The Other Tree Read Online Free Page B

behind sleek reception stations, hands darting over shimmering holographic panels swirling with information. The vaulted hall reminded Chris of a futuristic cathedral, with a direct electronic feed from God.
    The elevator was enormous. She noted with mild mortification that it was four times the size of her apartment, and she wondered for a moment whether she was being taken up in the freight elevator in some obscure slight. All four walls of the elevator had sliding doors, and some of them had several. There were no buttons to indicate the various floors, just a smoky glass strip running the circumference of the elevator. Hoyle waved his wrist in front of this, and there was a soft beep as the elevator doors closed.
    There was no elevator music, just a very soft buzzing noise, which Chris suspected came from Hoyle’s discreet earpiece. His head was cocked slightly to the side, and his frown occasionally deepened. Chris felt vaguely like the kid who’d turned up to class with a magnifying glass only to discover that everyone else had electron microscopes.
    The elevator doors opened onto a very different level. The corridors were narrow, and the floor was seamless obsidian. Chris wasn’t a fan of black floors—they made getting rid of millipede infestations very difficult. The only complaint she had about the green linoleum in the basement was the fact that cockroaches got stuck to it in hot weather. Then again, there had also been the cicada plague two years ago. Somehow they had gotten into the basement, and no matter how often Chris thought she had scooped up the last cicada, there was always one bleating sadly somewhere. But she could never find it against the mottled green floor.
    Hoyle paused beside a polished, black door.
    “Chris Arlin, sir,” said Hoyle.
    “Come in,” came a voice.
    The door slid into the wall, and Chris stepped into a large, circular office, overlooking Varria City through a sloping wall of glass. Marrick stood by the window, her dark hair in a flawless French twist. She looked in her late fifties now, but the bearing was the same. Confident, contained, no regrets, no mercy.
    “I remember you,” said Chris.
    “I was at her funeral,” said Marrick.
    “Too bad there was nothing left to bury.”
    Marrick turned to Chris, seeming to draw all she needed to know in a single glance.
    “I didn’t ask you here to reopen old wounds,” said Marrick. “Your mother’s death was a tragic accident, and I wanted to give you the courtesy of telling you this myself. SinaCorp’s team is leaving tonight, and they will find the Tree of Life. It will become the property of SinaCorp, and any beneficial properties will be studied and shared with the scientific community in the same manner as all our other intellectual property.”
    “The highest bidder,” said Chris.
    “The free market. Out of respect for your mother, we offered to make you a part of this expedition. You are free to decline, but consider whether you’re throwing away a promising future out of some misdirected childhood grudge.”
    The hollow burning that had filled Chris over the past day was now turning into a different kind of fire. Older, darker, growing stronger over time.
    “What will SinaCorp do, once it has the Tree of Life?” asked Chris. “Grind it down into chemicals and market immortality to those who can afford it?”
    “And what would you do, Arlin? Open a free clinic and heal the world? Create a deathless society? Or just save your father?”
    That was the thing about death. Education, equal opportunity, human rights—they all acted as levellers in one way or the other, but death was the one thing that made everyone equal. It was the one inescapable fate. To divide the world into the eternal and the mortal, based purely on market economics—it wasn’t just immoral, it was unscientific.
    Scientists were regularly accused of playing God. But there was a quiet, persistent undercurrent of thought that trickled through