Eve and Adam

“I can’t get the eyes right.”

“Hmm. Maybe. But he’s got great lips.” She taps her chin with her index finger. “You know, he reminds me a little of what’s-his-name. So-hot.”

“Solo.”

“Needs a body, though. Your drawing, I mean. So-hot’s doing just fine in that department.” She smirks. “If you need suggestions, I can help you finish him. If you know what I mean.”

I ignore her. “Must be genetic. My dad never could do faces, either.”

“But he was a sculptor.”

“Sculpting, drawing. Same problems.” I stare out the window at the undulating hills wreathed in fog. “I remember once he tried to draw my mother. He was using oil pastels, I think. He gave up after a couple tries.”

“Must’ve been tough, capturing Satan on canvas.” Aislin places the sketchbook on my bedside table. “Hey, can you draw, anyway? With your arm all mummied up like that?”

“Nah.” I consider my crushed hand. “Although the way things are going, who knows?”

“So where’s the minibar?”

“There’s a fridge in that cabinet with sodas in it.”

Aislin pulls a flask from the back waistband of her shorts. Naturally, security only found the one in her purse: who carries more than one?

She takes a swig and holds the flask out to me. “Cough syrup?”

“You mean vodka?” I ask. I don’t want to show disapproval, I really don’t, because it bothers her when I do and it creates a barrier between us.

“Lemon vodka, cough syrup, who can tell the difference, really?” Aislin asks.

“I’m actually tempted,” I say. “But, no.”

“You’re on meds.”

“Plus I don’t really drink.”

“You’ve had beer.”

“Don’t get caught or my mother will ban you. And listen to me, Aislin: I’m all alone in here. I need you.”

She acts tough. But she gets tears in her eyes and gives me a hug. “Don’t worry, no one will keep me away from you,” she says. “Now, let’s go find Mr. Bashful. I’ll tell him you like him.”

“I will kill you if you say any such thing!”

“Yeah, right: You’re in a wheelchair. You’re not that scary.”

“There’s something else I want to show you first.”

Aislin steers me toward the door. “What is it?”

“I’m making my own male.”

She frowns. “Mail, like e-mail?”

“Male, like m-a-l-e.”

“You have my full attention, girl.”

– 13 –

SOLO

So. She has a friend. Not at all the kind of friend I would have expected.

Interesting.

I watch from the end of the hallway as Eve and Aislin head toward the elevator. Aislin’s pushing the wheelchair at full throttle. Eve is cracking up.

Man, she has a great laugh.

How to do this without being obvious? She’s not dumb, Eve, she’ll know I’m trying to get to know her if I just keep accidentally running into her.

I do need to know her, at least a little. Not as a girl, of course—although she is definitely, well, that. But that’s not really the point.

You’re so full of it, Solo. Of course that’s part of it. Why not be honest with yourself and admit that’s part of it?

Yes, okay, yes, you need to get to know her in order to decide whether she’s useful. But dude. Solo. Dude: That’s not all of it.

I decide to let it go. Let Eve and her friend have some time. I don’t need to push it right now. Plus I have work to do.

I watch them rolling away.

Damn.

I don’t like them being here. I’ve gotten along so far in life without so-called peers. I have some people I talk to online. Actual humans my own age, really not important.

And yet I almost can’t resist the magnetic pull as they head into the elevator.

The elevator doors slide shut. “Damn,” I say, resisting my desire to punch something.

My phone buzzes with a text. It’s work, of course. It’s not like my twenty closest friends have my number. It’ll be someone needing a doughnut, or a rack of instruments run through the autoclave, or some forgotten thing fetched from a car in the parking lot. In theory it could be one of my online teachers, but that’s unlikely: I keep up with my work. It’s not a strain.

I check my screen. Tattooed Tommy wants a cappuccino and a poppy-seed bagel.

I groan, head to the elevator. I push “7” and I’m whisked to The Meld, the incredible space where the Big Brains hang out. It’s a vast open area—you could park a passenger jet in it—but it’s broken up into pods of moveable workstations. It’s like they took the cubicles from every boring office on earth—one wall, plus a desk and chair and all of that—and rigged them so they could be driven around.

Each workstation has an electric motor and four nylon wheels. They form into groups and they break apart and re-form into different groups. You never know where any of the individual Big Brains might be just by looking, but we have an app that shows current locations. I know, for example, that Tattooed Tommy, the crazy-smart biochemist from Berkeley, is at grid J-7.

In the kitchen, I grab the coffee cart. Caffeine in various forms, organic herbal tea, bagels, muffins, energy bars. This isn’t my job, but I don’t mind covering for the regular dude. There’s no better way to find out what’s going on than by being a peon everyone ignores. If you’re the coffee guy, it’s just assumed that you don’t understand anything you see on the computer screens, holographic displays, and even the occasional old-school chalkboard.

In a place filled with people who think of themselves as Big Brains, a guy dishing out fruit cups is invisible. No one notices when I seem to be checking e-mail on my phone, but I’m actually taking a picture or hitting the “record” voice memo button. I’ve got a pretty good memory, and that helps, too.

I pause and take a swig from my water bottle. Karen, one of the biochem research assistants, grabs a cheese Danish off my cart. “You get a promotion?” she asks.

I shrug, move on, keep my eyes open. It’s hard to steal data here, very hard. But not impossible.

My biggest problem: At Spiker Biopharm, we don’t do cloud.

It’s a security thing. Everyone uploads data to the cloud. That’s where people have their pictures, their tunes, their manuscripts, whatever. But Spiker isn’t “whatever,” so all Spiker data goes strictly to in-house servers.

No CD burners. No USB ports for thumb drives.

Which makes it very complicated for me to steal data. And yet…

There’s a file in the cloud. I’ve encrypted it so heavily the CIA couldn’t break in. People usually use a four- or five-character security code. My code is thirty-two characters long.

I comfort myself with this knowledge as I make my way toward Tommy.

“Bagel and a capp, right?” I ask.

He’s around thirty. Covered in tattoos, everywhere except his hands, neck, and his face. Even his forehead has the word “Pixies”—that’s an alt-rock band—in gothic script.

Tommy thinks of himself as a cool guy. He’s nice to me, in the condescending way that a person who’s