She watched Hyper for his reaction; saw his eyes travel down her body and up again to her face. He was smiling. “Now that’s a significant mutation. Do you have complete use of them?”

“Yeah,” she said, sliding into the chair, “but my bottom hands are better at fine work, and they don’t really lift up to the sides too well, top ones go three-sixty degrees, though.” Helix crisscrossed her hands about her knees and rocked self-consciously.

“That is so cool looking.”

“Thanks,”

“You know,” said Hyper, “She needs to meet Orielle.”

“Not Orielle,” said Chango.

“Who’s Orielle?” said Helix.

“Oh, just somebody who would make you fade right into the woodwork,” said Hyper.

“She’s a drug dealer,” said Chango.

“And a drug inventor, don’t forget about that,” said Hyper.

“Yeah, but she still makes her bread and butter by selling blast in this community. It keeps the vatdivers down, keeps them from doing anything about the company. They just do as they’re told, and collect their pay and use it to get blasted, that’s all.”

“It’s not just the blast, Chango,” said Hyper, “besides, you used to do blast, before...”

“Yeah, but I don’t any more, do I? And you know why, too.”

“You always say Ada didn’t dive blasted. Don’t you believe that?”

Chango glared at him, and finally stood up, to walk past them and stare at something hanging from the ceiling. “Fuck you, Hyper,” she growled softly.

Hyper shrugged and looked at Helix. “She’s a bundle of contradictions, she is. Can I get you something?

Water, Cool-Aid, Chromium 50?"

“Water, please.”

Chango, still standing, still staring at the ceiling, shook her head. “You’re going to regret it.”

“You want anything, Chango?” asked Hyper, heading towards the back of the house.

“Only your immortal soul,” she said, and sat back down in the lev seat. Hyper returned in an instant with a cup of doubtful looking water and handed it to Helix. She sniffed it. It smelled like solder. Casually she set it down on the floor.

Hyper tapped his foot, rooted around in his shirt pocket, came up with a half-empty pack of Reefer Madness, pulled one out, lit it and offered Helix the pack.

"No thanks."

"I'll take one," said Chango.

"So you're new in town huh?" said Hyper, switching on his holotransceiver and flipping through channels.

"Well, new to Vattown."

"That's what I mean. I heard — I heard you were adopted, by some corporate dink, excuse me, professional man."

"He's a research scientist."

“Oh yeah? What kind of stuff does he do?"

Helix shrugged, "I don't know."

"You don't know? Well, what kinds of projects is he working on? I mean generally, don't spill any trade secrets or anything, for gods sakes."

She shook her head, "I don't know."

Hyper stared at her. "Industrial ecology, biomathematics, gene splicing..." Helix shrugged again.

"You've been living with the man for, what, ten years, and you don't know. Okay." Hyper drew on his cigarette and pulled the transceiver’s imaging lens down over one eye. He glanced at the hologram reflected through the lens, his eyes flickering as he called up new files. He glanced from Helix to the holo several times in rapid succession. “Do think I could-I don’t mean to be bold, or embarrass you or anything,” he glanced at Chango and then back to her, “would you mind, could I look at your back?”

“My back?”

“Yeah, it looks like you only have one collarbone. I was trying to mount a set of manipulating arms onto the existing armature of this robot I’m working on. I thought I’d have to hang it up, but if I can see how it’s been done, with you-”

“Hyper builds robots,” said Chango, answering Helix’s glance with a reassuring nod. She felt like she was outside herself as she stood, turned her back to him and lifted her tunic with her upper arms. Beyond the numbness of her fear she felt a burning curiosity. What would he be able to see?

She heard him looking, and then felt his hands on her back. She flinched, and then relaxed as they ran, warm and soft, along her muscles and bones. Of course she couldn’t see the hologram he was working on, but she sensed he was tracing her.

When he was through he slipped the transceiver over her head, so she could look through the imaging lens and see what he’d drawn — an anatomical rendering of her back, arms and shoulders. “What are you going to do with that?” she asked, backsliding into a paranoid fantasy of her image plastered on every building in Vattown, labeled with the words ‘Look at this freak.’

Hyper led her to the work area, to a thing with the lower body of a small tractor, and two waldo arms bolted to a steel drum with a hole cut in the middle. A gas combustion engine painted to resemble a face rested on a pivot on top of the drum.

“See, if I mount ball sockets here and here-” His fingers traced the metal struts the same way they had touched her own flesh. “-I can support the second set of arms without adding a whole new framework for them.”

“What does it do?”

“Well, it’s not finished yet. Eventually I want to put a pivot piston in here, and that’ll make the head nod up and down as it rumbles and spews smoke. And then it rolls around on the tractor treads, and the arms are operated by radio control and can pick stuff up. I want the extra arms so they can hold this-” He hefted a dented saxophone. “I’m calling it Close Enough for Jazz.”

Chango wandered in from the front room. “Do you still need a counterweight for the pivot piston? I may have just the thing.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool because I haven’t found anything... symbolically correct yet.”

“It’s out in my car, why don’t you come out and see.”

oOo

“Did you get into that data card yet?” asked Chango as she and Hyper walked to her car.

“What? Uh, no. No, It’s not giving up easily, and I’ve been busy with Robo-Mime. Is she asking about it?”

“She did at first, but I think she’s forgotten about it.”

“Well, she’s obviously never read any of it. Unless all that ignorance was an act. She any more forthcoming about her father to you?”

Chango shrugged, “I think his name is Hector. I didn’t really ask about him.”

“Hector? Hector Martin?”

“That’s it,” said Chango.

Hyper choked, "Her father is theDr. Hector Martin? Christ!"

"You know him?" asked Chango.

"Know him? I know of him. He's the inventor of the multis.”

“Multi’s.” Chango shook her head. So Helix’s adopted father was the man behind the multi-processor brains that run nearly every major networked system in the world. Maglev, stock market, polymer plants. Shit, even the temperature and ventilation systems in most big buildings. “Geez,” Chango cast her gaze to the tower of the GeneSys building, hazy in the distance. “Talk about friends in high places.”

oOo

Hyper gave Chango a crate of DataKleen memory enzyme in exchange for the chrome fossil from the Russell Industrial Center. They drove to a faded cement block house surrounded with sunflowers.

“Pele’s house,” Chango said.

The woman who came out the front door to greet them had skin like a painted pony, irregular patches of black on a white background. The color scheme carried over into the cloud of thick hair surrounding her head. She was dressed in a yellow housecoat. “Hey Chango, I hope you came to fix my truck.”

“Actually it was more to make a trade, but what’s the problem?”

“It’s burning oil.”

“Ow. They’ll take you off the road for that.”

“You don’t think I know it? I’ve got a lot of goods to get to the market this week.”

“Alright, I’ll take a look.”

Helix sat on the porch with Pele, drinking iced tea and watching Chango crawl around under Pele’s blue pickup truck.