Spin State - Chris Moriarty [29]
It was there in the surreal color of her violet eyes, the inhuman, almost repellent perfection of her face. No human geneticist would have designed such a face. Nature had never meant humans to look like that. She could be only one thing: a postbreakaway A or B Series Syndicate-built genetic construct.
Haas intercepted Li’s glance at the woman and put a proprietary hand on her shoulder. “And here’s our witch, of course,” he said offhandedly.
The witch stood as still under Haas’s hand as a well-trained animal, but something in the set of her shoulders said his touch was less than welcome. Or did Syndicate constructs even think that way? Could like and dislike be programmed in the crèches? Could feelings be spliced out of the perfect, unvarying, simulation-tested genesets? Or were the wrong feelings just forbidden—along with every other unprogrammable thing that made up an individual?
Li said her name and held out her hand.
The witch hesitated, then reached out tentatively, like an explorer greeting possibly dangerous natives. Her hand felt restless as a bird in Li’s grasp, and she kept her head down so that Li saw just the pale curve of forehead, the dark hair falling away from a part as straight as a knife blade.
Li watched her surreptitiously as they took their seats and the pilots went into the final preflight checks. She’d spent half her adult life fighting the Syndicates, but she’d rarely been so close to a high-series construct. This one would have been tanked in the orbital birthlabs above the Syndicate home planets. She would have grown up in a crèche full of her twins, never seeing a face that wasn’t hers, never hearing a voice or feeling a touch that wasn’t hers. And if she’d lived long enough to end up here, then she’d survived the one-year cull, the eight-year cull, the constant barrage of norm-testing that routed out physical and psychological variations in order to achieve the disciplined, unquestioning, unvarying perfection that the Syndicate designers insisted on.
Li glanced around at the other passengers. Even the ones who weren’t looking at the witch were focused on her, aware of her, orbiting her like iron filings lining up under the influence of a magnet. They were seduced by the beautiful face, the graceful body, the woman she appeared to be. But Li saw battle lines forming along the Great Divide of Gilead’s southern continent. She saw a flesh-and-blood statement of Syndicate ideology, Syndicate superiority, Syndicate disdain for human values.
Maybe Nguyen was right, Li thought. Maybe she didn’t understand politics. Maybe she was just that stereotypical, vaguely pitiful figure: an old soldier who couldn’t look peace in the eye. But was she the only old soldier who thought the UN was selling off hard-earned victories to pad the multiplanetaries’ profit margins? Was she the only UN construct who thought the thirty-year contracts were still slavery—even if the new slave masters were constructs, not humans? Why was this woman here? What could she offer that was worth the risk of her presence?
“Best investment we ever made,” Haas said, as if in answer to Li’s unspoken questions. “First six months after we picked up her MotaiSyndicate contract, we tripled production and halved our payroll. Fantastic, huh?”
“Yeah,” Li said. “Fantastic. Bet the union loves it.”
“What?” Haas looked like he was giving serious thought to spitting. “Someone’s been selling you fairy tales, Major. There is no union.”
He shot an arm past Li’s face and lifted the window shade to check their progress toward the planet. They were well into the atmosphere, pinions of flame streaking the shuttle’s wings, the coalfield spread out like a map below them. Li scanned the broad floodplain, leveled by an ocean that had dried up three geologic ages before humans set foot on Compson’s World. Headframes and mine buildings curved along the valley’s edge, following the coal seam. Far above, their jagged spires already flashing red in the dawn, loomed the