Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy:
A Love Story
Handsome Kioga Matson, waking from a fitful programmed microsleep imperfectly contoured by the experimental orexin-modulating drug Ailurexant he had self-prescribed, and landing once again in yet another of those Science Parks that constituted his insular and discontiguous adopted homeland, a quasi-state composed of homogenous R&D and prototyping sites in a globe-girdling network of exclusive brainpower, had to pause a moment on consciousness’s hazier edges, an interzone fuzzed also by an ongoing bad episode of Kyoto Duck Flu against which he had been administering a powdered antiviral inhalant from NexBio, DAS939, in order to recall exactly what antiquated nation-state now hosted him.
Looking blurrily out the window as the SonicStar plane taxied, he saw a line of modest mountains ringing, at some distance, the small corporate landing field. So this could not be Kalundborg in Denmark nor Seletar in Singapore nor Granta in the United Kingdom. But it could very well have been Sunlight in Montana, USA, or Acheson in Canada or Baikampady in India. Very disorienting.
A glimpse of some lush emerald tropical vegetation caused the knowledge of his current destination to click into place in his memory. He had come down in Parque Arví, Medellín, Colombia. Along with other boffins Kioga was to participate in a presentation for MercoSur trade reps, his field of expertise being industrial metabolics. And he was also to spend a full glorious twenty-four hours in the presence of his fiancée, Mallory Sloper, whom he had not seen in six whole weeks.
In theory, what bliss!
And yet, Kioga found himself strangely unexcited at the prospect of reconnecting with his bride-to-be. He imagined with some degree of accuracy that much of their private time here would be spent firming up the endless details of their elaborate wedding next year—details that had already consumed a myriad of online hours when apart—and that rather too little time would be spent with any kind of preferable bedroom athletics. This skewed ratio of work to fun irked Kioga, and he had to strive hard to convince himself that everything would be different after they were married.
As the ground crew wheeled a set of steps up to the opening hatch of the jet, Matson sneezed suddenly with contaminatory gale force. He fumbled out a packet of tissues and evacuated his nostrils, preparatory to blasting another hit of DAS939 into his sinuses. That task done, he woke his nap-silenced phone and, feeling somewhat guilty at his ingratitude toward Mallory’s majestic and unyielding love, rang her up. She’d be happy if he checked in immediately upon landing and disgruntled if he didn’t—though she would never admit her displeasure, instead merely affecting a certain sharpness of voice that cloaked ostensibly jovial phrases in sonic barbed wire.
The superfine patrician bone structure of his beloved’s face, wrapped in seemingly poreless, peachy flesh finer than spidersilk, filled his phone’s Retina Display. Since last telephonically encountered, Mallory had changed her hairstyle to a platinum pixie cut layered with living crimson pinfeathers that tapped her scalp’s blood supply to stay perpetually vibrant.
“Darling! You beat me to Colombia. And I so wanted to be there to meet you! But the Osaka conference ran long.”
“It’s just as well. I’m a bit under the weather. La grippe canard. I can use a little downtime first.”
“Well, I’m somewhere over the Pacific at the moment. ETA about two hours from now.”
“Fine. You can wake your Prince Charming with a kiss.”
“But of course! And then—”
Kioga brightened. “And then?”
“We simply have to discuss the guest list!”
Kioga suppressed a wince. The dreaded guest list discussion had already occupied one-hundred-and-fifty-two-point-five hours of his life. He knew the stat precisely from totaling all the automatically tagged hours in his lifelog. Sometimes it seemed that this endless parsing of the relative affinity bonds of friends, relatives, and business associates would extend into infinity, finding an angel-winged Kioga still indecisively parceling out seats in the heavenly cloudbanks.
“Of course. I can’t wait. See you soon.”
“Mwah! Bye for now, lover.”
* * *
Lodgings for braintrust gypsies at Parque Arví were, of course, more or less identical with the facilities at a hundred other Science Parks, an organically efficient architecture and interior design that bespoke a kind of stern technocratic accommodation with the needs of the flesh and spirit, acknowledging that a measured slight amount of earned pampering was conducive to productivity and creativity, while any hints of hedonism would amount to a venal betrayal of a sacred, semi-public trust, not to mention stockholder bottom-line expectations.
Kioga’s phone checked him in as he walked through the lobby, instantly making his location known to everyone in his social and business networks. Greetings and memos filled his message queue, but the phone flagged nothing for his immediate attention. A message from Jimmy Velvet, declaring boisterously that Jimmy himself would imminently be “hot-cradling in Parque Arví,” lifted Kioga’s spirits. Any time spent with Mr. James Swinburne Vervet would involve exotic inebriants, Planck-level conversation, and possible rousing altercations with offended pecksniffs and grundies of all stripes. But right now, Kioga felt relieved to have a couple of hours to himself.
Up in his room Kioga unpacked his small bag, his essential invariant kit. He propped a dented, military-hardened, brushed aluminum digital picture frame on his dresser top. A memento of his recently deceased mother, Brenda, the frame cycled through photos of the Matson family: a sprawling, well-fed, bright-eyed Anglo clan, jolly as a whitebread Christmas pudding with one dark little raisin embedded.
Kioga regarded that selfsame grownup raisin in the smart mirror over the dresser. (The mirror flashed a mild warning that his body temperature was one-point-seven degrees above normal, courtesy of la grippe canard.) Six-two, burnt sienna skin, hair buzzed almost to nullity, at age twenty-eight he resembled, some said, Uganda’s still vibrant elder statesman, President Frank Mugisha.
Not exactly a phenotype in conformity with his adopted kin.
Twenty-five years ago, in 2015, Brenda Matson had been a KBR mercenary attached to the USA’s AFRICOM forces based in Entebbe, Uganda, where they waged a cat-and-mouse contest with the fighters of al-Shabaab. Captured after a fierce firefight in the bush, Brenda Matson had been removed to a tiny remote village on the shores of Lake Kioga that hosted the terrorist cell. There she had been securely bound and dumped into a big multifamily hut, all gnarly poles, mud-walls and palm-thatched roof. Hot, smelly, claustrophobia-inducing, with manic house geckos skittering every which way.
Brenda’s training served to tamp down but not utterly eradicate a fear that threated to swell to panic if she should divert her will for a second. Her zip-tied wrists and ankles ached. Everyone she could see, from the male fighters to the women and adolescents, were heavily armed with Chinese weapons. Everyone, in short, except for Brenda and a very charming naked boychild of three. Oddly enough, the neglected toddler, ignored by the chattering flustered and hyperactive adults, had gravitated instinctively to Brenda, eventually falling asleep against her cramped side while, numb, nervous, hungry and stinking, Brenda awaited rescue.
Within a few hours of the geo-stabilization of her transponder-chipped person, and following an undetectable UAV survey of the scene, AFRICOM softly deposited a Bee Hive in the middle of the village.
From the armaments package emerged hundreds of lethal thumb-sized aerial drones, rocketing on burst chemical propellants. The pack of angry discriminating bees promptly drilled straight through the skulls of all the belligerents before their fingers could even compress a trigger, leaving Brenda and the little, suddenly wailing boy the only living inhabitants of the carnage.
When the AFRICOM forces came for her, Brenda thought she was fine.
But that didn’t explain why she insisted irrationally on squeezing the lone young survivor tight to her chest and refusing to be parted from him, while issuing mad threats of physical assault against her comrades, even while she was being carried on a stretcher into the waiting copter.
Kioga Matson often rehearsed this chapter of his autobiography. He recalled nothing genuine of the fateful incident, but had heard the tale so many times that he had developed vivid false memories of it. Yet oddly enough, they were all channeled from his mother’s POV. He saw himself clutched to her chest as if in some Nollywood biopic of Brenda’s life.
Kioga’s adoption into an upper-middle-class American family ensured that, barring some grand personal failure of character, ill health or a suite of implacable vices he would slide effortlessly into the meritocracy. He failed to encounter even a whiff of racism in the exclusive enlightened realms through which he sailed as a boy and teen and young adult; developed his propensity for economics and science into expertise in the field of industrial metabolism—the discipline of charting and optimizing how raw materials and energy were turned into products and waste; and his departure from graduate school at the laudable age of twenty-three found him firmly emplaced in the Science Park network, earning an admirable salary and feeling generally fulfilled.
His engagement to Mallory Sloper, powerful witch of the carbon-sequestration wizard clan, whom he had met three years ago at an epochal gathering in Migdal HaEmek, Israel, only reinforced his feelings of good fortune and gratitude.
He hoped he had thanked his mother often enough for giving him this wonderful life, so far above the global norm and so far above his lot at birth. There would be no more such filial opportunities to render gratitude and love. After her exemplary stint as a grunt, Brenda Matson had graduated into the spectral ranks of international spook-dom, and just last year had gone missing in the mountains of Khövsgöl, Mongolia, on the track of a subversive group calling itself Lex Talionis.
* * *
Turning away from the dresser mirror, Kioga once more affirmed his own happiness with how his life had developed.
And yet—and yet—there was one wordless part of him, buried deep and generally ignored, that still dwelled in prelapsarian bliss on the simple shores of his natal lake.
Kioga forwent another dose of Ailurexant and yet got a surprisingly solid natural nap. He awoke at noon—the presentation was scheduled for 2 PM—and, refreshed and wearing a trig new Buddy Cheetah smart suit in fawn and aurora orange, ambled to the commissary.
The air here in vegetation-rich, manicured Parque Arví was wholesome and fragrant. No noise penetrated the pastoral campus from the city of five million people—rich and poor, struggling and well-off—that stretched away in all directions from the base of the lofty enclave, extending also in ramshackle vertiginous barrios halfway up the mountainside until the squatters encountered the lethal perimeter of the Science Park.
An energetic conversational knot occupied the lobby of the dining hall, and Kioga was startled to spot Mallory thoroughly engaged with a host of fellow savants, some of whom Kioga recognized, others not. He came up behind his fiancée and gently clasped her elbow.
“Oh, hello, dear, how are you?” She pecked his cheek. “Stuart and I got so busy on the flight talking about the latest exciting work out of Biorecro that we just couldn’t break away. They’ve increased the uptake in their transgenic poplar trees by fifteen percent!”
Stuart Holliston, tan and swimmer-fit, bestowed upon Kioga a smile dangerously close to a smirk. “Your lovely woman has some great notions about how to monetize this, Matson. If you’re not careful, she’s going to make you both filthy rich.”
“Oh, I’m decidedly high-maintenance, Stuart. A regular luxury sink. I’ll spend her money faster than those poplars suck up CO2.”
Kioga waited a moment for Mallory to break off and accompany him to table, but she showed no signs of wanting to flee present company. So he simply said, “I’m very hungry, so I’ll see you after the presentation.”
He walked into the dining hall feeling crestfallen and sad.
But the sight of Jimmy Velvet seated at a table and surrounded by seemingly every waitress in the commissary cheered Kioga immensely. He strode over.
Jimmy familiarly held the hand of one young uniformed woman, a native beauty, and chattered in rapidfire Spanish that caused her to grin and nod. Finished, he kissed her hand and she departed, giggling, with her fellow refectory angels.
“Ky, my ligand! You’re just in time! I’ve only now promoted a bottle of Valdivieso 2035 from that brilliant lass. What a peach! And that gorgeous rump! As for the wine, it’s a trifling Chilean Champagne. Undoubtedly inferior to the Veuve Clicquot you regularly bathe in, but needs must. Not on the menu, but the Director has a private stock. Join me, lig, join me!”
The wine arrived in a homeostatic chiller, along with two giant bowls of steaming ajiaco soup, with succulent avocado on the side. Kioga realized then just how famished he was. He forked up the floating encobbed corn from his bowl and stripped it clean in well under sixty seconds. Jimmy matched him, bite for bite. The cold bubbly went down smoothly and seemed not to interact badly with Kioga’s meds, leaving him feeling buoyant and vivid. And for business purposes, he could always pop a tab of Null-borracho if necessary.
Their hearty soup finished, awaiting the dessert of bocadillo and panelitas (guava and panela candy), Jimmy dabbed neatly at his lips with a cloth napkin. “So, I see Mallory is networking up a storm while she’s here. And we’ve got the presentation in an hour or so. Does all that leave any time or spirit whatsoever for a little mattress gymnastics? Or will you be debating candied almonds versus cocktail wienies until the wee hours of this splendid, moon-kissed tropical night?”
Kioga winced. He felt he had to defend Mallory against the very charges he himself had been harboring a little while ago. “Come on now, Jim, she’s not at all like that. You’re being much too harsh on the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”
“Better I speak now than when the matrimonial saddle is fully cinched.”
“I’m certain the orgiastic noises spilling from my quarters tonight will shock the entire staff.”
“Hrm. Well, if you find yourself at loose ends this evening, be advised that I and some others are heading into the city. The Zona Rosa, Poblado ’hood. The Parque Lleras district, to be precise. Many, many square blocks of wanton women, inveigling intoxicants, hip-oiling music, and finger foods of the gods. Or so I’ve been promised.”
“Thanks. But I know I’ll be extremely busy with my own exclusive amorous affairs.”
“Your phone knows my phone, lig. Hey, look at the time! We’re due a mile away a week ago! What are they using for personal transport here? Not those cheesy little Tata PicoPods! Oh, my word! My spine will never be the same.…”
Kioga tried to spot Mallory as they rushed out, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Large yet somehow intimate, with its reconfigurable walls and fixtures, the conference room already held all the expectant and highly polished Mercosur representatives when Jimmy and Kioga arrived. Kioga felt pleased that he was not the last braintruster to show up. In fact, Mallory and Stuart kept everyone waiting till a whole ninety seconds past the scheduled start of the presentation. His fiancée smiled hastily at him, squeezed his shoulder in the manner of a sports teammate in passing, then settled down at her assigned seat.
The group presentation went well, thought Kioga, although, truth be told, he gave only half his concentration to the speeches, even including his own part. The only slight glitch occurred when Jimmy, explaining the efficacy of the new options for seabed mining, his speciality, likened the process to “hoovering vomit off a Scotsman.” But aside from that gaffe, the Mercosur suits seemed well pleased with the valuable new insights and profit-enhancing technologies presented to them.
When the meeting broke up, the time was almost seven PM. Kioga hastened to Mallory’s side, intent on cutting her out of the herd.
“Oh, Ky, so wonderful to be together at last. I’ve missed you so!” She fussed with her phone. “Step over here a minute with me, please.”
Mallory guided Kioga behind some slowly repositioning panels she had requisitioned that pivoted and angled, butterfly-gentle, to enclose them in a privacy alcove. She gazed at him with her limpid driftglass eyes and Kioga felt his heart get the whim-whams.
“Ky, dear—I’ve just realized what’s truly important in our relationship.”
Kioga could hardly believe his ears. “Yes, dearest?”
“We need to make babies. Several of them. Just as soon as we’re married.”
This urgent procreative game plan was the last thing Kioga had been expecting to hear. Naturally, he was disconcerted, so much so that he had trouble composing a response. But Mallory filled in the conversational gap.
“Have you been following the newsfeeds lately? Something clicked inside me today. I had the most startling revelation. Life-changing, in fact. It jumped out at me when I was talking with the others at lunch. I realized that despite everything the Science Parks have been doing, this world is still in dire shape. Just look at those weird things breeding in the Pacific Garbage Patch—my god! Oh, of course we’ve made great progress. Essential stuff got done just in time, and is continuing to get done, thanks to our kind of people. We’ve halted the planet’s tragic slide over the past twenty years. Without us, and people of our cadre, there would have been nothing but chaos and suffering, mass die-offs and one unending catastrophe after another.
“But the idiocracy is out-birthing us! Nine billion humans right now, with another two billion to come before population growth is finally halted. More and more marching morons to fuck things up, every minute! Now, I know we don’t have to match their numbers one for one. We have brains and talent and money and organization and virtue and character on our side. But still, it’s a race to the finish, which element in the equation will determine the outcome for the planet. Will it be our smarts, or their animal fecundity? Can we possibly save the breeders from themselves?”
Mallory gripped both of Kioga’s hands and gazed imploringly and sincerely into his eyes. He could not doubt her sudden passion for the topic.
“And here I was, worried over the trivialities of our wedding, when I should have been focused on blending our superior genepools to produce the next generation of global saviors. Cognitive homogamy, to ensure our future security.”
Cognitive homogamy? Next generation of global saviors? Suddenly Kioga felt like the Virgin Mary. Or was Mallory Mary and he the Holy Ghost?
“That’s why I know you’ll understand, Ky, when I explain that I have to leave right away tonight. Stuart has presented me with a rare chance to earn a solid nest egg for our future family. But I’ve got to jump on it immediately. We want to give our children the best start in life, don’t we? Of course, I knew you’d agree! So kiss me quickly now, and I promise you that there’ll be no more foolish talk of seating arrangements. We’re going to get married as simply and quickly as possible, once we’re together again. I’ve consulted my schedule, and that appears to be at Instituto Butantan, Sao Paulo, three months from now. And then we can start raising our superior brood.”
Mallory was pressing her lips efficiently against Kioga’s before he knew what was happening, the wings of their little shelter had parted, and she was gone.
Outside the conference building Kioga found Jimmy Velvet waiting for him. Jimmy mantled Kioga’s shoulders with a comradely arm and said, with lateral, soreness-deflecting tact, “As Omar the Goofy Sufi once remarked, ‘I often wonder what the punters buy one half so noxious as the stuff they swill.’ Let us conduct our own field trials, my lig!”
* * *
The nighted, OLED-lit, club-dense, numbered streets around the small Parque Lleras throbbed with roisterous humanity. Kioga found himself so instantly and immersively swept up in the weekend carnival of flesh and frolic that all the hurt and confusion surrounding Mallory’s absurdly sociological treatment of their love dwindled down to a tiny, almost totally ignorable kernel of disappointment and unease located, as best as Kioga could tell, midway between his navel and groin.
Jimmy started the liquid part of the night’s menu by ordering mojitos made with maracuya passion fruit. Apparently it was illegal for the drinks to be served in any container smaller than liter-sized plastic tumblers. Toting his beverage through the happy crowd gyrating to ambient music—some kind of chutney-fado mélange, at once hip-shaking and mournful—Kioga marveled at the scads of beautiful women sauntering arm-in-arm. Apparently, Colombia produced nothing along the XX lines but gorgeous females ranging the spectrum from pixieish waif to Junoesque Amazon. He felt lubricious stirrings all throughout his body that promised to drown, at least temporarily, the radioactive kernel of regret Mallory had implanted.
Jimmy intuited Kioga’s thoughts and said in a loud voice that still hardly penetrated the surf of speech and music, “Colombia’s number three globally in recreational somatic tailoring! More licensed and unlicensed omics tweakers than Brazil and Macau combined! Be careful though! They’re not all baseline double-ex! If that even matters!”
Having manfully dealt with their original cocktails, Kioga and his pal began an increasingly unsteady crawl through a variety of clubs and bars, intent on participating fully in the scene, sampling all the native drinks while not neglecting a modest amount of alcohol-buffering foodstuffs. After a few hours of metronomic imbibing, close to midnight, Kioga devoured two plates of aborrajados, cheese-packed plantain fritters, followed by some arepas de chócolo, and achieved a momentary lucidity, the eye of a swirling internal ethanol hurricane.
He found himself precariously perched atop a stilt-legged bamboo chair at a quaintly neon-decorated bar. Jimmy was visible nowhere.
Kioga turned to his left, and discovered an alluring woman staring at him with frank interest.
Rather petite, yet busty and well-curved, the woman wore her long dark hair simply, in lustrous parallel curtains that framed a strong set of features: hazel eyes topped with naturally thick eyebrows; delicately hooked nose; wide expressive mouth lipsticked a Boysenberry shade; an impudent chin. She wore a tight-fitting short-sleeved shirt, on whose front abstract animated artwork ceaselessly replicated the colorful gyrations of the autocatalytic Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction; simple classic piña-spidersilk jeans; and high-heeled lizard-skin espadrilles.
“Hola,” Kioga managed.
“You are from Parque Arví,” responded the woman in English.
Kioga’s Science Park affiliation had never sounded less glamorous. “Is it that obvious? Couldn’t I be, oh, some rich princeling from Swaziland?”
“Yes, I think maybe. In another life. But I heard you and your friend talking, so I know different. But why are you here?”
Kioga swiveled around, away from the woman, and almost fell off his stool. “Jimmy! Where are you, Jimmy! I’m being cruelly interrogated!”
The woman laughed brilliantly. “Your friend cannot help you now. He has gone off with two very indecorously dressed tarts. This is the correct word, I think, ‘tarts’?”
“Knowing Jimmy, it is probably an entirely accurate description.”
“Very well, then. You have no hope of rescue. So, I ask, why are you here?”
“Well, just to have a good time.”
“You cannot do that in Parque Arví, with others of your kind?”
“Hey now, wait just a minute. ‘My kind?’ I’m as human as you, aren’t I?”
“Sometimes I wonder. You Science Park people seldom descend to this level. You live apart from me and my kind. You work with each other, play with each other—marry each other. Maybe you are indeed a separate species—or becoming one. It is very much like something I read once, by a Mister Wells.”
Kioga felt vaguely offended. “Except that we Eloi are the ones in this scenario who do all the work.”
The woman’s delicate nostrils flared. “Ha! You think I and my friends do not labor like donkeys, just to survive! I could show you such things—”
“Oh, you work hard, I’m sure. That is, those of you who aren’t on some kind of government dole. But even your best workers don’t really perform intelligently, or with any long-term vision. You’re too focused on pleasure, and instant gratification. You have no code to live by, as we do in the Parks. No guiding principles.”
“Instant gratification! I would be instantly gratified to kick you in los huevos right this minute!”
Kioga held up a placatory palm. “Okay, stop. Somehow we got off on the wrong foot. Couldn’t we start over? My name is Kioga Matson.”
“Please accept my apologies. I am Avianna Barranquilla.”
They shook hands. Avianna had a strong grip, noted Kioga. Yet still, her small hand, lost in his, proclaimed a femininity he found inflaming to his rising lust. A brief flash of Mallory’s terse goodbye kiss interrupted his wet reveries, then dissipated like exhausted utility fog in a maker cabinet.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Gracias. Just a Club Colombia beer, if you please.”
Kioga opted for the same. A sweetish lager, the beer refreshed Kioga without contributing too much more to his inebriated state.
“You know I work for the Science Parks, Avianna. But what do you do?”
She looked slightly distressed. “It is a long story. Basically, I am trying to help my brother with an entrepreneurial project of his. But perhaps we should avoid speaking of our vocations too much, yes? It seems a touchy subject. All my fault, I admit.”
“All right then. What should we talk about?”
“Well, what do you think of my beautiful country?”
“To be honest, I’ve hardly seen enough of it to form a worthwhile opinion. Parque Arví, of course, is well run and has produced some good things—but that’s true of every other Science Park on the planet. The people I’ve seen downtown here seem happy and healthy and carefree and congenial—but I assume they’re middle class or above and quite secure. I don’t know anything about other levels of your society, so I can’t say how prosperous or equitable your nation is. As for your country’s politics—sorry, no idea. Just not relevant to my life or anything that really counts in this world.”
Kioga paused to sip his beer, and the influx of alcohol prodded his courage and tongue.
“However, I will happily proclaim with the utmost sincerity that Colombia produces the hottest women I’ve seen in my last dozen assignments.”
Avianna seemed unperturbed by his overblown statement, and in fact appreciative of the compliment. Her smile lit up her face.
“You truly think so? Myself included? But perhaps you are just being polite?”
Kioga placed a bold hand on her knee. “I always tell the truth to una chica muy linda.”
Avianna failed to raise an objection to his touch. “And I always accept protests of honesty from a handsome man. Let us celebrate our mutual accommodations.”
Before Kioga quite realized an order had even been placed, the bartender was delivering a bottle of clear booze, which Avianna commandeered.
“This is aguardiente antioqueño. Once opened, the bottle must be finished.”
“Start pouring!”
Somehow Kioga found himself on a dancefloor—whether in the same club where he had met Avianna or a different one, he couldn’t say. The explosively loud and high-BPM music seemed to be located within his skull. Avianna was grinding against him, all lean flanks and tight roundels of ass. She cast a sultry, smoldering backwards glance every half minute or so that sent ripples through his loins. Finally, Kioga couldn’t withstand the erotic sensations. He spun Avianna around, clutched her length tightly against his own burning skin and kissed her. Her tongue drove back against his.
They were at the bar—some bar, any bar—again, and Avianna was proffering a bowl of snacks.
“What’s this—these? What is it?”
“Ai, hombre! These are las hormigas culonas. Fried ants! They are so good for your manhood. Just try them!”
Kioga grabbed a sloppy handful, crunched them up. Not bad. One ant popped liquidly. Weird …
Outside everything whirled. Colored lights with nimbuses, demonically laughing people, screeching night birds, automobiles powered with infernal electricity. Boozily, Kioga marveled that the aguardiente seemed to have positively killed all his flu germs.
“Try to walk, Kioga, just a few more steps. Here is the car.”
Car? What car? He and Jimmy had gotten dropped off by Parque Arví staff.
Kioga laughed deliriously at the thought of Jimmy in a taxi. That had to be the answer. “Jimmy! Jimmy! Where are you, my lig?”
The car door opened and a strange man said in a kindly but forceful manner, “Oh, Mister Matson, Jimmy cannot help you now.”
* * *
The smell of a leaky bioreactor allowed Kioga to focus his newly reborn consciousness. As an expert in industrial metabolics, he could not mistake the yeasty pong. So many clients had benefitted from his help in optimizing their production lines. Surely these new owners would be no exception. Gotta show them that Science Park boffins had the best goods. He must be out on the fab floor now. Though how he had gotten here remained unclear.…
With eyelids hoisted leadenly upwards, however, Kioga did not see the expected gleaming large-scale facility of pipes and filtration units. Instead, he discovered a dank, poorly lit basement stuffed with amateur kit. A black economy sartorialist suite. The cheap bioluminescent jellyfish scabbed to the walls lent everything a suboceanic tint.
He found himself lying on a rickety cot. Seated patiently on folding chairs opposite him were three men—and Avianna. The innocuous yet competent-looking men wore stern, unmenacing expressions. Avianna looked only slightly less dour and no-nonsense.
“You return from your sad little decadent spree,” said the woman. “Bueno. Now we can discuss things.”
Kioga sat up, causing tectonic stresses in his abused head. “Oh, my Christ! Don’t you have any Null-borracho, please?”
One of the men dispensed a pill with a glass of water. “Not Null-borracho. Much better. Homemade.”
With no choice, Kioga uneasily accepted the foreign pharma. Ingestion brought astonishingly swift relief. He momentarily pondered inquiring about the formula, then decided he had more pressing issues.
“Now, discuss what?”
“How you will help us,” said Avianna.
“Us? Who’s us?”
“Me and my brother, Hernán.”
Avianna indicated one of the men, a stolid, lantern-jawed fellow with a somewhat aggrieved air, like a bright hopeful child unjustly sentenced to a remedial class. He wore a tight t-shirt with the famous logo of prestigious edX University over his admirably chiseled chest.
“Our two friends here need not be named,” Avianna continued. “They are just along for muscle, should you prove unruly. It is the plight of my brother that matters.”
Hernán nodded graciously, with some deference, as if sheepish at the necessity of invoking non-familial assistance. “I will gladly explain, Mister Matson. We would not have brought you here if matters were not otherwise beyond our resolution. You see—”
Kioga suddenly sprang to his feet, sheets of acrid binge sweat gushing like spring freshets from his entire body. The Colombians reared back, startled, the two unidentified men reaching behind their backs and toward unseen waistband holsters.
A vision had burst upon Kioga: his young mother, captive in an African hut; the lethal Bee Hive device; himself a toddler—
“My phone! Where’s my phone! They’ll be homing in on it. If they think I’ve been kidnapped—”
Seeing Kioga meant no assault, the bodyguards dropped their readiness to deal hasty freeform hurt. Avianna placed a calming hand on Kioga’s arm.
“Your phone is taking a journey on a plane to Bogota. There is no need to worry.”
“But I’m chipped, too! Look!”
Kioga pushed one arm of his jacket upward to show the branded patch of skin above his subdermal tracker. But to his surprise, the brand was gone, replaced by a large bruise whose dull pain now faintly registered for the first time.
Avianna smiled. “We borrowed an ultrasonic medical device from the local hospital. Extracorporeal shock wave treatment. What you would receive for kidney stones. Most effective, and totally non-invasive.”
Kioga plopped down on his cot, his thrumming nerves slowly stabilizing. He didn’t know whether to be angry, relieved, or impressed. “My god, I thought—”
Avianna regarded Kioga with a quizzical tenderness. “Did you really care that we four might die, Mister Matson? You surely would have survived, and then you would have been happily rid of our unwanted attentions.”
“Of course I care! What kind of monster do you think I am, anyhow?”
Avianna squeezed his arm. “No kind of monster at all—Kioga. Especially if you lend us your help. This is why we picked you, over your friend Jimmy. He is such a nihilist. Not like you. Now, just listen …”
The region around Medellín, particularly the state of Chocó, had been gold mining territory for many decades, ever since the country had sought to diversify from its drug cultivation at the same time that global prices for gold had soared. But so many of the unregulated companies played fast and loose with the environment, gouging the gold out of the deep-riven earth and processing it with cyanide and mercury that contaminated the land.
Hernán Barranquilla had worked as an environmental engineer for one of the larger players, Conquistador Mining, although his budget had been practically nonexistent and any corporate support for his department a public relations sham. Nonetheless, he had discovered a very valuable wild microbe in the ore tailings. It thrived by metabolizing poisons, although poorly, leaving its milieu marginally cleaner than received. With much labor, over many months of off-duty nights and weekends, Hernán had tailored the bug, right here in this basement lab, to perform miracles of remediation. He had brought the improved bug to Conquistador first, thinking they would license it. Instead, they had stolen it, confiscating all samples, and fired its inventor.
“But if I could only get back even a trace quantity of the microbe, Mister Matson,” Hernán explained, “I could prove my ownership. Establish a patent and market my invention to help my country.”
“How is that?”
“I have encrypted my proprietary information into the genome of the microbe. It cannot be removed without ruining the best features of the bug. Any readout of the genome proves my claims.”
Kioga thought about this story. The clever hack appealed to him, a natural extension of his industrial metabolics concerns. He felt sorry for this ingenuous guy, up against corporate perfidy. And being able to help Avianna’s brother—
Kioga regarded the woman with what he hoped was a righteously indignant glower that communicated, with high semiotic wattage: You deliberately led me along by my dick and abducted me and now you have the nerve to ask for my help!?!
Avianna looked deeply and sincerely and adorably contrite. “Mister Matson—Kioga. Please forgive us. We do not know any powerful people who could come to our aid. The local authorities are all in the pockets of Conquistador. Someone like you represented our only hope. When you descended among us, it was like an angel arriving from heaven. But still, we suspected you would brush off any solicitations we made openly, so we had to bring you here under our control. Our tactics were heavy-handed, yes. But can’t you accept them as a genuine expression of our helplessness?”
Exercising his imagination and empathy, Kioga had to admit to himself that he probably would have followed the same course, were their situations reversed. Life outside the Science Parks, he already knew, bred desperation and ethical shortcuts, and this incident merely confirmed his estimation of the scene.
“No, I guess not. Your intentions weren’t evil or selfish. But still, kidnapping someone—”
Avianna hurled herself around Kioga’s neck, squeezed him tightly, kissed both his cheeks, then unpeeled herself and bounced back, before he could possibly even respond with any gesture, fraternal or lewd. All the Colombians were smiling, even the anonymous muscle.
“Oh, I knew you would be on our side, Kioga! Surely, victory is ours now!”
“What exactly am I supposed to do?”
“We will reveal our plans in a moment. But first, let us have a small meal. It is well past noon.”
Kioga pondered this previously unremarked passage of time: long hours after he was due back at Parque Arví. What would Mallory be feeling? She would surely be worried, instrumental in searching for him, raising hell. Best to get this unanticipated chore over with quickly, so he could resume his normal life.
Lunch practically brought tears to Kioga’s eyes, it tasted so good: arepas, those ubiquitous corn pancakes, filled with salmon and shrimp, with a big cool glass of fresh guanabana juice.
“I am so glad you like my cooking,” said Avianna.
Wasting no postprandial time, his captors bundled Kioga into a Baolong Motors SUV. Blinking in the sunlight, he discerned that Hernán’s lab was still within the city. No point in hiding its location, he guessed, since he knew Avianna’s identity already.
Hernán, driving, and Avianna, shotgun, sat up front, Kioga sandwiched behind between the guards. They headed southwest, steadily climbing out of the valley-nestled city center.
“What we wish you to do,” Avianna said, “is merely to present yourself at the offices of Conquistador. Explain who you are. They will be very impressed. Everyone knows and respects the Science Parks. Ask for a tour of the waste stream processing. We are betting that Hernán’s bug will be present. Steal a sample somehow. This is the only tricky part. But it can be as simple as getting your sleeve wet in the slurry. Just do not arouse their suspicions. Then, when you leave, we will pick you up, claim the sample, and your part in the affair is over. You can go back to the Science Parks with our thanks, and forget you ever knew us.”
Kioga contemplated the chore. It seemed trivial, harmless, safe. “Okay.”
Climbing, twisting, climbing, Kioga noted changes in terrain, vegetation and human settlement. Amid the fantastical foliage, he witnessed large swaths of poverty and rampant want, suffering and a makeshift, make-do existence. Here, firsthand, as impactful as a trash fire, was the backwardness and lack he was intent on ameliorating. Alien and incomprehensible in many respects, the scene nonetheless whispered enticingly to him, a parent calling back a changeling son.
Surprisingly, despite the squalor and material scarcity, many of the people looked happy and content.
“Avianna.”
“Yes?”
“You really picked me out of all the Science Park people?”
Looking back, she smiled. “There is much public data about all of you. But your profile was the most congenial.”
Kioga sat silent for a while.
“Avianna.”
“Yes?”
“What will you get out of all this?”
“If my brother is a rich man, I am sure he will be good to me.”
“Si,” said Hernán.
“I think I might like to study medicine. I trained as an EMT for a time, but I had to cease my courses out of necessity.”
“Well, maybe I could help somehow. That is, if I ever returned here.”
“Perhaps.”
Two hours passed in relative silence. The SUV finally stopped at an empty portion of road high in the mountains. Fenced-off property stretched along one side of the tarmac.
“This is our rendezvous spot. We will come back in three hours. The gate to the Conquistador operations is about half a kilometer down the road, around that bend. We must leave you here. Otherwise, we will come under their surveillance.”
Kioga let himself out of the vehicle. “How do you know I won’t just get help and never return?”
Avianna bestowed a broad smile. “But you gave us your word, Kioga.”
The SUV made a gravel-crunching three-point turn.
“Goodbye, Kioga. Thank you, and good luck!”
Kioga watched them go, then walked around the bend.
He could see the gated entrance and guard shack, all razor wire and robotic antipersonnel emplacements.
The booth was manned by three armed security workers. Kioga straightened his rumpled jacket and went up to them. They regarded him vigilantly until he explained himself, then seemed to relax a trifle.
“Señor Matson, we will take your biometrics now to confirm your identity.”
“Of course.”
After he had been tera-scanned, Kioga grinned.
Then the alarms sounded, louder than Armageddon.
Kioga took a step or three backwards.
“Mister Matson, stop! You are under arrest! Please come peacefully.”
Kioga was ten meters away and running before he had formed any conscious impulse.
The taser barbs caught him in the butt and lower back. He spasmed like a gaffed fish and went down, head aimed, he noted clinically, straight at a sizable jagged roadside boulder.
* * *
Jimmy Velvet arrived in Kioga’s Parque Arví hospital room while Kioga was replaying for the nth time on his phone the news accounts of his embarrassing escapades. His friend beamed, carrying a bottle and several gifts. Kioga ignored him momentarily. He was too intent on marveling at what an allegedly humorous spin the announcers had managed to put on his near-fatal contretemps.
Missing person alert! Unflattering photo flashed onscreen. Last seen in dodgy native company. Anonymous accusation delivered, proclaiming sudden terrorist sympathies and affiliations in the Science Park renegade. Grudging admission by his fiancée that he might very well have gone dingo. “Just not himself lately.” Then all revealed as one laughable chain of mistakes, once Kioga had been apprehended and debriefed.
Of course, Mallory’s reactions hurt the most. Her swift betrayal. And then her non-apology. And when she had asked Kioga, fresh out of the ICU, to donate his sperm for an early insemination, given the unavoidable delay in their wedding—
Well, journalistic accuracy would have demanded an update to amend her status to ex-fiancée.
Jimmy set down his offerings. He unwrapped one of the packages and helped himself to a chocolate. Munching contentedly, he looked inquisitively at his friend before speaking.
“You really are a right mug, aren’t you?”
“Say what?”
“A sucka. Gullible to the bone.”
Kioga took offense. “I don’t really think so! I just employ common human decency, and a willingness to expect the best of everyone. At least, until they show me they’re malicious.”
“And that naïve philosophy almost got you killed. That brain hemorrhage you incurred in tumbling tasered arse over teakettle nearly did you in. It didn’t help that the Conquistador guards took close to an hour to summon medics. Lots of dead neurons you could ill afford to lose. Well, perhaps that little replacement wodge of cloned cortical cells out of the vat will render you good as new!”
Kioga ran a finger along the healing surgical incision on his skull. “I certainly hope so.”
“Maybe you’ll be better than before. Less naff. I just hope there are no side effects from the new bits! Any sudden desires to cross-dress? Maybe some fresh new talents emerged from the subconscious, such as the ability to speak Khmer, or to dance en pointe?”
Jimmy had Kioga laughing so hard, tears rolled down his cheeks. “No, Jimmy, nothing like that!”
“Splendid, then! Wonderful to have you back, more cautious or not!”
For the first time since his surgery, Kioga felt as if he might live down this dumb brush with infamy.
Jimmy forked up another sweet, and changed the subject slightly. “I take it there’s no chance of you and Mallory getting back together? Normally at such a decisive break, I’d ask how she was in the sack, in pursuit of my own interests.”
Kioga made a rueful face. “You’re welcome to her, Jimmy.”
“No, I think not, given the altogether too utilitarian and disloyal face she’s shown.” Jimmy ran a finger around one incisor to clear away some sticky caramel. “That Avianna gal, however. Another story entirely. And rich to boot! Why, she and her brother practically own Conquistador Mining now. Not to mention his patents. Even the countersuit against them for property damage and trespass was dismissed. Devilish sly. Positively Machiavellian! Sending you as a diversion, while they broke in elsewhere. Brilliant!”
“Agreed. Though being the actual catspaw makes one slightly less appreciative of their ingenuity.”
Jimmy arose. “Well, it’s all water under the bridge now. It’s not like your world will ever intersect with hers again. Cognitive homogamy rules, after all. So long, Ky. Until we next share a conference table.”
Kioga’s lunch arrived half an hour after Jimmy’s departure. The young male orderly placed the tray reverently on the bedside table and made sure to direct Kioga’s attention to it.
“Something special today, sir.”
Kioga lifted the aluminum dome off the plate. The heady aroma of salmon-and-shrimp-stuffed arepas wafted out.
And the meal came with a note in a feminine hand.
This tale represents my first—and so far only—sale to Analog magazine. Accomplishing that feat was one of my personal career benchmarks. Analog—formerly Astounding—is the living repository of so much science fictional history and heritage that one almost feels an imposter if one has never placed a story there. I know my pal Scott Edelman felt the same way when he sold his first tale there, not too long after I did. So thanks, editor Trevor Quachri, for helping to prove I was fit to consort with Heinlein and de Camp, van Vogt and Asimov, Simak and Anderson.
As for the story itself, it’s one of my more stringent pieces regarding current technologies and their extrapolations. It was written years before the recent headlines involving synthetic skin used for cosmetic purposes, and I take pride in being ahead of the curve.
And I like to think that very few Analog stories before mine have ever featured ambulatory self-booting dinosaur skeletons!