They are mere toddlers, four of them. Nikki would put them at around two, maybe three, chasing each other aimlessly but joyfully around a square of lawn. There are two adult supervisors, a man and a woman, vigilantly ready to intervene but otherwise keeping their distance. When the woman turns, Nikki sees that she is cradling an infant in her arms.
This is a bigger secret than mind-control devices or Project Sentinel. Someone is raising children on CdC, which is as unethical as it is illegal to the extent that women are forced to abort pregnancies or fly back to Earth to give birth.
These are not mere visitors. This garden proves that. Someone wants young bones to develop properly, under standard gravity while playing outdoors and enjoying nature; or as close to nature and outdoors as you’re going to get here.
Nikki hasn’t seen children in the flesh in fifteen years. The sight of them is almost paralysing. She wants to get closer, wants to reach out and hold them but she has to stay hidden.
Her eyes mist, a rush of feelings and memories coming back, lying dormant but so close to the surface. The sluice-gates open on a flood of hurt she tried to escape, but there is not only pain: there are good things too. Things she once had but lost. Things she could not stand the loss of. Things that made her who she used to be.
You can’t have one without the other: the memory of what once was treasured without the agony of its absence. She thought when she came here that if she could distract herself, anaesthetise herself, then the blotting out of all those good memories would be a price worth paying for the absence of the pain. But to be thus anaesthetised is to feel nothing, not merely for yourself, but for anybody else. It is how she became this wraith, feared but friendless, needed but despised.
Corruption is a form of decay. Something good inside you has to die before you can do something truly bad. Then with every further bad thing you do, a little more of what was good inside you dies.
This is why she is embarking on a suicide mission on behalf of a crazy girl she has barely met. She needs to believe that there is still some last fragment of good left inside her.
“Okay, who’s hungry?” asks the woman.
Excited hands go up in response, restless feet jumping up and down.
“I think it’s time for lunch.”
One of the kids is looking Nikki’s way. She may have pulled aside one branch too many, trying to see a little more. The little girl tugs at the male helper and points.
Nikki withdraws and freezes. Logic is telling her the man is unlikely to make much of it. Toddlers love making things up.
“Come on, everyone,” the woman beckons, holding open a door leading out of the garden and into an adjacent building.
The little girl who was pointing trails obediently after her friends, no longer interested in what she may or may not have seen among the bushes.
The man has decided to check it out, however.
“I’ll catch you up in a minute,” he announces.
Damn it, Nikki thinks. The distance is too short to give her time to get back down the grate. She’s going to have to deal with him.
The door closes, so at least there won’t be any witnesses, particularly tiny ones who shouldn’t see shit like this.
Nikki grips her electro-pulse. She has the drop on him so she could easily zap him unconscious, which will prevent him from raising the alarm via his lens. But if he fails to return, somebody is going to come looking for him in just a few minutes. That alarm is getting raised one way or the other, and Nikki has some questions she’d like answered.
She takes him down in a heartbeat, swiftly removing his wrist disc to disable his gesturing. Not that he would be able to concentrate on those options and menus when he was reeling from the shock of a blow.
She flips him onto his back where her lens identifies him as Tobias Muller. Nikki figures he is part scientist and part kindergarten teacher, so he’s probably not schooled in withstanding interrogation techniques, or even schooled in withstanding the prospect of being punched in the face. He’ll tell her anything she asks.
“I’m looking for a girl named Amber. Where is she?”
“She’s in isolation,” he replies, terrified. “I don’t have clearance. She ran away. She got confused. She needs help.”
“She wasn’t confused, she was seriously distressed. Her head’s all messed up, but she was adamant about one thing: she said someone took her baby.”
Muller swallows. He’s scared, but she isn’t sure whether he’s more frightened of what might happen to him if he doesn’t answer her questions or of what might happen to him later if he does.
“Well, like you said, her head is messed up.”
“Don’t jerk me around, son. I know ways to hurt you that would make you puke if I even described them. She had a fresh caesarean scar on her. What’s going on here? Who are these kids? How come Amber doesn’t even have an identity?”
He’s trembling. Nikki recognises this particular flavour of shock and fear. It’s what happens when assumed impunity meets cold reality: people who have been getting away with something so long that they almost forgot it was wrong. Almost. One hint of retribution is all it takes for the illusion to come crashing down. This guy is already thinking about how he can cut a deal. Probably never broke a regular law in his life.
“None of them has an identity, officially. When they come here they get given a colour rather than a name. Amber, Scarlet, Cyan.”
Deniability, Nikki thinks. These women were never officially here on CdC. She thinks of the container at Dock Nine, diverted because of the all-stop, the whole place shut down and cleared of witnesses.
“So they’re smuggled in? To have children?”
Muller nods, sweating.
“Where do they come from?”
“They are recruited. Carefully screened. They are very well paid.”
“They come here pregnant?”
“No. They are artificially inseminated. Every part of the process is monitored, from conception to birth. Diet, fitness, sleep patterns. No expectant mother is better looked after, believe me.”
“And what happens after birth?”
Muller pauses again, because they both know the answer.
“They give the children up. It’s all agreed in advance.”
“And these children who don’t officially exist and have no rights become Neurosophy’s property?”
“These children are being cared for perfectly, all of their needs met. They’re being given a gift.”
“Not the gift of a normal life on Earth, where they can breathe fresh air and visit the countryside or spend a day at the beach.”
“The children on the Arca will not have these things.”
“Yeah, but they’ll have family. They’ll have parents. And they’ll have rights. These are children. They’re not your subjects to experiment on.”
“Their welfare is our primary concern, I assure you.”
“Sure. That’s why this is all off the books, because nobody would have a problem with the ethics of it if they knew.”
“All humanity will benefit from this gift, in the long run.”
“Said every mad scientist ever. Where’s Amber? Where are all these children’s mothers? What happens to them post-partum?”
“Once they are fully recovered, they return to Earth. With a substantial payment.”
“Yeah, you already said that. Which counts as a red flag. No amount of money would give you insurance about a secret this big, and I can’t see you people leaving yourselves vulnerable like that.”
Muller is trying to steal a look towards the door, hoping to see help on its way. He’s even more nervous now. She’s homing in on something he really doesn’t want her to know, and suddenly she susses it.
“You motherfuckers. You wipe their memories.”
Muller swallows, guilty as hell.
“First you ensure they have no credibility, so nobody would believe them. They can’t prove they were ever here. They have no recourse, no rights, no claim on their own children. But the real insurance is that you take away their memory of having the child.”
“It’s part of the advance agreement. It’s a kindness to them. They are told they will not remember why they came here.”
“Will they remember a fee was agreed? Because it strikes me that money leaves a paper trail.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. I’m a paediatrician.”
Nikki thinks of the women she has met who had traumatic memories erased, and why she wasn’t tempted having seen the results. They still suffered the same sadness but could no longer remember what was making them feel this way. She wonders how many women down below now have this desolate sense of loss, of aching emptiness, but don’t know that they have had their child taken and their memory of it destroyed.
“So what about Amber? It didn’t work with her, did it?”
For the first time, Muller looks pained rather than guilty.
“She changed her mind,” he says.
And she wasn’t the first, Nikki would wager.
“She wanted to keep the baby,” she says. “But she had no rights and you people took it from her.”
“They couldn’t let her. She knew too much.”
They, Nikki notes. He’s distancing himself from this.
“She endangered the child. She tried to escape with the baby, so they sedated her and did the wipe then, hoping that would solve the problem, but it was too soon. I tried to tell them. I knew it was wrong. It’s not like overwriting a piece of data in the mesh. This kind of memory is more than that: it’s something you feel, something you instinctively know. She was still lactating, all these hormones telling her body something that contradicted what was in her mind.”
“So what is this gift you’re giving the children? Because it would have to be a hell of a thing for you all to be able to live with yourselves pulling this shit.”
Muller almost seems relieved to be asked this.
“Oh, it is,” he says.
Then Nikki hears a door open and Muller looks up, hope and relief lighting up his face.
She rolls off him and wheels around rapidly, only to find herself staring down the barrel of a suppression rifle. Staring back is what should be a familiar face, except that it is topped with blonde hair, not black.
“Officer Nicola Madeleine Freeman,” Blondie declares. “I think it’s time for you to meet my maker.”