Kingdom of Cages(156)

Chena ignored the question. “I’m glad you’re satisfied. Shall we take care of the rest of the meeting now?”

Client’s hand lifted away from the papers and curled in on itself. “Yes. Now is a good time.”

“I can handle this on my own.” Chena flicked a gaze at the transparent walls. “You don’t need to concern yourself with it.”

Client followed her gaze, her lips pursuing slightly and her fingers rubbing against her palm. “Yes, you’re right, of course.” Her eyes swept the laboratory dome. “A colleague of mine did say we could use his station. It’s data-trained for what you need. Let me come with you in case it’s locked.”

Triumph singing through her, Chena followed Client up to the very top level of the laboratory dome, where the far walls curved in, letting the people who worked there look out onto the blue sky during the daytime. As it was night, of course, the whole dome was opaqued to a pearly gray.

Client stopped in front of an open laboratory that seemed to be all comptroller. Banks of processors rose from the floor to the height of Chena’s shoulders. The first sweep of her eyes counted twenty main screens, each with a separate input pad and listening grill.

“You will be able to find what you need? You can call me if you can’t,” said the client.

Chena shook her head. “No need. I can manage,” she said with a confidence she did not feel. She pasted on a smile and sat in the lab’s one chair.

She felt Client’s gaze on the back of her neck like an itch. She didn’t start right away. She rubbed her fingertips together and steepled them, pressing them against her lips, as if lost in thought. Gradually the itch went away.

Okay, Aleph. Now it’s just you and me. She laid her hands on the keys and began.

As she suspected, the data trees were similar to the ones set up for the library comptrollers, only these were much more extensive, with innumerable sub-branches and cross-references.

Chena found the branch for daily reports and report archives and followed it down. She did not go straight for Mom’s name. That would certainly be protected. She would not get that this trip, she was sure. She would have to be patient.

Without delay or inquiry for identification, the comptroller presented her with reports sorted by wing: voluntary, involuntary, and home. Chena’s fingers tingled at the idea of going through reports on the involuntary wing and maybe finding out what happened to Sadia. That was too much of a risk right now. She only had a little time before Client came back for her. She turned down the branch for the voluntary wing.

Pandorans were nothing if not thorough. They recorded how much food was consumed and what kind, water use and reservoir levels, CO2 levels, how much equipment and electricity was used to maintain the environment. Then there were the psychological records: education, behavior, sociability, sleep patterns, cooperativeness.

My record on that score must be something to see, thought Chena with a tight smile. Her hands kept moving.

Next came medical records, listed by date and whether they referenced physical maintenance or an experiment.

Chena froze. All the experiment names spelled themselves out in front of her, cross-referenced with the patient names.

It can’t be that easy, can it?

The lists were extensive, but surely these were just the low-security experiments. They would have a separate security database for the high-level things, like what Mom had been involved in.

Except the only people who have access to this terminal are hothousers, and hothousers have no secrets from each other because that work is so interconnected.

That was what Administrator Tam told Nan Elle anyway, and nobody could lie to Nan Elle. Chena had seen people try. There were things he would not say, maybe, but he would not lie to her.

Chena stared at the path and the list of reports on the screen. Did she dare? It looked like she could. It looked like she could have it all now. She could know, right here and now, who was ultimately responsible for Mom, who had allowed her to die.

Chena’s fingers started moving before she was even sure of her decision. She entered the search for her mother’s medical records, the experiment she was involved in, and all other data pertaining to and about Helice Trust, in order of decreasing relevance to the experiments. When she finished, her hands fell into her lap, as if all the strength had flowed out of them and into the machine.

Chena waited. In the space of a heartbeat, the data all came spilling out onto the screen, all of it under the heading EDEN.

Chena read, drinking in the information until she felt she would burst. Eden was a genetic construct. It was supposed to be the answer to the Diversity Crisis because it had a “rapidly adapting and aggressively proactive” immune system—a set of antibodies and T cells that could take anything the worlds could throw at it and spit it back out.