MANHATTAN

OCTOBER 19

"Well, it's been two weeks since the inspection," Romy said, "and we're still in court trying to get SimGen to open its basic research facilities. So, net gain thus far from all this effort is zip. Or maybe I should sayzero  - if you'll pardon the expression."

"Any time," Zero said.

They had assumed their usual positions in the dank basement under the abandoned storefront on Worth Street: Zero backlit behind the rickety table, swathed in a turtleneck, dark glasses, and a ski mask this time; Romy sitting across from him. She'd walked twice around the block today to assure she hadn't been followed.

Romy knew she'd been in a foul mood lately; she'd spent the past couple of weeks snapping at everyone in the office. And with good reason. The organization was getting nowhere with SimGen. Lots of movement but no forward progress. Like jogging on a treadmill.

And she resented Zero too, with his corny disguise and his secrets and his damned elliptical manner. She could sense him smiling at her behind the layers of cloth hiding his face. She wanted to kick over his crummy folding table, snap his dark glasses, rip off his ski mask, and say, Let's just cut this melodramatic bullshit and talk face-to-face.

Usually she didn't like herself when she fell into this state, but today she relished it. She wanted someone to push her buttons so she could tap dance on a head or two.

"But 'zero' isn't quite accurate," he said. "Your inspections confirmed that SimGen is treating its sims as humanely as advertised."

Romy nodded. That had been the plus side. Though the young sims led a barracks-style life of multilevel bunks and regimented hours, their environment was clean and they were well nourished.

"Humanely," she said. "After spending all that time with so many of them, the word has garnered new meaning in respect to sims."

"How so?"

"Well, so many typical chimp behaviors are missing. The mothers don't carry their young on their backs like chimps, but on their hips like humans. And I saw only a rare sim grooming another. Chimps are always grooming each other. I'd think if SimGen wanted to keep the public thinking of sims as animals they would have allowedsome chimp behavior to carry over."

"First off," Zero said, "it could be learned behavior. If they've never seen or experienced grooming, they might not do it. Plus, sims don't have anywhere near the amount of hair as chimps, so it's not necessary. And if it's genetically linked behavior, it might have disappeared when SimGen 'cleaned up' the sim genome by removing most of the so-called junk DNA. Or the company might have engineered it out of them because it would interfere with their work efficiency."

"That last sounds typical. Too bad, because it seems to give chimps comfort." Romy shook her head. "No grooming, no sex, no joy, no aggression, no love, no hate...it's like they're half alive - lessthan half. It's unconscionable. Chimps laugh, they cry, they exhibit loyalty and treachery, they can be loving and murderous, they can be born ambitious, they can fight wars, they can commit infanticide. A mix of the good and the bad, the best and the worst, just like humans. But sims...sims have been stripped of the extremes, pared down to a bland mean to make them workforce fodder."

She closed her eyes a moment to hold back a hot surge of anger. No use getting herself worked up now.

"How do sims feel about it?" Zero asked. "Ever wonder?"

"All the time. I signed to a lot of the young ones during the inspection tours, asking them just that:How do you feel? andAre you happy? "

"How did they answer?"

"They answered 'Okay' to the first, but they didn't seem to know what 'happy' meant."

"Tough concept."

Romy shot to her feet and walked around in a tight circle, grinding a fist against her palm.

"Maybe I should quit this."

"Romy - "

"No, I'm serious. My life is one tangled mass of dissatisfaction. I should quit the organization, put in my time at OPRR, settle down, marry a fellow bureaucrat, buy a house, have kids, and forget all this crap! Life would be so much simpler and I'd be so much happier!"

"Would you?"

"At least I wouldn't be so damn frustrated!" You're losing it, she thought. Keep a lid on it. But she couldn't. She needed to spew. "Everywhere I turn, someone's hiding something from me: couldn't find anything useful at SimGen, you won't show me your face or let me in on who else is in the organization. Hell, for all I know, OPRR's got a secret agenda they're keeping from me too! I'm sick of it! Sick to death!"

Zero said nothing, merely sat and waited for her to cool. Good move.

With a little more circle walking and fist grinding, the heat seeped away and she dropped back into the chair.

"Okay," she said. "I'm back."

"What can I do to make this better?"

"Nothing. It's not you, it's me. I always seem at odds with a world that I should be so thankful for. Look what the genome revolution has done. We'll all live longer because so many genetic diseases have already been wiped out, and days are numbered for the rest of them. Heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, certain cancers - if they ran in your family you pretty much had to resign yourself to dealing with them at some point in your life. Not these days. Germline therapy has seen to that. Cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, MS - hell,nobody has those anymore."

"Jerry Lewis finally stopped those telethons."

Romy had to smile. "There you go - something else to be thankful for. And then there's...me. You know about my splice, I assume."

Zero nodded. "Changed your life, didn't it."

Oh, yes, she thought. You might even say it saved my life.

She remembered adolescence as a time of chaos. Under the influence of the new hormones surging through her maturing body, her childhood fits of violence segued into other modes of acting out. When she was Reasonable Romy she was an A student, but then somewhere in her system a switch would be thrown and Raging Romy would emerge. If Reasonable Romy had a fault, it was that she felt too much, cared too much. Raging Romy cared for no one, least of all herself, and needed to go to extremes to feel anything.

She stifled a groan as she remembered the reckless sex - she cut a sexual swath through the willing males and females in each of the three high schools she attended, then jumped into drinking, drugs, shoplifting, the whole gamut. When she was caught dancing naked on the roof of the gym she qualified for emergency institutionalization.

During her time in the locked ward of the hospital, the doctors explained that Reasonable Romy was the real Romy, the only Romy, but at times her neurohormones would undergo wild fluctuations, causing her to act out of character. They said it was a form of what they called bipolar disorder and they had medications that would keep her neurohormones - and thus her behavior - on an even keel.

Wrong.

Oh, the drugs worked for a while. She survived high school and her parents' divorce - Raging Romy's behavior playing a major part in the breakup - And Got Through College Without too many incidents. During grad school she started noticing increasingly wide mood swings. She managed to earn her Ph.D. in Anthropology, but shortly after that she was out of control.

A parade of doctors tried a wide array of chemical cocktails to regulate her behavior. No luck. Finally someone suggested a radical new treatment - gene therapy. A defective gene in her brain cells had been identified as the cause of her disorder. Using a viral vector, they could replace the aberrant base sequence in the gene and get it back to normal functioning.

But no success was guaranteed. The therapy was still experimental in those days. The virus would target only areas of the brain that controlled her serotonin and dopamine levels; if it got to enough cells, the levels would stabilize, normalize. If not...well, there'd been all sorts of releases to sign.

Apparently the vector virus reached a sufficient number of cells: Raging Romy never showed her face again.

But she wasn't gone. She remained in the unspliced cells, whispering, rattling her chains...a ghost in Romy's machine. And when Reasonable Romy was angry or stressed, she could feel Raging Romy pushing her way to the surface, trying to break through to be reborn.

And the scary part was, sometimes Romy found herself cheering her on, almost hoping she'd make it. Because she'd felt so damngood when Raging Romy had the wheel.

"Yes, it did," Romy told Zero. "I had a genetic defect spliced out of me and I've never regretted it. I'm more my own boss because of it. So why aren't I overjoyed with our brave new world?"

Zero said nothing.

The perfect response, Romy thought. If I don't know, he sure as hell doesn't.

She sighed. "Anyway, our inspections were satisfactory - as far as they got. But they could be performing vivisection in that basic research building for all we know."

She'd had two ongoing problems to contend with during the inspection tour. Lack of access to basic research had been the major issue. The other had been the relentless come-ons from Luca Portero; the man somehow had developed the notion that he was irresistible to women, and that Romy's repeated refusals of his invitations to lunch, dinner, and even breakfast were simply her way of playing hard to get.

She didn't mention that to Zero. What was the point? OPRR would be locked in court with SimGen for the foreseeable future and she probably wouldn't see Luca Portero again for a long time, if ever.

But just thinking about that man only added to her edginess.

Zero said, "We'll let the courts deal with the basic research issue for now. The good news is that after many man-hours of effort by a number a people, we've finally hit pay dirt on that license plate number you so wisely recorded - a number we wouldn't know had you not thrown them a curve by showing up early. A lucky day for us when you joined the organization."

She could feel his praise mellowing her - a little. Always nice to be appreciated, but how sincere was he? Was it that he had sensed her mood and was simply trying to placate her? So damn hard to read him without a glimpse of his face or his eyes. Almost as bad as email. Worse - even email had those annoying little smilies.

But she remembered his excitement when she'd told him about the plate. He hadn't been faking that.

"About time something paid off," she said.

"Not a big payday, I'm afraid, but who knows where it will lead. The truck was leased from a firm in Gooding, Idaho, by a private individual named Harold Golden."

"Really." She drew out the word. "What's a private individual from Idaho doing on SimGen's campus?"

"It gets better: Harold Golden's MasterCard is sound, so the leasing company never checked him out. But we did, and guess what? Harold Golden doesn't exist. He's just a name on a credit card account."

"How can you be sure?"

"Can't be one hundred percent sure unless we find something like his Social Security number belonging to a soldier who died in Afghanistan or Iraq. That's not the case here. The provenance of his Social Security number appears sound, but can you imagine a man who's doing some sort of business with SimGen who has never taken out a loan of any kind? Who has one credit card on which he charges only one thing: the lease of three trucks?"

"Unlikely...but that doesn't mean he doesn't exist."

"I can tell you that he doesn't live at the Boise address he gave the leasing company. And that his MasterCard bill goes to an entirely different address: a mail drop in Hicksville."

"Long Island?"

"At the risk of sounding like an infomercial: But wait - there's more. The investigator I sent to Idaho turned up something else: Harold Golden began leasing these trucks four years ago. The man who runs the company remembers him because Golden wanted the exact same trucks that had been returned that very day from another lessee. Guess who that lessee was?"

Romy shrugged. "Mercer Sinclair?"

"Close. Manassas Ventures."

"Doesn't mean a thing to me."

"Manassas Ventures was the source of the start-up capital that allowed the brothers Sinclair to get SimGen rolling. Consequently it controls a huge block of SimGen stock."

"And the connection to Harold Golden?"

"At this point, nothing beyond the trucks. But guess where Manassas Ventures has its office."

"Hicksville?"

"Exactly. And it has a strange way of doing business. The company rents space in a small out-of-the- way office building but doesn't seem to have any employees. Manassas Ventures is on the door, but it's a door that remains locked all day, every day, week after week. Makes you wonder, doesn't it."

"A man who doesn't exist and a business that doesn't do any business."

Romy felt a tingle along the nape of her neck. "Am I detecting a pattern here?"

"I think so. Ironically, we've been aware of Manassas Ventures all along but never paid any attention to it. I'd assumed it was simply another of the countless venture capital groups that have popped up since the early nineties - one that happened to get lucky and strike it very rich. But I should have known never to assume anything where SimGen is concerned."

"If Manassas owns a lot of company stock, then it's logical for it to be involved in SimGen doings."

"But logic seems to be taking a breather here. For instance, if you were an investment group with SimGen on your list and flush with capital, what would you be doing?"

"I'd be crowing. I'd have impressive offices to attract new ventures to underwrite."

"Exactly. Yet Manassas Ventures's only address is a deserted space in a nowhere building."

"Almost as if they're hiding."

"They are. Behind Harold Golden. I believe Manassas invented him as a layer of insulation between itself and the truck rentals. And it almost worked. We were just lucky that our investigator asked the right questions on a day when someone at the leasing company was in a talkative mood. Otherwise, we'd never know the Manassas connection."

"But why insulate itself?"

The tingle in Romy's neck moved across her shoulders and down her spine. She sensed the situation moving beyond simply wrong...something sinister at work here.

Zero said, "Because I'm betting that Manassas Ventures has ongoing involvement with SimGen's day- to-day workings that it doesn't want anyone to know about. And the most likely reason for keeping an activity secret is that it's illegal."

"But SimGen is one of the richest corporations in the world, with a lock on a unique product" - she hated when sims were referred to as "product," but this time it fit - "in high demand. They're practicallyminting money. They've got it all. Why risk a connection to something illegal? It doesn't make sense."

"It does if whoever is behind Manassas Ventures is pulling strings inside SimGen. Pulling strings that lead to the basic research facility, perhaps?"

That struck a nerve...might explain the company's adamant refusal to let OPRR near the building, even with a court order.

Zero went on and Romy could sense him fairly vibrating with anticipation. "If something illegal or even quasi-legal is going on, we may have found the lever to crack open SimGen's wall of secrecy. All because you showed up earlier than expected."

"And caught a worm."

"Maybe a snake. I'd say Manassas Ventures is long overdue for an in-depth probe of its workings and personnel, wouldn't you."

"Anything I can do?"

"In regard to Manassas, no. But as for our friend, Patrick Sullivan - "

"Oh? So he's 'our friend' now, is he?"

Romy sensed a smile behind Zero's ski mask. "Not a close friend, not a bosom buddy, but..." His voice trailed off.

"But what?"

"I don't know...there's something about him. Maybe I'm feeling a little sorry for him because he's going through the worst time of his life."

"Really?"

"His girlfriend dumped him, his house is a charred ruin, he's been living in a motel room for weeks, and SimGen is putting the screws to his career."

Romy felt her interest growing. "How so?"

"They're pressuring Sullivan's clients to drop him."

She shook her head in amazement. "How do youknow all this?"

"I have my sources."

"You're a SimGen insider. You've got to be."

"Back to Mr. Sullivan?"

Romy tore her mind away from the tantalizing possibilities of Zero's identity. Sullivan...his predicament did sound pretty awful, but the shyster deserved it.

"Don't expect me to shed tears for any lawyer, especially one of the headline hunting variety who's been taking those sims for a ride."

"You're assessment of him might be accurate, but I've got to hand it to him: He's lost a number of big clients and he's still hanging tough."

"No kidding?" Romy was surprised. "I'd have thought he'd have folded like an old suitcase by now."

"Well, I don't expect him to hold up forever, so I believe it's time we stepped in. And speaking of suitcases..." Zero lifted a large metal attache case onto the table. "I'm hoping the contents of this will bolster his fortitude."

He slid it toward Romy who released the catches and lifted the top. She repressed a gasp at sight of the stacks of currency.

"How much is in here?"

"Two hundred and fifty thousand."

"What's wrong with a check?"

"I feel a man like Mr. Sullivan - I am not blind to his failings - will require more concrete proof of the seriousness of our interest."

Here was concrete, all right - a whole sidewalk. "How do I approach him?"

"Directly, I would think. I'll leave the details up to you."

Zero rose. A sign the meeting was over.

"But where do I say the money's from?"

"Again, I leave that to your inventive mind. But since I know how lying bothers you, I'm going to make things easier. I'm giving the money to you, no strings attached."

"You'rewhat ?"

"That's right. To do with as you wish. Buy a house or a fleet of sports cars if you want. It's all yours."

As the shock wore off, she began to understand. "I see what you're up to."

Zero said, "But should you decide to approach Mr. Sullivan with it, I suggest being nice to him. You might find yourself spending a good deal of time with Mr. Patrick Sullivan."

"I can hardly wait." She snapped the lid shut on the money. "That's it? You're letting me walk out of here with a quarter of a million in cash?"

"Yourquarter of a million. Remember?"

Romy smiled. This was turning out to be not such a bad day after all.