The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Read Free

branches like pet shop parakeets, but rather soaring inside a biosphere that itself soared higher than an aircraft hangar.He focused on a flock of yellow bee-eaters, swarming like mosquitoes and then diving into the greenery below us. After a while he said, “I thought this place was for monkeys.”
    “It’s a complete ecosystem. What you can see from here is the southeast quadrant. Three streams, two waterfalls. A lake. Fish, birds, anthills. Orchids. Strangler vines. Everything that’s endemic to the animals’ environment. Four point two acres of habitat completely enclosed and rigorously managed. Twice as large as the original Biosphere project in Arizona, except that this one works. Outside the compound itself there’s another 317 acres accommodating 18 different primate species within 31 large social enclosures. We house a total of 2,800 individual primates, not including the staff.”
    “You sound like you’ve given this spiel before.”
    “Many times. That rock formation on your right is eighty-four feet high and tall as a four-story building. It’s an exact replica of a cliff face in Tanzania, where some of our first animals were taken. On the far right, that gray slab jutting out? The large male beside the log is named Morgan. Sort of the patriarch of the clan. That pile of leaves is where he’s been nesting for three or four nights, which they asked me to mention because he’s never removed himself from the others this far before. It’s probably Morgan on camera making a threat gesture just before the incident.”
    “Threat gesture?”
    “Their hackles go up, and they yawn. Chimps’ve got a set of fangs like Count Dracula.”
    “I didn’t see any bite marks on the body.”
    “They’ll clobber the shit out of you too. And throw stuff. Your average chimp is a lot stronger than an adult human. And their temperament doesn’t improve with age.”
    “You saying the husband did it?”
    “I’m saying you’ve handled more of these than I have.”
    “So. How serious are your protesters?
    “Depends. We have several species of those—the no-fur crowd, PETA , Animal Liberation Front, Earth Firsters. Every once in a while a few of them will get past security and trash a lab or spring a few animals.”
    “And it might look bad for the Center if the wrong kind of story got out. Hold up the research and all that.”
    “Yeah. You’re catching on.”
    “Bad enough to close you down?”
    “I doubt it. The stakes are too high. This is the last stop before major medical trials on humans, and we’re talking about pharmaceuticals, implants, tissue cultures, and new operative procedures. There’s money going through here like coke through Colombia.”
    “Great. So this Deckard. He’s really onto something big?”
    “We believe so.”
    “Okay. How about I talk to this other chimp, the one named Morgan?”
    “Talk to him?”
    “Yeah. He can do sign language, right?”
    “You want to interview a chimp?”
    “You said go anywhere I want, ask anything I want. So why not ask the guy who was there?”
    “I’ll see what I can do. But we’ve got less than twenty-two hours, and I’ve got a hell of a lot of writing to do. How about we review the tape first.”
    “How about I talk to the chimp first.”
    “I’ll see what I can do.”
    The caretaker brought him on a leash. Morgan himself closed the door but stiffened when he saw Stillman sitting beneath the mirror on the far side of the room. “It’s okay,” the caretaker said. “Here, let me take this off. Now hop on your box. Hop up here the way we always do.”
    Morgan clambered onto a carpet-covered box and scooped up the grape on his side of the table, holding it between his lip and gum for a moment, taking it out of his mouth for a closer look, and then popping it back in for a satisfying chew. He glared at Stillman and then at the keyboard on his side of the table. He raised one arm and jabbed twice at the oversized pictograms like a man with a