The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 11

  “It could be,” Helena says, and thankfully the Colorado server opens before Lily can ask any further questions.

  The brief requires status reports at the end of each workday, but this gradually falls by the wayside once they hit the point where workdays don’t technically end, especially since Helena really doesn’t want to look at an inbox full of increasingly creepy threats. They’re at the pre-print stage, and Lily’s given up on going back to her own place at night so they can have more time for calibration. What looks right on the screen might not look right once it’s printed, and their lives for the past few days have devolved into staring at endless trays of 32-millimeter beef cubes and checking them for myoglobin concentration, color match in different lighting conditions, fat striation depth, and a whole host of other factors.

  There are so many ways for a forgery to go wrong, and only one way it can go right. Helena contemplates this philosophical quandary, and gently thunks her head against the back of her chair.

  “Oh my god,” Lily exclaims, shoving her chair back. “I can’t take this anymore! I’m going out to eat something and then I’m getting some sleep. Do you want anything?” She straps on her bunny-patterned filter mask and her metallic sandals. “I’m gonna eat there, so I might take a while to get back.”

  “Sesame pancakes, thanks.”

  As Lily slams the door, Helena puts her iKontakt frames back on. The left lens flashes a stream of notifications—fifty-seven missed calls over the past five hours, all from an unknown number. Just then, another call comes in, and she reflexively taps the side of the frame.

  “You haven’t been updating me on your progress,” Mr. Anonymous says.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” Helena says flatly, having reached the point of tiredness where she’s ceased to feel anything beyond god I want to sleep. This sets Mr. Anonymous on another rant covering the usual topics—poor work ethic, lack of commitment, informing the Yuen family, prosecution, possible death sentence—and Helena struggles to keep her mouth shut before she says something that she might regret.

  “Maybe I should send someone to check on you right now,” Mr. Anonymous snarls, before abruptly hanging up.

  Helena blearily types out a draft of the report, and makes a note to send a coherent version later in the day, once she gets some sleep and fixes the calibration so she’s not telling him entirely bad news. Just as she’s about to call Lily and ask her to get some hot soy milk to go with the sesame pancakes, the front door rattles in its frame like someone’s trying to punch it down. Judging by the violence, it’s probably Lily. Helena trudges over to open it.

  It isn’t. It’s a bulky guy with a flat-top haircut. She stares at him for a moment, then tries to slam the door in his face. He forces the door open and shoves his way inside, grabbing Helena’s arm, and all Helena can think is I can’t believe Mr. Anonymous spent his money on this.

  He shoves her against the wall, gripping her wrist so hard that it’s practically getting dented by his fingertips, and pulls out a switchblade, pressing it against the knuckle of her index finger. “Well, I’m not allowed to kill you, but I can fuck you up real bad. Don’t really need all your fingers, do you, girl?”

  She clears her throat, and struggles to keep her voice from shaking. “I need them to type—didn’t your boss tell you that?”

  “Shut up,” Flat-Top says, flicking the switchblade once, then twice, thinking. “Don’t need your face to type, do you?”

  Just then, Lily steps through the door. Flat-Top can’t see her from his angle, and Helena jerks her head, desperately communicating that she should stay out. Lily promptly moves closer.

  Helena contemplates murder.

  Lily edges towards both of them, slides her bracelet past her wrist and onto her knuckles, and makes a gesture at Helena which either means “move to your left” or “I’m imitating a bird, but only with one hand.”

  “Hey,” Lily says loudly. “What’s going on here?”

  Flat-Top startles, loosening his grip on Helena’s arm, and Helena dodges to the left. Just as Lily’s fist meets his face in a truly vicious uppercut, Helena seizes the opportunity to kick him soundly in the shins.

  His head hits the floor, and it’s clear he won’t be moving for a while, or ever. Considering Lily’s normal level of violence towards the front door, this isn’t surprising.

  Lily crouches down to check Flat-Top’s breathing. “Well, he’s still alive. Do you prefer him that way?”

  “Do not kill him.”

  “Sure.” Lily taps the side of Flat-Top’s iKontakt frames with her bracelet, and information scrolls across her lenses. “Okay, his name’s Nicholas Liu Honghui . . . blah blah blah . . . hired to scare someone at this address, anonymous client . . . I think he’s coming to, how do you feel about joint locks?”

  It takes a while for Nicholas to stir fully awake. Lily’s on his chest, pinning him to the ground, and Helena’s holding his switchblade to his throat.

  “Okay, Nicholas Liu,” Lily says. “We could kill you right now, but that’d make your wife and your . . . what is that red thing she’s holding . . . a baby? Yeah, that’d make your wife and ugly baby quite sad. Now, you’re just going to tell your boss that everything went as expected—”

  “Tell him that I cried,” Helena interrupts. “I was here alone, and I cried because I was so scared.”

  “Right, got that, Nick? That lady there wept buckets of tears. I don’t exist. Everything went well, and you think there’s no point in sending anyone else over. If you mess up, we’ll visit 42—god, what is this character—42 Something Road and let you know how displeased we are. Now, if you apologize for ruining our morning, I probably won’t break your arm.”

  After seeing a wheezing Nicholas to the exit, Lily closes the door, slides her bracelet back onto her wrist, and shakes her head like a deeply disappointed critic. “What an amateur. Didn’t even use burner frames—how the hell did he get hired? And that haircut, wow . . .”

  Helena opts to remain silent. She leans against the wall and stares at the ceiling, hoping that she can wake up from what seems to be a very long nightmare.

  “Also, I’m not gonna push it, but I did take out the trash. Can you explain why that crappy hitter decided to pay us a visit?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Helena’s stomach growls. “This may take a while. Did you get the food?”

  “I got your pancakes, and that soy milk place was open, so I got you some. Nearly threw it at that guy, but I figured we’ve got a lot of electronics, so . . .”

  “Thanks,” Helena says, taking a sip. It’s still hot.

  Hong Kong Scientific University’s bioprinting program is a prestigious pioneer program funded by mainland China, and Hong Kong is the test bed before the widespread rollout. The laboratories are full of state-of-the-art medical-grade printers and bioreactors, and the instructors are all researchers cherry-picked from the best universities.

  As the star student of the pioneer batch, Lee Jyun Wai Helen (student number A3007082A) is selected for a special project. She will help the head instructor work on the basic model of a heart for a dextrocardial patient, the instructor will handle the detailed render and the final print, and a skilled surgeon will do the transplant. As the term progresses and the instructor gets busier and busier, Helen’s role gradually escalates to doing everything except the final print and the transplant. It’s a particularly tricky render, since dextrocardial hearts face right instead of left, but her practice prints are cell-level perfect.

  Helen hands the render files and her notes on the printing process to the instructor, then her practical exams begin and she forgets all about it.

  The Yuen family discovers Madam Yuen’s defective heart during their mid-autumn family reunion, halfway through an evening harbor cruise. Madam Yuen doesn’t make it back to shore, and instead of a minor footnote in a scientific paper, Helen rapidly becomes front-and-center in an internal investigation into the patient’s death.

  Uno
fficially, the internal investigation discovers that the head instructor’s improper calibration of the printer during the final print led to a slight misalignment in the left ventricle, which eventually caused severe ventricular dysfunction and acute graft failure.

  Officially, the root cause of the misprint is Lee Jyun Wai Helen’s negligence and failure to perform under deadline pressure. Madam Yuen’s family threatens to prosecute, but the criminal code doesn’t cover failed organ printing. Helen is expelled, and the Hong Kong Scientific University quietly negotiates a settlement with the Yuens.

  After deciding to steal the bioprinter and flee, Helen realizes that she doesn’t have enough money for a full name change and an overseas flight. She settles for a minor name alteration and a flight to Nanjing.

  “Wow,” says Lily. “You know, I’m pretty sure you got ripped off with the name alteration thing, there’s no way it costs that much. Also, you used to have pigtails? Seriously?”

  Helena snatches her old student ID away from Lily. “Anyway, under the amendments to Article 335, making or supplying substandard printed organs is now an offence punishable by death. The family’s itching to prosecute. If we don’t do the job right, Mr. Anonymous is going to disclose my whereabouts to them.”

  “Okay, but from what you’ve told me, this guy is totally not going to let it go even after you’re done. At my old job, we got blackmailed like that all the time, which was really kind of irritating. They’d always try to bargain, and after the first job, they’d say stuff like ‘If you don’t do me this favor, I’m going to call the cops and tell them everything’ just to weasel out of paying for the next one.”

  “Wait. Was this at the bakery or the merch stand?”

  “Uh.” Lily looks a bit sheepish. This is quite unusual, considering that Lily has spent the past four days regaling Helena with tales of the most impressive blood blobs from her period, complete with comparisons to their failed prints. “Are you familiar with the Red Triad? The one in Guangzhou?”

  “You mean the organ printers?”

  “Yeah, them. I kind of might have been working there before the bakery . . . ?”

  “What?”

  Lily fiddles with the lacy hem of her skirt. “Well, I mean, the bakery experience seemed more relevant, plus you don’t have to list every job you’ve ever done when you apply for a new one, right?”

  “Okay,” Helena says, trying not to think too hard about how all the staff at Splendid Beef Enterprises are now prime candidates for the death penalty. “Okay. What exactly did you do there?”

  “Ears and stuff, bladders, spare fingers . . . you’d be surprised how many people need those. I also did some bone work, but that was mainly for the diehards—most of the people we worked on were pretty okay with titanium substitutes. You know, simple stuff.”

  “That’s not simple.”

  “Well, it’s not like I was printing fancy reversed hearts or anything, and even with the asshole clients it was way easier than baking. Have you ever tried to extrude a spun-sugar globe so you could put a bunch of powder-printed magpies inside? And don’t get me started on cleaning the nozzles after extrusion, because wow . . .”

  Helena decides not to question Lily’s approach to life, because it seems like a certain path to a migraine. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”

  “Right, you need to send the update! Can I help?”

  The eventual message contains very little detail and a lot of pleading. Lily insists on adding typos just to make Helena seem more rattled, and Helena’s way too tired to argue. After starting the autoclean cycle for the printheads, they set an alarm and flop on Helena’s mattress for a nap.

  As Helena’s drifting off, something occurs to her. “Lily? What happened to those people? The ones who tried to blackmail you?”

  “Oh,” Lily says casually. “I crushed them.”

  The brief specifies that the completed prints need to be loaded into four separate podcars on the morning of 8 August, and provides the delivery code for each. They haven’t been able to find anything in Helena’s iKontakt archives, so their best bet is finding a darknet user who can do a trace.

  Lily’s fingers hover over the touchpad. “If we give him the codes, this guy can check the prebooked delivery routes. He seems pretty reliable, do you want to pay the bounty?”

  “Do it,” Helena says.

  The resultant map file is a mess of meandering lines. They flow across most of Nanjing, criss-crossing each other, but eventually they all terminate at the cargo entrance of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel on Jiangdong Middle Road.

  “Well, he’s probably not a guest who’s going to eat two hundred steaks on his own.” Lily taps her screen. “Maybe it’s for a hotel restaurant?”

  Helena pulls up the Grand Domaine’s web directory, setting her iKontakt to highlight any mentions of restaurants or food in the descriptions. For some irritating design reason, all the booking details are stored in garish images. She snatches the entire August folder, flipping through them one by one before pausing.

  The foreground of the image isn’t anything special, just elaborate cursive English stating that Charlie Zhang and Cherry Cai Si Ping will be celebrating their wedding with a ten-course dinner on August 8th at the Royal Ballroom of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

  What catches her eye is the background. It’s red with swirls and streaks of yellow-gold. Typical auspicious wedding colors, but displayed in a very familiar pattern.

  It’s the marbled pattern of T-bone steak.

  Cherry Cai Si Ping is the daughter of Dominic Cai Yongjing, a specialist in livestock and a new player in Nanjing’s agri-food arena. According to Lily’s extensive knowledge of farming documentaries, Dominic Cai Yongjing is also “the guy with the eyebrows” and “that really boring guy who keeps talking about nothing.”

  “Most people have eyebrows,” Helena says, loading one of Lily’s recommended documentaries. “I don’t see . . . oh. Wow.”

  “I told you. I mean, I usually like watching stuff about farming, but last year he just started showing up everywhere with his stupid waggly brows! When I watched this with my ex, we just made fun of him non-stop.”

  Helena fast-forwards through the introduction of Modern Manufacturing: The Vertical Farmer, which involves the camera panning upwards through hundreds of vertically stacked wire cages. Dominic Cai talks to the host in English, boasting about how he plans to be a key figure in China’s domestic beef industry. He explains his “patented methods” for a couple of minutes, which involves stating and restating that his farm is extremely clean and filled with only the best cattle.

  “But what about bovine parasitic cancer?” the host asks. “Isn’t the risk greater in such a cramped space? If the government orders a quarantine, your whole farm . . .”

  “As I’ve said, our hygiene standards are impeccable, and our stock is purebred Hereford!” Cai slaps the flank of a cow through the cage bars, and it moos irritatedly in response. “There is absolutely no way it could happen here!”

  Helena does some mental calculations. Aired last year, when the farm recently opened, and that cow looks around six months old . . . and now a request for steaks from cows that are sixteen to eighteen months old . . .

  “So,” Lily says, leaning on the back of Helena’s chair. “Bovine parasitic cancer?”

  “Judging by the timing, it probably hit them last month. It’s usually the older cows that get infected first. He’d have killed them to stop the spread . . . but if it’s the internal strain, the tumors would have made their meat unusable after excision. His first batch of cows was probably meant to be for the wedding dinner. What we’re printing is the cover-up.”

  “But it’s not like steak’s a standard course in wedding dinners or anything, right? Can’t they just change it to roast duck or abalone or something?” Lily looks fairly puzzled, probably because she hasn’t been subjected to as many weddings as Helena has.

  “Mr. Cai’s the one bankrolling it, so
it’s a staging ground for the Cai family to show how much better they are than everyone else. You saw the announcement—he’s probably been bragging to all his guests about how they’ll be the first to taste beef from his vertical farm. Changing it now would be a real loss of face.”

  “Okay,” Lily says. “I have a bunch of ideas, but first of all, how much do you care about this guy’s face?”

  Helena thinks back to her inbox full of corpse pictures, the countless sleepless nights she’s endured, the sheer terror she felt when she saw Lily step through the door. “Not very much at all.”

  “All right.” Lily smacks her fist into her palm. “Let’s give him a nice surprise.”

  The week before the deadline vanishes in a blur of printing, re-rendering, and darknet job requests. Helena’s been nothing but polite to Mr. Cai ever since the hitter’s visit, and has even taken to video calls lately, turning on the camera on her end so that Mr. Cai can witness her progress. It’s always good to build rapport with clients.

  “So, sir,” Helena moves the camera, slowly panning so it captures the piles and piles of cherry-red steaks, zooming in on the beautiful fat strata which took ages to render. “How does this look? I’ll be starting the dry-aging once you approve, and loading it into the podcars first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Fairly adequate. I didn’t expect much from the likes of you, but this seems satisfactory. Go ahead.”

  Helena tries her hardest to keep calm. “I’m glad you feel that way, sir. Rest assured you’ll be getting your delivery on schedule . . . by the way, I don’t suppose you could transfer the money on delivery? Printing the bone matter costs a lot more than I thought.”

  “Of course, of course, once it’s delivered and I inspect the marbling. Quality checks, you know?”

  Helena adjusts the camera, zooming in on the myoglobin dripping from the juicy steaks, and adopts her most sorrowful tone. “Well, I hate to rush you, but I haven’t had much money for food lately . . .”

  Mr. Cai chortles. “Why, that’s got to be hard on you! You’ll receive the fund transfer sometime this month, and in the meantime why don’t you treat yourself and print up something nice to eat?”