Oh, Elvi thought. Oh, fuck this. I don’t care what it takes. As soon as I get out of here, I will find a way to never, ever come back.
“The original bodies died twenty years ago, more or less,” Cortázar said. “These artifacts that were built from them have been static since their recovery.”
“So they’ll always be young?”
“Well. They’ll always look like immature human beings,” Cortázar said. “That’s not exactly the same thing. They have, for the most part, similar structures and chemistry to the original bodies, only very stable. Telomeres don’t shorten. Mitosis can run indefinitely. There’s no buildup of senescent cells or plaques. The immune response has a couple additional pathways and structures that are interesting. Really very nice work.”
“That’s amazing,” Elvi said, and the words felt like dropping a stone down a well. Deep and kind of hollow.
“The high consul’s interest in personal immortality came from them. He thought that if we could learn the differences in structure and function from these samples and reverse engineer them into a living body instead of a corpse, sort of the way carbon-silicate lace plating was based on long-lived architectural structures… well, that would be interesting. I tried a few animal models first, and made enough progress that I felt comfortable with a human trial.”
She leaned on her cane and fought back the dizziness. “Duarte agreed to that?”
Cortázar turned to look at her. He seemed confused. “Of course he did. It was the answer to his biggest problem. How do you hold a galaxy-spanning empire together over generations? Have someone running it who doesn’t die. Well, here they are. Things that have all the traits you need not to age and die.”
“Wasn’t he worried something might… I don’t know. Go wrong?”
“He understood there was some risk, but he thought it was justified by the possible return. We went very carefully, and the high consul had a great deal of faith in my abilities.”
“All right,” Elvi said. “Okay.”
“It was fine until you triggered that—” He gestured at her injured leg. “It was working. It may still work, with some adjustments and a new subject.”
“I didn’t trigger anything. That was Sagale, following orders,” she said, but what she thought was: A new subject like Teresa. It didn’t sit right. Cortázar turned his attention back to the children in the cage. No, he wants it for himself.
“I have complete records, of course,” Cortázar said. “I have them set up for you on the system here. Take as long as you want looking over them.”
“In here?”
“The project doesn’t exist outside of this room. The high consul was very clear on that, and I can’t imagine Admiral Trejo would want to reduce security.”
The private lab was smaller all told than her office back at the State Building. The younger one, the boy, came to stand beside what had been his sister. Elvi was going to be under their eyes the whole time she was here. She wondered whether Cortázar had set it up like that to make her uncomfortable. And whether the information he showed her would be anywhere close to complete…
“Wait,” she said. “Amos Burton’s body was missing.”
“They’re out looking for it now,” Cortázar said. “It will be very useful having an adult subject to compare with. I mean, it would mean more if I had complete scans and medical records of him from before the corpse was modified. That’s what we really need to move forward. But I’ll enjoy this all the same. There’s a restroom just outside the hall. And if you need food, you should probably have it outside. We’ve only ever had one unintentional protomolecule contamination, but—”
“Understood,” she said, and sat at the low monitor. The chair squeaked.
“I’ll come check in on you later,” Cortázar said. He forgot to smile this time. The doors closed behind him, and Elvi turned to the reports and the data. Her head felt like it was full of bees. There was too much, and it left her unsettled and jumpy. She expected Cortázar’s work to bounce off her brain and puddle on the floor. Actually engaging with it was too much to ask.
But once she’d started looking through it, her focus started coming back, and a familiar calm came over her. Other people might take reassurance in a lover’s hand or a cup of herbal tea—really a tisane since it didn’t have tea leaves, but tea was the term people used anyway, which Elvi had always thought interesting. Elvi only had room in her mind for learning or panicking. She couldn’t d
o both, and she didn’t like panic.
The thing that struck her first was how small the differences really were. Cortázar wasn’t a biologist. His background was nanoinformatics, which had a huge overlap when it came to things like genetics, epigenetics, and heritable cytoplasmic proteins, but missed basics like anatomy. The way the kids’ hearts had changed to adjust for a different viscosity in their plasma, the way that their blood had changed to a more efficient, non-cell-bound hemoglobin analog, all the other tweaks and modifications weren’t really changes in kind. They were just improvements.
Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.
When she looked up and saw the children looking back at her, it was five hours later, her leg ached like hell, and the fear was gone. The grayness in their skin was an artifact of the oxygen transport. The blackness of their eyes was an optical structure that was better at capturing light. Whatever was going on with the new kind of neurons in their brains and the extra layer in their neocortexes, all the old, purely human structures were there too.
The process of re-creating all that using tools out of the protomolecule’s toolbox was an act of hubris that took her breath away. If anyone besides Duarte and Cortázar had been part of that conversation, there would have been prosecution. Two men, each convinced of their exceptionalism, were capable of leapfrogging over vast chasms of maybe-this-isn’t-a-great-idea and this-is-totally-illegal. Elvi had become convinced that Cortázar was jealous that Duarte intended to feed his own daughter into the same grinder instead of his pet scientist.
She levered herself up on her cane and walked to the transparent cage. The boy stepped back, like he was afraid of her. The girl—Cara—stood her ground.
Development into a mature form wasn’t the same as aging and death. Maybe the drones hadn’t understood that. So that meant something about how the protomolecule designers had functioned, didn’t it? That their designs didn’t take growth and maturation into account suggested that the original designers only had mature forms. Adults making adults. She tried to imagine what that would be like.
“Can I ask you something?” Elvi said.