Organo-Topia by Scott Michael Decker Read Free Book Online

Detective.”
    Thermal, they said.
    “Zero-kelvin cryo?”
    “Three layers in, yes, but even observation gets chilly.”
    He donned one over his trench coat. “I'm not interested in freezing my balls off.”
    In the corridor beyond the blue door, chill thrust up his legs like spikes. Multiple frosted glasma panes to one side contained cryo nodes on dense racks, the sign saying “ovum.” To the other side was similar, the nodes larger, this sign saying “semen.” Each and every node was ragged at the end, as though shattered. The floor scintillated with bright, sharp shards.
    “All of them, destroyed,” she said, her voice wooden. Tears froze on her cheeks. She led him through to the other side, out a second blue door.
    He doffed the robe, stamping his feet to get some feeling back in them. “How many ova?”
    “Half a million.”
    A slug to the gut. His heart hammered and vision clouded. His knees begged to buckle. Disbelief and anger waged a desperate battle.
    “This way,” she said, wiping her face and leading him from the anteroom.
    Girders gridded high ceilings. Tubing tangled with conduit in twisted, multi-color confusion down to pods hanging on racks. Pod after pod stretched into the distance, rack behind rack behind rack.
    He looked at one pod, an oval about two feet long and one foot around.
    An egg. Smeared inside was a red-brown goop, at the bottom a puddle of puce.
    He looked at all the pods on the rack. He looked at all the racks.
    His mind numb, he turned to the Ofem to ask a question.
    Ofem Ilsa Janson stared at the pods, eviscerated of their viability, tears coursing silently down her cheeks.
    Detective Maris Peterson didn't ask how many fetuses had been destroyed. He couldn't.
    * * *
    Atrocity, the headlines declared. Incomprehensible, the anchors propounded. Unconscionable, the talking heads opined. The tragedy at Plavinas Incubation saturated the neuranet.
    “How?” seemed to be the only question they had.
    “Why?” was the only question Maris considered.
    He plodded toward home, the western sky scored with the last light of day, pink clouds raveled through with blue. Wind ripped holes through his trench coat, laden with the threat of rain. The streets were cold comfort to his hot thoughts. He dealt in murder all the time, but had never known the urge to kill. He knew now why people did.
    I'll have to clear my mind, Maris thought, feet gobbling pavement. Cold calculation had wiped out half-a-million ova and a quarter-million embryos. Cold calculation could catch the killer. It was said revenge was a dish best served cold. So was investigation.
    Maris couldn't push the tragedy aside. The fertility regression crafted by Brehume Professor Bernhard Vitol plunged to a spot of grease on the statistical pavement. Breeding rates on Tartus IX had taken the fatal plummet.
    They'll probably bring in Coalition hacks and dismiss local gumshoes like me.
    Darkness swallowed him before he got home. He'd used the facilities at the facility and was glad he had. Metaphor and reality had plunged him deep into despair, and only his feet kept him moving forward, powered by a strained bladder.
    Home was just another hole in his life. Divorced twice for the hours he kept, it was a cold hole. But it was a hole to hide in. He couldn't afford much more on a dick's pay than a one-bedroom three-fourths up the side of a high-rise. They left him alone on the lift, despair an insolent insulant.
    He didn't remember the badge on his lapel until after he got off. Pocketing it, he approached his door.
    Ajar.
    What the jerk? he wondered.
    “Sorry, I couldn't wait in the corridor.” Ofem Ilsa Janson, his facility guide, offered him a tentative smile from just inside the door, gesturing as if to invite him into his own home.
    “You've got testicles.” How'd she get in?
    “Technically, I do.” Engineered to go either way, Ohume embryos were then infused in a hormone soup, testosterone to make them male, estrogen female, as