The Vital Abyss

Brown bonded with the wrong answer. Quintana hadn’t so much as been allowed a glimpse of the dataset. All I needed was for the Martian to ask me as well as Brown, and I would be the one they took. The prisoner they exchanged.

If something still nagged at my hindbrain—the guards hadn’t come when Quintana stole the terminal, the Martian hadn’t been there during Brown’s questioning—it had no form, and so I pushed it away. But there was a moment, that hypnagogic shift where the thoughts of the day faded into dream and the guards of rationality fell.

The poisoned thought crept in upon me then, and I went from my half doze to a cold terror in less than a heartbeat.

“It’s okay,” Alberto said. “It’s a nightmare. They’re watching him.” I looked down at him, my heart beating so violently I thought it might fail. In the shadows, Alberto rolled his eyes and turned his back to me, his head pillowed by his arm. It took me a moment to understand his assumption. He thought I feared Quintana. He was mistaken.

The filthy thought that had slipped into me was this: If the Belters were negotiating a trade of prisoners with Mars then they might well still be enemies. If they were enemies, the Belters would want to give over whatever they had with the least intrinsic value. The Belter guards had questioned Brown twice now, without the Martian present. They might very well be probing not to see whether he had divined the secrets the data held, but to determine that he couldn’t.

By trotting out my idiotic egg hypothesis, Brown might prove to our guards that he would be of the least use to their enemies. Or Quintana, by his violence and ham-handed duplicity, might convince them that Mars wouldn’t be able to work with such a fragile and volatile ego.

I’d plotted my course assuming that being competent, insightful, and easy to work with would bring reward.

I astonished myself. To have come so far, through so much, and still be so naïve…

* * *

“Say I’m developing a veterinary protocol for… I don’t know. For horses. Should I start by trying it in pigeons?” Antony Dresden asked. He was a handsome man, and radiated charisma like a fire shedding heat. Protogen’s intake facility looked more like a high-end medical clinic than an administrative office. Small, individual rooms with medical bays, autodocs, and a glass wall facing a nurses’ station outside able to look in on them all, panopticon style. The company logo and motto—First. Fastest. Furthest. — were in green inlay on the walls.

The language in my contract mentioned a properly supervised medical performance regimen, and I assumed this had to do with that, but it still felt odd.

“I’d probably recommend trying it in horses,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the animal you’re trying to develop a protocol for,” I said, my voice turning up at the end of the sentence as if it were a question.

Dresden’s smile encouraged me. “The pigeon data wouldn’t tell me just as much?”

“No, sir. Pigeons and horses are very different animals. They don’t work the same ways.”

“I agree. So do you think animal testing is ethical?”

“Of course it is,” I said.

“Why?” The sharpness of the word unnerved me. My belly tightened and I found myself plucking at my hands.

“We need to know that drugs and treatments are safe before we start human testing,” I said. “The amount of human suffering that animal testing prevents is massive.”

“So the ends justify the means?”

“That seems a provocative way to phrase it, but yes.”

“Why not for horses?”

I shifted. The wax paper on the examination table crinkled under me. I had the sense that this was a trick, that I was in some kind of danger, but I couldn’t imagine any other answer. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“That’s okay,” Dresden said. “This is an intake conversation. Purely routine. Do you think a rat is the same as a human being?”

“I think it’s often close enough for preliminary data,” I said.

“Do you think rats are capable of suffering?”

“I think there is absolutely an ethical obligation to avoid any unnecessary suffering—”

“Not the question. Are they capable of suffering?”

I crossed my arms. “I suppose they are.”

“But their suffering doesn’t matter as much as ours,” Dresden said. “You seem uncomfortable. Did I say something to make you uncomfortable?”

At the nurses’ station, a man glanced up, catching my gaze, and then looked away. The autodoc in the wall chimed in a calm tritone. “I don’t see the point of the question, sir.”

“You will,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’re just getting a baseline for some things. Pupil dilation, eye movement, respiration. You’re not in any danger. Let me make a suggestion. Just see how you respond to it?”

“All right.”