"The Transgenic Falcon"

I’d been a little surprised when Belinda led me out of the main Gen-Tech facilities of the acrology and into a huge mall area. She didn’t say where we were going and I didn’t feel like giving her more authority by asking. The trees and the real, live grass made it feel like the out-of-doors, with a couple of notable differences. First off, I knew the temperature outside had to be into the high nineties, but the park-like area was a very comfortable seventy-five or so. Then there was the air quality. Even with the reduction in using oil for fuel, my fair city is still home to nearly twenty-five oil refineries. They’ve been slowly moving away from gasoline production, the New Delhi Accords on climate change had mandated it, but that didn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other things you can do with crude oil, and Houston is still a hub for it. Any time there was an on-shore wind; downtown was alive with the sharp tang of ketones. There was none of that in this park in a building. It gave the whole place an unreal feeling, like something was missing.

It didn’t help that Belinda had steered us to a moving sidewalk, then continued striding ahead. The combination of the walkways speed and our own forward progress made the park and shops move by at faster than a quick jog.

I started to slow my pace and let my guide get a ways down the slide-walk. As soon as I fell out of her peripheral vision, Belinda stopped and looked back; one eyebrow cocked in the unasked question of what the hell was I doing?

“I know we’re on a timetable, but running everywhere cuts down on the incubation time,” I explained.

She wanted to roll her eyes, I could tell, but Belinda had decided she was in management mode and the focus of that management probably didn’t need to see her impatience, for now.

“You can’t think and move at the same time?”

“I can, but studies show that you do less creative work when you are exercising. Different parts of the brain are activated when your heart rate climbs. There was a whole fad for treadmill workstations back in the twenty-teens, but it was self-defeating. You got healthier workers, but less creative work.”

“Fine,” she said, walking a few steps back to me, with poorly disguised bad-grace. I smiled an internal smile; chalk one up for the micro-managed underclass! Now that we weren’t moving through the mall at warp-speed I had a chance to look around a little closer. The floor of this huge room had been built up in gentle raises and dips, breaking up the line of site and contributing to the illusion of being outside. Huge pillars, carefully crafted to look like giant Sequoias held up the roof that was probably thirty feet overhead. It was impossible to tell as I couldn’t get a clear view of the ceiling. There was a massive hologram projecting the image of a bright blue sky, dotted here and there with Disney-perfect fluffy clouds.

“Why not have your open spaces on the roof? There more than enough room.”

“We do have open space on the roofs, but it’s not always usable, especially during the summer during the day. By having malls like this, our people get the best of the outdoors without having to deal with the inconveniences like rain or pollution.”

Our moving walkway curved and brought us closer to one of the walls. Shops were tucked into the walls, each little cubby filled with a temple to the gods of commerce. Clothes and electronics were well represented, all medium to high end merchandise.

“Are all the shops G-T owned?”

“Sort of.” Belinda answered, “G-T owns all the space, but if a citizen wants to open a business we make the space available for them at the cost of maintenance. Power and water are part of the deal. This lets our shop keepers sell their goods at better prices than outside and still make a bit of spending money.”

“I thought you everyone who lived here was a G-T employee?”

“Well, either an employee or a significant other of one. But you can’t move in unless you both have work in the acrology. So, if you’re an IT specialist and you want to live here, your husband is going to need to either find a job or open one of the subsidized businesses.”

“Subsidized, break-even costs, if everything is so inexpensive, why was Taylor complaining about money? There can’t be that many top level researchers in his field, his salary has to be in the high five, low six figure range.”

“His overall compensation is at that level,” Belinda agreed.

“But?” I asked, annoyed she was making me pull this out.

“But, money is not the only way to be compensated. He doesn’t pay for the luxury apartment he lives in; his meals are all covered, unless he wants to eat in one of the restaurants, though they have the same low price structure as the shops. All the gyms and movie theaters are free of charge, and if he needs a car to go into Houston or anywhere else, he just signs it out. Anywhere else he’d have to pay for all of that, so when you look at his salary, it’s low, but its mostly disposable income.”

I mulled that over for a minute. It seemed like a reasonable set up, on the surface. You move into a lovely new apartment, have access to lots of inexpensive shops, basic food, water and electricity are all included, so why worry about the low level of income?

Thing is, it’s the same old company store trap that kept lots of workers in indentured servitude a century or more ago. As long as you, (and your spouse don’t forget) worked for G-T or were part of the internal economy things were great. But you never really had the chance to accumulate wealth on your own. Everyone I could see was well dressed, many of them sporting comms/data rigs similar too, if not as cutting edge as Belinda’s. They were all healthy and looked happy. But there was a sinister down side to it all.

As long as you played by the G-T rules things were fine, but if you got sideways with the management, maybe spoke up about the way things worked, then you would find yourself outside the pyramid, with little or no savings, and no real contacts to smooth the way for you. I’d nailed it earlier; this place had a real Disney/Stepford feel to it. Even if there hadn’t been a ticking clock, I’d have wanted to get out of here as fast as I could.

“How hard would it be to look at Mick’s finances?” I asked.

Belinda twirled a couple of rings, and the gold dots at the inner corner of her eyes glowed with laser light as they projected a screen in her field of vision. “What would you like to know, I have access to all his banking records?” she asked.

This kind of easy access to personal information sent another frisson down my spine. Accessing those records out in the real world would have taken a day at least, but Belinda just called up the records in a second.

“Nothing too big, how much does he have in savings?”

“Ah, let’s see.” Belinda said, rings twirling again. “Huh, he wasn’t kidding about being broke, he has $106 in his checking account and no savings at all.”

“And his take home salary is what?” I asked.

“Call it thirty K per year, after taxes.”

“That would buy a hell of a lot of action figures. Where has it been going?”

Belinda had been looking while I spoke, “Well, it’s hard to say, he has been making cash withdrawal’s pretty much every week for the last eighteen months. That means he’s spending it outside.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“You can’t buy anything with cash inside G-T. It’s all done by debiting your accounts, using thumbprints as the biometric.”

Of course you couldn’t. You can’t have any commerce that G-T didn’t know about and approve of.

“Does that mean something?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I told her, “Money problems are a classic way to get to someone inside a security screen.”

“So you think Taylor might be our killer?”

“No. Or at least let’s say not yet. At this stage we’re pulling lose strings and seeing where they lead. Call it a data point, not a trend.” We arrived at the end of the slide-walk and exited with care, as we were prompted by the disembodied voice. “Where are we going?” I asked, finally giving in.

“We’re on our way to talk to see Tara O’Neil, of course.”

“Then shouldn’t we be in the office complex?”

“No, you told Chief Round you didn’t want to interview people in the police station, so he let them go. Taylor went to his office, but O’Neil sent a note to HR that she was not fit for work and was going home for the day. She was very upset, apparently.”

We walked for a while in companionable silence down an angled hall. After about fifty yards of so, we came to a dog leg, a tight zee shape in the hall. Following it we wound up in another angled hall. It made sense. In a building this big it would be easy to have very long halls, cheaper too. But G-T wanted their citizen-employees to feel more at home, so they had built zigzags into the halls. It visually broke up the space, and gave the impression your hall of doorways was more like a neighborhood. To increase that perception there were even the occasional small pubs and restaurants located between doglegs.

There was not much that could be done to individualize the outside of apartments, but the residents had done what they could by customizing their doorways. Some ambitious and un-superstitious soul had smashed a bunch of mirrors to make a mosaic depicting the sun, with a broad smile, on the gold door.

Others had painted climbing vines and flowers around their doorframes, which I thought went well with the hanging and potted plants that were probably provided by G-T. It wasn’t a tree lined street, but it was a decent analogue of one.

I smiled when we arrived at O’Neil’s door. Her display was probably one of the plainest there, but it struck a cord in me. Whether you like the story of the Irish rebelling against Victoria’s order for all the doors in the Empire to be painted black when Prince Albert died, or the one about a tea-totaling author painting his door a different color from his drunken neighbors to prevent the drunk from trying to get into his house when on a bender, the doors of Irish houses are often painted bright colors. Tara O’Neil (from the name it was a safe bet she had more than a touch of the shamrock about her) had opted for a bright green, with a big, classic brass doorknocker. The knocker was just for show, of course, all the housing units on this hall had nifty little intercoms to signal the inhabitants they had visitors. Belinda took the lead, pressing the button and announcing us to Dr. O’Neil. The door opened by sliding into the wall (see how futuristic we are here at G-T! The future is ten minutes ago!) and we were greeted by our next interviewee.

If I’ve read it once, I’ve read it a thousand times, that crying women are heartbreakingly beautiful. I have no idea what those authors are talking about. As far as I’ve ever seen, crying women just look sad, or mad, or bedraggled, but definitely not beautiful. Dr. O’Neil was no exception.

She was five four or so, even with the meager help of her low heeled shoes. Broad and curvy, she was a little thick through the middle, but the extra padding made her chest truly impressive. She had curly black hair, now in moderate disarray from the more tightly controlled shape it must have been in this morning. Her cornflower-blue eyes were made all the bluer by the redness in them and the blotchy spots of red on her face. If she had not been crying right before letting us in, I’d eat my shoes.

We all stood in awkward silence in the entryway of the apartment. Belinda jumped in and introduced me.

“Dr. O’Neil, this is Eamon Hunt, he is here investigating Dr. Cho’s death. I believe Chief Round told you we’d be coming by?”

O’Neil nodded, and dabbed at her red nose with a very compacted tissue. “He did, won’t you come in, Mr. Hunt, Ms. Morris?” She gestured deeper into the apartment and turned to lead us. The hall itself was a bright and cheery yellow, decorated with big photos of exotic landscapes. Here was a younger and slightly less plump O’Neil knee deep in torques blue water, with blinding white sand in the foreground. There was one of her, bundled up in jacket, holding a game-show presenters pose pointing towards the saw-toothed peaks marching away into the distance.

The hall let out into a large living area. It was split, with a big square, couch lined pit in the middle, one side of the square missing as it butted up against the glass outer wall of the apartment. Above the left side of the square was a small flat screen TV, and a large pair of bookshelves. At a glance the selection was an eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction. I thought Dr. O’Neil might be my kind of gal, based on it.

All around the floor to ceiling windows there was a veritable jungle of plants, though today they would not be enjoying the usually abundant sun. The windows were darkened and a gauzy gold curtain had been drawn all the way across them. The apartment was dark, except for the conversation pit. Recessed lights in the ceiling made it feel like an island floating in a dark sea. A cream colored cube doubling for a coffee table in the center set off the dark brown leather of the couches.

“I’m sorry to have to pester you at a time like this Dr. O’Neil, but getting your input as quickly as possible is critical.” I started.

“Please, call me Tara, Mr. Hunt, I don’t stand on formality.” O’Neil replied.

I smiled, “Only if you’ll call me Eamon. Fair is fair” I said. “Now, Tara, can you tell me what happened this morning? Everything you can remember please.”

O’Neil took a deep breath in through her nose and visibly pulled herself together. She sat up straighter and looked me in the eyes. “Let’s see, it was about 7am when I met up with Mick Taylor to start the day. We always hit the lab break area for a cup of coffee. Mick and I talked for a few minutes then headed to the lab.”

“What did you talk about?” I broke in.

“Oh, he was complaining about being tired, as usual.” O’Neil said with a wave of her hand.

“Quite the night-owl is he, Dr. Taylor?” I asked. If Mick was the killer he might have been up late putting his plan into action.

“I guess,” O’Neil said, “At least he always seems to be dragged out in the mornings.”

“What does he do in the evenings?”

“Oh, I don’t know. When you spend sixty or seventy hours a week in the lab with someone, you don’t always want to see them socially.”

“You had your morning coffee-klatch, then what?”

“We went to the lab and carded in, then the door opened and we…” O’Neil’s breath started coming faster, but she plugged on, “we saw the bodies. I took a step inside to see if Constantine was there too, and then I saw him” Her control ran out and her face contorted as she began to weep again. It built fast, from a high keening sound to big wracking sobs. She must have been about cried out because for all the noise there weren’t that many tears. It happens when people have been crying for hours.

Belinda stood up and crossed the middle space to sit next to the crying woman and put an arm around her. O’Neil turned into the half-hug and buried her head in Belinda’s shoulder.

After a minute or so I fished down in my pocket and pulled out a pack of gum. “Tara,” I said gently, “Tara, look at me.” O’Neil turned her face towards me, wiping at her eyes. “Have a stick of gum,” I said, “It will make you feel better, I promise.”

Belinda was looking daggers at me, but there is method to my madness. Grieving people get in a loop where they start thinking about what they lost and it just goes around and around. They might even want to think about something else, but their emotions are all locked down. Getting an interruption to the pattern, something normal, but not common, is a great way to lift them out of it; for a while anyway.

“Go on, take two sticks,” I told her. She seemed to be of Belinda’s thinking at this point, but slowly she reached out and slid two sticks of gum out of the pack. She put one down while she unwrapped the other piece; taking time to neatly fold the silvered wrapping and put it parallel to the edge of the coffee table. She repeated the process with the second stick as well, then put them both in her mouth, and started chewing. After a few chews, she looked more composed.

“I know this is terribly hard, but I have a few more questions. Did you notice anything out of place in the lab when you came in?”

“Just the dead body,” O’Neil said.

“Bodies,” I corrected.

“What?”

“Bodies, there was Dr. Cho and the Eolin-I,” I explained.

“Oh, yes, the poor little Eolin-I, they were dead too.”

“Did you notice anything else?”

O’Neil shook her head, “I’m sorry, once I saw Constantine’s body, I ,I lost it. I basically crumpled to the ground outside the door.”

“It was a shocking sight, I’m sure,” I agreed, “What happened then?”

“Uh, Mick went and checked for vital signs, then he called the medical emergency team.”

“Paramedics?”

She shook her head, “No, internal medical emergency, they are on standby for possible bio-containment incident.”

“I see. Were the two of you concerned there had been an incident?”

“No, even if somehow our newest work escaped, it would just die. It’s not in any way infectious. We’re working on decreased cell replication times, but there is no transfer mechanism for the new DNA strings. Mick called them because they would be the fastest responders, not that it made any difference.”

“Can you think of any reason why Dr. Cho would have that many Eolin-I in the lab? Six seems a little excessive for a cleaning crew.”

“There’s no mystery there. Constantine loved them. They were the crowning achievement of decades of work. Even though he’s handed off the project to the commercial development team, he’d often invite them into the lab so he could talk with them and keep an eye on their progress.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to kill Dr. Cho?”

Tara laughed, “There’s probably a list as long as my arm!” I stayed silent and after a moment O’Neil continued, “There are plenty of crazies in the world, Mr. Hunt. I know he received death threats on a regular basis.”

“What sort of threats?”

She shrugged, “I don’t really know, he only mentioned it once or twice.”

“Did he say anything recently? Anything to indicate he was concerned?”

“Not that I remember. But Constantine was never very worried about it. He hardly ever left the acrology. We even host conferences here so he didn’t have to travel to talk to others in the field. He thought he was safe inside G-T,” O’Neil paused, “He should have been,” she finished quietly, her eyes going vague as she looked at some internal vista. Time to move on.

“Do you know if Dr. Cho kept a journal or diary of any kind?”

O’Neil nodded and swallowed hard, holding back new tears. “He kept a personal research journal, on his handheld. He always said the end product of his work was G-T’s, but the process belonged to him and him alone.”

That was interesting, though probably not much help in the case. Research notes are an integral part of validation in science. If the teams trying to reproduce your results didn’t know exactly how you did the experiments and what the outcomes were, it was nearly impossible to verify any discoveries. In companies like G-T the research logs would be shared with other internal teams, to keep proprietary processes from leaking. That Cho was keeping his methods secret even from the rest of G-T was far off the norm.

“But working with him, you must have known his processes?” I asked.

“You would think so, wouldn’t you? But no, Constantine was always working at odd hours and was as likely to be working on private projects as the ones the team is assigned,” O’Neil said with a bit of bitterness.

“He didn’t share those things even with you? I ask because we’ve been told you and the doctor were involved. Men often share things with their, uh, girlfriend that they don’t with anyone else.”

“Not Constantine, he could be quite secretive.”

“Forgive me for asking, but we have also heard that you and he had had a falling out a while back?”

“We did,” O’Neil agreed, “Constantine was a very virile man and he didn’t want to be tied down.” She sat up straighter and Belinda took her arm off her shoulders and moved to put a bit of space between them. “But I knew that going in. He needed to have a final conquest, but things were working out. We were going to be so happy together.” Her face clouded with pain, “And now it will never happen!” she wailed. She covered her face again and her shoulders shook as she sobbed. I shot a look at Belinda, and tossed my head toward the door. We were not going to get anything useful from her right now.

Belinda rose and straightened her skirt with both hands. She turned and walked up the steps of the conversation pit and headed for the door. I got up, found a business card in my pocket and laid it down on the coffee table, next the neatly aligned gum wrappers.

“I know this is very hard on you, Tara, but thank you for your time. If you think of anything else, please give me a call, anytime.” I put a comforting hand on her shoulder and she nodded, her face still covered by her hands. I followed Belinda’s path and left the apartment.