Immunity Index by Sue Burke (best fiction books of all time txt) 📗

its water ruffled by the wind. She could go back home, but … the mutiny couldn’t say no to her now if she was one of the kinds of people it was fighting for. Old-fashioned equality, including for all second-class and disbarred citizens. Nothing about us without us. That was an old doctrine and a good one. She could stay and fight back. Her dad was right about one thing, too. If she was anything weird, if she had some failed superpower, she’d know by now.

But staying on campus was dangerous. The thought jolted her with a realization: She wanted danger. Injustice coalesced around her now. She could be part of the mutiny, a big part.

“I think I’ll try to stay.”

“I’m proud of you,” her father said. He seemed to be thinking. “In the meantime, I recommend against contacting that woman with the mammoth. That would only make it easier for you two to be connected and your status to be confirmed. Besides, she might not know.” He thought again, and his hand with the swirls inked into the skin on his fingers clenched in a white-knuckled fist. He was angry, very angry, but not with her. “I’m glad you want to go on with your life, but there might be a fight, and it will likely be long and hard.”

Her mother added, “You’re being very brave and understanding about this. We want you to know we love you.”

“We brought some information for you,” he said. “It’s printed on paper so it will be hard to trace, and it will tell you more about yourself. Now that you know, you should know everything.”

This was as much of an apology as she was going to get, even though she deserved a lot more. They weren’t even really her parents. She didn’t have real parents.

“The whole truth.” She stood up.

They both stood up, too.

“We’ll be here for you,” her mother said.

Avril couldn’t think of a way to refuse to walk them up to the room to collect their electronics and then back to their car, so she did, and after hugs and murmurs of “I love you” that she couldn’t avoid without making things worse, her mother took an envelope from her purse and handed it to her, and they left.

She sent Shinta an all-clear message and went to the room, clutching the envelope. There seemed to be only one sheet of paper inside.

She opened the envelope the moment the door to the dorm room was closed behind her. The sheet looked to be a copy from an official document with parts of it erased—everything that would have identified it as hers.

Baby girl, 8.22 pounds, 21.2 inches, vaginal delivery, no complications, inconsequential scalp bruising. Full-term SongLab zygote AP 5Y08SD71x6.

That was all. That was enough.

She searched for information about SongLab. It had been based in Shanghai, China, and went out of business eleven years ago. Its owner, a woman named Peng, had been accused of creating designer babies, built piece by piece, a human being created from scratch, not just a modified real person, although Peng sold modifications, too. SongLab had promised hair and eye and skin color, body build, traits like intelligence, creativity, general personality such as extroversion or curiosity, and of course perfect health. Mix and match or choose from a catalog, get implanted, deliver nine months later, and give that beloved little bundle of joy a name.

She’d been engineered. Blond hair, dark eyes, a bit taller than average, slim, smart enough to pick her university since her parents could pay for anything, good at math, and very healthy.

Her parents were also white but not blond, not dark-eyed, and their faces were more angular than hers. Her mom was slim only because she got monthly microbiotic therapy. They used to tell her that she took after a grandmother who’d died before she was born, that she had her hair color and her personality. Her eyes stung. She took a deep breath.

A quick search for “mammoth” and “Wausau” yielded the video and eventually the information that the woman was Irene Ruiz, and she could be traced through the university to her recent degree in environmental ecology. Her hometown was Madison, her mother Celia Ruiz, an artist famous for her children’s picture books. Avril had brought one of those books with her to campus from home, that was how much she’d treasured it. For a while when she was little, she had read it every day.

Shinta arrived with a question on her face. Avril nodded—nothing more to say.

They now shared a secret like shiny new knives. What were they going to do with it? Avril was going to carve a new persona for herself: the mutinous dupe.

I hadn’t seen the sun or talked to anyone for more than a day (I felt confident the clocks in my underground cell were correct) other than my distant coworkers and occasional laconic military staff who tidied and resupplied my quarters. Those conversations were limited and transactional.

And yet, I felt uneasy, as if I’d unconsciously noted a foreshock to an earthquake. The delta cold was coming—perhaps arriving extremely soon rather than very soon. Because of that, I wanted to work at all deliberate speed, but my coworkers, perhaps even more spooked by that ineffable tremor than I was, wanted to work faster, even recklessly.

We had found a way to suppress some of the attenuated virus’s virulence, but the people infected could still contract secondary infections because the virus could overwhelm alveolar macrophages, at least by my analysis, and the ultimate death toll would be too high.

“This is worrisome,” I told my far-off coworkers.

“It could be prevented by antibiotics,” said someone identified as Node 6, whose voice was static-strewn. I was Node 3. (Node 1 listened but never spoke.)

“I don’t think that it would be practical,” Node 2 said. The voice, despite distortions, sounded female, at least to me. I thought of her as Grrl because her falsified voice growled. “We’d face a lot of problems, and a