Page 78 of Tyton: The Spider and the Dragonfly
“Let’s go somewhere more comfortable.”Siku gestured.Black hesitated.“Please,” Siku snorted a laugh.“If we wanted to kill you, it would have happened already.Sesi isn’t here at the moment, but you can wait for her in her office.Unless you’d rather stand around the corpses of the men you sent to die, of course.”
Black wrinkled his nose.
Siku tilted his body toward him.“I know.The smell of viscera can be pretty intense if you’ve never been around it.”He started off toward Sesi’s office.Callum followed, back straight and head high.He wouldn’t be cowed by this filth.
“Tomorrow, you’re going to need to start training surgeons.”Siku spoke without turning.
“Why?DocPods are superior in every way.”
“Not for much longer.You’re also going to need equipment to extract nuclei and organelles.
“That’s impossible.DocPods can’t see cells once nuclei and organelles are removed.”
“It isn’t.You just need a cell big enough for your newly trained lab technicians to work on without AI enhanced tools.”
“Why?”
“Reproduction.”
Callum made a face.“Why not just use sperm?”
Siku leaned against the wall.“You’ll forgive me, I’m tired with this leg.”
“Why not get it fixed?”
“The same reason your scanners can’t see me.Synthetic organelles.”
Callum curled his lip.“Talk sense.”
Siku pointed to the dossier.“It’s in there.Most of us have them, thanks to you.Now, we need to get rid of them.”
Callum snarled, “Then find another ghost.Go breed somewhere in the snow.I don’t care.”
“The initial organelle instructions were encoded onto the Y chromosome.I’m infected.You’re infected.Almost any Y chromosome carrier will restart the whole thing.How do you not know your own tech?”Siku shook his head.
“That makes no sense.The organelle would only be present in boys, then.”Callum curled his lip.
“Oh, so you do know some basic biology then.Your great grand whatever thought of that.The new organelle has its own DNA and is present in every cell – including sperm.”
Black stared blankly.“Once it’s built, it self-replicates, like mitochondria, just from the male line.It’s all in there.”Siku pointed at the dossier.Black gazed, vacuous at the thick folder in his hands.
“So, you’re just going to eliminate men from your new cell line?”
Siku opened the door and directed Black to sit.“I didn’t fuck up the world.You did.You can make your arrangements while you wait.The rest, Sesi can explain when she gets here.”
“And if I call for backup?”
Siku smiled.“Here I thought you became a CEO by being smarter and working harder than the rest of us.”He closed the door and Black heard his footsteps fade away.
Cat handed her daughter a cup of tea and slid across the faded orange plastic cushion.Suddenly, Callie missed holding a mug.Missed how they warmed her hands.Missed how they felt so solid.These Hexcel cups seemed inferior in every way.Cat caught her staring at the cup.
“No Sparx today?Did you have a falling out?”she asked.
“Do you really think Sparx wouldn’t have told you if we had?”Callie felt that her smile had grown lopsided.She must have picked it up from Talia.Just the thought of her and Sesi made her heart feel like it was going to burst.She hadn’t felt this way since Brin.And even then, not to this extent.Was she falling in love?That was supposed to happen before you discussed having kids, not after, idiot.
Callie spun the cup slowly on the table.“I know I don’t share as much with you as I probably should, but I need to tell you something and I need you to just listen for a minute.”
“Do I not listen to you?”Cat wrapped her hands around Callie’s, still fidgeting with the cup.”
