Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [86]
The antibody extended its arms, so it could see its own hands for the first time. Its fingers were stubby and half-formed, its wrists fat and inflexible. Hateful. The antibody decided that once the victim was dead, its first act would be to terminate itself.
As it drifted down towards the girl, it grew memories, and an identity started to develop in the folds of its formative brain. The antibody had been modelled on the girl’s biodata, not on her psychological profile, so strictly speaking it shouldn’t have shared her past. But there were certain things in the universe, rare and dangerous things, that could freeze experiences into a being’s biodata; the security systems of the City knew that, so the antibody knew it, too. There were some things so powerful, all you had to do was brush against them and the memory would be coded into every cell of your body for the rest of your life.
The antibody wrapped its hands around the girl’s neck, heard the skin on its fingers squealing like Cellophane. The girl tried to beat it off, but the antibody’s siblings were moving into position around her arms, holding her still. She thrashed her head from side to side. From her memories, the antibody reached the conclusion it was a young human female. At least, the victim was a young human female, so the antibody reasoned that it should be, as well. A her, then, not an it any longer.
Her name was Samantha Angeline Jones. Her date of birth was the fifteenth of April, 1980. She didn’t believe in astrology, but then, Arians were sceptical like that. Her parents were educated, socially aware, middle-class Londoners; her mother was a social worker, her father was a doctor. The antibody didn’t remember their faces, exactly, but she knew what they meant to her. She’d grown up in the aftershock of what people liked to call Thatcher’s Britain, had gone to a scummy comprehensive in East London, had been arrested for shoplifting at the age of twelve, all the usual stuff.
Her hair was dark. Her figure was athletic. There was a scar on the back of her left hand, where she’d been burnt with a cigarette end in a Dagenham nightclub at the age of fourteen (she’d lied about her age to get in, same as she did every weekend). There were still a couple of scars up her left arm, where she’d injected diamorphine and something had gone wrong under the skin. The scars had got her arrested, once, walking down East Ham High Street in a short-sleeved t-shirt.
The antibody cut off the victim’s air supply. The girl didn’t look scared, even though she was a minute or so away from death, and even though the other antibodies had started giggling in her ear. She looked confused, more than anything. Sam Jones, the antibody Sam Jones, wondered why that might be.
Antibody Sam dissected her personality a little further. She was a vegetarian, she discovered, the only person in her class who didn’t think homosexuals ought to be shot on sight. She was on Amnesty International’s mailing list, and she was planning to vote Labour as soon as she was old enough to vote. Of course, no one believed any of that when they saw her. If you looked the way she looked, you were a non-personality. You were supposed to be either a thug who sold crack to schoolchildren or a mindless victim whose life was just one long string of fixes and vomiting fits.
The antibody stopped squeezing. The girl, the other Samantha Angeline Jones, managed to suck some air back into her lungs.
The victim had blonde hair. Real blonde, not out of a bottle. But Sam had dark hair, it was written into the genetics of her biodata.
Wait. She had to think.
Her name was Samantha Angeline Jones. Her birthday was the fifteenth of April, 1980. She didn’t believe in astrology, but then, Arians were sceptical like that. Her parents were educated, socially aware, middle-class Londoners; her mother was a social worker, her father was a doctor. But her hair was blonde, not dark, and there was no cigarette burn