Sergei Lukyanenko - The Genome

“Into trouble?”

“Do you have an inkling of how much it costs to regenerate half a body? I had a comprehensive insurance plan, so the company had to pay up. I think they would have preferred to have a nice elaborate funeral for me instead.”

“But they could have just re-attached your other half…”

“Nope, they couldn’t. William didn’t waste any time, and that was what saved me. But he had only one IC unit handy, so he had to choose what was more important—the top half or the bottom half.”

Kim smiled.

“The top half… they patched up the bottom half just fine.”

“Even better than before. My left leg had been broken twice.”

“Another accident?”

“No. I had that since childhood… just kid stuff. I jumped from the fifth floor, on a bet. I figured a pilot-spesh would be okay. What I didn’t take into account was that I hadn’t had my metamorphosis yet.”

“I jumped, too. But not from so high up. My bones aren’t as strong.”

Alex smiled, wrapping two fingers around her wrist. The girl was looking thoughtfully at him. “You know… I have to tell you this one thing…”

“Kim, you don’t have to do anything.”

“Yes, I really do.” Kim got serious. “I have to tell you… about… this.”

She slid a hand across her stomach and held out the gel-crystal a moment later.

Alex said, with no hesitation:

“Kim, I really have to warn you! If the Imperial police have an official search out for this crystal, it is my duty to report you and turn you over to the authorities.”

“There is no search out for it.” Kim shook her head. “I give you my word. It’s a very large crystal, isn’t it?”

“Very large. Very expensive… that is, if it works.”

“It’s working as we speak.”

Alex cocked his head. Carefully took the crystal from her hand, looked through it at the light. Along its facets, a light whitish film was gathering, or perhaps it only seemed to be.

“Then we have to recharge it, Kim. It looks like it’s been running autonomously for quite a while.”

“That’s exactly why I took it out. You do have a spare control center, don’t you?”

“I do.”

Kim nodded.

“The computer in my cabin isn’t capable of feeding such a large crystal. But yours will probably manage.”

Alex got up silently. Went over to the terminal, snapped off the processor panel. In a small port lined with a moistly trembling bio coating, there sat another crystal, a tiny one, less than point two inches in diameter. The brackets of another port were open. Alex tried the crystal against the opening, gave a contented nod. It would fit. Just barely, but it would. Kim had also gotten up and was now standing next to him, pressing her warm, firm thigh against his leg.

“You understand what I’m doing?” Alex unfolded three tiny, thin bracket arms—each one could rotate on its axis and then be fixed in place in two different positions.

“No.”

“These are the crystal’s information chain conduits.”

“But why?”

“Who knows what kind of programs are in it? The crystal will get its charge, as well as access to the infonet. But it won’t be able to interfere with the ship’s controls network. That’s the recommended procedure for recharging uncertified gel-crystals.”

Alex inserted the crystal into the port. Its aperture trembled, then contracted, tightly hugging the transparent cone. Only the three little conduit arms helplessly wobbled in the air, unable to reach the crystal.

“I could cut off the information input as well…” added Alex pensively. “And leave only the recharging function on. Well, this ship has nothing all that secret on it, really….”

“Don’t cut it off!” said Kim hastily. “He’ll be really bored!”

“He?”

“I better start at the beginning.”

Alex looked at the crystal, shrugged, then closed the panel.

“All right, baby.”

Kim sighed. Then said quickly, in the same breath, as if jumping off a cliff:

“My friend is in there. My best friend.”

“An artificial intelligence?”

“No, he’s human. Just like us.”

“This is a great start. That is, it’s a great place to stop. Kim, darling, let me take a shower and change? Then you can tell me the rest, okay?”

They took a shower together. There was nothing erotic about it; Kim simply couldn’t wait to start telling her story. She must have been longing to share her secret with someone for a long time now.

Alex put on light overalls, sat down on the bed. Kim didn’t go back to her cabin for a change of clothes, but simply wrapped herself in a bath towel. Alex didn’t mind—she looked even better this way.

“I was nine,” Kim began, having settled, legs and all, into an armchair. “And I… well, it just so happened that I had absolutely no friends back then, girls or boys. I had lots of pals, you know, but not a single really close friend.”

Alex nodded.

“I found a friend in virtual reality.” Kim smiled gently as she said this. These memories must have been pleasant for her. “His name was Edgar. He was my age. We hit it off, became good friends… you know the way it happens in virtuality?”

“Yeah. At that age, I also liked virtual reality. Especially spaceflight simulations.”

“Well… these were not spaceflights. You see, he didn’t have a real body.”

“What?” Alex raised one brow in surprise.

“Edgar told me he had been in a car wreck. Back when he was really small, only three. They couldn’t save him, so they just transferred his consciousness into a gel-crystal…”

“Kim!” Alex raised his hand. “Wait a minute! Stop right there. This is utter nonsense! A gel-crystal this size costs as much as a good hospital. So it’s much less expensive, not to mention more… humane, to reconstruct a body, even if it has been smashed up into suspension.”

“They couldn’t get him to the hospital on time. Just managed to transfer his mind into the crystal.”

“Hold it right there! Let’s suppose the boy’s parents could afford it… although I can’t really imagine such a thing. Why couldn’t they reverse the process, grow another body for him, say, by cloning the old one or generating a new one out of his parents’ stem cells? They could then transfer his mind back into the clean brain. I’ve heard of such cases, except they were famous scientists and politicians, not little boys.”

“That’s right. I’ve been telling you a bunch of lies.” Kim smiled. “But they aren’t my lies… that’s the crap they told Edgar. Don’t forget, we were both just nine.”

Alex nodded.

“All right, then. Go on.”

“Edgar grew up in the crystal. In the virtual worlds. His playmates came and went back to the real world, but he stayed there. Always. At first, his parents would visit him, often, in their virtual bodies. After a while, they stopped coming. He was thinking they’d simply forgotten about him, had more children, or whatever… He was really upset about that.”

“But what was really going on?”

“He’d been stuck into the crystal on purpose!” Kim tossed back her hair. “Can you even imagine? There wasn’t any car accident! His memory got placed into the crystal, and his body… we don’t know what they did with it! Maybe they threw it away. Maybe it’s out there somewhere, in a vegetative state. And maybe his memory got copied, without erasing the original, and there’s another Edgar somewhere, alive and well.”

“Why?” Alex shrugged his shoulders. “Kim, this is a crazy story. Why would anyone screw up a little boy’s life like that? A crystal which contains a human consciousness and is also, I assume, capable of sustaining some semblance of a living environment… the cost is simply inconceivable!”