I knew I was in trouble the first time Bree Carson showed up at my house uninvited. This was on a Monday morning in the middle of September. Kara had been gone for a week. Her mom was going through a long fade, and Kara had been staying with her dad, riding with him back and forth to the hospital, trying to keep him from fading away as well.
That weekend had been a gray, muddy slog, but when I woke up on Monday there wasn’t any rain pounding against the windows for once, and I actually started the day thinking things might be looking up. As I was dropping Hannah off at school, the sun poked out through the clouds for the first time in days. I only had a couple of DragonCorn conferences scheduled for the afternoon, and I was thinking maybe I’d get in a long run before lunch, do a bit of tweaking to the mod package I’d been working on for the last month and a half, and then maybe catch up on my downloads during the calls.
I was only a couple of minutes from being safely out the door in my running gear when my bedroom wallscreen popped up a still frame of Bree standing on my front porch. Her glasses were pushed up to the top of her head, and those eyes . . . I sighed, and ran my hands back through my hair.
“Open the door,” I said, and started down the stairs.
Bree was waiting for me, still standing on the porch outside the open front door. She smiled when she saw me.
“Good morning,” I said. With the glasses up, I had a hard time figuring out where to look. It was hard enough to avoid staring at her breasts without worrying about locking in on those purple cat-eyes.
“Hello, Drew,” she said. “I hope this isn’t a bad time?”
“No,” I said, “It’s fine. What can I do for you?”
“Well,” she said, “for starters, you could invite me in.”
I stepped down into the foyer.
“Wait,” I said. “You’re not a vampire, are you?”
Her eyebrows came together over the bridge of her nose.
“What?”
“A vampire,” I said. “Isn’t that a thing? If you don’t invite them in, they can’t . . . I dunno . . . bite you, or something?”
She shook her head. Her smile was beginning to look a little forced.
“No, Drew. I am not a vampire. Can I come in?”
“Sure,” I said. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Tea? A beer?”
She crossed the threshold. The door swung closed behind her.
“Thank you,” she said. “Tea would be lovely.”
The thing you have to understand about Bree Carson is that she wasn’t bad—which is not to say that she was necessarily good either, of course. She just wanted what she wanted, which is probably a fair description for most of us. Kara summed her up pretty well later on, after everything had settled out.
“Imagine you’ve got a dog,” she said. “Not a yappy little dog. A big one, like a great Dane or something. Imagine you’ve got a big, slobbery, Marmaduke-looking great Dane.”
I nodded.
“Now imagine it’s Thanksgiving,” she said. “It’s Thanksgiving, and you just pulled a big, juicy, golden-brown turkey out of the oven. You put it on the dining-room table, and go out for a walk while it’s resting.”
“Why would I do that?” I asked. “Shouldn’t I be making the gravy or something?”
“Look,” she said. “Just go with me on this, okay?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Fine. I go for a walk.”
“Right,” she said. “You go for a walk, and while you’re out, what do you suppose that big, stupid piece-of-shit dog gets up to?”
I leaned back in my chair and sighed.
“Does he eat the turkey?”
“Yeah, Drew. He eats the hell out of that turkey. Now, here’s the question. Whose fault is this? Is it the dog’s fault that he ate that delicious, crispy-skinned, sweet-and-savory turkey?”
I sighed again.
“I’m guessing not.”
“No,” she said, and smiled a not-at-all-happy smile. “It is not the dog’s fault. Eating turkeys is what dogs do. It’s your fault, Drew. It’s your fault for leaving the dog alone with the turkey in the first place.”
“I’m assuming Bree’s the dog in this scenario?”
“Right,” Kara said. “Bree is definitely the dog.”
I will say, I never saw Bree as a dog. That Monday morning, she sat across my kitchen table from me, staring me down with those can’t-look-away eyes, drinking my oolong, and warning me about all the unsavory things that Hannah was getting into.
“Hannah’s not a bad girl,” she said. “I would never suggest that. I’m just . . . concerned, Drew. Briarwood by itself can be a difficult place for a new girl to navigate, and when you start bringing in outside influences, well . . . Hannah has so much talent, and I’d hate to see her fall in with the sorts of kids who might pull her down instead of building her up.”
“Well,” I said. “I won’t argue with that. The thing is, I’m not aware that Hannah’s falling in with anybody in particular just now. Other than the girls on the team, she doesn’t seem to be doing too much socializing of any kind. We’ve actually been a little worried that she’s turning into a recluse.”
Bree smiled.
“Don’t be naive, Drew. Just because she’s locked in her room doesn’t mean she’s alone.”
Which was true enough, I guess, but I didn’t think there was much she could do up there to get herself into actual trouble.
That, of course, turned out to be incorrect.
“Look,” I said after a long, awkward pause. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m really not sure why you’re here, Bree.”
“Oh, Drew,” she said, and reached across the table to touch my hand. “I’m here because I want to help you. You were so sweet after that mess at the Fairport meet, and I thought I could return the favor. I’m sorry if I’m intruding. I truly didn’t mean to. I just . . . I know how hard it can be for a young woman at this age. I wanted to help.”
I suddenly felt like a colossal ass.
“No,” I said. “You’re not intruding, Bree. I appreciate that you’re trying to look out for Hannah. I just don’t see what makes you think that she needs looking out for.”
She leaned back, and folded her arms across her chest.
“What do you know about Devon Morgan?”
By the time Bree was done, I knew much more about Devon Morgan than I wanted to. I knew that Devon had anger issues, that she was jealous and resentful of Briarwood’s runners in general, and of Tara in particular, and that she was at Fairport because three different private schools, including Briarwood, had refused to admit her.
I also learned that the reason those schools had refused to admit her was that her father was an AI sympathizer.
Bree obviously expected that little nugget to horrify me, and I did my best to play the part. We were only six years past the war, remember, and those months between Hagerstown and Frostburg were still pretty vivid in people’s brains. The histories say the decision to purge the networks was a more-in-sorrow-than-anger thing, but that’s bullshit. I was there. It was pure panic, a reaction to the sudden realization that we’d made ourselves incredibly vulnerable—I mean, if you had an ocular, you’d opened up a direct line into your cerebral cortex that an unethical AI could exploit, and who knew whether there was any such thing as an ethical AI?—and the people who’d made the call really, really didn’t want it second-guessed. NatSec put out a ton of propaganda on the topic after the war, and six years later there were still plenty of folks running around who’d denounce you for saying anything remotely nice about life in silico.
I wasn’t one of them, though. I wouldn’t have said it out loud then, but I remembered that essay that Mike Morgan had written, and I remembered thinking, even at the time, that he was kind of a hero.
Once Bree was gone, I locked up the house and went out for my run. The day was as close to perfect as September gets in Upstate New York. The clouds were gone and the sun was clear and high and bright, flaring from car windshields and glittering off the puddles in the fields. The air was cool and dry, and it took me almost a mile to break a decent sweat.
I get in most of my best thinking while I’m running. I was in the middle of a ten-miler when I came up with the idea for splicing genes that code for animal proteins into potatoes, for example. I was also out running when I figured out how to subdue a rampaging carnivorous potato horde.
Just kidding about that last part.
Mostly.
That Monday, though, I wasn’t thinking about work. I was thinking about Bree. I tried to focus on the stuff she’d been telling me about Devon, and on the terrible peril that my darling daughter was apparently in from some combination of mean girls and NatSec agents, but mostly I was thinking about the feel of Bree’s lips on my cheek, and what those purple cat-eyes looked like from two inches away.
The weird thing was, I wasn’t even really attracted to Bree. I was just . . . maybe fascinated is the right word? As an engineer, I was impressed as hell with what they’d managed to do with her. You tweak as many genes as they must have to get what they got in Bree, and more often than not you wind up with a carnivorous potato.
As a man, at that point, I was mostly confused.
When I was younger, I’d never had much luck with pursuing women, and by the time I was into college, I’d basically given up. I had pretty much resigned myself to a life of work, quiet contemplation, and lots and lots of masturbating . . . until I met Kara.
This was on a Thursday night in April of my junior year at Hopkins, at a bar called the Lizard Lounge in downtown Baltimore. The place was built like an indoor amphitheater, with concentric half rings of tables descending in steps toward a stage where two pianos sat in front of the main bar. They usually kept both of them manned, sometimes by comedians, sometimes by serious musicians. There were bags of peanuts on every table, and the floor was covered a half inch deep in crushed shells.
They had a sort of a comedy act playing that night, a man and a woman at the two pianos banging out up-tempo political satire that mostly went straight over my head. I was there with Matt Porter, another aspiring engineer who was even more socially hapless than I was. We were sitting at a high table about halfway between the doors and the bar, nursing our first beers, filling up on peanuts and arguing about whether dogs actually like their owners or not, when Kara climbed onto the stool next to mine.
“Hey,” she said. “These guys are pretty good, right?”
Kara was tall and broad-shouldered—a swimmer, I’d find out later—with long dark hair, pale, freckled skin, and eyes like a hawk. She was smiling in a way that I couldn’t quite place.
“Sure,” I said. “I guess so. I mean, I mostly don’t have any idea who or what they’re singing about, but they seem to know how to play the piano, anyway.”
She laughed.
“Not a poli-sci major, huh?”
I shook my head.
“Nope. Gene Eng.”
She gave me a smirk—the same one I always got when I told people what I was studying.
“In it for the cash, huh?”
I shrugged.
“Cash is good, right? But no, not really. I just like trying to figure out how to make things work, and this seemed like my best shot at getting to do that for a living.”
I finished my beer. Kara smiled and said, “You want another one?”
I gave her a hesitant smile in return.
“Sure. I mean, I guess so.”
As she was making her way up to the bar, Matt leaned over and asked me who she was.
“No idea,” I said. “She just sat down and started talking to me.”
“Huh.”
He gave me a look that was a weird mixture of resentment and respect, and took a swig from his mostly empty beer. The piano players started in on a new song, about a Supreme Court decision that had just come down declaring that gene mods were covered under the same blanket privacy rights that protected abortion. They were finally singing about something that I was at least vaguely interested in, and I was really trying to catch what they were saying when Kara came back.
“Here ya go,” she said, and set a fresh bottle in front of me.
“Thanks,” I said. Without making eye contact, I pulled a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and slid it across the table to her. When the song finished and I looked around, she was gone. I turned to Matt.
“Hey,” I said. “Where’d she go?”
He was staring at me like I’d just grown an extra head.
“You know that girl wasn’t a waitress,” he said. “Right?”
It was another six weeks before I saw Kara again, at a party in a friend’s apartment on campus this time. Thank God, she didn’t recognize me.
I got back from my run a little before noon, tired and sweaty and still just as confused, but riding high on endorphins and feeling much better about my day. I dropped my clothes on the bedroom floor and got into the shower, spent fifteen minutes mostly just letting hot water sluice over me, then got dried off and dressed and headed downstairs to make lunch. I ate, made some calls, and was just starting to think about playing around with a few things on my simulator when I felt my phone buzz. There was a priority message waiting for me. It flashed to the screen as soon as I pulled the phone out of my pocket and it registered my thumb print. It was from Meghan Cardiff, DragonCorn’s lead for synthesis and testing.
MCardiff: Sorry to bug you, Drew, but there’s something seriously funky with the last set of schema I got from Singapore. I mean, the synthesizer ran to completion, but I know what corn RNA looks like, and this ain’t it. Call me when you have a minute.
MCardiff: Scratch that, Drew. Call me now.