“Why’s that?”

“She may be sick. Nothing contagious to humans, but she might infect other sims.”

Infect? Beece think. What mean infect?

“I don’t need none of that. I can barely make production quotas now.”

“If she shows she may look a little different than the average sim and—”

“Different? What is she, a new breed?”

“No. Same as the rest, but she might look a little heavier…perhaps ‘bloated’ is a better term. She’s sick and we can take care of her, but we have to find her first.”

Meerm! Man talk about Meerm! Meerm sick but fraid doctor. Beece feel sorry Meerm. City Man want help Meerm. No hurt Meerm.

Beece fraid talk Boss. Boss yell all time. But Meerm Beece friend. Must help Meerm.

Beece step in office. “’Scuse, please, boss.”

Boss face go mad. “What the hell you doing here! Get back to work, you lazy—”

“No, wait,” red-hair city man say. He look Beece. “Do you know something?”

“Sick sim come home.”

“Home? Where’s home?”

“I crib them in Newark overnight,” Boss say.

“Newark? Why so far?”

“Because it’s tons cheaper to bus them back and forth than rent space for them around here. Sorry if that’s out of your jurisdiction, pal, but—”

“Oh, don’t you worry about that. Just give me the address of this place. I’ll take it from there.”

Beece happy. Red-hair city man nice. Help Meerm. Make Meerm better.

18

SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ

“This is good,” Mercer Sinclair said as he skimmed the reports. “This is very good.”

Just SimGen’s security chief in the office with him today. Portero had personally delivered the police reports on the sim massacre in Brooklyn, an unusual courtesy. Perhaps the man was coming around, learning to be a team player.

Who am I kidding? Someone like Harry Carstairs is a team player, but not Portero. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word “team.” Mercer smiled to himself. Come to think of it, neither do I.

This visit meant one thing: Portero wanted something.

He’d never come right out and ask, Mercer knew. He’d use an oblique approach, try to sneak it in when no one was looking. Mercer was sure he’d find out what it was before the meeting ended.

“I thought you’d be upset,” Portero said.

Is that why he came? To watch me blow my top? Sorry, Little Luca. Not today.

“I am. I hate the idea of losing a dozen of our sims. That’s something people seem to forget—they’reour sims. No matter what country they’re shipped to, even if it’s the other side of the world, they still belong to SimGen. We can barely keep up with demand as it is, so of course I hate to lose even one.”

“But you seem almost…happy.”

“I’m happy that these SLA creeps have been exposed for what they are. Yesterday’s discovery shows they’re not pro-sim activists, they’re murderous organleggers.” He glanced at the police report again. “They’re sure these are the same sims that were hijacked from the globulin farm?”

Portero nodded. “Absolutely. Lucky thing NYPD was able to resuscitate that memory chip from the Bronx. And lucky too these globulin farmers were excellent record keepers: They scanned the neck bar codes of all their ‘cows’ into their computers.”

“Then that nails the SLA. When they’re caught they’ll go down for murder and illegal organ trafficking. Any chance of tracing those organs?”

Portero shrugged. “Unlikely. They were probably shipped overseas while still warm. I’ve heard the Third World black market in transplant organs is booming, but…” He looked troubled.

“But what?”

“I know there’s a big demand for human organs, but sim organs?”

“They’re called xenografts—nonhuman organs. Human bodies used to reject them almost immediately, but with the new treatments that remove his to compatibility antigens, the rejection rate is about equal to human allografts. Those hearts, livers, and kidneys are worth a fortune on the black market.”

Portero nodded and Mercer thought, You haven’t a clue as to anything I just said.

“Hearts, livers, kidneys,” Portero said. “What about uteruses and ovaries? Are they transplantable?”

“No value at all. Nor are the testicles they cut off—unless someone’s developed a taste for a new kind of Rocky Mountain oyster.”

Just the thought made Mercer ill.

“Then why go to the trouble to harvest them?”

“Maybe they were stupid organleggers.”

“One other thing concerns me,” Portero said. “The chip from the globulin farm shows records of thirteen sims housed there right up until the night of the fire. But only twelve were found in that Brooklyn basement.”

“You’re sure?”

“We know from the records that a female sim is unaccounted for. The only reason I can imagine why she wasn’t butchered along with the rest is that she wasn’t with them.”

“You think she escaped?”

“I suspect she was never captured. I think she fled the raid and the fire, and is hiding somewhere in the city.”

“Why on earth would she hide?”

“Maybe she saw the security man murdered and she’s frightened. She could be anywhere, too terrified to show herself.”

A witness, Mercer thought. A sim could never testify in court, but this one might be able to provide the police with a lead or two.

Mercer glanced down at the embedded monitor in his desktop. Damn near every headline scrolling up the screen this morning seemed to be about the sim slaughter in Brooklyn. The good part was that the phony “SLA” had shown its true colors; the bad part was the depiction of sims as helpless victims, easy prey for human scum. Too high a sympathy factor there. He needed to counter that, and this missing sim offered a unique opportunity.

“I want that sim found,” he told Portero. “To make sure she is, SimGen is going to offer a million-dollar reward to whoever finds her.”

Portero looked dubious. “Do you think that’s necessary? I’m sure my people—”

“Forget your people. This is strictly a SimGen matter. We’ll handle it.”

Yes. The more he thought about this, the more he liked it. Here was a way to take back the headlines and reassert SimGen as the true champion and defender of sims.

“Very well,” Portero said, rising. “Since there’s nothing for me to do in that regard, I’ll get back to my office.”

After Portero was gone it occurred to Mercer that he hadn’t discovered the reason for the security chief’s personal visit. He’d been sure he’d wanted something. But what?

Well, whatever it was, he hadn’t got it.

19

Luca Portero went directly from the CEO’s office to the parking lot where he picked up one of the SimGen Jeeps. He grinned as he drove out the gate.

A million-dollar reward—and Sinclair thinks it was his idea. Doesn’t have a clue that I steered him into the whole thing.

The meeting had been a thing of beauty, he had to admit. Knowing Sinclair-1’s obsession with SimGen’s public image, Luca had simply parceled out the information—first playing dumb about the xenografts, then mentioning an unaccounted-for sim, then hinting that she might be a witness—letting Sinclair pounce from one to the next like a mouse following a trail of cheese bits, until he’d ended up right where Luca wanted him.

A reward! Put SimGen in the news: The corporation with a heart as big as its market cap value!

Putty in my hands, Luca thought.

His grin faded as he thought about what lay ahead. Another meeting. This one with Darryl Lister. He and his old CO hadn’t had a face-to-face in almost a year, which could only mean that the subject was as delicate as it was important.

That made him uneasy. Worse yet, they were meeting at Luca’s house.

He pulled up the long drive to the rented two-bedroom cabin in the center of five acres of dense woods. He liked the isolation. This was his retreat from SimGen and lost sims.