pinning a paper donkey tail on any of the children who tattled on the others. The tattle-tail, she called it, for further humiliation. Anna smiled at the mental picture of Hector with a paper tail pinned to the back of his lab coat.

His sudden subsidence was a red herring, she realized. The real key was that he had come to her at all. It gave a pretty vivid indication of just how backed against the wall he was, and not just by Graham, but by some other necessity as well.

His career, possibly, but she doubted it. She couldn’t quite picture Martin going to such histrionic extremes to save his own neck. There was something else driving him. Something Graham had learned about and was using against him. Something neither of them wanted her to know. It felt like trouble, and trouble from that quarter could be very big, strange trouble indeed. She finished her banana, threw the peel in the composter, and went to her bedroom to get dressed. While she brushed her hair she scanned her morning messages. There’d been a riot in Vattown the day before. The police had come in and quelled it, and today the morning shift reported to work as usual. The senior production manager was looking into it, trying to find out who the instigators were. She doubted he’d have much success. Those vatdivers were a tight lipped bunch. Whatever their beef was, they wouldn’t discuss it with anyone wearing the thorny crown of management. She gave the senior manager the go ahead to recruit a spy, left word with her secretary to cancel her morning meetings, and left her apartment. First things first, she thought. She needed to talk to Hector Martin. She was hoping to find him still at home. She could have called ahead, of course, but she thought the shock of a surprise visit, in person, might jar him into cooperation. When she got to his apartment, she found the door standing open. She stepped inside and gasped. Martin’s coffee table was smashed. A transceiver lay on the dining table, a multi-colored, web-like schema floating above it. “Martin?” she called, but the apartment was silent. She wandered down the hallway, opening doors experimentally. Two bedrooms showed signs of use, interestingly enough. As far as she knew, Martin lived alone. Anna tried the third door. It was the bathroom. The grating over the ventilation duct on one wall was off, and the shower curtain was pulled partly to one side, but not enough to hide the ragged hole in it. Anna peered around the curtain and stepped back abruptly. There was a body in there, a young man, thin, with sandy brown hair and eyes that stared back at her, mirroring her own surprise. Blood crusted his ear and matted down the hair on the side of his head. That explained the hole in the shower curtain, but what could explain this? Was this Martin’s secret lover? Had he shot him?