Fearful Symmetries

“Nohar, what have you done to yourself?” Maria stared at him as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

“Is that you?” Henderson asked. Both of them were wearing blousy shirts and pants that were a decade away from any style. Nohar presumed the clothes belonged to Beverly. Maria was wearing green and Henderson was wearing navy. Nohar thought they should swap colors.

Beverly’s voice came from back in the apartment. “He can’t fit through with you both clogging the doorway.”

The other two stared at him, as if they didn’t quite trust his new appearance. But they moved aside so Nohar could duck inside the apartment.

Nohar ducked plants as he moved to the cramped corner where Beverly’s comm sat. As the door shut, Maria swiveled her chair around to face him. “What have you been doing all afternoon?”

Nohar sat and took out the ramcard he’d minted at the public comm. “Checking out Manuel’s acquaintances.” He slipped the ramcard into Beverly’s comm. “They’re watching the Clinic.”

Henderson sat down next to him. A ghost of chlorine still haunted his nose, but he could just make out the odor of her musk next to him. She touched his arm and asked, “You went to the Clinic? Wasn’t that dangerous?”

The touch may have been innocent, but Nohar didn’t feel it that way. He moved his arm from under it by turning on the comm and starting to run through the record of Necron’s public messages. “The new coloring bought me some cover. Didn’t stay long.”

“Did you find out anything about Manuel?” Maria asked. There was a catch in her voice and Nohar couldn’t bring himself to say that their son had been supplementing his income with petty theft. He sidestepped the issue.

“I found a coworker with a lead. Manuel may have a ramcard with information these guys are looking for.”

Beverly turned toward all of them from the kitchen side of the room. “Why don’t you all take a break for dinner?”

Nohar ate dinner as he perused The Necron Avenger’s collected works. Most were the typical hacker montages of sound video and text that were spliced together with little regard for form or sense. One article consisted of Mozart’s 25th Symphony conducted by electric guitars and overlaid with images of the Race—the one nonhuman species that wasn’t created on Earth. It culminated with news footage of the bombing of Alcatraz.

There was one called “Drips,” more recent. This was a collage of human generals and government officials spliced in with combat footage of the Pan-Asian War, mostly moreau corpses. Spliced in with that were scenes of human-supremacy groups preaching that the moreaus were so much genetic waste from the war, and should be disposed of like any hazardous material.

Another untitled piece was strictly sexual images run through slide-show fashion, intercut with subliminal images of needles and surgical procedure.

Nohar didn’t know what to make of Necron’s work, but there was a theme running through it—a near obsession with the moreau world that was at odds with what Nohar had seen of Oswald Samson. It might explain a pink owning a house in Compton.

The more of his work Nohar saw, the more he realized how paranoid and apocalyptic Necron’s point of view was. There was a sense of intractable evil in the world Necron portrayed, a cycle of pain that led inevitably to disease and death.

The subtext—maybe it was even the point of all the messages—was that the disease and death were engineered by those who ran the country.

He was on his seventh message from the Necron Avenger when the comm went dead. Nohar looked up at the other three. Maria and Henderson were quietly talking to Beverly, finishing the last of their dinner. None of them had noticed anything going wrong.

Nohar had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He got up from the comm and started moving to the front door, ducking under the pipes and around the three females.

“Nohar?” Beverly was the first one to notice him move, though she wasn’t even facing him.

“Shh.” Nohar kept moving to take position next to the door. He didn’t have time to reach for his gun. Almost at the same time, the lights in the apartment went out and the door flew open.

Nohar saw the arm belonging to the owner of that voice. It was pointing something into the room. Nohar didn’t wait to see what it was. He grabbed the wrist, moving his leg so he could pull the speaker into his knee.

When his knee struck flesh, Nohar brought his other hand down on the back of the intruder’s skull. The person flipped over his knee, and landed flat on his back. Whatever he’d been armed with went sailing into the room.

There was a pair of light-enhancing goggles on the guy’s face, and Nohar tore them off, revealing the intruder’s face. Nohar recognized him from his picture—

Now that he was face-to-face with the kid, he could see the oversized skull and the elongated fingers. The kid was a frank—a genetically engineered human.

After it was clear that the kid was alone, Nohar sent Henderson out to fix what the kid had done to the power. Nohar restrained the kid with a belt and threw him on the couch. He retrieved the kid’s weapon, a government-issue .45 automatic that probably belonged to his father.

Nohar shook his head and turned to the kid. The aggressiveness was gone. The kid seemed to deflate on the couch. Nohar saw him clearly in the dark, but frank or not, without the light-amplification gear his eyes probably hadn’t adjusted to the dark.

“You were trying to do what?” Nohar asked the kid. He looked at the gun and thought of a wild shot hitting Maria, or Henderson, or Beverly and felt a lethal anger building. The adrenaline was still surging and hadn’t found a true outlet yet. It was the kind of internal high that he could do anything on.

“I’m looking for my dad.” His head tuned back and forth, as if he was trying to find Nohar.

There it was. This kid had come home to trashed house and missing father. When Nohar’d shown up, the kid had seen him and assumed he was one of the Bad Guys. He had even used the bleach to cover his scent. He’d probably been inside the house when Nohar had walked up to the door, and had slipped outside while Nohar was searching the place.

The lights came on again, and after a few moments the comm came back to life, still in the midst of playing one of Necron’s messages. Nohar looked at the frank kid, no more than fourteen—for a human still a child—his eyes locked on the gun, and he could feel real fear begin to wash off of the kid in waves.

Nohar felt his anger fade somewhat. They were both in the same boat, and in the same position Nohar might have done exactly as this kid had. . . .

The kid stared at him, and his eyes darted toward the comm. One of Necron’s articles was playing the national anthem while panning across burned-out Moreytowns.

Necron turned to face him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head and stopped when his gaze landed on Maria. He stared at her for a long time, as if he recognized her.

It was in Necron’s eyes. He knew all right. He saw the same familiarity that Nohar had only gotten from a bad picture. The coloring was different, but Manuel had Maria’s face.

Nohar crouched so he could look the kid in the eyes. “I found your house because I traced your posts. The name I came up with was Oswald.” He reached over and grabbed the kid’s shoulder, pulling him forward to look at him. Necron was now completely limp, near panic. “You used your dad’s account, didn’t you?”

“Manuel Limón, they want something he has.” Nohar leaned forward. He knew just being close to a predatory moreau like him was intimidating to most humans. He was hoping to make Necron as cooperative as possible.

Necron stared at him with a hollow look. Nohar was cruel enough to let him think the worst for a few seconds.

Henderson came in the door, and Beverly drew her aside, away from the drama on the couch. The kid jumped when the door opened. Nohar could tell that The Necron Avenger was close to breaking. He eased back and let go of the kid’s shoulder.

Maria leaned forward in her chair, reaching a cupped hand as if she was begging. In a way, she was. “Where is my son?”

“We were hiding him.” The kid’s voice came out in a breathless rush. “I promised—”

Nohar holstered his Vind and shook his head. “Helping us may be the only chance you have of seeing your father again.”

The kid’s name was John Samson. His dad, Oswald, was involved in nonhuman immigration. When John was five or six, he’d been orphaned during a Pacific crossing in a cargo ship packed with too many franks and moreaus escaping Greater China. The mortality rate on that ship was close to sixty percent—and would have been higher if it hadn’t been intercepted by the Coast Guard.

Oswald Samson had come across the orphan while processing the refugees and had decided to adopt him. The story came across in only a few terse sentences, but it was clear that John Samson remembered every bit of it.

He didn’t even have a choice. His species had been engineered by Japan before the Chinese invasion, and one of the traits they’d been bred for was a photographic memory.

He and Manuel had met over the net. Some of his compositions seemed to echo Manuel’s own world-view. That didn’t surprise Nohar that much. Both kids had to feel similarly isolated, and had to have similar views on society as a whole.

Manuel was lost, as The Necron Avenger was lost. Manuel, like John Samson, watched the world pass by him with a fatalism that seemed truly frightening. The world was a burning building, a car wreck, an autopsy that had no emotional content because there was no connection between the watcher and the victims.

According to John, Manuel had no other close friends. He had tried at school, at work, but no one seemed to relate to the mule. He had even searched out other mules, but most mules had bodies broken, and brains damaged, and were too complete in their own isolation. Manuel’s curse was he did not want to be alone.

John, the frank living in Moreytown, was the first person Manuel had ever met who seemed to relate to him.

The two of them had been talking over the comm for two or three years. And, lately, they’d actually been meeting in person. The data-trafficking had only begun in the last few months, when John had let slip that The Necron Avenger had some deep contacts in the data underground that could move that kind of merchandise.

They had moved about half a dozen pieces of such merchandise, making a total of about thirteen grand between them, when Manuel had showed up with the last package—the one that was not supposed to reach Compton.

“Everything was just like normal, until I hacked what was on the card.” John Samson shook his head.

John looked up at him, his eyes blank and dead. “Fear is a natural thing, you know. Any rational person in this world has to be paranoid. There’s no choice.” John shook a little, and screwed his eyes shut. Nohar could sense the tension in John’s posture. “No paranoid hopes he’s right.”

“The Clinics—” His voice caught. John took a few deep breaths before he continued. “The Bensheim Clinics are intentionally infecting people with the Drips.”