Darcy Vance spent a lot of time in the lab staring at the egg. There wasn’t much else to do at this stage of the project, not until Ahiro showed up with a subject to host the alien hatchling. She knew that Michael came in late at night and used the elaborate equipment setup to play the newest of his ever-expanding collection of syndiscs. It was too bad she didn’t have a hobby like that to occupy her free time; she’d probably be a lot less miserable if she did.
The alien part of the Eddington project though… that had promise. Finally, something besides MedTech’s frogs and bacteria, and endless experiments trying to find a more economical way to provide the inoculation serum that was given to newborns to protect them against HIV, ebola, measles, and the rest of the long list of diseases that had been wiped out at the end of the twenty-first century. Darcy had taken the job here at Synsound a year ago, lured by their offer to promote her to bioengineer and increase her salary by twenty percent. Unfortunately, her pay as an entry-level bioscientist at MedTech had been nothing to crow about, and the twenty percent didn’t make a dent in her student loans and all the charged credits she’d run up during her years at school. She and her father had gone their separate ways when Darcy had first entered college, and now, without family to help bail her out, Darcy was stuck with the bills; the HUD/Education Dept, was authorized by law to take forty percent of her salary until the bills were paid. Not much was left over to devote to entertainment… or a hobby that required tangible materials. Things like rent and food tended to take priority.
The Synsound job was a major disappointment. While it meant more money in her paycheck and toward her bills, the word was dull, dull, dull. The Synsound recruiter had contacted her, not the other way around, and Darcy now believed the woman had been nothing more than a Synsound shark whose sole purpose was to steal away the competitor’s employees. Darcy had been led to believe that she would be working with the genetics engineering department, designing new clones for the shows, finding ways to reengineer existing ones when the paying crowds had grown tired of them. No wonder she’d jumped the MedTech ship—who wouldn’t have? Instead, Darcy had become a sort of android repairperson, and the tiny lab and tinier office to which they relegated her and her work was filled with spare parts, growing cultures of android flesh, and the oily smell of the lubricating fluid that was used in the mechanical compartments of android bodies. Rather than searching for a cheaper way to manufacture inoculation serum, now Darcy spent her days tracking down obsolete machinery parts and hunting for a way to make android skin more rubbery and resistant to tearing.
After a few months of this, Darcy had swallowed her pride and decided that earning a little less money wasn’t so bad if in the long run it paid off with steady promotions and job security, but when she checked back with MedTech she discovered that in its eyes, she’d committed the ultimate sin. Synsound was, oddly, MedTech’s largest thorn, something about the music company being responsible for having to construct the force field that had cost the company nearly a billion dollars. Had she been a Synsound employee first, MedTech would have happily stolen her away just as Synsound had done. As an employee who had “defected,” however, Darcy found she wasn’t wanted back.
A surreptitious job hunt among the smaller companies proved fruitless; no one would give her uninspired academic record and short work history more than a cursory review before saying, “We’ll call you, Ms. Vance.” She had shot herself in the foot by leaving MedTech, and now she was stuck; MedTech couldn’t even be persuaded to give more of a job reference than the legally required confirmation that she had once worked there.
Suddenly Damon Eddington’s dreams had shone into her drab world, breaking through the murky haze her workdays had become like a red laser beam. Darcy had always wanted to work with animals or alien life-forms, and most of her classes in college had been geared toward that field. Unfortunately, she was seriously lacking in the concentration and application department; a dreamer at heart, Darcy spent far too much time thinking about all the radically experimental things she could do if she were a high-level bioengineer instead of applying herself in the classes required to really get that degree. Things hadn’t changed much in that respect; here she was again, watching the egg do nothing in the physical world but envisioning with perfect clarity the thing it would someday become. She knew Eddington was disappointed about her lack of a musical background, but she couldn’t—and wouldn’t have, had she had the funds—change that for him. She and her coworker had agreed from the outset that coddling Eddington was to be Michael’s responsibility; Darcy had no patience for such emotional frivolity, and chronicling the existence of the alien that would be born was to be her duty.
An alien… Could something like that be controlled? Perhaps trained? Common sense reminded her that they weren’t exactly dealing with a friendly puppy here. Compassion? Attachment? Ludicrous concepts all, yet they represented the exact things Darcy had wondered about for years, since the first news that the creatures had been discovered during the colonizing expedition to Homeworld. After all the years of dreaming, she finally had a chance to find out if the situations she’d concocted in her head, exaggerated theories really, held even the most remote grain of truth. How many people had been in the position that would soon be available to her? She would be here to watch it grow from a hatchling, from the moment of implantation to birth—
Well, that part bothered her. Darcy could play the dispassionate scientist on the outside, but inside she was horrified that they were going to use a human being to host the alien hatchling. To see Eddington’s ambitions become a reality, someone was going to die… and with her hunger to be a part of this assignment so strong, was she any less a guilty party? Michael had stubbornly pointed out that the… “donor” would be someone who wanted to do it, an addict so dedicated to the sensations created by royal jelly that he would donate his body to the continued existence of the alien species. But those people were… demented, so overtaken and mentally enslaved by their addiction to jelly that they barely knew which way was up anymore, much less the worth of their own lives. Was it really scrupulous to take advantage of that?
On the other hand, they couldn’t work or function in normal society any longer, and they would never heal. Did the justification for using someone to hatch the alien egg rest in the concept that the donor was a walking dead person anyway?
Darcy simply had no answer.