1
Gen sat at a kitchen table reading a book of love poems in Bengali. She smiled at the mouth-feel of the words, tender and sweet, like the fruits in the salad she had made for breakfast.
Gen experienced each of the languages she spoke as having its own personality. She visited different languages like other teen-age girls might spend time yakking on the phone or Facebook with different friends. She had favorites: Portuguese, for melody; Bantu, for sheer fun making the tongue clicks; Romanian, for when she pretended she was a gypsy.
Reading the book of poems now, Gen decided that Bengali felt to her like a grandmotherly version of Hindi. She pictured the Hindi language as a white-haired sage, wise but sternly ascetic; Bengali was his kindly old wife, pudgy and overly fond of honey. It would be terrific to chat with a native Bengali speaker, but she had learned the language from tapes and no one else at the lab spoke it. She had to be content reading Ramprasad Sen's verses-which were good, she wasn't complaining. Last night, she had read a bicycle repair manual in Tagalog. It was the best she could do to break the monotony of her days and nights.
Gen looked up from the book at the tall glass walls of her apartment-three layers of thick glass plates. A second vault enclosed the one that confined her, and on the wall of the outer vault a series of airlocks led into the main laboratory room. Beyond the lab building existed "the real world"-which to Gen was a mythical realm she visited only in daydreams.
She surveyed the 20-foot-square glass box: her permanent quarters, her world. Stainless steel furniture-a small kitchen table, a desk, a bookshelf, a bed-occupied a stainless steel floor made of a single, seamless plate. Computers controlled the room's lighting. Video cameras mounted in the ceiling recorded her every move from various angles. A curtain on an overhead track concealed an area containing a stainless steel toilet and a shower stall. After many tearful complaints, Gen had persuaded a committee of scientists to add the curtain as a token to her privacy; the cameras still recorded her actions from above.
She spooned up a plump strawberry and let it roll around in her mouth, feeling the tiny bumps and whiskers with her tongue. She bit into the fruit and closed her eyes at the splash of flavor. She imagined a Bengali-speaking friend-better, Ramprasad himself-sitting at the kitchen table with her. Of course, she had to imagine a chair for the poet to sit on, because the isolation chamber that served as her apartment contained only one chair. Biohazard Level Four did not permit visitors, so there was no point in providing extra furniture. More than anything else in her environment, the single chair had become for Gen a symbol of her loneliness. Sometimes, lying on her bed, she would glance around her bleak room and her eyes would fix on the solo chair; then the ache of solitude wrung her heart until she felt the muscles would fray.
But this morning Ramprasad was telling her about his life as a boy in Bengal in the 1700s. He described in gritty detail the cottage factory where his family made incense. In a wooden press, they squeezed oils from sandalwood blossoms and mixed it with a combustible paste of rice powder, then rolled the paste onto slender stalks of grass. Gen smiled. She could feel the heat and taste the dust, and the smells were overwhelming: sandalwood paste drying, cow dung burning for fuel, and on every sultry breeze, the fragrance of cinnamon trees blooming.
You and I have some things in common, she told Ramprasad. We both love to write poetry, though I could never hope to be as wonderful a poet as you. That made him laugh, and his laugh sounded musical, like his words. See what I mean? she said. You even laugh like a poet.
Ramprasad Sen was unreasonably handsome. He wore a saffron-colored sarong and a simple white muslin shirt. White teeth flashed in his dark face and his black eyes shone like polished obsidian.
Gen wore a shapeless orange nylon jumpsuit. She had dozens more exactly like it, neatly folded and stored on stainless steel shelves; for the laboratory staff did not wash her clothes, they vaporized them in a high-temperature hazardous waste incinerator.
Like you, I have never spoken on a telephone, she told Ramprasad, and then giggled at the confused look on his face. She did her best to explain a telephone and how it worked, converting sound waves into transmittable electromagnetic pulses. She went on to explain radio, television and computers. Not that I've ever used these things, she said, but I've learned about them from books. They let me read books here. And some of the researchers talk science stuff with me.
Know what I would love to have? she said. Tears sprang to her eyes and she blinked them away. It makes me want to cry to think about it, so usually I don't...but I would adore a little pet. A kitten or a puppy. We could play together. She laughed at the feelings the images brought to her. That would be heaven.
She looked around the glass vault. Trouble is, she told him, I think I'd feel guilty. Sorry for the little thing. Because it could never get to go outside. Never see the sun. Roll in the grass. Chase a butterfly.
Her voice caught and she wiped at a tear that started down her cheek. Anyway...what do you think, would it be too selfish for me to have a pet?
Ramprasad had stopped listening to her ramblings. He was gazing intently into her eyes. You are the one with the musical laughter, he told her.
Gen felt herself blushing. His baritone voice was as rich as the fragrance of sandalwood.
Your laughter rings like anklet bells on the feet of a temple dancer, he said. And our Mother Tara, Creatrix of all the worlds, has made your eyes as violet as amethyst gems.
She sighed and turned away from his fiery black stare.
Someone tapped the outer glass wall. It took Gen a couple seconds to realize that this new sound was real. Her imaginary companion vanished and she found herself alone in a cage of glass. Sorrow spread through her chest like a cold and heavy wave.
Outside the vault, a figure in a blue biohazard suit shouted to be heard through his plastic helmet and the heavy glass. "Ohayo gozaimasu," he said. Good morning, in Japanese.
Ah, Toshi. She felt better. Dr. Toshi Yamato was her only friend on the research team at Redstone Military Laboratories. He could have used his helmet mike to broadcast over the room's loudspeakers. But Toshi was polite; he always gave her the opportunity to invite him into her personal space. Privacy virtually did not exist in her life, so the gesture meant a lot to her.
She clipped a dime-sized microphone to the collar of her orange jumpsuit, then crossed to the thick glass wall. "Ohayo, Toshi." She bowed deeply. "Ogenki desu ka?-How are you?" She mimed for him to turn on his mike.
He clicked on the mike with his chin. "Hai, genki desu," he said. "Okagesama de-I'm healthy, thank you." Now his voice came through speakers on her side of the glass apartment. The dome of his helmet gave his voice a hollow ring. She often wondered how her voice sounded to him, if her mike picked up the room's faint echoes.
Toshi grabbed a yellow air hose that dangled from the ceiling of the outer vault and plugged the brass nozzle into a coupling at the base of his helmet. Then he thrust an arm through one of a dozen segmented steel sleeves that lined the glass wall. He extended a heavy rubber glove and shook her small hand. She bowed again. He withdrew his arm from the mechanical sleeve and managed a semblance of a bow in the rigidly inflated Chemturion suit.
"Onaka ga sukimashita ka?-Are you hungry?" she asked, and waved a hand toward the bowl of fruit salad on her table. Proper etiquette if she were a Japanese hostess, and a standing joke between them. Six-inch tri-plate glass separated Toshi from the offered meal. If he made an unauthorized entrance into Gen's chamber through the airlock, a billion-roentgen burst of x-rays would shower them both, killing-sterilizing-every cell in their bodies.
He grinned. "Happy birthday!"
Gen gasped and put a hand to her chest. She had forgotten, but Toshi had remembered. "You're so good to me," she said, and bowed again.
"Here, I brought something to show you." He opened a stainless steel specimen container marked with a red trefoil, and took out a photo. He pressed the photo against the thick glass so Gen could study it: a miniature Japanese red-leaf maple, growing in a rectangular Ming porcelain pot. "This tree has belonged to my family for six generations."
"Oh, how lovely!" Her heart strained with longing as she touched fingertips to the cool glass. "Toshi, tell me how it feels against your fingers."
Gen had been isolated since birth at Biohazard Level Four, the ultimate level of biological quarantine. She had never looked upon another person who was not sealed in a biohazard suit; never heard a voice not broadcast from a speaker; never been touched except through thick rubber gloves at the ends of hermetically sealed sleeves. Through such gloves up to a couple dozen scientists would examine her today, as they had examined her yesterday and would do so again tomorrow: measuring the healing rates of her wounds, drawing blood, cutting out small plugs of living tissue for biopsies.
Gen often asked Toshi how things felt when touched.
"The bark feels rough," he said, "like...uh..."
"Canvas?"
"Like canvas. But rougher-little ridges under your fingertips. And the leaves are silky."
She knitted her eyebrows. "I don't know silk."
"Silk feels...smooth. Maybe something like the material you're wearing."
Gen stared at the photo of the tiny tree. Her fingertips lightly stroked the glass over the photo while her other fingers touched the sleeve of her nylon jumpsuit.
"Does it have a fragrance?"
He smiled. "The soil contains volcanic ash from Mt. Aso, so it smells like my boyhood home near Kumamoto Castle. The leaves smell to me like my grandfather-he was a bonsai gardener."
Gen returned his smile, though she suddenly felt like crying. "Could you bring it here, Toshi? The actual tree?" It hurt to hope for things, and she usually managed to hold her desires to a trickle, but this yearning had burst forth before she had time to halt the flood.
"Ha. Get serious, I-"
"Oh, please, Toshi." Her heart beat faster. What would she do if he said no? How could she shove this longing back inside her chest? "I'd love so much to see it."
"Impossible. Never get it past security."
Her big eyes filled with tears, but she continued to smile. "I'll let you share my breakfast with me every morning."
He laughed and returned the photo to the hot-box, screwed the lid down tight, resealed it with yellow-and-black striped bio-static tape. "I'll try. But no promises."
The flesh on her new legs still looked pink, but Gen managed to bow low to the floor, fingertips touching, like a geisha. "Domo arigato gozaimasu!" Then she straightened and rewarded him with a little dance of joy.
"Okay, okay," he said. "Remember-no promises."
"Of course," she said, then whispered, "I can't wait to see it!"
The airlock door hissed open behind Toshi. Gen instantly recognized the scientist in the biohazard suit because of his slouching gait: Dr. J. Anandamurti. His Sanskrit surname meant image of bliss, which was a joke, because the geneticist was always crabby. She secretly called him Dukhamurti, image of dissatisfaction, but she liked him. He'd taught her to speak Hindi and with much cajoling, she could get him to tell her stories from the Ramayana.
Toshi gave a slight bow to his colleague and Anandamurti returned a barely perceptible nod. Gen placed her hands together in the attitude of prayer and bowed. "Namaste, Maharaji. Good morning." She addressed him as "Great King" to coax a smile out of him.
His mouth turned down. "Good morning? I had not noticed." He spoke with a strong Indian accent, D's formed with the tongue-tip far back on the palate.
Without another word, Gen rolled up a sleeve of her jumpsuit and hopped into a chair next to a pair of manipulators called "waldoes" that extended from the outer to the inner vault.
Anandamurti stuck his arms through the manipulator sleeves and opened a drawer near her chair to take out a tourniquet, needle, Vacu-tainer, and two blood collection tubes with red and purple stoppers.
While the geneticist drew her blood, she and Toshi chatted in Japanese about the history and culture of bonsai trees. Gen was excited about the possibility of getting to see the actual bonsai red maple. The air lock in the outer vault opened with a pop! followed by loud hiss that petered out in a breezy sigh. Negative air pressure in the vault ensured that air always flowed inward, never outward, so airborne particles could not escape through the airlocks. Compressed air tanks pumped fresh air in, sterilizing filter systems sucked stale air out.
Col. Jack Eberhard entered the outer vault's workspace. Toshi stiffened and Gen switched to English in mid-sentence; she and the others were allowed to speak foreign languages only when alone-Eberhard's orders.
All biohazard suits bore a name stenciled in red letters across the chest, but no label was necessary to identify Eberhard. He was much taller than the rest of the research staff. Toshi, who was only an inch taller than Gen, came up to the colonel's collar bones. Biohazard suits are bulky, and most workers shuffled. But even in a stiffly inflated spacesuit, Eberhard strode.
"Why are you here, Yamato?"
"Uh, just leaving, sir."
"Fraternizing is counterproductive to this project," Eberhard said. "I want these little social visits to stop. You're to report here only when you have scheduled work to perform."
"Yes, sir. Understood." Toshi hurried toward the airlock. He refused to meet her eyes as the airlock door closed.
Her heart sank. Toshi's visits had been the highlight of each day. Now that the first phase of the project was complete, the biophysicist would have few legitimate reasons to see her. Why did Eberhard do everything in his power to make her life so miserable?
The colonel just stood there, hands grasped behind his back, staring at her. He made her feel like a specimen in an aquarium, his prize goldfish.
Gen's stomach knotted. Eberhard's early-morning arrival meant one thing: another test. He had designed the current series to simulate combat injuries.
Last week ago, the forty-third trial in the series involved a Chinese-built land mine. The explosion disintegrated her left leg and stripped all flesh off the other, leaving the bare, white tibia jutting down from her right knee like a peg-leg. The clean-up crew had found her right foot lying like a tossed-off shoe near sandbags stacked against the far wall. The orphaned foot had gone into the incinerator along with equipment used to mop up the mess.
By controlling the signaling in her nervous system, Gen had shut down most of the pain, but even so, the amount that first blared through to her brain had been bad enough to tear a scream from her lungs. It took nearly a half-hour to fully neutralize the hurt, make it fade to nothing. In a dozen more hours of bed rest, the missing bones, muscles and other tissue had completely regenerated. By the next day, she was getting around with a slight limp.
Eberhard's tests had started four years ago. Minor wounds at first: scaldings, punctures, finger amputations. But over time, Eberhard kept increasing the harm he inflicted, trying to push her limits-or find out if she had any. So far, no amount of damage had overwhelmed her ability to heal. In fact, her body had learned to repair itself more and more rapidly and efficiently, and she intuitively knew her powers had leaped ahead since the landmine blast.
Even so, she dreaded another test. Although Eberhard had often told her that she was the most important experiment in the history of military science, his latest tests seemed bent on getting as close as possible to killing his precious subject.
What was he going to do to her today? She rubbed at the stone in her belly, feeling like she might vomit or get diarrhea; it had happened before when he'd made her wait too long, worrying. She glanced nervously toward the curtained area in the glass apartment that hid the shower, sink and toilet; but she managed to fight down the rising bile.
Come on, come on. She jiggled her knees below the table. The best thing was to get it over with, quickly.
She got up and carried the tubes of blood to a workstation that spanned most of one wall. State-of-the-art medical lab equipment outfitted the tabletops: a DNA micro-array, gene sequencer and synthesizer, cell culture hoods, high-speed centrifuges, laser spectrograph, stereo optical microscopes, scanning x-ray microscope, and side-tunneling electron microscope. Other tools would be at home in an advanced physics lab: low-energy collimated particle beam, precision-guided lasers, and microwaldoes for manipulating molecules. In one corner of her room stood the white hulk of a CAT-scan machine.
Anandamurti seated himself next to a portion of the workstation on the opposite side of the glass wall, next to several sets of sleeves. The geneticist busied himself examining the daily blood specimen under the electron microscope. The magnified images appeared on a high-resolution video screen. The machine gave off heat and a slight whiff of ozone, but of course, only Gen could detect that, on the inside of the glass boundaries.
The blood analysis was routine, but Gen knew Anandamurti would concentrate totally this morning and not glance up from his work. He hated to witness the tests. None of the scientists liked to watch. Except Eberhard. The colonel clearly got a kick out of it.
He was still gawking at her. A band of overhead lights reflecting in his faceplate hid his eyes. Just as well. Eberhard's expression revealed nothing. Either he was adept at concealing emotion, or he simply held no emotions to conceal.
The only motive she could read in him was curiosity. Eberhard was a scientist, proud that his rational mind-given the scientific method and enough time-could figure out anything...everything.
But he couldn't figure out one teen-aged girl. How her special clock ticked. And that frustration festered in his intellect like a boil.
Gen returned to the breakfast table, plopped into the chair and shifted so her back was to him. Fresh fruit was her favorite food, and in her enclosed world of limited variety, she usually took the time to revel in the sensual textures, colors, flavors, and aromas. Now, she only nibbled at a sliced peach, a coin of banana. She took a bite of rye toast, but her mouth was too dry to eat it; she spit the dough into her hand. She could barely swallow a sip of orange juice past the painful lump in her throat.
She glanced up at a video monitor and saw Eberhard's lips moving, making notes using a voice recorder in his helmet. Then he reached through a pair of sleeves into her room and keyed in a code to unlock the weapon cabinet.
His helmet mike switched on with a faint buzz. "You know the routine. Go stand in front of the shield." He sounded bored.
She hung her head, staring at the blob of bread she'd spit out. What would happen if she refused to obey?
"Play coy with me, and I'll take away your books again," he said, as if reading her mind. "Or maybe your music, this time."
When he had finally returned her library, she had memorized each book, word for word. But her music collection was still vulnerable to his threats. All right. Starting today she would record every song in her mind, note for note.
Gen stood and slowly turned toward him, swept a long coil of dark hair from her face with her fingers. Eberhard's arms through the mechanical sleeves held a flame-thrower, pointed at her chest. From early on, she had resolved never to reveal her fear, but now in spite of herself, she shuddered and gulped. As an expert on the pain of every type of injury, she knew firsthand that burns were the most agonizing.
He tracked her as she stepped over to a concave steel backdrop. Steel plating protected the floor in front of the blast shield. Gen held her head high and faced her enemy, arms hugging her chest.
"Uh, for this test," Eberhard said, "The cameras need you to be naked."
She clamped her arms tighter.
"It'll burn the clothes off you anyway. Come on. Use your head."
She stared at her feet.
"You know," he said, "I can get those Mandarin language cassettes you asked for. The Stephen Hawking book? I just want a little cooperation."
She frowned and blew out her breath. Then she unzipped her orange jumpsuit, peeled it off her shoulders, tugged off the pant legs.
"And underwear," he said, too casually.
She imagined Eberhard smirking behind his faceplate. Being treated as a lab test animal was a daily routine, but Eberhard could still make her feel humiliated, and that made her angry at herself. Don't let him get to you! She stepped out of white cotton panties. A stir of cool air brushed her bare thighs and made her shiver. She wanted to hide, to flee. But in a glass cage, hiding fled from her.
She stared down the gaping muzzle of the flame-thrower, feeling more angry now than afraid. Good. The pain would be horrible, but she doubted it would last longer than the first scream.
"Okay. Here we go," Eberhard said. "Video rolling." He glanced at a heads-up display inside his helmet. "Time is 0915 hours. Subject awake and alert. Test Series: Combat Injuries, Trial forty-four: Burn Wounds. Flame-thrower...ah, Soviet LPO-50, with 3.3 liter canister...ah, delivering a three-second burst of Napalm-B. From three meters." He flipped a switch on the shotgun-shaped weapon. "Battery on. Igniter on. Timer running...now..."
Gen shut her eyes.
"...five, four, three, two, one." He squeezed the trigger.
With a roar like a raging dragon, the weapon vomited a river of fire. Jellied gasoline spewed onto her, slamming her backward against the steel barrier. She bounced forward onto her knees, coated in flames from head to toe. In three seconds, the napalm canister was empty and Gen's whole body had turned into a furiously blazing candle. Heat waves rebounded off the glass wall, making it shudder.
She crumpled onto her side enshrouded in billowing orange flames. Skin cracked and blistered off her face. White bone blackened. Greasy smoke poured from her body, and ventilators sucked the thick haze out of the room.
Gen had shrieked at the first blast of searing heat, then instantly her pain receptors had shut down. As she fell onto her side, a healing force was already spreading from within her cells outward, blanketing her sizzling skin and smoldering scalp in a wet, iridescent fog.
The fog was composed of her protectors; each one of them infinitesimally small, but together forming a force so vast and powerful she called it the Abundance.
The Abundance worked speedily and expertly, obeying the same genetic instructions that had guided the original fabrication of her body from a single embryonic cell. Now, her nervous system came selectively back online and her whole body tingled intensely as trillions of microscopic helpers began the regeneration of ruined tissue: atom by molecule by protein by cell.
Charred muscles changed into red, glistening bands of meat. They bulged as Gen rose shakily, like a dissected cadaver coming back to life. She stumbled, fell onto hands and knees, pitched forward onto her face.
Eberhard gasped. "Hell no!" Gen heard the panic in his voice and let him go on fearing that he had finally overdone it and killed her.
Heat had warped the shield behind her body. The tang of hot steel and pungent stink of charred flesh hung in the scorched air. On the floor nearby, her nylon jumpsuit and cotton underwear had burned into a shiny smear and a patch of soot.
Gen rested, facedown against the steel floor plating, metal still hot. Her ears roared like seashells from the furious internal labor of healing.
Skin began to form over exposed muscles. It grew back smooth, flawless, unscathed. Again, she tried to stand. This time, she grasped the edge of the shield and pulled herself upright; then rested her weight against the backdrop, forcing air into her lungs in sharp pants.
Dark hair, renewed in the same pattern of tight ringlets, grew from her scalp and flowed down her back like a slow-motion spill of glossy ink, until it hung to her waist.
"Three minutes, eighteen seconds," Eberhard said, his voice unsteady. "That's incredibly faster than you've ever healed before. It's exponential."
Gen turned her back on him and walked barefoot through a puddle of sputtering fire. She didn't even limp; her regeneration was total.
"What's going on?" he said. "What does it mean?"
She sat down naked at the kitchen table and made herself eat casually.
"Tell me what's happening," he said.
Peaches. Bananas.
"There's something you know that you're not telling me."
Apples. Strawberries.
"Dammit, what is it you know that I don't know?"
Gen felt him glaring at her, heard his ragged breath through the speakers. The colonel was afraid. The striding warrior with his terrible arsenal was badly frightened by her! She half-smiled at the irony of it, but then her heart sank further, and she sighed.
Col. Eberhard studied the multitude of unique organisms that lived inside her. He hoped to learn more about them by repeatedly testing their ability to repair whatever damage he could inflict. But Gen kept a secret from Eberhard, from all of them; even her one friend, Toshi.
She knew the Abundance was more than an army of healers. The microscopic organisms possessed some level of mind, of sentience. A whole civilization within her body. Eberhard and the others suspected the organisms were intelligent, but the researchers couldn't begin to guess what Gen had come to understand: her trillions of servants had their own purpose; she was their instrument. This knowledge led to her biggest secret-she was scared, too.
Eberhard had told her she was the vector of an unstoppable epidemic; more lethal than a rain of nuclear warheads. What she contained within her could infect every living thing-break down the planet's biosphere.
Tears wet her face.
She had never held an ungloved hand. Or touched a leaf. A flower. A sea shell. She felt a bodily longing to meet-to touch-all the things she cherished from within her lonely chamber. To be a part of the family of the earth.
Engineers had vigilantly designed the entire lab to prevent her breakout; the escape of any particle of her. But how could Eberhard or any of the researchers think she wanted to escape? Did they really believe she wished to bring a scourge upon the earth? Couldn't they see how much she loved the world-if only from a glass-walled distance?
She thought of Toshi, and suddenly wondered if he was afraid of her, too. It broke her heart. She'd read of the Marianna Trench, deepest spot on Earth-but surely, that ocean canyon can't be deeper than this loneliness. The biohazard isolation unit quarantined not only her body, but her soul.
She sniffled, brushed a teardrop from her chin.
If only Toshi and the others could help her understand what was going on. How to control the changes she felt building inside her, like a thunderstorm. How to contact and communicate with the Abundance.
For now, the legions served her. Like an enormous flock of tiny guardian angels, they saved her repeatedly.
But what was their ultimate aim? Their mission?
The Abundance did not feel deadly. It produced a steady hum of energy in her body, and each day the electric buzz in her cells surged more powerfully. It sounded in her brain like static, like a stream of chatter among countless radio channels. Perhaps someday she and the Abundance would link minds and communicate directly.
Meanwhile, she could only wait. With intense dread and hope, she waited for the moment she and the society of beings inside her might join minds. Then at last she would know the Abundance was harmless-or know she was a walking plague of death.
Either way, she would no longer feel lonely. For she would no longer be one isolated self. She would be trillions of selves. She would be the Abundance.
Dr. Anandamurti looked up from his analysis of her blood. She watched his reflection on the far glass wall, startled black eyes behind the clear plastic faceplate.
"Col. Eberhard," the geneticist said, in a shaky voice. "Sir, ah, you had better come take a look at this."
Her tormentor didn't budge; he continued to glare at her immaculate nude form.
"Hurry, sir," Anandamurti said. "There's been a change. You need to see this."
Gen felt a stab of fear; a ray of hope. The purring in her cells rose in a crescendo until her whole body trembled.
She closed her eyes and listened to rushing rivers of blood.
Within her sang a choir of a trillion angels.
Or demons.