PROLOGUE
He toyed with the food in front of him, then pushed the plate away. He
wasn't in the mood for eating. Hadn't been, actually, for weeks, and could
hardly sleep, but he'd managed to keep it a secret. He'd been to the medicos --
there wasn't anything wrong with him. Physically, that is. Krikes, he knew
that. He was in better shape now than he'd been at twenty-five. He knew why he
wasn't hungry. It was excitement. Arousal. They were getting so close. These
were important times.
He stared around the cavernous room. The huge dining table, the
expensive chairs and sofas, the two huge flatscreens. Priceless artwork on the
walls, handwoven rugs on the polished stone floor. He himself wore a handmade
robe worth more than most of his employees made in a month, and he was a
generous employer. All of it was his, not that he cared about money or material
goods anymore. No, he had only one interest in his life now, one solitary
passion that consumed his every waking moment. The dream of a new world - no,
make that a different world. The dream was his passion, and he wouldn't rest
until that dream became a reality. And unlike many men before him, he was in a
unique position to -- perhaps -- realize his lofty goal. It had been long in
the making, and it would take decades more before the changes were complete, but
the signs were there, too big to ignore, even if you weren't looking. Had been
for years, in fact. The dreams of his father, and his father's father, of all
the men in his line since they'd landed on this sandy globe, finally near
fruition after almost two hundred years. What was once only the dream of a few
special men . . . .
The man was alone for the moment, though he could hear the incessant
bustle of his employees echoing through the halls. A veritable army of workers
serving him, performing every task imaginable, only a few of them aware that a
vision was driving their world, changing it, making it better. Everyone doing
their part, whether they knew it or not. His contemporaries understood the
purity of his mission, and diligently followed their directed course. Most of
them, that is. Those who'd tried to interfere had been handled in ways that
best suited their transgressions.
Footsteps echoed off the stone and his security chief strode into view
in his black and grey uniform. Charles Van derMeer. The man had been with him
for years, his hair starting to grey at the temples but his body still whipcord
tough. He was in charge of the estate's two hundred man security force, and
fully aware of his boss' vision for the future of his planet. Whether the end
result would be the perfect world his boss envisioned he couldn't say, but Van
derMeer liked what he saw so far. Liked it a lot, and was more than willing to
stop anyone who tried to derail his powerful employer. The huge paychecks were
the cake; the perks were the icing, something he'd found he couldn't live
without. Or rather, wouldn't.
The powerful man stood up and together they strode out of the room.
While everyone called it an estate the property was much more than that, close
to a dozen buildings scattered over an area the size of a spaceport. They were
all interconnected by aboveground walkways and underground passageways, and
dominated by the huge residence squatting in the center of the complex. The
main house was mostly belowground, carved into one of the planet's many rocky
hillsides, and was much more than just living quarters. The two men strode down
a wide corridor carved straight through the orange stone; floor, walls, and
ceiling all polished to a mirror finish. The edges of the man's robe fluttered
around his legs as he walked. The robe was woven of light grey and ruby red
fauxsilk, brilliant flowers embroidered on its lapels. "Where is she now?" he
asked.
"I've got her in one of the cells off the PowerBall court," Van derMeer
answered.
The hallway they were moving down was cavernous, over four meters wide
and nearly as high. A wide fabric runner ran down its center and muffled their
footsteps; the stone walls had a tendency to turn the entire house into an echo
chamber. Expensive artwork hung on the walls and recessed lighting kept the
hallway nearly sunlight bright at all times. Employees and household staff
members came into view, moving up and down the hall and in and out of the many
doors that punctuated its length. All nodded to him, most smiled.
The big hallway was the architectural spine of the main house. Almost
all the rooms in the sprawling building ran off of it at one point or another.
Its mere size, however, was not the hallway's most striking feature. A visitor
couldn't help but notice that along both walls, every five meters or so, there
was a well-lit alcove. In each alcove they'd see usually one but sometimes two
life- or larger-than-life-size nude sculptures done in the Realist style. The
statues were the greasy white of real marble, gleaming dully in the light. Each
in a different pose, their bodies the idealized perfection of the human form.
Mostly women, all nude and in classical poses, close enough to touch. Their
sheer physical presence, not to mention their anatomical correctness, sometimes
caused visiting dignitaries to stop and stare. None of the myriad people
rushing up and down the hall paid the slightest attention to the white bodies to
either side; they'd seen them all before and had important work to do.
"Explain to me again how she got onto my property."
"One of the sensors near the Special Projects Testing Center apparently
malfunctioned. But the sensor rings overlap, so I don't know how she got
through undetected. I don't think she even knew there were sensors out there,
she sure wasn't trying to hide. The first thing she apparently did was approach
the testing center and start asking questions of two technicians who were
standing outside taking a break. When they were uncooperative she demanded they
call the main house. They'd already hit the silent alarm." He smiled, and not
prettily. "Apparently she has some questions for you personally."
The two men reached the end of the hallway, which turned to the left and
narrowed to half the width. To the right was a short hallway ending at a lift,
the doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Van DerMeer hit the sensor on the
wall and the lift doors opened for them. His boss swept past in a soft rustle
of fabric and waited inside the small chamber. Van derMeer entered and turned
toward the control panel. "Charles Van derMeer," he said. "Security Chief.
Bitefly. PowerBall court." The powerlift's computer sensor compared his voice
and physiological signature to the one it had on file for Charles Van derMeer,
found a match, and began a rapid descent. A different password and the car
would have filled with sleeper gas while alarms went off throughout the complex.
"Any chance she was the one that disabled the security sensor?"
"No. Pure equipment failure. I've got my men fixing that, then we're
going to start testing the perimeter where she got through to figure out how she
got in without the thermal or vibration sensors picking her up. Then I'm going
to double-check the entire perimeter, just to make sure this doesn't ever happen
again."
"I'd expect nothing less from you, Charles."
"She walked right in," the security chief went on. "We followed her
footprints straight back to her roller where she'd parked it on the highway
shoulder. My men cracked it but didn't find anything of note."
The car slowed after dropping nearly thirty-five meters in complete
silence. The two men exited the lift on the opposite side from which they'd
entered, stepping into blazing sunlight. They both squinted against the glare
and took a brief look around before walking on.
They were in a deep canyon, created centuries before by a massive
earthquake. Vertical cliffs of orange stone towered above their heads. The
canyon was a near-perfect oval with a floor that had hardly needed to be leveled
at all. The majority of the hard-packed earth floor was taken up by a
regulation size PowerBall court, the backboards scuffed with use.
The powerlift was the only way into or out of the canyon, and that was
just the way he wanted to keep it. The men walked around the court to the far
side of the canyon, to the doors of another lift, this one not an enclosed car
but rather a small platform with a railing. They entered the lift and the
security chief spoke once again. The lift platform rose on a single protected
rail mounted inside the stone of the canyon wall. That made it impossible, or
so he'd been told, for a person to use the lift's track to climb up or down the
cliff face.
The small lift hummed to the end of its track, just under twenty meters
above the canyon floor. Above it stretched featureless orange rock another
fifteen meters to the canyon's rim. As soon as the two men stepped off the lift
into the wide tunnel the lift dropped rapidly back to the canyon floor. It
would only return when a voice the computer recognized spoke the correct words
into the control panel near the tunnel's entrance.
This new tunnel had been carved thirty meters straight into the planet's
native rock. The engineers had done a beautiful job, leaving the floor and
ceiling smooth and free of machine marks. To either side of the wide hall bays
had been cut, five-by-five meter rooms that Van derMeer liked to call his pods.
It was a much more pleasant-sounding word than "cell". There were twenty
individual pods, and in one of them they found the woman.
"Amandir Pringler," Van derMeer told his boss, holding up the woman's
permID. They stood in the hallway, looking in. The woman, sitting on a padded
bunk with her back to the hallway, heard his voice and jerked. She stood up and
faced them.
The robed man raised an eyebrow and stared at her. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-four," she said indignantly. He assumed she meant local years,
and automatically converted that into Galactic (Earth) Standard. "Krikes, that
doesn't matter. Let me say right now that what you've done is totally
unacceptable. Armed men verbally abusing me, physically dragging me off and
throwing me into a speeder. I assure you I was not trespassing. I'm on
official business."
"She's a story wrangler for the Garshak Heralder," Van derMeer told his
boss.
The robed man grunted with amusement. "I wouldn't exactly call what you
do official business. What story were you investigating?"
"The Squeaker Explanation. GUP's comments on the situation seem totally
disingenuous and unbelievable, not to mention absurdly convenient. And the
Council of Twelve's wholehearted acceptance of the explanation and dismissal of
the entire episode seems highly suspect, just as it did with the Lumiprod
fiasco, which you were also behind. I've done research and it has only
intensified my suspicions. I wanted to start with your research testing
procedures, then--" her indignant rant was cut short.
"Did Peter Kians give you this story as an assignment?" he interrupted.
"Because I'm very close friends with him, and I can't imagine your editor
arranging something like this behind my back."
The woman took a deep breath. "Not actually, no. I'm trying to develop
the story first a little, on my own, and then I was going to--"
"I talked to Kians," Van derMeer said. "Asked him if he had anyone
looking into GUP." He shook his head.
"Listen, this charade has gone far enough. I'm appalled at how you've
treated me, no better than an animal. And this collar, that's the final bot, it
really is." She tugged at the dull silver ring encircling her neck.
The two men regarded her silently. No visible barrier separated them
from the woman, but she knew what the collar meant. Van derMeer could just hear
the hum from the magnetic field that invisibly sealed off the front of her cell.
The field was totally harmless to him; he could walk across the portal and
squeeze her nose if he wanted. But if she tried to leave the field would stop
her, or rather the collar, just as surely as if she'd tried to walk through a
solid rock wall. It was the time-proven circuitry inside the collar around her
neck that provided the security. The collar would not pass through the magnetic
field, and removing the collar was something prisoners had been attempting for a
hundred years without success. The collar was rather dainty, actually, silver
in color and thinner than the woman's pinky finger. It lay snug around her
neck, locked into place by Van derMeer's men.
The woman was rather young to be a wrangler. Thirty-four was barely old
enough for her to be out of trade college. Her hair was pretty, light brown
shot with wide streaks of blonde, but styled unattractively. As for her body,
well, that was another matter. The robed man shook his head.
"Are you going to stand there all day staring or are you going to
release me?" she demanded. Her hands were on her hips, and she scowled.
"Girl, do you have any idea who I am? I mean, do you have the faintest
grasp?"
"Of course I do. I mean, I think so. You're Garvin Espering, aren't
you?" She squinted. Pictures of him were easy to find, but everyone always
looked a little different in person.
"I'm Garvin Espering, founder and Chokbat of Garshak Universal Products.
I'm an inventor, a philanthropist, and an artist of some merit. Four million
people in five hundred odd companies on six worlds work for directly for me, and
what with contractors and OEM's I could claim another hundred million beyond
that who owe me their livelihood. I'm rich beyond your ability to comprehend
and, most importantly, head of the Council of Twelve." His face was red with
anger and indignation.
"Ms. Pringler lives alone, has no close relatives, and apparently is so
abrasive that she doesn't have any close friends at the Heralder," Van derMeer
murmured into his boss' ear.
The woman was speechless for a second. "Well you certainly can't keep
me here!" she said just a little too loudly. "This isn't the City Lockdown.
Your keeping me here violates--"
"I can do whatever I want," Espering told her firmly, his voice gravel
and steel. "You obviously haven't yet realized just how tenuous your situation
is. You were trespassing on my private property. I could have you shot just
for that, and your body dumped in the desert for the shrikes to pick at. Even
if you told everyone you know you were coming here, no one would question my
word. They would not dare. I am the most powerful man on this planet by a
factor of ten. The most powerful Chokbat Monsipur has ever seen, not that you'd
know. Your education apparently has gone for naught. I am the closest thing to
a God that you will ever see. Maybe that's your problem, that you just can't
see anything." He peered at her, one hand on his hip. His eyes roved over her
body.
"Maybe that's not your only problem," he told her. "Look at you. It's
disgraceful. What do you weigh, a hundred and twenty kilos? When all you need
to do to stay slim and trim is take a pill or two every morning. That's got to
be the result of some sort of personality disorder."
Amandir Pringler weighed, in fact, a hundred and twenty-four kilos.
Since she was of average height, about one point eight meters, she was shaped
more like a pear than anything else. Her mode of dress reflected her
less-than-trim physique -- a baggy tent is how Van derMeer would've described
it. She seemed taken aback by Garvin's line of questioning, but he gave no sign
that he'd noticed. "I say," he went on, "exactly how do you expect to attract a
mate? I suppose certain males might have some bizarre attraction to a fat
woman, I guess I've heard of such things, but to tell you the truth, the thought
of seeing you naked turns my stomach." All that fat hanging on her body, she
was practically the size of a speeder, and still she didn't have any breasts to
speak of.
Pringler's mouth worked up and down several times silently. Her face
was red with embarassment. It took her a few seconds to get over her shock.
"I'm sure that will never happen," she spluttered. "I am not interested in men,
and if I was, I certainly would not be interested in you. I am perfectly
healthy, I just don't happen to conform to your prejudicial idea of what the
perfect woman should look like. I weigh exactly what I want to weigh."
Espering couldn't decide whether or not to laugh at her. "Not
interested in men, oh? Not one twinge of desire for a stiff, hard cock between
your legs?"
She got an uneasy look on her face. "Men are disgusting. They're
sweaty, hairy, . . ." She suddenly realized she was divulging too much of
herself to him and clamped her mouth shut.
Espering pursed his lips and stared at her thoughtfully, an idea
blossoming inside his brain. He turned to his security chief. "I'm getting a
vision," he said reverently, with only the faintest hint of self-mockery.
Van derMeer slowly shook his head. "I don't know. Look at her.
Between her looks and her attitude I don't think you'd be happy with the
result."
"Nonsense. You know my people are practically working miracles these
days. The squeakers, furries, L.O.L., arty FeelReals; the list is immense. The
true maphs are just the latest. People told my grandfather the same thing about
lackeys a hundred years ago, said it was crazy, said it couldn't be done.
Didn't stop him, and have you seen the latest figures on milk consumption? Have
you seen the latest morphs? Even I find them unbelievable." He waved in the
woman's direction. "She's the perfect opportunity to push the envelope once
again. And you know something? I think under all that fat her face might
actually be somewhat attractive."
"This is totally unbelievable," Amandir erupted. "I demand you release
me at once! This charade has gone far enough."
"Shut up," Espering snapped. "I'm tired of your mouth. It's open too
much, I should be running my cock down your throat if I have to see this much of
your tongue."
"You get anywhere near me and I'll bite it off," she snarled.
"Look at that," Van derMeer said. "All that fat and she still doesn't
have any bumpers."
"Men are such pigs. What good are breasts except for you to stare at?"
Garvin Espering studied at the fat woman glaring at him, and smiled.
"When I get done with you, not only will you look like a new person, you'll act
like one too." He slowly unbelted his robe and pulled it open. Underneath it
he was nude, and Pringler stared at him in shock. "You'll beg me to put this in
your mouth, and every other orifice," he assured her. "And if you're good, I
just might." He jerked his robe closed and strode away.
Van derMeer smirked at the woman and ambled after his boss. When the
sound of the lift had faded and the rocky pens were quiet again, a voice called
out to her.
"He won't hurt you, don't worry about that."
Amandir jerked in surprise and looked around. There, across the
corridor, in his own pod, sat a middleaged man on a bunk. He looked very tired,
and she thought for a second she recognized him, but the fact that he was nude
threw her off. He seemed slightly embarassed by his lack of clothes, but
resigned to it. She didn't see any clothing anywhere in his pod.
"He might do a lot of things, but you needn't worry about him killing
you," the man told her.
"He's crazy if he thinks I'd ever touch him."
The man's tired eyes creased in a sad smile. "Oh, he's crazy all
right," he agreed. "But let me assure you, everything he told you was true."
"Before we get into your proposals, and status reports," Espering told
the five men, "I've got my own little pet project for you. Another one." They
were seated around a thick null-oak table, relaxed and, as usual, enthusiastic.
Espering's Special Projects Team consisted of two geneticists, one neurologist,
one neuropsychologist, one endocrinologist, one mechanical engineer, and one
public relations expert. Together his team personally commanded close to three
hundred people, specialists, all geniuses in their own right, none of whom had
ever been heard to utter the word "Why?"
Espering explained what he had in mind, detailing and elaborating on the
project, adding new ideas as they popped into his head. When he was done the
men around him were quiet, thinking.
"Well, as you know," one of the geneticists said, "the obesity is not a
problem. And in the past twenty years we've made great strides, so hardwiring
her cortex for the high sexual drive won't be difficult either, although that is
a pretty high number."
"Why not just an injection?" Espering asked him. His second geneticist
answered.
"Too unpredictable. All things being equal, everyone's brain tissue
absorbs the drug at a different rate, and, simply put, fine-tuning injected
levels are a nightmare."
"Her orientation will take some time to adjust," the neurologist said,
"but once the correct way to alter brain chemistry was discovered the actual
nuts-and-bolts procedure turns out to be rather simple. Technically still
experimental, of course, but then we've always been so far ahead of the
mainstream it's laughable." He waved a hand around the table. "I assume you've
got some special chips you want her to experience. In addition to them, a
lengthy series of psyche-programming FeelReals, some gray-screen, some with the
programming buried inside standard sex-chips, will do wonders. Not just on her
personality -- they'll erode her memory and alter her brain chemistry, although
that'll take some time. Her sex drive, too; you've all seen the studies. Just
one Feelie a week raises the HSF three points a year. We've perfected the
compressed ones and they'll triple that, at least."
"No PCA?" the engineer said.
"No."
"I'm concerned about the weight distribution," the other geneticist
said. "Even if we do combine synth muscle strands with her own, and the
vertebrae don't warp, I don't think the result will be practical." He saw the
looks he was getting from the rest of the table. "Okay, okay, we're not talking
practicalities here, I realize that, but we're still talking about a huge mass.
Center of gravity will be totally different, and that's just the tip of the
iceberg."
"'Tip of the iceberg'?" the engineer said. "I can't remember the last
time I heard that. You know," he said to Espering, "I was just thinking about
this the other day. About how traditional enlargements are limited, because
they don't alter the attachment points to the body. You see what I'm saying?
If, on the other hand, we expand the points of contact, say to the base of the
ribcage? Ovals about this big?" He illustrated what he meant with his hands.
"The entire front of the ribcage then becomes the platform, allows for an
exponential increase in volume. Necessitates it, actually, to maintain a normal
proportion."
"You're right," Espering said. "I like it. Remember," he told the
group, "I want them to be firm but soft, and I want them to look natural. No
perfect spheres, and no cones. It seems that's all I see these days is cones.
I'm afraid of putting an eye out." They all laughed.
"That won't be a problem," a geneticist said. "Between DNA acceleration
and hormone cascades and skin therapy, we'll come up with something you'll
approve of. It's the sheer weight that has us worried."
"What about implanting some of those new micro AG units?" the
neurologist asked. "Calibrated to reduce, by a certain percentage, the total
mass. So that it doesn't feel any different to her when she moves around."
"Is that even possible?" the public relations man asked. "Wouldn't they
migrate?" They all turned to the engineer. He had his brows knitted together
in thought.
"I hesitate to say yes too quickly," he told them. "We'll have to talk
to an AG specialist, and probably a surgeon. If it's even possible, we'll need
to learn about unit size, if there'll be a problem with migration, long term
maintenance if any, that sort of thing. I think I know just the guy to talk
to."
"So you're saying that it's feasible? That you can deliver?" Espering
swept the group with his intense gaze. He got nods from everyone, some more
confident than others, and a smile creased his face. He looked half his sixty
standard years, and was still a handsome, charismatic figure. Whenever possible
he used that to his advantage.
"You men have never disappointed me," he said warmly. "Sure, we've had
setbacks, but in the end you've always come through. I knew when this group
first dreamt up Genuflex you were talented, and then with the squeakers you
cemented yourselves places in Monsipurian history as geniuses. The Maph
breakthrough merely confirmed what I already knew." He looked around at their
smiling, proud faces. "I'll be getting the Demeanor report in a few days, and I
just know the numbers in it will surprise even you gentlemen."
"Gotta drink water," the neurologist said with a rueful smile.
Espering laughed and cracked his knuckles joyfully. "Running into me is
the best thing that ever happened to that fat girl. I just wonder if she'll
ever figure that out."
