Digital Venous by Richard Gohl Read Free Book Online

of outer space.
    Shane, on the other hand, had a pleasant, brief, high-speed magna-rail journey back to the inner-western side of the spiral precinct.
    Architecture in the city was limited only by plumbing—and the imagination. Generally, Napea was arranged in architectural precincts. Popular designs for precinct areas ranged from the human body, the most famous being a naked woman leaning back with hands on hips, to extinct animals: dolphins, snakes, rhinos, and the famous forty-eight-metre eagle house. Other areas favored more classical forms of architecture, notably the Egyptian sector and the ancient Orient featuring beautiful Chinese pagodas. One cooperative had built a huge V; twin towers angled backwards at a forty-five-degree angle—looking straight into each others’ lounge rooms.
    Shane decided to wait and surprise her with the baby—if Mark Luhrman did not come through with the goods, there would be no added disappointment. But, thought Shane, She needs good news and she needs it now!
    The next day a fertilizer bomb went off just inside one of the entry points, rupturing a section of the Blackwood Gate at the base, upward about twenty meters—providing Mark Luhrman with the necessary diversion to pass into Napea with one large backpack and a bag.
     

Chapter 12
    A Present
     
    “HELLO?” SHANE CALLED out from the huge circular atrium to the bedroom above. “I’m back!” There was no reply.
    Shane put the backpack down and walked through to the bedroom, holding his other bag. Smiling, Shane said jokingly, “Honey, I’m home.”
    Mia didn’t lift her head from the pillow and made no answer. He tried again. “Guess what I’ve got?”
    A groan came from the bed.
    “Drop the clown show.” Mia’s dry, wooden voice croaked, “I’m going, Shane. There’s nothing for me here.”
    “Okay, well, let me put it this way… when you find out what I’m holding and you still wanna kill yourself in three days, I’ll top myself as well.”
    Mia’s head lay between two pillows. From under a tangle of yellow hair, a hazel eye squinted. “Okay, I give up.”
    “At least sit up,” he said.
    Her curiosity finally piqued, she raised herself onto one elbow.
    “What is it?” She saw something she’d never seen before—a tiny little hand.
    Mia hissed through her teeth, “What have you done?” and, wide-eyed, sprang out of bed like an athlete.
    “It’s what you always wanted,” he said. Whose is it?”
    “Yours, now.”
    She saw a button nose, the eyelashes, and her involuntary finger came up to touch a pudgy cheek.
    “He’s still asleep,” she said dumbly. “How’d he sleep through all that?”
    “He’s drugged.”
    “Oh, Shane, no!”
    “Just light. A very light sleeping medicine—for babies. Had to.”
    “And they feed all the time! What are we going to feed him?”
    “Got it.”
    “What?”
    “In the bag. Enough milk for an army of these little things.” She went across to look in the bag. Six months’ supply of concentrated dried human lactate.
    “I don’t want to bring him up in our world—what will he think of us? I mean, look at us! Look at him! Shane, he’s so different to us! He’s real! Oh my God, he’s got blue eyes! We have to take him back!”
    “Can’t…”
    “We can’t keep a child locked inside forever.”
    “We have to. Someone’s gotta look after him now. Whoever brought him in risked his life for us. They won’t take him back. Not now. Not ever. You don’t know how lucky I was to get this up here.” Shane shook his head “I must be the only one in Napea that actually looks at other people,” he said incredulously. “No one batted an eyelid at me on my way up here!”
    “He’s going to need real food, Shane! What then?”
    “We’ll work out a way of swapping him over to N.E.T. It’s doable. We wouldn’t be the only ones.”
    Shane stared at Mia. Mia stared at the child. It was a crime of the highest level. Punishable by death. Mia smiled. A baby