Clade by Mark Budz Page A

temporary solution. At some point, he’ll either have to be deported or recladed.”
    “Deported to where?”
    “Good question. We haven’t been able to identify all the pherions in his system. We have no idea what they do or where they came from.”
    “Care to venture a guess?”
    Isa wets her lips. “Offhand, I’d say they were manufactured by a black-market pharm.”
    Meaning they could have come from just about anywhere in the world. “What about the pherions you can identify?”
    “SEA.” Southeast Asia. “But it’s difficult to say for sure because the ecotecture implemented there was modified later for Africa and South America.”
    “So he could be part of that migration.”
    “Or not.”
    Well, that narrows it down a bit. She knows with a fair amount of certainty that he isn’t from Europe, Antarctica, or Mongolia.
    “There’s another problem,” Isa tells her.
    “What’s that?” Anthea says. Judging by Isa’s expression, she doesn’t want to know.
    “Every cell in his body is dying. Whatever ecotecture he’s claded for provides a critical pherion, or combination of pherions, his body needs to survive.”
    Anthea knits her brow. “If he’s away from it for too long he’ll die?”
    “Right. It’s like he’s going through withdrawal. But instead of getting better as his system detoxes, he’s getting worse.”
    Anthea glances at Ibrahim. “What kind of pherion?”
    Isa shrugs. “He’s got so much crap in his system, sorting through it could take weeks.”
    “So you don’t even know what it does?”
    Isa shakes her head. “Sorry.”
    Meaning there’s no way to synthesize a replacement. “There must be
some
thing you can do.”
    “There is, and we’re already doing it. Everything we can.”
    Anthea grinds her jaw from side to side, scraping her teeth along her bottom lip. “How much time does he have?”
    “At the present rate of decline, a few days. Less, if the degeneration accelerates toward the end.”
    “You think maybe he was in a child labor camp?” Anthea says. In some subclades, indentured workers are made physically dependent on a pherion in the ecotecture. Without the pherion, they can’t survive. Escape results in slow but certain death.
    “It could also be a religious sect or conscript militia,” Isa says. “Biodependency is still legal in a lot of places.”
    True. Since the implementation of gengineered plants and artificial ecologies half a century ago, biodependency has been used by governments and politicorps to control demographics—keep populations confined to certain geographical regions. In the beginning it was a necessity. The old ecology was too damaged and fragile to support even the status quo, let alone any sustainable growth. Areas of the world died off en masse, killing billions of people in the process. Starvation was rampant. The only way to preserve various segments of a population, whole societies, was to confine them to ecotectural zones capable of supporting life. Of course, nothing’s perfect. Some of the gengineered flora and fauna wasn’t as benign as originally believed, or it mutated. Either way, people had to be modified to cope with the changes. Retroviruses spliced in artificial genes designed to augment the immune system. After a few million more deaths, chemical imbalances were neutralized, equilibrium reestablished, and everything was more or less hunky-dory.
    Soon, the geographic boundaries evolved along ethnic and racial lines, reshaped by the politics of the past. People settled into clades, populations with a specific biochemical signature compatible with some ecotectures, but not others. From there, it was only a short leap to clades based on specific religious, social, or political ideologies. Environment became less of a determining factor than dogma.
    Which is where things stand now. Clades have gotten so granular that they can be as small as two individuals, binding one to the other. Spouse to spouse, disciples to cult