Corporate Mentality

CHAPTER TWO

ME

When forty-five thousand people die all at once, the survivors naturally ask, "How did it all begin? Where did it all start?" Then they get mad when you tell them you don’t know.

"Just tell the story," they demand. "Start at the beginning!"

I don’t know where the beginning is. I mean, is it when my great-grandmother died and my great-grandfather chose his son, Jonathan Blackstone, to take her place? Or is it when Meredeth Michaels decided to marry Jonathan Blackstone? Or is it when Jonathan Blackstone first struck his son Lance and cracked his mind into forty-eight different people?

The cliché description of chaos theory is that a butterfly flaps its wings in China and the resulting tiny changes to the air currents eventually multiply and grow until a hurricane wrecks Florida. What the chaos theorists don’t tell you, though, is that this kind of change takes a thousand butterflies flapping their two thousand wings, and if you step on even one of them, the inhabitants of Florida will live their lives in blissful ignorance of the storm they missed. So which butterfly is the one that started it all? Was it my great-grandfather? My grandmother, Meredeth Michaels? My grandfather, Jonathan Blackstone? My father, Lance? Where do you start?

I think I’ll start with Mrs. Wells.

She was standing on her front porch staring at the silver car in our driveway when I got home from school. The weather was typical for my birthday—wet, slushy springtime—but I had decided to take my bike to school instead of hitching the buggy or riding one of the horses because I didn’t have mood or patience to deal with saddle or harness. My jacket flapped open in the chilly air, but I refused to button it. I didn’t have the mood or patience for keeping up stupid appearances, either. The heavy weight of my book bag dragged at my back.

It had been an unusually snowy winter on Felicity, and chunks of white still patched the ground in the shadier portions of our yard. Leaf buds with green cracks knobbed the imported maples Dad had planted in the front lawn, and a pair of buckets hung beneath two small spouts hammered into each trunk. Wire mesh covered the mouths of all eight buckets and a trio of lizzie-bats pittered anxiously back and forth above the buckets, craning their long necks and chirruping with impatience. I smiled wryly in spite of myself. Every year Dad tries to make maple syrup, and every year the lizzie-bats get to the buckets, no matter how hard he tries to guard them. Sometimes I think he’d actually buy a gun and start shooting if Felicity allowed projectile weapons.

Anyway. My birthday. Front porch. Mrs. Wells. Silver car.

My jaw tightened and my stomach clenched. Looked like I was going to spend my birthday alone. A cool spring breeze washed over me. I pulled my windbreaker shut and shivered, though I still wasn’t cold.

"You have a visitor," Mrs. Wells called from across the road, and I wondered if I should reply or pretend I hadn’t heard. Mrs. Wells was at least sixty now, with white hair and flabby arms. I wondered what it would be like to be an old woman. It didn’t seem likely I’d live to be an old man. Not with my twin gone.

"Isn’t today your birthday, Kate?" Mrs. Wells called. "Happy birthday!"

I gave her a small wave, ditched my bike on the lawn, and trotted up the flagstone path to the front door. [Gremlin,[ I thought. [Do you know who—[

But Gremlin wasn’t there anymore. The thought jolted me, as if I had missed the last step coming down a staircase. I clenched my jaw again and opened the door.

The man sitting in the living room with Dad wore a dark suit and held a yellow notepad full of desperately scribbled notes. He got to his feet and bowed to me when I entered. I didn’t bow back. Dad also stood up uncomfortably and gave me an apologetic look with his green eyes.

"Hello, honey," he said. "This is Mr. Ting Chen. He’s with—"

"So when are you leaving?" I asked shortly.

"I’m sorry, Kate," he said. "Please, honey. It’s not as if—"

But I didn’t stay around to hear. I stomped upstairs to my room and flung the door shut. My book bag went skidding under my bed, my windbreaker fluttered into the corner. Beneath my window, Mrs. Wells had gone back inside and one of the lizzie-bats was triumphantly snaking its head into the gap it had pried into the wire mesh. I stared furiously down at the yard, hoping one of its friends would shit on the perfect silver car. Dad had missed my first track meet, the first Christmas my twin and I made him a present on our own, and the first time I had won the Youth Sculpture Award. Now he was going to miss my eighteenth birthday. I thought about sending a regiment of nanobots downstairs and dismantling Ting Chen’s chair out from under him. Then I discarded the idea. It was a childish trick, and anyway it wouldn’t keep Dad from going.

The hardwood floor creaked outside my door and someone knocked. When I didn’t answer, the door creaked slowly open. I faced the window, arms crossed. The lizzie-bat was gulping greedily from the sap bucket.

"Kate?" Dad said, entering my room. "Honey? Listen, I’m sorry but—"

"You already said that," I interrupted. "You can skip the rest, too. I know the beat. Ting-Ting down there works for someone who has a nanobot hive on their hands and you’re leaving in a few minutes to handle it." I waved a hand over my shoulder without looking at him. "So go. Who cares? Gremlin’s off line. My twin is God-knows-where. What’s one more member of the family gone?"

"Kate, it’s different this time." My bed creaked and I knew he was sitting on it. "This nanobot hive’s managed to take over the computer systems of an entire planet. Thousands of people have already died, and it’s going to be millions if I don’t get there soon."

I turned around. "Take me with you this time."

Dad looked at me for a long moment. He’s an undeniably handsome man, with hair the color of an autumn sunset, bright green eyes, and a broad, muscular build that the male body my twin currently wore had managed to inherit. The similarities between us and Dad end there, though. My twin and I are dark, where Dad is fair. We both have large brown eyes—my favorite feature on both bodies—and curly, dark brown hair with auburn highlights. My twin and I had long ago agreed to keep it long on the female body, short on the male.

Dad doesn’t look anywhere near old enough to be my father, though he’s in his midfifties. Women of all ages are constantly hitting on him. It’s weird seeing that happen. You don’t grow up thinking of your dad as someone who has a sex life.

"I can’t take you with me, Kate," he said. "You know that."

My jaw tightened a third time, and I didn’t answer.

Dad got up and sighed. "Look, I have to go. I’ll be back as soon as I can, all right?" He crossed the room and kissed the top of my head. "I’ll make it up to you when I get back. I always do." He turned to go, then paused. "Hey—keep an eye on the sap buckets, will you? I don’t want the lizzie-bats getting all the sap this year."

And he was gone. Through my window I watched him climb into the car with the corp guy. It zipped almost silently up the muddy road and vanished in the distance. The lizzie-bats glided back down to the sap buckets to resume their interrupted feast.

Nanobots swarmed inside me like bees ready to burst from their hive. There was nowhere for them to go. My twin and his nanos were gone, and without them both I was stuck. I was trapped. A lizzie-bat with a broken wing. I wondered if my twin, wherever he was, felt the same way or if he was too angry to care.

The walls of my room seemed suddenly close, and the air felt stuffy. I threw open the window and breathed in cold lungfuls of spring air. The lizzie-bats looked up at me suspiciously, then went back to their greedy gulping.

I wandered downstairs, letting my hand trail on the contours carved into the banister, listening to the familiar creak of the stairs. Dad has a thing for wood, meaning the walls are sanded blond boards and the floors are bare of carpet except for the occasional big rug. We’re at constant war with the dust bunnies. Kevin says the house smells like oil soap whenever he comes over. I can’t tell. You can’t smell your own house.

In the kitchen I found sugar, butter, cocoa, and flour sitting on the counter next to an empty ceramic mixing bowl. A small bundle of tiny candles lay wrapped in brown paper nearby. I stared at them for a moment, then snatched up the bowl and threw it against the wall. It shattered with a satisfying crash. Feeling only a little better, I stomped down to the basement.

Although I can’t smell the oil soap upstairs, I always notice the welcome smell of wet clay downstairs. I hit the lights, dispelling the shadows that coated my work table like cobwebs. It was cooler down here and I wished I had put on a sweatshirt, but felt too perverse to go back upstairs and get one. A moment later my nanos noticed the drop in body temperature. They increased the pyrogen levels in my blood, and the chill evaporated.

I filled my dipping bowl with water, cut a clump of clay from the bigger chunk wrapped in brown paper, and started kneading. The clay was cold and satisfyingly gritty beneath my hands, but it was still stiff and hard to work. In response to my thoughts, a few million nanos poured out of my mouth, eyes, and nose and rushed down my arms into the clay. Although I can’t see or feel them running over my skin—most of them are smaller than a red blood cell—I can control them just like other people control striated muscle. It’s like having an extra limb, one that can do several things at once. I can’t explain it better than that, but then, I can’t explain how I breathe, either. I just do it. And just like my breathing, my nanos revert to their regular tasks if I stop concentrating on them. Most of the time, their tasks involve fine-tuning my body chemistry, making sure I don’t get sick, and healing any damage. My twin has nanos, too. We got them from Dad.

The nanos helped me work the clay, loosening it and pulling water through it until it was the texture I wanted. I glanced at the foot-powered potter’s wheel next to the worktable, then decided to keep molding with my hands and see what took shape.

I wondered what Dad was doing, if he had reached the spaceport all right, if he was boarding the skyhook even now, or if he was still in the silver car. He should have taken me with him. My fingers squelched and kneaded the cool, gritty clay. Suddenly I wanted to talk to Gremlin, the thoughts and questions already forming in my mind. But my twin was gone, and Gremlin needed both of us to exist.

Clay bulged and bunched, and not always just where my fingers worked. My birthday. Dad, Gremlin, my twin. All of them were gone on my birthday. Loneliness made an empty place in my chest. My fingers and my nanos worked faster and faster, trying to fill it with clay. A tree sprouted in the gray lump, and its branches grew upward, thick and bare. I added a pair of sap buckets on the trunk and a trio of lizzie-bats perching anxiously above them. My nanos let me work in impossibly tiny detail, adding patterns to the fur and even a microscopic drop of sap hanging from one sap spout. It was shaping up to be a nice piece of work, maybe one of my better ones. I blew a curl of hair away from my nose. If I had the male body right now, I’d probably be running through the woods behind the house. I can’t sculpt when I’m male, and I can’t get an endorphin rush from physical activity when I’m female.

I looked down at the tree and noticed my twin’s male face looking up at me from the bark. I smashed the entire thing to mush and fled upstairs, leaving the clay to dry under the basement lights.

G G G

Four days later, someone banged the front knocker. I thudded downstairs from my room, heart in my mouth. Dad wouldn’t knock, but maybe it was someone with some news.

I opened the door on Ting Chen, the guy who had taken Dad away. His silver car was parked in the driveway again. The air outside was balmy and sweet, and baby leaves hovered in the maple tree branches like a green mist. The lizzie-bats had long ago emptied the last sap bucket and flown away.

Ting bowed. I didn’t bow back. My heart was pounding, but damned if I would let any of that show.

"Where’s my father?" I asked before he could speak.

Ting Chen shifted a moment uncomfortably before answering. A rock plunged though my stomach and into my feet. You can blurt out good news. Bad news takes some thought.

"I’m sorry, Ms. Radford-Michaels," he said at last. "Your father landed on the surface of New Pakistan—the hive-infected planet—three days ago, and we have not heard from him since."

My entire body turned cold, as if I had been filled with ice water. "Is he dead?"

"We have no idea. However, I’m afraid—" He paused to clear his throat. "I’m afraid that’s what many in my company believe. I deeply regret that we can’t consider sending a rescue ship. We don’t know how your father defends his computer systems from hive takeover, and any ship we sent might be infected and destroyed. We can’t take the risk."

We can’t take the risk. We can’t take the risk. Ting’s words ate through my mind like a school of piranha. I couldn’t do anything but stare, too numb to do or say anything.

Ting whipped out an envelope. "Although your father was hired as an independent contractor and my company assumes no liability," he went on, "we have decided it would only be proper to offer you a compensatory settlement. I know it can’t make up for your loss, but—"

The numbness abruptly vanished, replaced by cold rage. I reached into the house and picked up a vase that sat on a table near the door. My nanos swarmed over it in invisible waves, finding microscopic fissures and gaps between molecules. I thrust it under Ting’s nose.

"Run," I said.

Ting blinked. "What?"

"The human skull is composed of eight bones fused together along a series of fissures," I said. "You’d better run."

Ting Chen didn’t move. "I’m afraid I don’t under—"

The vase shattered into eight pieces with a loud pop. Shards glittered like knives on my palm. "Run!"

Ting fled. His silver electric car vanished down the road in a cloud of dust. I watched him go, my brain not really processing what my eyes recorded. The anger vanished, replaced by a sour lump of worry. My twin was gone. Gremlin was off line. Dad had disappeared.

Damned if I was going to sit around and wait to find out what the hell was going on.

I dashed into the house and threw a few things into a shoulder bag. In the kitchen I put a box lunch together from the icebox and packed the rest of the perishables into a crate. I left it on Mrs. Wells’s front stoop with a note asking her to keep an eye on the house and feed the horses until I—we—got back. Then I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled furiously down the road.