'Sorry.' Neko's voice turned cool. 'Didn't mean to be nosy.' She turned and walked out of the factory and into the new day.
Damn! Jannine thought. She wanted to try to explain, but couldn't think of the right words.
She hurried to catch up, blinking and squinting in the bright sunlight. When she'd arrived at work at midnight, rain had slicked the streets. Now the air and the sky were clean and clear.
'Want to get a beer? I'm buying.'
For a second she was afraid Neko would turn her down, keep on walking into the morning, and never talk to her again. Neko strode on, shoulders hunched and hands shoved in her pockets.
Then she stopped and turned and waited.
'Yeah. Sure.'
Finding a place that served beer at eight o'clock in the morning was no big deal near the factory. A lot of the workers, like Jannine, came off the substrate with nerves tight, muscles tense. In reality, she'd spent the last eight hours lying almost perfectly still. But she'd felt like she was in action all the time. Her work felt like motion, like physical labor. Somewhere, somehow, she had to blow off the tension. Beer helped. If she drank no more than a couple, she'd be able to pass the alert at midnight, no problem.
She slid her hand into her pocket and crumpled up the note. A couple of beers would let her stop worrying about that, too.
'Jannine!'
'Huh? What?'
Neko shook her head. 'You haven't heard a word I've said.' She pushed open the tavern door. Jannine followed her out of the sunlight and into the warm, loud gloom. They submerged in the dark, the talk, the music.
Neko slipped through the crowd toward the bar. Jannine, head and shoulders taller than her friend, had to press and sidle past people.
Jannine joined Neko by the wall, put her I.D. into the order slot, grabbed a couple of glasses, and drew two beers. The tavern charged her and returned her I.D. Neko retrieved it for her and traded it for one of the beers.
'Thanks!' Neko shouted above the racket. Four or five people were even trying to dance, there in the middle of the room where hardly anyone could move.
Jannine looked around for a table. Stupid even to hope for one. After work she preferred standing or walking to sitting, but Neko obviously wanted to talk. They weren't supposed to talk about work outside the factory.
Somebody jostled her, nearly spilling her beer.
'Hey,' she said, 'spill the cheap stuff, OK?'
'Hey yourself, watch it.'
She recognized the guy: two couches over and one down. Jannine didn't know his name. Heading back to the order wall, he emptied his glass in a gulp. She felt envious. He could drink like that all morning. She'd watched him do it more than once. He always passed the alert when midnight rolled around.
'Neko!' She caught Neko's gaze and gestured. Neko nodded and followed her.
Jannine pushed her way farther inside, holding her glass high. She passed the bouncer. She knew one was there, out of sight in the small balcony above eye level. She'd come in here four or five times before noticing any of the people who kept an eye on the place. The balcony, upholstered in the same hose-down dark fabric as the walls, blended into the dimness, unobtrusive. The bouncer let the artificials take care of everything but trouble.
Jannine reached the hallway.
'Wait-- ' Neko said as Jannine slid her I.D. into the credit slot of a private room.
The door ate the I.D. and opened.
'What for?' Jannine crossed between the equipment and set her glass down on the small table in the corner. 'Hardly spilled a drop,' she said.
Neko hesitated on the threshold.
'Come on, it's paid for,' Jannine said.
Neko shrugged and entered. 'Yeah, OK. This is kind of extravagant, but thanks.' She shut the door, cutting out the din, somebody yelling at somebody else, a fight about to start. After work, your body was geared up for action, and your brain was too tired to hold it back.
Jannine drank a long swallow of her beer, then made herself stop and sip it slowly. She was hungry. She ordered from the picture menu on the back wall.
'Want anything?'
'Sure, OK.' Neko sounded distracted. She pushed a couple of pictures, barely glancing at them, then sat at the table and leaned on her elbows.
Jannine swung up on the stationary bicycle and started to pedal. It felt good to get rid of the physical energy she had been holding in all day. Sweat broke out on her forehead, under her arms.
'Did you see what we were making?' Neko said again.
'If I'd stopped to think about it, we wouldn't have done such a long stretch and we wouldn't have gotten any brownie points.' Jannine tried not to sound defensive. 'Besides, I was worried about the warm fuzzies.'
'It wasn't natural,' Neko said. She drained her glass, put it down, and raked her fingers through her shoulder- length black hair.
Jannine laughed, relieved. 'I noticed that,' she said. 'I thought you meant something important. Jeez. Nothing we build is natural. If it was natural, we wouldn't need to build it.'
'But we weren't using the regular base pairs. We were using analogs.'
'Yeah. So?' Jannine wondered if Neko, too, had been set up to test her. 'I build what they tell me. It isn't my job to design it.'
Continuing to pedal the bike, she wiped sweat from her face with the clean towel hanging from the handlebars.
'It must be something dangerous,' Neko said stubbornly. 'Something they don't want out in the world. Yet. So they make it with synthetic nucleics. So it can't reproduce.'
'It isn't dangerous to us,' Jannine said, confused by Neko's distress. They were building a set of instructions. Neko knew that. Being scared of it made as much sense as being scared of a music tape.
'I don't mean now, I don't mean yet. But later on when they use it. Whatever it's coding for could be dangerous to us the same way it could be dangerous to anybody.'
'I think you're being silly. They always start sterile, till they're sure about the product.'
An artificial stupid pushed through the hatch in the bottom of the door, rolled inside, slid their food onto the table, and backtracked. The hatch latched with a soft snick.
Jannine swung off the exercise bike and wiped her face again. She took the lids off the plates and pushed Neko's dinner, or breakfast, toward her.
'Do you mind if I have another drink?'
'Go ahead.' It was polite of Neko to ask, since Jannine's I.D. was in the slot. But she should've known she could have whatever she wanted.
Jannine broke open the top of the chicken pie she'd ordered. Steam puffed out, fragrant with sage. When she had a night job, she liked to eat breakfast before her shift, in the evening, and dinner after, in the morning.
'How can you work out and then eat?'
Jannine shrugged. 'I don't have a problem with it. I'm going to eat and then work out, too.'
Neko preferred dinner at night and breakfast in the morning. She had a couple of croissants and an omelet spotted with dark bits of sauteed garlic.
'No hot date today?' Jannine said.
Neko drank half her second beer and pushed her food around on her plate.
'I'm not really hungry,' she said. 'I guess I'll go on home.'
'I thought you wanted to talk. That's why I got the room.'
'I wanted to talk about the helix, and all you want to say about it is 'No big deal.' So, OK. So maybe we're building them a nerve toxin or some new bug.'
'What do they need with a new bug? There's plenty of old bugs.'
'Right. So it's no big deal. So forget it.'
