Binary

Book 2: ®Evolution

by Stephanie Saulter

Genres: Dystopian; Genetic Engineering; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

When confiscated genestock is stolen out of secure government quarantine, DI Sharon Varsi finds herself on the biggest case of her career: chasing down a clever thief, a mysterious hacker, and the threat of new, black market gemtech. Zavcka Klist, ruthless industrial enforcer, has reinvented herself. Now the head of Bel'Natur, she wants gem celebrity Aryel Morningstar's blessing for the company's revival of infotech - the science that spawned the Syndrome, nearly destroyed mankind and led to the creation of the gems. With illness in her own family that only a gemtech can cure, Aryel's in no position to refuse. As the infotech programme inches towards a breakthrough, Sharon's investigations lead ever closer to the dark heart of Bel'Natur, the secrets of Aryel Morningstar's past . . . and what Zavcka Klistis really after. ' Some books are good, some books are even great. This one is important ' - SF Signal

Release date: April 3, 2014

Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books

Print pages: 353

Sample

We are a split and splintered species. Every pivot-point of need and creed proves the ease with which we fracture; every heartfelt reunion warns against its own necessity. The lines of our division are as many and varied as the sins of our ancestors and the accidents of history; as varied as the lines on the palm of Mikal Varsi’s hand, double-thumbed and huge at the end of a three-foot-long arm, as he raises it and takes the oath.

His eyes, split-lidded like a lizard’s, blink slowly as he listens to the solemn proclamation of the clerk, stumbling over her words a little as she gazes up and up to his face, wondering as she does so if her tiny part in this moment will be remembered; and wondering also, fleetingly and with guilt, whether posterity will smile upon the memory, or revile her for it. Then he opens his mouth, an ordinary mouth, a mouth she has already learned is no less quick with smiles than with wit, and in a gentle, nasal voice repeats after her just as he should, and she thinks, Well that wasn’t so bad.

She turns to set aside the edicts he has sworn to uphold, and he turns aside to the woman who stands behind him, a woman whose height and hands and eyes are steadfastly normal and who would, moreover, tell you that her heart is too; though there are still many who think this unlikely, for she has given both it and her name to a gem, a man designed for service and built for labour. He bends now and the long arm wraps around her body, and the thumbs on either side of that well-lined palm squeeze her shoulder as she tips her head back to smile up at him and receive his kiss. There is applause from his fellow councillors and hearty laughter all round the chamber, but the clerk thinks she sees a hint of her own secret worry flit across more than a few faces.

And then he steps off the platform, eight towering feet of genetically modified humanity moving to take its place for the first time among the elect of the city; and they part for him like a sea, and like the sea close behind him once again.

*

Aryel Morningstar watched until Mikal had settled into his seat at the horseshoe-shaped council table from which London had been governed since the dawn of what had then been called the twentyfirst century. The era had since been relegated, with distaste and a considerable suggestion of blame, to the third decade BS – Before Syndrome, the last generation to precede catastrophe. She often mused on how little had changed since then, and how much.

When the formal welcomes concluded without incident and they moved on to the tedium of minutes and motions she flicked her tablet to standby and stepped out of the column’s shadow, enjoying the mid-morning warmth that radiated off the ancient stone of the cathedral. She was high up, standing on the circular balcony that ringed the dome, a place normally inaccessible to all but the few ecclesiastical staff who remained. Had any other gem, or norm for that matter, reached it unchallenged, the consternation and embarrassment of the custodians would have been intense.

That the rules did not apply to her – anywhere really, but especially not here – was a fact acknowledged at so base and basic a level that formal confirmation was neither necessary nor expected. Her gaze slipped idly past the discreetly placed and probably derelict security vidcam, grateful for this stolen moment of sunlit quiet. The low hum of the streets drifted up to her, but her view was fixed on the river, old Father Thames rolling slow, slate-grey and imperturbable. Her eyes, eagle-sharp and attuned to movement, caught the ripple and a flash of green as a pair of gillungs broke the surface, got their bearings and submerged again.

Visitors probably, in town for the Festival.

She had much to do herself, and could expect it all to take far longer than was strictly speaking necessary, given the added responsibilities of profile. But Mikal’s ascension to the city council was a milestone that deserved to be marked, a victory that would have been unthinkable not that many years before and a validation which still bathed the residents of the Squats in a slightly stunned satisfaction. She had worked as hard for it as any of them, and with the added complication of fending off suggestions that the candidate should instead have been her. She knew better, as did Mikal himself.

‘It’s not that I want to be in the spotlight,’ he’d said. ‘But it can’t only be you, all of the time. We need to really test how things are for the rest of us, and we need someone who can be a bellwether. Now I tick all their boxes for outsize, ugly, scary-looking gem, and they know I came up under the gemtechs. But the point is, they do know me. My abilities aren’t mysterious, they know I was a factory model. They know my cognition and mannerisms fall within the standard range, they know I’ve got experience running a community, they know I’m married. To a norm cop.’

‘I know they know. And they haven’t been kind about it so far. Do you and Sharon really want to put yourselves through that again? Because you’d be perfect, Mik, but what it would do to you …’

‘What it would do to us it’s already done. And we’re still standing.’

So it had been decided, and the campaign proved as bruising as she had predicted. Scrupulously proper public discourse had been leavened with whispered, withering, back-alley nastiness. The vitriol levelled at Sharon Varsi was muted and reduced this time, but no less vicious. She had rolled her eyes, set her jaw and stood up to it with a fortitude that made Aryel’s eyes prickle.

It was Eli Walker, carefully monitoring the tides of opinion on the streams, who first observed that he thought the naysayers had overreached, tipped the balance of acceptability and triggered instead a groundswell of opprobrium. It was a phenomenon they’d seen before. He looked keenly at her as he said it, as though expecting her to declare herself unsurprised.

She was indeed less so than the others, but they were still all astonished when he won.

Now she considered the impact of those few minutes in the council chamber on the people they represented, and thought about what it must mean to Mikal himself, only a few years emancipated; and to Sharon. It was nearby, no more than a couple of minutes’ flight across the river and downstream, and she could have been there to share the moment with them. But then she would have been unable to prevent the inevitable shift of focus from Mikal to herself.

So she had stayed away, allowing Mik to shine without the competition of her own strange and omnipresent spotlight. If there had been any subtleties of reaction in the chamber she’d missed them; but her presence would have skewed the responses anyway. So much that happened now had become so difficult for her to see.

Eli had been there. She would ask him later what he thought.

She slipped the tablet into its squeeze-pocket on her thigh and grabbed hold of the stone balustrade, stepping into a chink in its richly carved surface and levering herself up. Her other foot found the top of the rail, and she balanced easily there for a moment.

Sunlight glinted off bright bronze-coloured feathers as the first shouts came up from below. She spread her wings and leaned forward, falling into the wind, and angled to follow the gillungs up the river.

*

Further downstream, another woman also watched and pondered the significance of the morning’s events. She too had been less surprised than many, although she had both amused and startled herself with the surge of reflexive envy she’d felt that the first gem to attain such status had been the product of a competitor. Such distinctions hardly mattered any more. More important was the impact on her own intentions, and she considered the matter carefully. On the face of it Mikal Varsi, né Recombin, should have little bearing on her plans, but she’d been wrong about such things before.

She rose from her desk, an elegantly sculptural piece made of wood engineered to grow in precisely the flowing, convoluted shapes that would render it both beautiful and functional, and walked over to the gently curving window that formed the back wall of her office. Her view was vast, towers of steel and turrets of stone and glass pinnacles stretching away in every direction. She caught a glimpse of the river between them, and a glint off the dome of the cathedral.

Like everyone else in the city, she scanned the skies.

She had seen many changes in her life, a life longer than most would guess. But there was something in this latest shift, in the election of Mikal Varsi and the insouciance of the gillungs and above all the flight of Aryel Morningstar, that felt indelible; less like a period to be weathered than one which heralded the beginning of an age.

Her compatriots in the once monolithic gemtech world generally still decried it as a disgrace, or prophesied its derailment, or continued merely to wallow in a bewildered depression. She had worked hard to curb her own resentment and rethink the situation in terms of opportunity. She knew that a large part of what drove her on, what kept her focused and sharp, was the anger and excitement and bitterness she felt every time the winged woman soared over the city.

Aryel Morningstar could not – should not – exist. All the manipulations of the human genome, even the most radical, had resulted only in variations on the basic mammalian body type – four limbs not six, except in those few dreadful cases where mistake or accident had replicated an existing pair to painful and useless effect. All the careful, clever splicing of the DNA of other species had been subtle, incorporating new attributes into extant body parts: hyperspectral eyesight, oxygen exchange in an aquatic environment, organ regeneration. Crafting wings greater than any bird had ever borne to spring from human shoulders, in a delicate, complicated double ball joint that existed nowhere in nature, was simply not possible.

Yet it had been done, and in the doing, proved so many other certainties false.

A soft chime sounded, directionless, and roused her from her brooding.

‘Yes?’

The voice that responded was diffident, the undertone of apology for the interruption plain to hear.

‘The latest status report’s just come in, ma’am. From the new project? You said you wanted to know right away.’

‘Post it to my private stream. Immediately.’

‘Yes, Ms Klist. It’s been done.’

She was already back at the desk, activating the holoscreen. After a beat that was just a second too long to signify close attention, as an afterthought, she said, ‘Thank you.’

The unseen assistant knew better than to reply.

Eli was stopped twice on his way out of the venerable, bulbous city council building; once by a blushing sociology student with colour-streaked hair stammering out her admiration, and again by a newstream vidcam crew looking for a learned sound-bite on the latest entry to the city’s political pantheon. When they realised he was accompanied by Sharon Varsi, trailing a little behind as she finished listening to messages on her earset, they abandoned him practically in mid-sentence. He shrugged, cocked an eyebrow and a grin at her over their shoulders, and escaped outside.

The riverwalk was buzzing with activity. He leaned against the guardrail, watching a group of gillungs and norms on a nearby pier as they signalled to a small tender that was helping to position an airwalk circuit. The inflated corridor began as a platform at the end of the pier, before it sloped gently away to become the entrance to a tunnel that projected out into the channel. He could see the buoys that marked its progress as it curved away upriver.

Some crucial decision made, the tender stood off as the waterbreathing gems slipped into the river, submerging to swim out to an anchor point while their norm compatriots paralleled their progress from inside the airwalk. He quickly lost sight of the gillungs’ shimmering lime-green hair in the bright sunshine glinting off the water’s surface, and turned around to look for Sharon.

She emerged from behind the curved glass of the building and hurried over to him. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Fine by me. Were they all right?’

‘Oh yeah. Sweet as one of Bal’s plum pies. Everyone’s being just lovely, now.’ She sighed and shook her head, leaning on the rail beside him. ‘That’s not fair of me, really. UrbanNews are always pretty okay.’

‘Unlike some of the others.’

‘Mmm.’ She was distracted, staring out at the airwalk. ‘I thought this would’ve been ready by now.’

‘It’s bigger than I expected.’

‘Mik told me they want to showcase more than just the technology – they’ve expanded the original design so as you move further beneath the surface there’s room for them to demonstrate all the different kinds of things they’re starting to do, beyond just farming and fishing and foraging. He says the gillungs want it to be an immersive experience. Pun very much intended, of course.’

Eli laughed. Mikal’s fondness for wordplay, already well known to his friends, had proved a surprising hit in the campaign. ‘How is he today? Really?’

‘Really? He’s fine. You know Mik. Taking it in stride. There’s nothing they can throw at him in terms of council business that he won’t be able to handle, not after five years running the Squats. As for the rest of it—’ She shrugged. ‘He only really gets pissed off when they come after me. Everything else washes right off him. He’s had to put up with worse than a few Reversionists being nasty to us on the streams.’

Eli nodded, although privately he thought that they remained more than a few; and suspected that Sharon thought so too. Outright opposition to the desegregation of gems had largely faded away, drowned out by horror and remorse in the wake of the fundamentalist violence that first brought both her and Mikal to public notice. Archive vids of the no-nonsense police sergeant and the giant gem, desperately trying to help survivors and impose order in the chaotic aftermath of the worst such attack, were reposted with new rounds of heated commentary every time their union was criticised, or doubts raised about the wisdom of the new world order. The memory of those events kept even the more extreme Reversionists permanently in defensive mode.

And yet their numbers appeared to shrink only slowly, if at all. It seemed to Eli that in an era of such turbulence, their call for a return to traditional values and ways of life had found a resonance unrelated to logic.

He and Sharon strolled along the riverwalk, sidestepping other last-minute preparations as they headed towards the station. She glanced back as they passed workers making adjustments to a holo display, a shape-shifting cluster of light sculptures that swirled out Festival factoids, the images and text married to sound that insinuated itself softly into the earsets of those walking by. They caught a fragment of the list of events that formed part of the evening’s launch as the field radius was widened.

‘I’m still not sure what I think about this.’

‘The holo?’

‘No, the whole thing. A Festival of the Future. It sounds sort of … presumptuous.’

Eli chuckled. ‘Tempting fate, maybe?’

‘Maybe. It’s just, you know. We may have come a long way in the last three or four years but it’s not like we’re in some state of perfect harmony and can go skipping off into the sunset. Things are tough still. I should know.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what it is we’re supposed to be celebrating, exactly.’

‘Possibility, I think. And the idea that events are being driven by a sense of vision, that it isn’t all just random.’ They clattered down the stairs into the ancient Underground station. ‘There was a fashion for a while in something similar, a couple or three centuries back. They called them world’s fairs, sort of international trade bazaars, where all the countries got together to show off how sophisticated and forward thinking they were.’

Sharon snorted.

‘Yeah, well. They didn’t know then where it was all heading. But the point is they were consciously trying to focus on the future. To anticipate what was to come, instead of just reflecting on what had already happened. They may have got it wrong but I can understand the motivation. The government feels like they need to do something to push us into a next phase.’

‘Think it’ll work?’

‘Who knows?’ They paused at a junction, where a pair of corridors diverged towards their differing destinations. ‘What does Mikal think about it?’

‘That it’s an exercise in anticipatory self-congratulation.’

They fell out laughing, but there was an edgy sense of truth to the remark that followed Eli onto the train and all the way home.

*

Home was a small flat in the Squats, the gem enclave on the east London riverbank that had been first a refuge for escapees, and then for those who had gained their freedom on a rising tide of public opinion. After the international edicts outlawing retrieval and indenture, the derelict buildings had become a haven for thousands of gems suddenly released into communities unprepared, ill-equipped and often unwilling to handle the influx. They had banded together under the leadership of the still unrevealed Aryel Morningstar, been marshalled and managed by a phalanx of lieutenants with Mikal at their head, and built themselves a sanctuary.

A few norms had joined them since, including the eminent anthropologist Dr Eli Walker. He remembered the early mutterings that attended the genesis of the colony, about the creation of ghettoes and concentration of need, and his own surprise and unspoken glee when the gems turned their talents and training towards the repair of long-abandoned housing and the care of those of their number modified out of any hope of self-sufficiency. The gemtech claims of social inadequacy and limited potential had been effectively silenced.

With legal normalisation had come economic opportunity, and something of a vogue in gem culture and enterprise. The spectacle of Aryel, sweeping in and out on the wing to the gasps of visitors and the casual indifference of residents, added to the growing sense of an appealing exoticism. The shabby, insular neighbourhood Eli had moved into was rapidly becoming chic.

But integration brought its own challenges, he thought, not all of which could have been anticipated. He glanced into the groundfloor lounge as he went past, noting the increasing concentration of the disabled and malformed. Time was when their able-bodied and attractive neighbours would have been in there too, keeping them company. Now they were all out working, or simply elsewhere.

An alert chimed softly in his earset as he pushed back the door to his tiny balcony, letting out a wave of stale, sticky air. Aryel’s tone. She must have picked up his message. He felt a quick little rush of pleasure, followed instantly by a spike of annoyance at himself. Over the years of their friendship he had never been able to pin down quite why it was that doing her even the smallest of favours made him feel so elevated. He had concluded only that it was a phenomenon widely shared, though rarely remarked upon.

Her response was typically succinct, grateful and gently suggestive.

I watched on tablet, but no comparison to the view from the room. Your impressions much appreciated. Similarly with this: and she’d inserted a link to an item on the Festival’s opening programme. Worth checking out I should think.

Eli already knew he was going to go to whatever it was, even as he tapped up the link. The new information washed onto the screen, and he felt his eyebrows shoot up. It would have been worth checking out even if Aryel had not requested it.

*

Aryel herself was on the south bank of the river, close to where the airwalk Eli had observed outside City Hall terminated, this time at a staircase that dropped from the top of the embankment down to the foreshore. The tide was still coming in and the entry platform rose and extended smoothly, tread by tread, as gillungs swirled gracefully around it and made adjustments. She leaned against the rail, gazing down at them and politely ignoring the stares and whispers from her own level, the pointing fingers and surreptitious tablet flashes that accompanied her whenever she left the Squats.

One of the gillungs pulled herself onto an unsubmerged stair, glanced up and saw Aryel. She grinned and raised a hand. Sunlight glinted off the translucent webbing between her fingers.

‘Hey! You going to stay up there and watch, or come down and get wet?’

Aryel laughed, both amused by the suggestion and grateful for the woman’s easy informality. ‘You know that’s not my territory. I’d be about as useful as a cork.’

Other gillung heads popped up, and there were more calls and splashed greetings. Aryel waved back as the woman who had spoken to her ran up the remaining steps to the top. Water dripped from the tight cuffs of her bodysuit, trickling onto broad, webbed feet. Aryel leaned over the safety barrier and into a damp embrace.

‘Graca, it’s so good to see you. D’you know where the rest of my lot have got to? I’m going straight into messages.’

‘There’s a concert hall here? Gwen wanted to see it. Hear it too, no doubt. You know what she’s like, probably made them switch their ’sets off.’

‘How’s Rhys?’

A shadow crossed the other woman’s face. ‘He’s okay. Says he’s okay, anyway.’

‘You’re not convinced.’

‘Not completely, no.’

‘I better go find them.’

Aryel left the quayside and headed into the cavernous interior, built long ago for another Festival and after a tumultuous history, returned to its original use. The attention went with her, murmurs rippling ahead and trailing behind like some strange existential wake. She had long since decided that the best course was generally to act as though it wasn’t there; to treat people as if they behaved better than they did, and hope that with time and familiarity the pretence would become truth.

It was a careful and often, she thought, a hypocritical balance. She knew very well that the norm fascination with her – adulation even – was beyond the control, and usually even the awareness, of most of them. She also knew that she used it, gently and subtly, to keep herself and her people safe, to maintain their steady progress away from serfdom, and to counteract the very difficulties that celebrity created. It was a potent tool, and one that she should not, for purely practical reasons, wish to lose.

Now, for instance, it took no more than a smile and a quiet few words to detail a security guard to help her swiftly negotiate the maze of corridors and locked doorways that led to the hall. Far from resenting the task, the man’s dazed look said he could not believe he would be able to boast to his friends that evening that he had acted as escort to Aryel Morningstar.

Still, he seemed honour-bound to protest that their errand was likely to be fruitless.

‘It’s, umm, it’s locked, you can see,’ as he pressed fingers to an identipad. ‘There’s no access to the hall for the general public just now, and no rehearsals or anything … I’m afraid your party must have gone somewhere else …’

She nodded and smiled and said, ‘Let’s just check.’

And sure enough, as he swung the heavy old door back, voices washed up at them from the direction of the stage. The man’s jaw dropped. Aryel sighed and walked past him.

Lights had been switched on, illuminating only the front few rows. The elevated rear of the room, where they had entered, remained in dense shadow, as did much of the stage down below. Three figures could dimly be seen against the black of the backdrop; two heads glowed a deep wine red, like embers in the darkness.

Someone was singing, a clear, pure tone that rolled up the banks of seats and sent a shiver of pleasure up the guard’s spine. It stopped abruptly and an excited female voice said, ‘Just listen to it! The way the sound changes, it’s so … so round, and full …’

‘You do sound lovely, Gwen,’ said another voice: older, benevolent, amused. It came from the figure without any gemsign glow, and changed abruptly as he became aware of movement in the shadows above. ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s Aryel,’ said the other two in unison. The third voice belonged to a younger male, who added, ‘We’re busted.’

‘You are indeed,’ she said. She was already halfway down the sloping chamber when the guard found the controls, and lights came up in the entire room.

They picked out the two glow-haired gems, who both looked to be in their early twenties: a willowy, weary-looking youth, and a girl whose slender, athletic form and expressive face positively radiated well-being. It was the contrast between lassitude and fizzing energy, the guard realised as he hurried after Aryel, that was their least similar feature; otherwise the resemblance was remarkable. They were lean and long-limbed, and shared the same fine-boned, full-lipped features, along with flawless nut-brown skin and eyes so dark a blue they could almost be black.

Their companion was a white-haired man, norm to all appearances, who looked to be enjoying a hearty old age. He paced to the front of the stage, hands clasped behind his back, and twinkled at Aryel as he boomed, ‘And why is that? This is the people’s hall, after all. We are here only to appreciate our inheritance.’

‘Appreciation is confined to specific times or with appropriate escorts, as you know very well,’ Aryel shot back, but there was no hiding the answering smile in her voice. The girl jumped down from the stage, a distance and depth few norms could have managed safely, and skipped up to meet her. She threw her arms around the winged woman.

‘Don’t be cross, Ari. I just wanted to hear how it sounded.’

Aryel hugged her back, up on tiptoe in a vain attempt to match her height, wings billowing for balance. ‘I’m not. I can’t speak for this gentleman, though.’

The guard was standing behind them, mouth still hanging open in astonishment. ‘I … but … how did you get in?’

The other two had descended the stage by the more sedate route of the steps, and now came up to meet them. The younger man raised his hand sheepishly. ‘That was me. Sorry. Wasn’t my idea,’ shooting a glance at his fellow trespassers. ‘I did lock everything behind us though. And we haven’t touched anything.’

‘Except the lights,’ said Gwen helpfully.

‘Except the lights.’

The guard looked from the beautiful girl to her brother – was he a brother? He thought gems didn’t have siblings, not really – to the old man, now enveloping Aryel in another embrace.

‘But the locks,’ he said helplessly. ‘And … and there’s alarms and stuff.’

‘Alarms?’ said the young man, with an air of polite disbelief. ‘Did we set off alarms? Sorry about that. Really. Didn’t look like they were on.’

‘Yes they were. I mean, no you didn’t. I mean I don’t think so. I’d have got a call.’ He tapped his earset, wondering how to handle the situation. They had obviously bypassed the security systems somehow, but no harm appeared to have been done and Aryel Morningstar clearly knew all about them. She shook her head ruefully.

‘Rhys has a way with comms systems, Gwen has a way with Rhys, and Reginald here,’ she cast a fond look over her shoulder at the old man, ‘has a way of indulging them. First trip to London, you see.’

‘Really?’ said the guard. His head was reeling. The names of Gwen and Rhys rang only the most distant of bells, but he recognised the reference to Reginald right away. It was a name he could connect with the trio’s appearance, and begin to make some sense of it all.

The old man was dressed in the highly unfashionable, slightly shabby clothing characteristic of a Remnant. The two young people’s attire was not quite so outmoded, but neither was it of recent vintage. The full dimensions of the tale he could tell at the pub that night dawned on him.

It would not be improved if he had to add that he had concluded the encounter by rousting Aryel Morningstar’s foster family.

*

Later that afternoon, Aryel left Reginald, Rhys and Gwen resting in her own cavernous flat and tapped on another door in a quiet first-floor corridor. It slid back to reveal a man with glowing flamecoloured hair, and an air of subdued tension that receded when he saw her.

‘Hey, Callan. Glad I caught you.’ He smiled a little and stood back so she could step inside. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Fine. Just hanging out with him a bit, making sure he eats something.’ He gestured towards the small open kitchen, where the debris of a meal was in the midst of being tidied away. ‘I’ve got to go in a minute, though. Got some extra work on this evening.’

‘Festival?’

‘Yeah. Translating for some of the newstreams.’

‘Will you be free to come to the show after?’

The flame-haired man shrugged. ‘Should be. If I feel like it.’

Aryel looked at him keenly. Although he was young, well shy of thirty, he gave an impression of greater age. It was perhaps that subtle quality in his demeanour, a slightly hunted watchfulness; or maybe just the faint traces of scarring on his handsome face, the shadow of some old injury which had been expertly repaired, but not quite completely erased.

‘Please come,’ she said quietly. ‘Lyriam’s only just got back, he hasn?