“What? I did everything you asked me to. Now I’ve got to get out of town!”

“Getting a little hot for you? Well, if you remember, I asked you to get rid of Helix, and you botched it up.”

“But I took them to U of D, I saw the guards nab her.”

Graham shook his head. “It didn’t take. Martin pulled some strings somewhere and got me thrown in security before I could do anything with her.”

“But that’s not my fault!”

“Well it wouldn’t have happened if you’d taken care of her in the riot, now would it? I’m pretty sure she’s at Martin’s now, and I think I know what we can do.”

“How do I know you’re not going to just string me along again?”

“Well, that’s the risk you have to take, isn’t it? Believe me, I’d like nothing better than to see you jetting off to a foreign land, but first, you have to finish your job.” Graham crossed the room, ignoring Benny and the gun now hanging loosely at his side. He switched on the transceiver, called up the yellow pages and dialed an all-night hardware store. “How are you at welding?” he asked Benny over his shoulder. oOo

Quick hands untied the cords at Helix’s wrists and ankles. She stood and flexed her arms, stretching the cramped muscles in her back.

The guards stood between her and the tank of growth medium. She stepped around them to dangle her fingers in the delicious fluid. The guard that untied her cleared her throat. “Hector Martin has reserved a plane ticket for you. We can either escort you to the airport or take you to his apartment, but you can’t stay here.”

Helix looked at them, and then back at the little tank, barely big enough to hold her. It was no good. She might be able to fight them off and get into the tank, but more would come to take her out, or to examine her, run tests and take samples — make of her what she was, an experiment. They were right, she couldn’t stay here, but she couldn’t leave either. Graham had told her things she didn’t want to know. But knowing, she couldn’t erase his words. It was time to go to the source, time to confront her father with his lies.

oOo

His door buzzer went off, and Hector rushed to it, to peer through the peep hole. His heart fell. It was Helix. She had decided against taking the airplane ticket, apparently. He had hoped she would get away, far away, and be safe. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to face her.

He opened the door and the next thing he knew he was grabbed by four strong arms and slammed against the wall. His head struck first, pain lanced down his neck and shoulders.

“What have you done?” she snarled, her face only inches from his.

He shook his head, unable to speak. She looked awful, worse than she had when he first found her, after she’d been thrown out of the nest. Her skin was raw in large, flaking patches. She had a bruise under her eye and a cut on her lip. But worst of all was the look in her eyes. What he saw there he could not bear to look at for long.

She bared her teeth and grimaced. This close, it was an awesome sight indeed. “What the fuck am I, Hector? Huh? Tell me!”

He was afraid. She could kill him with no trouble at all. She was stronger than him, and she had the advantage of an extra set of arms. Right now, she could just tear his jugular vein with her teeth if she wanted to. And why wouldn’t she? What had he ever done except tell her lies?

“Tell me!” she screamed, lifting him and slamming him back into the wall again for emphasis.

“You’re, you’re... I don’t really know, alright? You’re a genetically engineered organism. A product of corporate research and development.”

She stared at him, eyes blue and wide with rage, stared and stared until he thought that in the next instant she would kill him, but instead she said, “Your research.”

He licked his lips and nodded his head ever so slightly. “Yes.”

The blow happened so suddenly he didn’t see it coming, just heard something go crack, and then felt the stinging pain on his cheek and in his mouth.

She had released him and stood now with her back to him. He raised his hand to his lip and brought it away bloody. He glanced at the door. He might be able to make it, he might never have another chance, but how could he do that? She was his responsibility.

“Liar,” Helix growled, her back still turned. She was staring down at the glass top of the coffee table, where the prism for the holoweb sat amid scattered mylar documents and takeout cartons. Her shoulders were shaking. “You lied to me.” She turned and her eyes were full of tears. “There never was any orphanage, you didn’t adopt me, I’m not a sport. I’m not even human!” She screamed the last, picking up the heavy glass prism and sending it crashing through the top of his coffee table. Hector cringed at the sound of splintering glass and suppressed the impulse to run. “No, you’re not,” he said loudly. “You’re something else, Helix, something new under the sun. You and your kind, I may have created you, but I don’t even know really, what you are, because there’s never been anything like you before. I know what you were designed for, but that’s not the same thing. It’s very important for you to realize that, Helix, it’s not the same thing.”

“What was I designed for, Hector?” She stood over the shattered remains of his coffee table, eyeing him coolly. “Why do I exist?”

He laughed in fear startled amazement. “Because I thought of you, I suppose, or... I don’t know. I — I was given a project, you see, to create a — a biological machine.” When at last he blurted the words out he flinched, expecting her to strike him again, but she didn’t. She just stood there, staring. “To replace the vatdivers,” he explained.

She nodded her head slowly. This new calm of hers was more frightening than her rage and tears. He didn’t know what to expect next. “And put all those people out of work,” she said at length.

“It’s lousy work, Helix. It kills them. You know that now, I’m sure you do. But you — you and your sisters and your mother — you can swim in the vats all day and all night, and it won’t harm you. And besides that, it was a fascinating problem. You had to be intelligent, you see, at least I felt you did. That was my solution to the complexities of vatdiving. Another researcher might have taken a different approach, but I made the multiprocessor brains, and that’s where I started with you.”

“I suppose you think I should be grateful to you for creating me, for making me... intelligent.”

He shook his head and looked down. “No, not really, no.”

Helix walked slowly about the living room, her gaze wandering, seeing nothing, crunching slivers of glass beneath her shoes. “My sisters and my mother, you said.”

“Yes.”

“My mother — she’s...”

“The first of your kind. Her name is Lilith,” he said gently.

She stared at him again, froze him with the cold blue fire of her eyes. “My mother was a vat diver. I was an orphan. You adopted me.” she whispered, advancing on him slowly. He wanted to back up, and probably would have, but the wall was in his way. She took his face in her four hands, gently cradling his jaw and skull in her fingers, and gazed into his eyes with a look so wounded that his heart went cold.

“Why did you lie?”

He swallowed with difficulty. He was crying now too, it seemed. He closed his eyes, unable to bear her gaze any longer. “My work is my life, Helix,” he whispered, “and you are my life’s work. I didn’t want to see the pinnacle achievement of my career wiped out or relegated to the status of slave labor. That you are finely suited to work in the vats cannot be denied, but there’s more. Your social structure, other things. You are a brand new, intelligent life form. I wanted to see what you could do outside of the laboratory. I wanted you to get loose, undetected, to pose as a sport, to get good and far away from GeneSys. That was my hope for you, in particular. Until you came along there seemed to be no future for your kind, but when I found you-”