“Interesting.” Barlow nodded again. “If you will both excuse me, I have a rather urgent meeting to get to. I look forward to working with you, M. Valdez.” He shook both of their hands, giving Amira a final appraising look before he turned toward the main building.
“A strange man,” Perkins whispered rather loudly as they watched Barlow walk away. He appeared to have forgotten Amira’s glare. “But a very talented and brilliant one, they say. They’re all like that, these men and women who devote themselves to the riddles of science. Aldwych demands the dedicated. I imagine you will feel quite at home among them, my dear.”
Chapter Two
Westport
When Amira arrived in Greater Westport ten years ago, armed with a tattered shoulder bag carrying clothes she would never wear again, the noise and chaos of the metro stations overwhelmed her. Now the trains incited a strange, kinetic excitement. The stop near the Academy was one of the city’s main intersections, an imposing, towering strata of tracks, platforms and rusted stairs that rattled above and beneath the streets. The highest train level was also the fastest – the Gradient line, which traveled between cities on the continent, and the Bullet, which could reach anywhere Earthside in a matter of hours. The slowest routes remained underground and dated back over a hundred years, carrying rattling electric cars through Westport’s scattered stations.
Amira knew them well. The Orange line took her to and from the Academy, but she could also get there through the Green and Gray lines. The Red line ran in a semi-circular path along the oceanfront through Northampton, Sullivan’s Wharf and the Westport Harbor, turning toward bustling Midtown and the cloud-slicing towers of Aldwych.
Aldwych. A city within a city. Technically, a district within the city of Westport, but Amira knew better than to consider Aldwych part of any world but its own. Within its boundaries, elite scientists defined the laws. Justice existed for those who contributed to the district’s power and knowledge, provided they knew their place within Aldwych’s complex, delicate ecosystem, where even the color of a person’s lab coat marked their caste in the scientific order.
Amira gazed numbly out the window where the station signs flashed by in a river of concrete. Her small frame swayed rhythmically in the train car, bathed in absinthe-green light. A battered, hologrammed TV screen delivered the news in static fits.
“…no official word yet on why ISP security forces were denied access to the Carthage station, but Mendel-Soma sources suggest that experiments with radioactive components made travel to and from the station too perilous at present, rendering inspections impossible…. In other news, the Volta station’s chief, Victor Zhang, has been conspicuously absent from Aldwych press conferences in the last month.”
An old woman in a brown coat coughed violently. Amira glanced at her briefly before training her eyes back on the TV.
“In the meantime, President Hume is considering a formal hearing on the genetic research giant’s highly controversial ‘Pandora’ project, following the deaths of its two volunteer subjects this past summer. Much of the criticism has centered on the use of subjects that are perceived to be among the most vulnerable….”
Amira stood up. Why hadn’t she brought music with her? Trying to drown out the news report, she could only think of New Covenant hymns, ones she hadn’t thought of in years that came bubbling up from the dark undertows of memory. Songs of sin and salvation, of realities spread across space and time like beads on a necklace, some sparkling and beautiful, others marred and broken. A dull throb settled in her temples where the holomentic machine’s sensors had sucked the past out of her.
Shrieking brakes signaled the train’s approach to the Riverfront, and Amira departed, ascending from the grimy station to the familiar scent of foaming canal water and moss. Candy-colored graffiti lined the walls along the station’s exit, bearing the usual slogans. Remember the Cataclysm. Human Workers First. We All Bleed the Same (Except Robots, But Fuck Them). She joined the frenetic rush of bodies that always greeted her as she stepped out into the sunlight.
It was an unusually warm late afternoon for September and the Riverfront’s denizens gathered in force along the waterfront’s main promenade. Young students crowded the walkway, spilling out of the neighborhood’s many bars and cafés into a swelling tributary of heavily tattooed street performers, transients and artists with makeshift displays. The sun dipped behind the red brick buildings, illuminating the waterway and the crowd in a muted, peachy glow.
Amira loved to walk this street on cool summer evenings or warm autumn days, but today an invisible, suffocating fog weighed down on her, slowing her progress through the jostling crowd. Pandora. The word clung to her thoughts like a clawed jungle animal onto a tree. Lyrical and taunting. She pushed against her fellow pedestrians, twisting past a pair of musicians lazily strumming their guitars in harmony.
Placement Day had ended with a placement, one she would have never imagined. Her bewilderment swelled with each step, accompanied by a growing sense of injustice. Had the panel intended to sabotage her career before it even began? Had she been a fool to mention the Osiris station? Why else would she have walked away with Pandora’s cloning project, the most hated endeavor in Westport, on her resume?
Her apartment was several blocks from the main waterway, close enough to hear drunken shouts in the later hours but far enough away to sleep through them. Affectionately named the Canary House due to the many birds that had overtaken its pipes and roof, it was one of several Academy-owned student residences in the area. The weathered brick exterior, coated in creeping vines, gave the Canary House a quiet charm.
Amira entered the common area, finding complete silence in the wake of Placement Day. A young male student with a mop of dark hair slept on a forest green couch, buried under a blanket of chemistry books, but the first floor was otherwise abandoned.
Amira arrived at her bedroom, one of eight on the third floor. A note taped to her door, written in a tight, distinctive scrawl, read ‘Music & BBQ on the roof’.
Amira threw her bag unceremoniously on the edge of her wire-framed bed. Though cluttered with books and bio-paper, her room had little in the way of decoration; the only personalized features were a pair of cactuses along the windowsill and a large three-dimensional map of the human brain on her desk. Her only prized possession in the New Covenant, a hand-held telescope unexpectedly gifted by her father, had not made the journey to Westport. Not that she would be able to star-gaze through Westport’s smog.
She forced the window open and stepped out onto the fire escape that led to the roof. The hum of music and animated chatter swelled near the top of the building. The scent of charred synthetic kebab hung in the air, sending a wave of nausea through Amira’s body. Of all her stories about life in the compound, few details shocked her fellow students more than the fact that its residents ate real meat, slaughtered from living animals, in defiance of the Synthetic Meat Act. Most of the students were born well after bio-tech advances rendered synth meat cost-effective, leading to a ban on factory farming. Butchery was an alien and frightening concept to them, but one Amira knew well.