Immunity Index Read online

  Assistant managers had mid-level access to the database, and the franchise was popular, so if the Swobodas existed, she could find them—and in the process violate at least two big rules against accessing the database for personal use. No one could tell why she was looking them up, though. And she was hardly the first to search for personal reasons.

  There they were: in a well-heeled suburb and about the right age. He was a retired doctor who had worked in oncology at a large hospital. She was also a medical doctor and had retired from teaching at a medical college. They frequented garden supply and athletic equipment stores, as well as specialized grocery stores and local parks. Lately only Christopher had called for a car. Linda had been deactivated, which probably meant death—with divorce, she’d be in the database at a different street address. Judging by the times he called for an autocar, he had a lot of free time. His photo showed a smiling man with features a lot like his dark-haired, round-faced daughter, Momma, who had hated him for decades.

  Momma had always said that when Berenike was adopted, both she and Papa had been unemployed—which wasn’t unusual—and they had no insurance, so Momma’s parents thought they shouldn’t try to raise a child. She said her parents were horrified by the idea that she and Papa possessed so few resources and yet had dared to start a family.

  “Think of what’s best for the baby,” Grandmother Linda had said, according to Momma, who had apparently made it all up. “We can take her for a while, just until you get your lives in order again.”

  “My life is in order!” Momma said she answered, still shrill with rage years later. She would add as Berenike got older, “They got a court order. Child welfare inspectors! Private detectives! That’s how much they wanted to snatch you. We couldn’t take our eyes off you for a moment. You were so unbelievably precious to us.”

  She added when Berenike got even older, “They were always trying to control my life. They hated your father. Called him totally fucking useless. They did everything they could to undermine our marriage.”

  Berenike would be bombarded by these pronouncements around the holidays, when families were supposed to gather and bond. Once, on the day before Thanksgiving, she was shoveling dry cereal into her mouth to get to school on time when she dared to ask a question.

  “When was the last time you talked to them?”

  “You were two, so thirteen years. Lucky thirteen!” Scorn sparkled in the words.

  “Then why are you still so angry about it?”

  Momma leaned in close. “You don’t know how much they tried to hurt me. The things they said about me. Slander! They tried to ruin our credit rating by getting a court order. We had just enough money to raise you but not to pay a lawyer, too. They bad-mouthed us on every network they could. You’d have led a better life when you were little except for all the harm they did to us, to our family.”

  The next day, during the holiday dinner, Momma continued the tale. “They got obsessed about you, Nike. They couldn’t leave us in peace.”

  Berenike remembered that dinner’s processed turkey and stuffing from a cheap takeout, spiced with well-aged resentment, and even at the time she’d felt sure she wasn’t hearing an especially accurate story. She’d already realized that if she knew more, she might feel differently about her grandparents and her parents. There were never completely innocent parties in any battle.

  Bearing that in mind, she stepped outside the AutoKar franchise office during her lunch break and took the first step, steeling herself for the likely consequences. She dictated a formal electronic mail message, very polite and proper. “… and I believe you may be my grandparents … I know there are disagreements between you and my parents, but if you would be interested in a meeting…” She included her contact information and a photo as proof of sincerity.

  Stay calm, whatever happens. There were so many ways this might go wrong. She might never learn the truth. Or she might learn the truth and prefer the old fake story about herself.

  Less than an hour later, her phone rang: Christopher Swoboda. She stepped outside again.

  “I would love to meet you.” He was sobbing, tears dripping past his smiling lips. “Oh, Berenike, Berenike, for years we wondered about you, about what kind of woman you’ve become. Look at you!” She heard echoes of her mother in that voice and that emotion. “We have to meet! Today, tomorrow? I can’t wait.”

  I, not we. Apparently, Linda really had died.

  “Tonight?” he said. “Dinner! Let me take you to dinner. Linda would have loved to meet you, but she died only two months ago. She almost got to meet you! Where do you live? I can go anywhere you want.”

  They agreed to a downtown restaurant. Berenike tried to sound as happy as he was, but he sounded a lot like Momma, and Momma had been dangerous, willing to do anything to get her way.

  Berenike got out of work in time to go to her shared studio apartment on the Near North Side and change out of her uniform. She took a rental bike to her neighborhood because she could earn a little money repositioning it, and arrived sweaty at her building, a brick-faced box that had absolutely no architectural interest. She tiptoed into her unit to avoid waking a roommate, and after a shower, she took a bus back. AutoKar, which also owned the buses as well as the bicycles, let her ride for free, although in the event of a problem, she had to respond as an employee, on-call for no pay, so it wasn’t really free.

  She hoped that her grandfather—was that the right word for him?—would pay for the meal. He seemed to have money.

  What else did she hope for? She tried to keep her expectations low so her disappointments would be few. Truth was always in short supply, so that might be too much to want. Maybe she could learn just a little more than she already did—but she needed to brace for possible bad news.

  She looked at all the American flags suddenly on display. Even some homeless people were holding little flags to show their love of country—the country that was deliberately starving them—as they conspicuously did not beg on the sidewalk. People and businesses were being pressured into sheeplike patriotism, although her employer might have put up the flags willingly. That’ll stop a virus. The Prez has everything under control. Sure. Three more days of his preening idiocy.

  She found the restaurant in one of the old two-story brick buildings near the river. The elaborate arched windows clashed with the faux Tudor English decor inside, and she tried to ponder the aesthetic mismatch and the American flag at the door to distract herself. For some people, family meant comfort, but familial comfort would be a new experience for her, and she couldn’t expect it.

  The reception robot, another period misfit made worse by the Beefeater tunic and ruff draped over it, told her that Christopher Swoboda had arrived, and it led her to his table. At the sight of her, he leaped up, smiling so wide that his eyes became slits. He wrapped his arms around her tight and held her for a long time, rubbing his gray-flecked beard on her cheek. For a little too long. She pulled back.

  “Grandfather.” That seemed like a polite, conflict-avoiding title. He didn’t feel like family, despite how much he reminded her of Momma. Maybe some sort of biological link was missing, a connecting family scent she’d heard about but never experienced. He smelled of a piney cologne, pleasant but meaningless.

  He gripped her hands. “You’re a full-grown woman now. I haven’t seen you since you were a baby. You look so beautiful!” He stepped back to study her from head to toe.

  She felt more uncomfortable. “You look a lot like Momma.”

  “How is she? You’ll have to tell me. First, I want to know about you. What have you been doing, Berenike? All these years.…”

  They sat down. The table screen lit up, sensing that everyone had settled, and asked for their orders. She considered a glass of wine, which she could never afford for herself, and decided on iced coffee instead—maybe real coffee at a place like this. It would pay to be sharp. She chose simple-to-eat, healthy dishes. She wanted good food for a change, and knew she�
��d likely be talking a lot.

  “How is your life?” he asked again.

  “Fine.” She talked about schooling in general terms and how she was working in management at a busy franchise, not mentioning exactly how humble the job was, what humiliating steps had brought her there, or how her work left her disappointed with her life. “Momma died just a month ago, though. Papa is well, still living here in Milwaukee.”

  “I’m retired. I used to be a doctor, an oncologist.”

  News of Momma’s death didn’t bother him at all, or maybe he already knew. He kept right on talking about other things. Momma would have put on a show of sorrow and concern, even if it had been fake, and a false show would have been more comforting than indifference.

  “I knew you’d be smart.” He beamed, gazing at her intensely. “That was what we asked for, a pretty, healthy, smart little girl.” A robot cart, painted in Beefeater red and gold, rolled up carrying the drinks. He handed her a tall glass of iced coffee, then picked up his glass of red wine and took a contented sip.

  She had been troubled about his indifference, but what he had just said, if he had meant those exact words literally, seemed like a bigger worry. “What you asked for?”

  “Yes, what we asked for.” He set down the glass and looked at her with an odd kind of expectation. “How much do you know? I mean, what did Olivia and Jackson tell you?”

  “They always told me I was adopted.”

  As she expected, he stiffened at that.

  “At least,” she said, “that’s what they said my whole life, until yesterday. Then Papa told me you bought them in vitro fertilization with a donor egg because you wanted to be grandparents.” She was going to take this step by step, so she wouldn’t mention the supposed battle yet.

  He nodded. “They wanted children, and we were happy to be grandparents, so we paid for it. We thought it would help them settle down, and we were wrong. Stupidly wrong. That never works. Children aren’t therapy. They asked … begged for our help to have a child when it turned out Jackson had a … fertility issue.” He shook his head as if to dismiss Papa as worthless in everything. “And we caved. We agreed, your grandmother and I, to get them the best. We learned about a lab from China, I think, offering not donor eggs but engineered zygotes, more expensive, but they came with guarantees.”

  Engineered zygotes. That meant … Stay calm, breathe deeply. Slow and deliberate. Sip some coffee, dark-roasted, genuine, and strong. Go step by step. This was worse than she’d expected, much worse. “Guarantees?” she said.

  “Healthy, most of all.”

  “You said you knew I’d be smart.” She left out the pretty part.

  “Oh, that was just a grandfather talking. You’re the smartest young woman in the universe. The most talented. The prettiest, by far. We knew you’d be intelligent, blond, healthy. That’s what you get when you buy an engineered zygote. It’s all there, sort of like a catalog. We picked out one that was tweaked to be perfect.”

  “Tweaked.” From a catalog.

  “Yes. I worked in cancer treatment, so I know about cells.”

  Engineered. Duped.

  The cart arrived carrying her soup, his salad. She swallowed a few spoonfuls, not tasting the broth and vegetables. She knew the laws about clones and how they were now second-class citizens. She knew what people thought about dupes—the same things that she herself thought.

  He speared a wedge of tomato in his salad, thinking. He looked up and his expression changed. Maybe he’d noticed her shock. “It’s okay. Here’s how it works, simply put. The lab takes apart DNA, combines various bits, makes some changes, picks some mitochondria, too, puts it all in an empty ovum, and lets it divide like an ordinary fertilized egg. Those new cells get separated and then divided some more. In the end, they had ten viable zygotes.”

  “There are ten of me?” Ten dupes. This was getting even worse.

  “No, only one. This is where things started going wrong. We would have been happy with twins, and you would have been identical twins, just like identical twins the … traditional way when a zygote splits in the womb.”

  He had shied away from the word natural, the politicized word in natural law. He knew what he was saying and what it really meant. But he wasn’t offering any empathy. Something was dangerously wrong.

  “In this case, Olivia was implanted with two embryos, and usually only one takes, but this time two did, and she only wanted one, so the other one was injected with a drug and killed. We were heartbroken, but to her it was a triumph.”

  Berenike almost had a twin. She waited for him to say more, meanwhile trying to think and not feel. She had always desperately wanted a sister, but not this way. No one would want one from cloning. Stay calm. Breathe. He was lying, he had to be.

  “That’s when we first thought she wasn’t ready to become a mother.” He looked down, as if it hurt to remember. “She’d gotten clean, stopped using drugs for almost a year. We thought she was ready.…” He looked up, again with that odd expectation. “Are you all right?” He took her hand and held it tight. His was warm and moist. And if his concern had been sincere, he would have offered it earlier.

  “I … well…”

  “She got rehab, and she seemed better. She wanted to begin a new life. Be a normal person, that’s what she said, normal. And Jackson, we thought he was going to be okay, too. All I ever cared about is you.”

  She gently tried to pull her hand back. He wouldn’t let go. She worked very hard to keep breathing.

  “And,” he said, “it turned into a big fight. They went to court. And we weren’t allowed contact. We tried to keep an eye on you through third parties until we were sure they’d settled down and you’d be safe.”

  “They told me I was adopted.” A normal child, not a dupe.

  He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way. Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”

  Safe? Even her hand wasn’t safe with him. He was worse than Momma. Stay calm. Protect yourself.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes. Well … this is a lot to take in.” She was a dupe—if he was telling the truth.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Too late.

  “You should come and live with me.”

  What?

  “I know you have a miserable job. I can give you a much better life.”

  No you can’t. “I’m doing okay.”

  “Does AutoKar employ second-class citizens? Does anyone?”

  She tugged to free her hand, groping for words. How did he know where she worked?

  His grip squeezed painfully tighter, and he leaned forward with a smile, a horrible smile. “I’m not lying. I’ll send you the contract from the lab. You’ll see. You’re not a natural human.”

  “Let me go.”

  “Go where? Go home? You’re not going to have a home much longer.” But he loosened his grip on her hand.

  She stood up. “We’re done here.”

  She walked out as self-controlled as she could, and soon she was panting and trembling, but at least she’d restrained herself until she was out of his sight. AutoKar wouldn’t just fire her, it would demand repayment of all her wages and training on the grounds of misrepresentation of identity, and she’d wind up homeless and in the gutter, unless …

  Unless he was lying, and she knew he was. She felt like a normal human being, and dupes always had something wrong with them. She hurried around a corner and stepped into an alley so she wouldn’t be seen by Swoboda if he came out. She leaned against a wall, the bricks still warm from the setting sun. She worked downtown, and its streets and alleys had always felt familiar and safe, but now … She had to talk to Papa.

  She sent him a message. “Urgent. We need to talk. Right away.”

  And she wanted to get home, to calm down. A bike—yes, she could find a bike, work off some energy, and get away.

  Papa hadn’t answered by the time she stashed the bike and
walked through the humid twilight to her apartment building.

  Two of her three roommates were home when she arrived, eating as they stared at their phone displays. One looked up from her rice and beans.

  “Oh, hi, B.” Her expression changed. “Rough day? Still hurting about your mom?”

  “Yeah.” That seemed like the easiest explanation. She had good roommates—but would they want to live with a dupe? If clones weren’t physically handicapped, they were morally deficient, unnatural, and soulless. It would be like living with a known thief, and if the mutiny changed the law, it wouldn’t change minds about the things that everyone knew.

  She hadn’t eaten, but she wasn’t hungry, just exhausted, or something that felt like exhaustion. “I’m going to bed.” She put on pajamas and climbed into her bunk, but she didn’t sleep. She watched a stupid movie for a long time.

  Papa didn’t answer. Maybe he was busy putting on a show. Or distracted. Or off on some drug trip, or sleeping it off. Maybe Papa would help her, but she couldn’t count on that. What else could she do to prove that she wasn’t a dupe?

  * * *

  I had no choice, either as Dr. Li or secretly as Peng, no access to that easily pronounced word of one simple syllable: no. If I had refused, uttering that word would have been more irresponsible than any other error in my life, and I’d made more than enough already.

  The soldier who had been waiting for me when I left the train station on my way home from work escorted me (with exquisite politeness) into the back of a windowless white van. It was driven to someplace near an airport, judging by the sounds—but not O’Hare, far too few flights. I disembarked in an underground parking area of a building, probably smallish, since there were a limited number of parking spots. Once inside, a colonel named Wilkinson sat across from me at a table in a meeting room, greeted me (also with exquisite politeness), and explained: