Isolation by Dan Wells Page B

but she followed it anyway, as she always did. As she had been engineered to do.
    Her name was Heron, and she was a Partial spy.

PARAGEN BIOSYNTH GROWTH AND TRAINING FACILITY, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
    January 5, 2058
    H er first sensation was sound.
    She didn’t know it as sound, because she didn’t know anything; her life was the barest essential minimum to qualify as life. An unborn child in its mother’s womb feels warmth and motion, hears sounds and voices, sees light and dark through the thick red filter of its mother’s own body. Its brain begins to process these sensations before it even finishes developing, an insatiable learning machine that is already defining the world months before it understands, on any conscious level, that the world exists. An infant human becomes so accustomed to its mother’s voice, for example, that it cries with its mother’s accent mere seconds after birth.
    A BioSynth brain can do so much more.
    The sounds she perceived were meaningless to her, but they were constant, and that made them comforting. If she had the words, she would call them voices, beeps, and the gentle wash of water in her growth vat. Doctors came and went, vital signs were scanned and reported and recorded. Machines hummed and buzzed and beeped and swished. Her father was a genetic sequencer, and her mother was a tube of carefully calibrated nutrients. They were her world, and she listened to them with a consciousness no human fetus could ever imagine.
    Her vision developed next, clusters of photoreceptive cells forming rapidly in the backs of her eyes. She saw the world not in red but in blue, the translucent walls of her growth vat letting in just enough light to give her a sense of darkness. Shapes moved beyond the dark blue walls, coming and going with the voices, but she didn’t know what they were, or who, or why. Her muscles developed soon after, and she found that she had arms and hands, feet and legs, each one seeming to act independent of her own thought and control. Over time she learned to move them—her arms drifting back and forth in the growth fluid, her fingers opening and closing. With her hands she discovered her face; when she accidentally poked herself in the eye, she discovered pain. As her control over her limbs grew stronger, more precise, she poked her eye again, on purpose this time, just to see if she could. It hurt, and she didn’t like to hurt, but it was new. In a vat in a lab where everything was done for her—and to her—it was the first thing she had ever done for herself. Her pain was her statement of identity.
    She had been growing for nearly three months. She was thirty inches long, and nearly twenty pounds. The vat’s inner membrane expanded, and she continued to grow.
    Her hair was already long for an infant, but soon it grew long enough to float in the tank before her, wafting in the currents of her own subtle movements. Her arms lengthened, her legs thickened, her chest and abdomen filling the space until they pressed against the warm, solid sides of the vat around her. This, too, was new, but it didn’t alarm her; the tight press was comforting, keeping her safe and protected. By six months she was nearly five feet tall, if she’d been standing up, and as her body approached its full size, it began to change in shape as well; what a human girl would call puberty became, for her, simply another stage of in-vitro development. Her limbs grew long and slender; her hips swelled; her chest grew from tiny bumps into round, curving breasts. She would later learn that this was also when a human girl would begin to bleed, but she had been designed sterile, like a living doll. This was neither a comfort nor a bother to her, for she knew nothing else.
    At five feet eight inches she stopped growing, and her skeleton solidified into its final shape and size: her skull plates closed and knit together; her adult teeth tore through the virgin flesh of her gums. She had been growing in