Wetware

The logo for Galapagos Wetware was an enormous turtle which smelled of iodine, salt, and seaweed. It hung above the door like a shoe above a cobbler's shop. The geometric pattern of the shell showed in dark greens and yellow, and the turtle's leatherlike flippers squeaked as they moved. Galapagos Wetware was in a building that had originally been a mill, and the architecture of the place still suggested the height of the machine age. What had been made here? Transformers? Electric motors? Generators? When Briggs worked late, he thought he could smell something that lingered from the time a small factory had been operated here. What was it? The scent that came from a spark in an electric engine or from the copper brushes in a generator? Even now he could feel the lingering, almost erotic quality of this scent that had been the essential perfume of that previous industrial age. Briggs's first project, which he had started five years before, had been to design workers who would do jobs that no one else wanted: people who cleaned up in hospital rooms after patients had died from new, virulent diseases, or who worked in nursing homes where people died alone in the usual messes. And people were needed for jobs that still required the efficiency of the human hand. For instance, coal was mined and used in making plastics, but the automated cutter at the face sometimes got jammed, and someone had to go down into the hot depths, to the coal face, and reach into the machine's stainless-steel blades. A lot of people had tried to come up with an automated human hand, but everyone confronted the fact that nothing was as good as the opposable thumb. Briggs's boss, Mashita, was proud that he had been clearheaded enough to start making these creatures when other people were still worrying about whether or not such a thing should be done at all. Of course, there were many emergencies. That was one of the things about all of this: everything was learned the hard way. One night the technicians had looked into the glass-covered platforms where the prototypes had been growing and discovered that the skin of the models was turning black, like plants touched by the first hard frost. Except, of course, these weren't plants. They had the shapes of humans, or the advanced ones did. There had been some speculation about how the room had been infected with weapons-grade smallpox. A pinprick in the tubes that circulated the growing medium, for instance, or maybe the virus had gotten in through some breach of procedures for maintaining a sterile room. The rules were rewritten and enforced more strictly. When the skin turned black from smallpox, the technicians had looked through the glass canopy, where a creature's face had an expression of confused horror and a suspicion of events just beyond its ability to comprehend. The first thing, of course, would have been the sensation, only partially realized, of being almost alive. Briggs tried to imagine what it would be like to exist as an inanimate object feeling the first blush of life. The first sensation must have been increasing warmth. And along with that, an apprehension of the first odors, which here would probably be iodine, but perhaps the novelty of them would have made them pleasant, like the scent of apple pie in an oven. In this moment, though, the creature had been trying to make sense of the effect of the smallpox. It went through the growing medium like acid, like some starved thing that had finally found the feast it had always dreamed of. The prototypes had turned black from the toes up, from the lungs in. It took about twenty minutes. And this, of course, was just enough time to feel how the smallpox worked and to wonder about what it meant. IQs just sufficient to ask the hard questions, but not high enough to be able to answer them. The technicians sat against the wall, hands in fists, bawling. It had surprised management how attached to the first prototypes the tNova, Craig is the author of 'Wetware' with ISBN 9780609605950 and ISBN 060960595X.