„-because what denialists of evolutionary biology don’t want to acknowledge is the fact that human behaviour and potential can be easily brought into direct causation with genes,“ I spoke to the assorted crowd of biologists and other folk before me. If there was one thing that the University of Cambridge got right, I was quite sure that I would say it was the podiums they employed for speakers in their auditoriums. Being slightly elevated while standing on a raised dais with the light directed at me had a certain feeling to it that just couldn’t be matched in Rheinland or Liberty. “Superior genes, if you will.”
With a click on a small handheld device, I switched the static image shown on the holoscreen behind her to one depicting a diagram. It showed a pie chart divided into four sections, each in a different colour. I went on to explain how certain traits within humanity’s gene code promoted certain features that were advantageous within certain regions. My favourite example of this was the darker skin tones that were more prevalent in the Hispanic folk than inside the houses, and that permitted for a higher resistance against afflictions like skin cancer. Up until this point, everyone was always on my side. Still, the controversial part about my views was still ahead.
“Not only are certain genetic makeups advantageous when dealing with environmental hazards, but it is very well possible that, from a Darwinist perspective, it is very likely that certain social structures are also actively promoted with a people being placed in a harsh environment.” As expected, several eyebrows went up. “What do I mean by that?” Another push of the handheld device and another image was shown, this time depicting tentative statistics alluding to the rate of certain crimes committed per capita in Corsair society as opposed to the Bretonian one. “Well, first I’ll tell you what I don’t mean. It has been said about me that I assume the existence of a ‘crime’ or ‘predator’ gene that is favoured Darwinistically in societies that exist within a perpetual state of distress. There is nothing to suggest something as to that extend would be true.”
With a laserpointer, I highlighted the discrepancies within the statistics. “As you can see, when it comes to per capita cases of what we would define as aggravated battery, Corsair males have a twenty times higher rate of being a suspect of the crime than a Bretonian.” There were single whispers within the crowd. I was quite sure they were wondering about my statistics. It was true that they were not publically known, or at least, not yet. I had spent quite a lot of time gathering that data, going so far as to return to Crete for a while. “People are quick to attribute things such as aggressiveness to things such as culture or upbringing. People are not comfortable with the idea that something as fundamental as one’s potential for violence could be hard wired, and indeed, Corsair culture is by far more patriarchal than that of most Bretonian colonies.”
I made a pause to take the glass in hand that stood on the podium before me to take a sip. My hand was steady. In my years, I had given many talks like that to scientific peers, and it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to their scrutiny. “A correlation between patriarchal ideas in society and the acceptance of violence has long since proven, thus the, albeit false, conclusion that this is the only factor when it comes to potential violence, is all too understandable. Men are even today still taught that any contact with another human is either violent or sexual.” Another click of the device, and this time, two DNA sequences were shown on the holoscreen. “The left sequence is taken from a Bretonian and the right one from a Corsair.” Several nucleotides on the Corsair strand were highlighted in one colour while the other DNA sequence had similar parts highlighted in a different one. I went on to explain how the highlighted parts of the Corsair DNA were responsible for the formation of certain brain regions and the creation of hormones at a later date, noting discrepancies between the two…
“I don’t rightly think they appreciated what I did,” I groused into a big cup of ice cream, staring at Adrian in front of me. We were sitting in a sweet little café roughly two blocks away from the university, watching taxis and other vehicles flit through the skies at irregular intervals.
“You were the one wanting to take a controversial topic for your paper,” he meant, taking a sip from his sundae. It had molten in the time we had been here, given that he was not a fast eater. He gave the sundae a sour look as if the dessert was responsible for him getting toothaches each time he ate something cold.
“You know it’d be easy for me to correct the nerves, right?” I asked, knowing what he would answer. It was always the same.
“I’m quite fine with my nerves as they are.”
I suppressed a snort. Looking to the window, I could see part of my reflection. My skin was darker than his, so it made making out details a bit more tricky.
“Hey, cheer up, you’re still one of the most valuable contributors they have,” he said after a few moments during which I hadn’t said anything. I blinked, noticing that I had been staring at my reflection for a while.
“For about twenty years now,” I replied, not really knowing what else to say. “I invented methods of genetic splicing, radiation therapy and decontamination technology that is used widely across Sirius, but I can’t convince a few cultural Marxists that they’re idiots.” I groaned. “It’d be way easier if I wouldn’t have to run to a lawyer each time I want to test a hypothesis. There are enough morbidly ill people in Bretonia, especially with the war with Gallia. So what if I didn’t test anything before? I can’t test anything if I don’t get the chance to test anything.”
“You should probably take a break,” Adrian murmured under his breath, pushing the sundae away.
“Maybe next time I replace anything related to serotonin production in you wi-“ I took a deep breath. I was way too easily annoyed. “Yes, you’re right.”
“So you’re going to cancel the trip to Pygar?” he asked hopefully, and I gave him a flat look.
“Look, it’s not like I’m going to suffer huge amounts of stress there, alright? I’ll just go there, listen to some old people ramble about xenobiology and bugger off again.” I sounded almost apologetic, I noticed, though I didn’t mind.
“Teresa, you-“
“No, really, it’s fine,” I said, trying to sound as reassuring as I could. It wasn’t like I’d actually collapse from stress or anything. “It is just a dead planet. Freeport 9 is directly next to the planet, almost.” I pulled out my purse to leave two credit chips on the table, signalling for him to stand up.
“Alright,” he said, pronouncing the word while breathing out.
I waved to the waiter so he’d know we were going. “Really, Adrian, for a man of science, you really are worrying too much about improbabilities.” He started protesting, but I didn’t listen. He was a sweet man. If I were younger, I might have considered dating him, but as it stood, there was a twenty-five year age difference between us. He was working towards his own PhD in Bio-Engineering right now. If I might say so myself, there was nobody else better than me he could learn from, but that was beside the point. We left the café and I called a cab, telling the driver to bring us back to the university.
Two weeks later.
If Pygar was one thing, then I would prefer using the words arid or dusty. The atmosphere was tenuously thin. Some had theorized that the remainder of the oxygen in the air had once come from vegetation that had grown on the pole parts of the planet, as archaeologists had found small amounts of oil there that could allude to fossilized wood and plant matter. In any case, this wasn’t really what I had come here for.
Pygar had a slightly tainted reputation since the year 800 A.S., given that it had been identified as the source of the Nomad infection that had swept into Rheinland and very nearly set into motion a chain of events that could have very well ended the existence of humanity within the Sirius Sector. Thankfully, there had been people braver than I had been. Really, thinking back those years, I actually appreciated the fact that the events of the Nomad War had barely touched the Corsair Empire at all. I had lived on Crete at the time, given that I had been born there. Maybe not the most comfortable place to grow up, but I was not one to dwell on such things.
Stepping down the ramp and into the hangar, I looked around. The indoor hangar pretty much reminded me of those she had seen on Sprague. The only difference here was that Pygar’s surface was prone to be ravaged by sandstorms that made any sort of unassisted human survival on the surface unfeasible. Adrian left after me, looking almost seasick. I chortled and he shot me a dirty look.
“Miss Martinez?” a man in lab coat asked me after we had distanced ourselves a few paces from the shuttle.
“That would be me,” I answered, waiting for the man to check his files and give us our identifications for our stay here. Given Pygar’s history, everyone was required to carry a valid identification with them at all times. Sporadic checks and checkpoints were set up at the fringes of where the research compounds connected, requiring people wanting to traverse the place to identify themselves every five hundred meters.
“And you must be Mr. Wight, then,” the man asked, and Adrian nodded. He handed us two electronic chip cards that were fastened on a chord that could be hung around ones neck. I looked at it, and found a picture of myself on it, together with name and pretty much everything else a regular ID card would have. I dimly wondered why we couldn’t just use our Bretonian passports, but my question was answered as soon as I touched the card with one hand.
A small green light lit up at the corner. “Fingerprints,” I stated, unimpressed. “Do we need to do retina scans as well? Do you want my pee, maybe?” I was only semi-serious in my complaints.
“Ma’am, I’m trying to do my work,” he replied, looking somewhere else as if wanting to leave.
I sighed. “I guess. Where can I find Dr. Julius?”
“Dr. Julius is currently at the excavation site C, together with his assistants,” the man answered, glad that I had stopped haranguing him. “Talk to the security personnel and they will lead you around the compounds.”
I nodded, and that was that. Looking around, I was definitely reminded of Sprague. Or at least, when Sprague hadn’t been terraformed to the point it was now. The hangar was relatively big, with at least four shuttles being able to comfortably be parked here. People were milling about, most wearing lab coats, others wearing blue uniforms that reminded me of police. Naturally, some security was required, given the immense value of the work done here.
And, well, the people working here also worth a lot. It’s not like I think people are not equal under the law, but I did believe that society could do without certain kinds of people. Losing even one of the minds at work here, for example, would be a bigger tragedy than some bum on the streets overdosing on the latest drug.
I motioned for Adrian to follow me as we approached one of the people in blue who seemed to have nothing to do besides standing around. I told him where we wanted to go and we were off. I couldn’t help but notice that he was limping while he walked ahead of us. Involuntarily, my mind wondered about the cause and came up with multiple ways of correcting it. I took a deep breath and continued walking.
“OCD again?” Adrian asked quietly by my side so the man before us wouldn’t hear, and I reluctantly nodded. “Just distract yourself. I’m sure there’ll be enough to keep you occupied when we’re there.”
I just nodded. I hated this. I hated the fact that this twenty five years younger man had to tell me to distract myself from my neurotic fits. My hands shook slightly as I put them into the pockets on my lab coat and started fiddling around with the keys I had in them.
Down an elevator we went, past at least twenty stories of this complex. I couldn’t even fathom how many people could realistically be housed here, but publically available information stated that it was at least a couple thousand. I tended to think that this was bull, simply because the sheer mass of this complex. One or two times, I glimpsed something that looked like a collapsed corridor or something and I turned to our guard.
“Do these cave ins happen often?” I asked, glad for the opportunity to distract myself further.
He turned to me slightly while we passed another story. “We’re already multiple hundreds of meters underground. The pressure is immense, and the older parts of the compound tend to destabilize when there’s an earthquake. We’ve requested more sturdy equipment to build everything, but passing Bretonia’s bureaucracy these days is impossible, especially with the Gallic War taking up all the capacities when it comes to steel production, et cetera.”
I looked at Adrian with a raised eyebrow. This was new to me. “I didn’t know the expedition had such chronic deficiencies in the means provided to them.”
“Well, up until now, there have been no deaths, but it is only a matter of time until someone will get hurt so badly that they won’t make it. We had an entire section cave in at some point. Luckily, nobody had been there at the time.”
The lift stopped and we moved out. The air was considerably colder down here. Occasional piles of stuff littered the corridor as we walked and I identified them as various ingredients used to repair. “What happened to that section?” I asked after we rounded a corner.
“Inaccessible now. Was supposed to be a medbay, since the one we have on level two is rather small. The expedition was never supposed to become this big, apparently, so the medbay there is only really equipped to handle a handful of people at one time.” I nodded again. From my perspective, it seemed like a real shame that Bretonia didn’t seem to be able to provide medics to help. After all, the only injuries I could see happen here were lacerations, broken bones, the occasional puncture wound. Lost limbs, maybe? Even a medicine student in the fourth semester could handle those.
“A real shame,” I answered, for lack of anything better to say, and that ended our conversation. I didn’t actually know how long we walked, but the talk had given me enough to mull over to not mind it terribly. Eventually, the corridor just, well, stopped. Instead, it gave way to something that looked like a natural cave inside the earth. Catwalks had been built in places to allow people to cross distances without fearing to impale themselves on some of the pointy rocks that jutted out from the ground like spears. All in all, this place seemed like a real death trap. It was dark, too, with the only light sources being glaring lights affixed to the catwalk. I’d say this cave could hold around the volume of a cruiser-sized vessel.
“The Doctor is down there. If there is anything else, I’ll be waiting in the corridor outside,” our guard told us, and Adrian nodded. I looked into the distance, where the catwalk seemed to slope down and eventually disappear deeper into the earth, forming stairs.
“Spooky,” Adrian whispered into my ear and I rolled my eyes, starting to walk ahead. On the way, I buttoned up my lab coat, trying to preserve some of the warmth of my body. They really could’ve made some effort to warn me about this. Eventually, I could hear the echoes of voices down below, and leaning over the railing slightly, I could make out people standing downstairs. Most of whom I did not recognize. Maybe half a dozen. Dr. Julius was distinct in the way I could see his brown hair bob up and down as he gestured with his hands. The man should’ve become a politician, I mused beside myself.
The embarrassment of needing to interrupt him in order to announce myself and Adrian was spared to me, because he raised a hand in my direction as he saw me. “Ah, Dr. Martinez!” he exclaimed, almost ecstatic. I cringed inwardly. Definitely a politician.
“It is nice to meet you again, too,” I replied, taking his offered hand. The assorted people around me eyed me weirdly, as if they couldn’t believe a Hispanic woman could know the capacity on the area of Xeno-Biology.
Dr. Julius was old. Older than me, in fact, which meant something. Being above seventy, but still possessing an ego large enough to fill this room, Julius spent nearly all of his actual earnings from his scientific work on beauty products. He dyed his hair, underwent regular therapy to counter the visible parts of the aging process about his body. Really, he looked like he was in his late twenties. Adrian had once confided in me, saying he found Dr. Julius exceedingly creepy, and fair enough, I could understand why he, given that he was a father, would find the thought of some old creep potentially dating his daughter creepy. My thoughts? I admired the work quite a lot. I never cared about money too much, as long as I could sustain myself. I could appreciate the work of biological manipulation Dr. Julius underwent. Now if only he was actually immortal…
“You’ve just come in the right moment to hear about our finds from last week. Drilling efforts have opened a new cave that we believe might have been a nest in which the Nomads hibernated for all those hundreds of years.”
I nodded. This did sound interesting. It might give us some important clues about their physiology, their needs. If we knew what they need to sustain themselves, we could start working on ways to either deprive them of their sources of sustenance, or we could try and devise a biological weapon that inhibits their bodies in space from metabolizing that particular source of sustenance, starving them.
“Mr. Wight, I imagine,” Dr. Julius said to Adrian and extended his hand to him, finally. Adrian shook it.
“Wouldn’t want to miss a chance to see this.”
And too see if I don’t fall into neurotic fits, I thought wryly, not voicing that, though. Nobody needed to know about that. It wasn’t like it inhibited my ability to work.
“Commendable, boy,” Julius’ voice boomed way too loud for my taste, echoing ever so slightly. “Alright, if we’re all here, then I guess there’s no reason why we should dally here any further.”
He lead the way, the entourage of archaeologists and biologists following him like ducks would their momma duck, or at least, that was the impression it made while we walked along another catwalk. Trailing my hand along the railing, I could tell that this one had been put up more recently than the others. Less grime, less use. I had no desire to walk directly after Julius, so I let the other people go first. For me, this wasn’t a competition, but I could guess that half of these people hoped to impress Julius so they could have him as their mentor while they promoted. I could understand that desire. I’d also sucked up to people like that. Not literally, though.
The walk was, thankfully, rather short. We came to a halt on a rounded platform that had been constructed in another cave that looked distinctly artificial. It had probably once been completely oval, though time and water had whetted away at the walls, creating crevices and nooks where parts of the stone had been knocked askew. That was not the most noticeable part, however. Looking around, the walls had holes that I could best liken to that of a honeycomb. There were alcoves created inside the wall, with the space inside being empty and dark. I looked down from the platform we stood on and noticed even more of these depressions in the ground. All in all, I would guess this room’s diameter to be about a hundred meters, maybe more.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Julius was the first to speak, addressing the assorted people. “This has been discovered in the aftermath of a recent earthquake that collapsed part of the cave that we just crossed to get here.” He gestured for the catwalk, that was leading through a collapsed part of the wall, judging by the rubble that was still strewn about. I dimly wondered how high the possibility was of all them getting caught up in a sudden cave in and dying.
“Initial examinations of the structure lead us to suspect that this room was artificially created, and no, we don’t just infer that from what we see with our eyes.” He withdrew a PDA from his lab coat and I rolled my eyes as everyone and their mother craned their necks to see what he wanted to show them.
“The walls of this cave have been whetted away so the angle of the curvature would sustain the maximum amount of pressure without compromising on the possible alcoves in the wall. We took samples of the stone and initial guesses are that the stone in this room was last heated to the point that it would be able to be formed around three hundred thousand years ago.”
I raised an eyebrow. That was interesting and all, but it didn’t really answer what I wanted to know. I raised a hand and Julius looked at me, apparently a bit distracted before he nodded and I spoke. “Why did the wall collapse? If this cave is that old, why did it not collapse earlier? It stands to reason that Pygar has been seismically active for at least half a million years now.”
He pointed at me. “Good question.” He turned to his PDA and showed another 3D display of this room, though this time, small Nomad ships were nestled — there really wasn’t a better word — inside the wall’s alcoves. “We believe that the room was actually stable only for as long as a significant weight rested on the grounds of these alcoves, because if we take them away in this simulation…” He trailed off, and pressed a button, prompting the Nomad ships to disappear. An overlay displayed the shifts in the center of gravity in the different parts of the wall, and I understood. Clever construction. The Nomads had used their ships as building blocks to keep this room stable while they hibernated. I mean, why not. It wasn’t like they could use them in this state.
“How did they get out, though?” I asked, feeling like I was stating the obvious.
“Well, that…” Julius began, picking up a flashlight from a small table nearby and walking over to the edge of the platform, putting one hand on the railing the other on the flashlight, and shone its cone of light below them.
I looked at where he pointed the light. A hole. “Like a drain,” he finished his thought. “We haven’t yet explored where this ‘drain’ leads, but we assume that it will probably lead outside at some point.” I could see that. The complex was closed off, so there was no way to test this without going down. The test where people identified whether cave paths led to the surface or not only worked if there were two points a draft of air could go. “That is secondary for now, though. What we are here to see is this cave in particular and its implications on Nomad physiology.”
I was lying on my back, facing the ceiling. The living quarters of the complex were surprisingly good, I found. I mean, it was still only relative to what I was used to when it came to such places. Sprague didn’t have running water in the first days when I was there, so a bucket and a brush was really all you had in the morning to freshen up. I was glad this expedition had put this part behind itself without my help.
It was a double room. Roughly ten square metres, it housed a bunk bed, a table with four chairs, two shelves and a small closet for clothes, mostly the standard issue clothes people were required to wear here. After all, there wasn’t a shopping mall nearby and if one stayed here for a longer time, chances were that the clothes people brought to wear during leisure time would wear out. Eventually, people just opted to wear their de facto work clothes around the clock, even if not on duty.
Adrian was on the lower bed. After we had entered the room and spied the bunk bed, we had looked at each other and silently agreed that I take the upper one. After all, we weren’t children anymore.
I turned to the side, groaning inwardly. This promised to be one of these nights in which I would turn around for hours just to fall asleep for half an hour in the morning. Didn’t really help that I was jet-lagged like hell from the time differences to Cambridge. I sat up, almost hitting my head on the ceiling. It wouldn’t really hurt if I went around a little. Maybe a small walk will make me more tired.
Climbing down, I quickly donned some clothes that would actually be decent while walking outside. A jacket over the lab coat might not look very professional, but it sure as hell would keep me warm at least. This entire complex was an ice desert. I had questioned one of the workers on their way back from Dr. Julius’ talk about the temperature, and he had said that the temperature was deliberately kept at a level that would provide the most comfort at the least energy strain for the generators. What, now even deuterium is a rare commodity these days?
I looked at Adrian and noticed his steady breathing. I might have been suspicious that he was faking if it weren’t for his moving eyes under his eyelids. REM sleep. The lightest phase of sleep, but I was sure the door would open quietly enough for me to leave without disturbing him. I silently slipped out the door and watched it close behind me, taking a deep breath after I was outside before I started off in no particular direction. The ID card I’d been given when I arrived dangled from my neck, beating a steady rhythm on my chest as I walked.
Given that it was night time on Pygar, or rather, given that the complex was now on the night side of Pygar at least for the next six hours, fewer people were milling around than when I had arrived. Surprisingly few people looked like they belonged to the science staff. Instead, the security personnel seemed to patrol the corridors here and there. They really were paranoid about anything Nomad related. Good. The creatures had proven to be subversive and frighteningly clever. I had been on Crete during the Nomad War, but tales of what had happened were everywhere after I had moved to Cambridge to promote. They sometimes came down from their domain beyond Omicron Kappa, but the Corsairs were always quick and indiscriminate when it came to dealing with them. If I didn’t know better, it almost seemed like the Nomads were either probing their defences or inept. I tended to believe in the former.
Without noticing, my steps had taken me to the elevator I had taken before and the doors slid shut in front of me. I pressed the button that would lead me to the lowest level and waited patiently until the doors opened again and I could leave. Taking the same route as a few hours ago, I soon found myself in the same chamber that Dr. Julius had orated in.
I sat down in the middle of the platform, on a desk that was littered with pens and sketches, as well as several data pads. A box with equipment was below the table, seemingly filled with all sorts of mining equipment. I deduced that they planned on expanding the tunnel further. Restless, I stood up again and approached the side of the platform, looking down. There was the drain we had noticed earlier. I estimated the distance between platform and the ground around the drain to be about two meters. I could jump down if I wanted and wouldn’t hurt myself. However, the depth of this drain was dark and I couldn’t see inside. I wondered how deep it was.
Picking up one of the pens from the table, I briefly glanced at the entrance, again confirming that I was alone before I went to the side of the platform again and dropped the pen into the drain, listening for the impact on the ground and counting seconds. 1. 2. Clatter.
The pen also seemed to roll a second before the noise was gone, suggesting that there was a slope down there and not even ground. I quickly did the math in my head to calculate the distance, which should be around six metres.
I looked at the box of mining equipment, in which I also spied a rope.
This really has to be the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, I thought idly while pulling it out of the box. It was ten metres long, or at least, that’s what it said on a label that was tacked on it. Fair enough, that would work.
I fastened one end on the railing of the platform and gave it a hard tug. It held, which I expected. Putting a flashlight into my jacket, I took a deep breath. If the platform could hold me standing, it could also hold me hanging. That, and my knot was a good one. Taking another deep breath, I climbed over the railing so I held onto it from the other side and used the rope to clumsily let myself down the first two metres onto the ground before the drain. The rope hadn’t fallen in there when I had let it down, so I threw it in there.
This really was the tricky part. Given that I never really did climbing, it was a whole new experience for me. I knelt down at the edge of the drain, holding the rope taut. Putting the soles of my feet to the side of the hole, I held onto the rope for dear life as I slowly moved my foot away. It was awkward, but I was able to climb down walking on the wall and using the rope to steady myself. I must have needed at least fifteen minutes before I finally set my feet on the ground below.
My hunch hadn’t been wrong. The ground here really did slope down slightly, but I still didn’t see anything. Taking out the flashlight, I lit it, shining it in the direction this tunnel led. It seemed to lead downward steadily, the slop following an angle of maybe five to ten percent. Hesitating for a moment, I made a step further in, then another, and soon found myself walking at a slow pace.
The walls weren’t as smooth as they had been in the chamber. Trailing my fingers along them, I could feel they felt much rawer than the almost processed-looking stone above. Water? No, water would have caused patterns of trails to emerge on the stone. Besides, there was no actual moisture here, which actually surprised me. I would think that ground water would seep in here from time to time at least. Come to think of it, some of these tunnels should, indeed, be flooded. I could probably even encounter an underground lake.
I almost tripped over a treacherously hidden piece of rock that stuck out of the curved ground and I opted to pay more attention to where I was treading. I didn’t really want to imagine what would happen if I broke a leg or something down here. My voice might still carry to the people standing on the platform, but I doubted that there would be anyone else visiting it in the next five hours.
Let’s just not die horribly down here. That’d be great.
I continued for what felt like half an hour before the tunnel gave way to another cave. This time, it appeared to be a more natural one. The walls were jagged and looked like they had formed naturally, although they were slightly blackened by something that I couldn’t yet identify. The ground was relatively flat, with the ground apparently having grown akin to pyrite formations, which made for flat expanses to stand on, some being more raised than others.
Seeing the ground, it was quite possible that the blackened parts of the walls were some sort of mineral. I approached one of them, using the flashlight to take a close look at the rocks. The light seemed to make the matter shift and ripple, or maybe it was just reflecting and breaking the light in a strange way. I blinked, trying to get away the white spots from my vision that had formed from looking too long into a light source. I took a step to the left, then another, examining the spots on the walls, and found each one to display similar properties.
Was there some cave leading further? I looked around and found nothing of the sort. If I were to guess, this cave had to be at least two hundred metres in diameter, so it made traversing it tricky, especially with the uneven ground, which I had to climb in some instances. It occurred to me rather late that I could also be looking up, and shining the lamp upwards, I noticed the ceiling at a dizzying height. My best guess was that there was some path further up there. The Nomads could fly after all.
I frowned. Given that this was a dead end for me, I couldn’t do anything but return to where I started off from. Checking my watch, I had about two hours before someone would invariably start working on the excavation site again. At least I had enough time to get back, I thought wryly. Taking another deep breath, I turned to one of the blackened spots on the wall again, shining the flashlight on it one last time. It really created a lustre that was almost mesmerizing. I blinked as my watch beeped and my eyebrows furrowed. Now it was 7:30. But it had been 6:00 just a moment ago when I had looked.
I looked at the spot on the wall again, and raised my hand, slowly making contact with the dark matter on the wall. It was smooth. Smoother than one would expect a wall to be, even if this was supposed to be pyrite. The light reflected off the surface as though it had edges, but that completely went contrary to what I was feeling.
Curious one, aren’t you?
I spun around, looking around frantically. A voice, as clear as if the words had been spoken directly next to my ears had startled me so much that the flashlight clattered to the ground, but thankfully, it didn’t extinguish.
Nobody there.
With my heart beating wildly, I scanned everything in my vicinity for the speaker. Could a human have reasonably crossed the distance and hid behind one of the pyrite formations, out of sight? Just when I was almost convinced that I had just imagined it, I heard it again.
The easiest solution has to be the correct one, right? If you can’t see anyone, surely it must have been your imagination.
“Who’s there?” I spoke, and I was surprised at how firm my voice still sounded despite this. I knelt down to pick up the flashlight, wary of anyone who might approach me while I was vulnerable.
I was merely marvelling at your application of Occam’s Razor, the voice sounded. It was… hard to make out any emotion or intonation in the voice, but the context made it sound almost mischievous. It is a good principle, yet only applies to happenstances that you can actually imagine.
“Naturally,” I replied briskly. “That’s like saying ‘you can’t understand it unless you understand it’. It’s a tautology.”
True, but only if you don’t have my context. There was a pause, during which I straightened up again, eyeing the exit. My curiosity was vying with my common sense.
“Who are you?” I repeated the same sentiment from before, but again the voice didn’t deign an answer.
I’ve been observing you since you arrived. A curious mind. Brilliant, almost. At least for your standards. Nature dealt you a nice hand when it came to your ‘hardware’. The last word had a strange intonation to it, as though it wasn’t the word the speaker had intended to use, but instead had been at a loss of words for a moment before opting for a word that meant something similar, but not quite what they meant.
“I’ll have you know that all of this is the result of hard work and dedication,” I sounded, almost offended that someone had suggested that I was only this good at my field because I had a good genetic makeup that favoured analytic thinking and gradual deferral of gratification.
A Corsair scientist. Chances are this fact does raise a few eyebrows here and there, right? The question was almost innocuous.
“It-“ I started, trying to ascertain how much I wanted to say. “Yes, the people of Crete are not renowned for their civil nature, at least in Bretonia.”
And you disagree?
“Of course I-“ I spoke, though stopped mid-sentence, as the gravitas of the statement became apparent. “It’s different. Bretonians don’t understand what it is like for a people to constantly face the threat of starvation. We’re not like the Custodi up north. They live sequestered from us in their beautiful cities and rich fields and know little of that.”
Wouldn’t it be easy for you to simply make your skin appear whiter and just completely leave the connotations and the memories connected with that place behind? I know you could.
How did they know that? “You must have been quite a fan of me that you know so much. You know, my kind dwells on praise. This entire show wouldn’t have been necessary to ask for an autograph.”
There was a sound of something approximating a chuckle. It was a cold sound that made it seem as though someone was trying to imitate it, having only had the barest idea of how it was supposed to sound like.
Know so much? Teresa, I know everything. Slowly, a pressure built up inside my skull and I gasped quietly, my hands involuntarily wandering to my head to hold it, as though it was about to burst. That doesn’t make me aloof though. You’d be doing well to remain polite.
The pressure was so intense that I sank to my knees involuntarily, the effort of remaining on my feet proving too much. Unable to formulate a coherent sentence, I nodded instead, hoping the incorporeal stranger would be able to see it. The pressure subsided and I let out a shaky breath of relief, remaining on my knees.
“Wh- what do you want?” I asked, and this time my voice sounded way less stable than it had been before.
Better question, it sounded, mocking me. I clenched my teeth. I want to help you.
“Help me,” I snorted before I could stop myself. “Your kind doesn’t help people. I know what you are.”
You’re right, I don’t just help people, it said, and this time it really sounded scolding. I want to help only you.
I said nothing.
No words of defiance? No words of inquiry?
“Would it matter if I did?”
No.
I closed my eyes. What were the odds of this happening? There was a diffuse feeling of rage inside me. Rage at myself for doing something this stupid. Rage at probability, that something like this should even be possible, given that Pygar was supposed to be clear.
Everything in the universe functions more or less like clockwork. Pieces fit together, and sometimes, all it takes for you to get what you want is greasing one of the cogs.
Again, a pressure on my skull. This time, it pierced through me like fine needles, burying into my brain and shutting down even the most basic of thought processes. My vision swam and distorted, but before it became a sea of colours and indiscernible shapes, I saw something manifest before me. A radiant light blinded me and the pain in my eyes momentarily dwarfed the pain in my skull, yet I couldn’t look away. The image seared into my retinae, and I was sure that I would be able to recreate this image in my inner mind’s eye until the day I died.
I don’t need to control you. It’s just the way you are.
Even the light before me blurred and dark corners began to appear in my vision before I sank to the ground completely and consciousness failed me.
Murmurs.
I had hated them when I had been smaller. The house my family on Crete had lived in — if you could even call it a house — had had paper-thin walls, and I had always been able to hear my parents talk to one another, even if they had tried to be silent. They had tried to shield the girl from the reality of their day, lack of food. My father had been a diabetic, yet he had always put me first. It was just the way he was.
The voice that had spoken moved away from me slightly and felt relief. My head was throbbing and the slow thuds in my ears made me acutely aware of my blood slowly pumping through my body in a steady rhythm. I felt feverish, hot. Parts of my body felt numb, yet I knew there was a blanket draped around me. Everything was heavy and I was quite sure that, if I moved even a single bit, I would immediately vomit, so I remained quiet.
“-awake.”
That was another voice from the first. Was there water in my ears? I wanted to sleep and sit out this agonizing feeling in my head. Why was it so bright here? Even with my eyes closed, the light pierced my eyelids uncomfortably and I couldn’t turn away. I just lay there like that. It felt like an eternity until I finally found something that approximated a feverish sleep. I didn’t dream, or at least, I didn’t remember any dreams afterwards.
I didn’t know how long it took but at one point, I felt lucid enough to open my eyes slightly and peer around. Adjusting to the light, I could see that I was in a bed. I dimly remembered the little medical section this complex had. This must be where I was. I turned my head slightly and a nauseating feeling threatened to overwhelm me, so I stopped. At least, this seemed to get the attention of a woman clad in a medical gown, who entered my vision from the opposite side I had turned my head to.
“Miss Martinez?” she asked quietly.
I grunted. There really was no better word for it. My throat was dry and it took a moment before I found the ability to speak. “Yes?” I was surprised at how hoarse I was.
“Can you turn your head?”
I obliged, although slowly, facing the woman. She appeared to be middle aged, white, brown hair. The bags under her eyes betrayed that she hadn’t slept in a while.
“Do you know what happened?” the woman asked, and just now I heard a slight hoarseness in her voice.
“I-“ I started, distracted, closing my eyes again. “I don’t.”
“You were found in the lower half of excavation site C. You repelled from the platform and stumbled over a rock in the dark, hitting your head. It knocked you out cold and you lay there bleeding for approximately eight hours alone and in the cold. You were found by the expedition team who was scheduled to descend into the caves below today, suffering from hypothermia and barely breathing.”
“Wha-?” That didn’t make sense. I knew that I hadn’t stumbled and fell unconscious. Had all this been a fever dream? No. It had felt way too realistic. Way too painful. “I mean. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” the nurse said, taking a pen from the clipboard and marking a few notes that I couldn’t see. “Dr. Julius is furious. Mr. Wight has been on edge since he discovered you missing this morning.”
“How late is it?” I asked, wanting to know how much time had actually passed.
She looked at her wrist watch. “Quarter past six in the evening.”
I nodded. The nurse went around my bedside, and I was too lazy to follow her with my eyes. When she appeared again, she took my arm and I could see an infusion needle in my arm. They were administering saline, of course.
“You should rest. You suffered quite the concussion and it’ll only get better by holding still. Are you in pain?”
If I closed my eyes, it was better, but only slightly so. “A bit.”
She nodded. “I will see that we give you a light painkiller. The rest will need to happen naturally, though.”
“Yes.”
Looking at her clipboard one more time, the nurse made another note before leaving my vision and I closed my eyes again. A few minutes later, I could hear steps and the nurse approached the side of my bed again, this time with a syringe in hand. She connected it to the infusion needle in my arm and slowly, my perception became subdued. I looked up at her face, and suddenly, everything made perfect sense. The bags under her eyes, the hoarse voice. This woman had recently gone through a breakup. If the way the woman held herself was an indicator, she had next to no self-esteem and would therefore likely be prone to shovel her own insecurities onto her partner until they couldn’t stand it anymore and left. There was more, though. The partner had not been male. There was something in the way she touched my arm with one hand while she injected the liquid. It was totally useless for the medical process yet…
It took two days until I was deemed ready to leave without medical supervision. I had been unconscious most of the time. At least I hadn’t puked which I was glad for. Even now, I still didn’t feel right most of the time.
Something was definitely wrong since I had woken up in that bed. I had started when I suddenly knew things that I couldn’t possibly regarding the relationship of the nurse that had been there on the first day. The next time had been when Dr. Julius had visited me to scold me and I could read out of his expression that he was doing this more to save his own hide than out of sympathy for me, given that he was responsible for this expedition and even small accidents could lead to disastrous PR nightmares. I hadn’t asked him about that, however, and simply nodded in reply. I was at fault for my own actions, anyways.
Another time had been when the nurse had been gone at the end of the first day and I felt like the machine that was monitoring me wasn’t connected correctly. I had turned a little and the patches on my skin that were monitoring my vitals had shifted. I had suddenly known how to calibrate the machine to compensate for it, even though I had never seen one up close, much less used them. Accompanying that was a splitting headache again. Needless to say, I didn’t touch it for fear something would go wrong.
The second day had gone without any such incident, and again, I had been willing to chalk up what had happened to the after effects of the concussion. Adrian had visited me on that day. It had been evident that he hadn’t enjoyed the entire ordeal as well, and he told me in no uncertain terms how irresponsible I had been for being this reckless. He’d also semi-forced me to accept a time out of two months and I had accepted, feeling like I owed this to him at least. To be fair, if there had ever been a time in which I felt like this was a good idea, it was about now.
I said my good byes to the medical staff that had supervised me during my stay and turned to leave. Adrian was waiting for me by the entrance. I knew he’d set it upon himself to monitor me like that before I did anything else stupid. We started to walk.
“I guess all in all, this was a shorter stay than I thought initially,” I said, wanting to break the silence somewhat. From the initial two weeks, we were about to take our leave again. Dr. Julius had been quick to accept Adrian’s proposal to put me on leave for two months. I would even be paid during it, which was more than I had expected, given that I had been culpable for my injury.
“This isn’t funny,” Adrian gave back.
“I know it isn’t,” I replied, giving him a flat look. “But we can’t go around acting like this was the end of the world, okay? I did something stupid. I admit it. Let’s get on with our lives. We even got vacation out of it.”
He sighed. “I knew from the start you would be doing something dumb. You might be older, but you’re definitely not more reasonable than me.”
I didn’t answer. He was right, after all. We turned a corner and I saw a worker leaning on the wall, some panel removed and showing the electronics beneath. He was looking as his PDA, which he was holding in one hand.
Developing Parkinson’s. Will drop the pad like this.
I made a quick step forward as we passed and I caught the PDA in mid air just as the guy dropped it clumsily. A sharp jolt of pain in my head made me groan. I managed to mask it as annoyance at the guy’s clumsiness. “You should hold this with both hands,” I told him while handing him back the PDA and he looked at me, then nodded.
“Uhm, thank you,” he said, and I nodded, walking on with Adrian.
“Good catch,” he said, giving me a surprised look. “I wouldn’t have been able to react quick enough.”
“Must be a sign that the concussion is getting better,” I said, giving him a toothy grin that looked odd on my face, I was sure.
“Aren’t you chipper?” he asked, chuckling, though not expecting an answer.
We arrived at our room and I could see that he had packed his stuff already, two bags neatly stacked were already by the door. “I’ll just quickly dash in and get my stuff so we can go, alright?” I asked him, and he nodded.
Entering, the door slid closed behind me and the light turned on. I spent a good five minutes collecting the few clothes that I’d brought and putting them into a bag before I saw it. I quickly poked my head out of the door again. He’d been here before, so he must’ve seen it. “Adrian?”
“Yes?” He had sat down by his bags and was playing a stupid tower defence game on his PDA.
“Did you leave anything of yours on the shelf with my clothes?” I asked, trying to phrase it so it wouldn’t be conspicuous.
“Nope. I got everything here,” he replied, giving me a quizzical look. “Why? Something the matter?”
“Uh, no, I guess,” I replied. “Must be mine, then.”
“Really? Lemme see, maybe I forgot something.” He stood up and approached the door while I freaked out inwardly, trying to think of a way to prevent him from going inside right now.
“You know I really don’t think-“ And he went past me.
My heart pounding I saw him looking at the shelf, apparently oblivious to what was quite plainly visible there. “Uh, no, those are your jeans,” he told me, shrugging. “Wrap up in here, alright? The shuttle will be there in half an hour.” He went out of the room again, leaving me there, dumbfounded. How’d he not seen it?
I approached the shelf on which three, well, rocks were laying. They had the same texture, same lustre as those I’d seen in my… episode. Other than that, they were completely unassuming. A note lay under the stones:
I sighed, pushing away my chair from the table. Flipping a switch, the light below the microscope went out and I removed the Petri-dish. I had inserted some of the black rock’s exterior by rubbing it off into it, trying to discern any properties under the microscope, but it proved rather useless. The material seemed to be crystalline, not unlike some of the silicate minerals one could find in nature, but this was where the similarities ended. A quantum scan had yielded that the material was capable of absorbing EM Waves and storing that energy, though it was not stable. Sometimes, single electrons escaped the binding within the material and created a cascade of photons to follow, thus creating the impression that the material was shimmering as though it had edges, even though it was smooth.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I closed my eyes. I was at home, on Cambridge. Even just getting that quantum scan with the university’s equipment had caused me to get looks of consternation until I was asked politely yet firmly to leave and finally take the two months of leave that I had been promised.
That had been a week ago. It wasn’t like I was a woman with few things she actually enjoyed, but having prolonged periods without work, where I needed to get up for at 8 sharp, I just started feeling uneasy.
What was worse about this strange material was that it appeared to be invisible for anyone else but me and I hadn’t yet been able to ascertain why. Two days ago, Adrian had visited me and we had drank some tea. On that occasion, I wanted to test how far I could go with this hypothesis and placed one of the rocks on a cake platter and gave it to him, and he had just chuckled and asked me why I had handed him an empty platter.
Even with my newfound alacrity that this S had given me, I couldn’t figure out what the purpose of these rocks was. In the week following the expedition to Pygar, I had tried testing the ability more, and it appeared that I was sometimes able to fill in gaps in my knowledge with it. It only worked on things that were naturalistically determined, and so I couldn’t use it to read someone’s mind, because that was subjective, but if it came to figuring out how things worked, it would feed me the knowledge that I needed.
However, it didn’t work on the rocks. Or on itself, for that matter, as it didn’t help me figure out why this was even possible.
I would kill for a quantum scan of myself right now.
The only real drawback that I had been able to make out was that I couldn’t control what the ability disclosed to me. There didn’t appear to be a pattern for when it would work and when it wouldn’t. What I needed for it to work at all though, seemed to be a starting point for information to gather. If I didn’t know anything about something, the ability also wouldn’t tell me anything more. If I knew actually false information about something, the ability could even feed me wrong information around this false premise. Each involuntary usage was followed by a sharp jolt of pain that would get worse and eventually develop into a splitting headache if it got triggered too many times in too short notice. It didn’t help that I didn’t know what prompted it to work.
I stood up and looked at the clock. Six in the evening. Walking over to the kitchen, I opened the fridge and poured myself a glass of orange juice before returning to the living room. I always enjoyed the way it looked. Most of the furniture was made out of expensive-looking wood, and I even had a fireplace. The only thing looking out of place was my work table, where I had erected a makeshift workbench. The microscope was still standing there, mocking me.
Sitting down on the couch, I took a sip of the drink while taking out my PDA and looking through the neural net. Some dumb and content-devoid entertainment was what I needed right now to distract myself. What caught my eye at first, though, was not a neural net channel, but my mail inbox. While I was urged by the university to take a time out, my mailbox wasn’t barred access to the usual business.
I opened the message, reading through it. It came from a woman called Sanae Miyasu, apparently Minister of Health and Education of Kusari. A weird mix, I thought. Health and education weren’t two things that had a lot of overlap in my mind.
Apparently this woman wanted to involve universities of the houses into some kind of culture project. Totally futile, I felt. It wasn’t like cultures necessarily differed much, but simply that the way the houses were run were fundamentally different, and this would be the reason people didn’t understand each other, not the cultures. Cultures were merely the sum total of a society’s beliefs and actions. Saying that a difference in two cultural groups colliding was due to the other’s culture and not themselves would be understating the agency of the people who actually made up that culture.
I decided not to answer. I was a scientist, not a social anthropologist. And yes, I meant to imply that the latter is not an actual science. I was about to close the mail app, but before I could, another unread message came in. Opening it, my eyebrows rose quite a bit, and if I wouldn’t tie my hair back into a bun, I was quite sure they would’ve vanished behind my bangs, especially once I read what they were willing to pay me for what they wanted.
It took around a day to get there. If I had thought the security measures for Pygar had been excessive, I really wasn’t speaking from any sort of experience. Landing the shuttle, I was scanned twice, stripped down in a decontamination chamber, padded down for implants under my skin, and needed to give a blood sample. I almost felt violated if it weren’t for the fact that even the Core pilot who had brought me here needed to subject to this. Fair enough, at least the Core understands the idea of equal treatment.
I was trembling slightly. Not because I was cold or because I was anxious, but because I was slightly intimidated by what was asked of me. Nobody attempted something like this before. First, I would need to face the contractor, though.
Being led through a maze of corridors, I lost track of where I was. The sleek whites and greys of the Core blended together into one big blur, it seemed. Finally, I was faced with a door that didn’t look any different from the others I had passed. Looking at the soldier who’d brought me, I only received a blank stare in return and I stepped forward, the doors sliding open as I approached and I entered.
It appeared to be some sort of work space slash living room. The difference was jarring, seeing the colour scheme shift from greys and whites to warm colours like brown. It weirdly enough made the impression of a lumberjack’s hut in a forest, only that it wasn’t untidy at all. My client was sitting on a cushioned seat, a cup of tea in one hand and platter in the other.
“Miss Martinez,” the Guildkeeper said. “Please, have a seat.”
“Thank you, Miss Lyell,” I replied, taking the offered seat. Another cushioned chair. I felt out of place sitting in it. I had never been small, but this thing was massive and I felt like it would swallow me by the amount it depressed from my weight.
“I must say that I’m surprised that you arrived this quickly. I hope I didn’t interrupt something?” the older woman asked, giving me a look that, contrary to the words she’d just spoken, didn’t belie care.
“Not quite,” I admitted, eyeing her cup. “I am currently on leave following, uhm.” How did I phrase that I had falled in a cave on Pygar and not make myself sound inept. “Well, I had an accident on Pygar. A minor concussion, though I was put on leave.” I’d rather not say how long I was put on leave, because two months was excessive for just a concussion.
“I see,” Lyell replied, nodding. “I take it that work can sometimes be invigorating to the point of self-harm.”
I suppressed a shudder. This woman was either uncannily clever or…
Unclear wording. She is playing mind games hoping to hit a nerve to keep the upper hand in a conversation.
I took a sharp breath of air at the accompanying jolt of pain that accompanied the influx of information. At least this was sort of reassuring.
I chuckled. “Well, that is one way to phrase it.” Crossing my legs, I folded my hands on my lap. “But I think this is not why you addressed my faculty at the university. I must say, what you want is…” I paused for a moment to choose a word. “ambitious.”
Before the trip to Pygar, I would have never even considered this, as technology was at least several hundreds of years behind for this. Still, if my suspicions were correct, my ability could maybe help here, and if that was true, I was quite possible I could do anything.
“One doesn’t attain my position without being ambitious,” Lyell answered, putting down the cup on the small coffee table between them. “It would be a shame if I would deprive Sirius of my presence, wouldn’t it? I am not the youngest anymore.”
I smiled awkwardly. This was one of these rhetoric questions that was more than just awkward. Still, I nodded. I knew that she was trying to throw me off track. “Biological immortality is something that humanity dreamt of for quite a while. It would effectively remove the juxtaposition of life and death, essentially creating something approximating a deity, something eternal.” I actually liked the idea of me possibly being the one to create something like this.
I had had enough time during my trip here to brainstorm the possibilities and I was sure that I had at least enough points where I could start exploring means to achieve Lyell’s wish.
“Poetic,” she replied, slightly dismissive. “I care little for religious rhetoric. If you think you can do what nobody else did before, I will fund your efforts and provide you with the equipment you need.”
By that point, I was practically salivating at the offer. The Core allegedly disposed over the most advanced equipment produced by mankind. The possibilities while working with that were practically endless.
“Miss Lyell, I think you couldn’t have contacted a better person for the job.”
Over the course of the next month, I think I spent more time inside a laboratory than was actually healthy. My skin already started to turn rather pale from the lack of sunlight, and Adrian would doubtlessly notice upon my return. I hadn’t told him that I went away for a while. If he asked, I’d just say I went to Holstein in Rheinland to enjoy a long spa treatment or something equally girly.
In the first few days, I had merely started making plans for how I could overcome mortality. The core problem was simple. Human bodies consisted of cells and these cells partitioned regularly. At a certain age, the cells were simply not able to divide anymore, and thus they died. Cells usually stopped dividing after 52 divisions, which was called the Hayflick limit. To replicate, cells need to replicate their DNA as well, which however doesn’t work if something called a telomere at the end of each chromosome is used up after the 52nd division. Cell death occurs. This, however, is not true for cancer cells, which have a large quantity of an enzyme called telomerase, which rebuilds the telomeres, therefore theoretically enabling these cells to replicate indefinitely. If a certain threshold of dead cells was crossed, people either suffered cancer or died of organ failure. Really, I wasn’t just looking for a cure to mortality, but to cancer as well. Talking about being a saviour to humanity.
The end goal was pretty clear from the start, which helped me immensely. I had to somehow arrest cell death. This was where things became tricky, though. To get myself a better understanding of the matter, I had wanted to take a look at the only naturally occurring slowing the aging process known in Sirius: The Outcasts and their Cardamine. Funnily or perhaps horrifyingly enough, Lyell provided me with a life specimen afterwards. At least the findings were incredibly interesting.
It had long since been known that Cardamine caused alterations in the genetic material of Outcasts, causing them increased problems when it came to fertility at the benefit of increased lifespans. It was quite possible that some Outcasts could biologically age to the point of being three digits old and still having all their faculties, which was impressive in its own right. It took me ages but I was able to single out single DNA parts that were responsible for the aging process with the help my ability.
Given this, I started working on a gene therapy that would reprogram a human to naturally restore their telomeres and thereby enable cells to replicate indefinitely. This was easy enough at first, as I had the first attempt ready after just two weeks.
Of course, I couldn’t test this on a life subject yet. Thus I created an organism in a Petri-dish that had properties similar to humans and tested the therapy. The advantage of this was that it would give me the results for an entire lifetime of the organism, since, as opposed to a human, the life expectancy for this organism was only three days. If the therapy had worked, it would still be alive on the fourth. However, it wasn’t. After the organism had crossed the threshold of its natural life, it started suffering degenerative effects, effectively dying of cancer.
While a failure, it allowed me a valuable insight into what I had done wrong. I had not considered that allowing the cells to replicate indefinitely didn’t remove the problem of cell excess. If cells divided, they created more than there were before, and eventually, it was too much. After this realisation, I needed to rethink. Not only did I need to arrest cell death by allowing chromosomes to regenerate their telomeres, but I also needed to limit the amount of cells created with each partition so they would only replace themselves.
It was clear that my one sided approach wasn’t going to cut it. While the gene therapy was one part of the solution, I needed a way to tackle the second half, and I was quite sure that only a treatment with nano technology could help there. The next day, I had a quantum physician working with me to create a type of nanobot that would attack and deconstruct superfluous cells. I must say, my ability was the only reason why I even got to this point, and even the quantum physician Lyell had delegated to work with me was astounded how much I ‘knew’ about the topics. Still, it took another two weeks before we had a working prototype ready.
It was time for another test. The organism was prepared as before and treated with the gene therapy. Shortly before its natural life would expire, we inoculated it with the nano bots, wanting to not interfere with the natural cell division before the projected point of death. I watched it for the next four hours after it was predicted to die naturally, and it didn’t. There were also no problems apparent with its health.
Thus I went to bed, and sure enough, the next day, roughly nine hours later, it was still alive. The time passed in relation to an average human life span was around thirty years at this point, and if these results were applicable to humans, it would mean that anyone having received the current therapy plus nanobots would have lived thirty years longer than they otherwise would have had.
We continued watching for the next week. By now, it was apparent that the goal was achieved and that it was working. However, there was one Achilles heel that should become apparent soon enough. After about 11 days after the organism would have naturally perished, its nanobots degraded and it died.
“Still rather impressive,” Lyell said after she put down the report I had handed to her. We were sitting in her woodcutter room again, as I had called it in my mind. My head was throbbing, as it had for a long time now since I was here. The work had been incredibly easier with my ability, yet it took a toll. I was quite sure I had lost weight and I could need a bra for the rings under my eyes.
“The only problems are the nanobots. With more refinement, I’m sure we can create self-replicating or self-maintaining ones,” I answered, my voice rather feeble. I hadn’t used it too much in a while.
“How long?”
“About a month?” I answered, deliberately guessing it would take longer than necessary, because I rather had too much than too little time. “These things are delicate. However, I’m sure that we can manage to make it so that they can use certain nutrients ingested with the food to sustain themselves or replicate. Another possibility would be taking a step more into the cyborg world and building a sort of maintenance hub that can be surgically implanted into a patient, but I feel that would be less elegant.”
“You’re doing science, not art, Dr. Martinez.” It occurred to me only now that Lyell hasn’t called me by my title since I had arrived, until now. Did that mean I had earned her respect?
“I’m quite sure I can manage both, ma’am,” I replied, trying to be as polite as I could while at the same time being really exhausted. “If you don’t mind, I would very much like a bit of sleep right now. Tomorrow, we’ll see if we can come up with a plan to refine the process.”
Lyell nodded. “You’re doing good work, Doctor. To be honest, I wouldn’t have thought you’d actually get results.”
“And why is that?” I asked, trying not to take it personally, but I did.
“You said yourself that this was something that people haven’t yet tried before,” Lyell simply retorted, unflinching.
I sighed. “There is a first for everything. You pay me the sum you promised at the end, and I make you immortal.”
“If I were superstitious, I would call you a magician. A woman that could bend the rules to her will. A witch.” There was a note of sarcasm, or maybe mirth in Lyell’s voice. Hard to tell. I wasn’t in the mood for games.
“I can pull a lot of other things out of my cauldron, trust me,” I replied, standing up. “Ma’am.”
Lyell nodded, effectively dismissing me, and I half-hobbled back into the room they had provided for me and collapsed onto the bed, fast asleep.
It took another week before the procedure was fine-tuned enough to attempt a test on an actual human. I was admittedly quite anxious about it. Not only was the potential for catastrophic failure quite great, but failure here also meant that a person was likely to die. I had been told that the one person who was to be subjected to the therapy was a volunteer, but that only soothed half my worried.
We had fused the two steps of the therapy. Before, the process had taken two steps, the first one entailing a radiation therapy to alter parts of a person’s DNA make up to stimulate the production of telomerase, and the second one entailing an inoculation with nanobots to patrol the body and get rid of unnecessary cells. Now, all it took was a single shot of the nanobots, technically. They had been refined and made more complex. Their task now was to spread in the body and rewrite the person’s genetic makeup as it would have been the case with the radiation therapy, and afterwards, they were supposed to assume the guardian position over the cells they had been originally intended to.
This had two advantages, the first of course being that it streamlined the entire process, but secondly, the nanobots could now also react in case the body fought the alterations to its code. Still, there was no was we could administer this to someone who was actually awake. Our strategy was to put the subject into an artificially induced coma before we would begin with the procedure.
As I looked at my gloved hands, part of my surgical gown, I looked at the door, knowing that any moment now, the person who was supposed to play test tiger would be carted in here. The room was brightly lit, neon lights tinting everything a glaring white. It reminded me of a delivery room, with the difference that there was going to be no new life born here in the next few hours. All those hours I had worked hinged on the next two hours, I thought.
Closing my eyes, I tried to relax, though God didn’t will it as I heard the doors open and the telltale noise of wheels on ground. Exhaling slowly, I opened my eyes, pushing everything else to the back of my mind for now. Focused, I took a look at the patient. A young man, not even thirty, with blonde, short hair. He was completely naked besides a pair of boxers. An impressive array of muscles bulged under his skin. I had no doubt that this may was as healthy as one could humanly get.
Giving the assistants I’d been given a sign, they held back while I affixed some diodes to the man’s body. Those would monitor his vital functions while I worked. The pulse was nearly non-existent. Brain activity was minimal. He had been given muscle-relaxants to prevent eventual epileptic spasms from jolting him out of the bed, and also to guarantee the safety of those working for him. It was the same safety measures that had been used for electroshock therapy, I dimly noted. I waited until the machines had collected enough information to create a graph that would show me his vital signs were stable and not about to change. No problems here.
I reached out for the small table beside me that contained various syringes. There was an epi pen in case the procedure would cause heart failure and various other substances. The left one would flood his system with enough adrenaline to wake him from his coma if necessary. Every valuable was accounted for.
Injection into the jugular vein could prove to aggressive. The safest way would be to inject the substance into different parts of his body in equal parts. The soles of the feet, the arms. It will spread evenly this way.
I would need to be extremely quick with this. The substance didn’t need to enter the blood stream per se, since the nanobots could move themselves, but it would help them spread quickly, and that was the desired result. I spent the next five minutes affixing entrances into his extremities. I had a single space I could insert the needle to, and tubes would push the nanobots into his bloodsteam, slowly. After all, his heartbeat was extremely slowed. Now trembling, I inserted the needle into the little hole and slowly, delicately started pushing. I heard a little hissing as the tubes released the excess air inside them to not have it enter the patient’s body, the suction pushing the bots further along the tube until it slowly, gently reached the points where they would enter his body.
Nothing.
Seconds past and more and more of the substance vanished beneath his skin, but his vitals remained roughly the same. If there would be any complications, I had expected them to occur right in the first minutes of the process, since that would be the point the body would react the most violent towards the invading nanobots. Soon, the syringe was empty and the remainder of the nanobots travelled into the subject’s body.
“Push his body into the quantum scanner,” I ordered the nurses after I had removed the entrances from his body and closed them with a regenerator. They obeyed and soon, all I could do was wait and watch the values shift on the monitors in front of me.
My steps echoed through the hallways of Durban. Lyell had summoned me into her office and since all I had been doing was watching monitors, I figured I could leave the subject alone for now. It had been three hours since the treatment had begun and the gene alterations had been finished twenty minutes ago. Given that the nanobots had spread through his entire body, this was pretty much everything. They would now patrol and kill cells before they became burdensome. However, out of safety, we decided to keep him comatose for another two days.
Coming to a halt in front of Lyell’s door, I wondered why it didn’t open. Usually, it did as soon as I approached. Frowning, I used the console by the door to ring, but still nothing happened. I was about to turn around and leave for the lab again when the door opened.
“Well, I thought something was bro-“ I stopped mid-sentence. I had made a step into the room while turning around and only now noticed after crossing the threshold that this wasn’t Lyell’s room.
Turning around, I wasn’t facing the door either, but the blackened stone of the cave on Pygar. It was in that moment that I realized that I was probably dreaming. Turning again, I shielded my eyes from the radiance of the creature hovering in the air, some fifteen feet tall.
I take it you have figured out what the gift was for?
I really hadn’t missed this sort of communication. It felt invasive, as if I couldn’t hide even if I buried my deepest thoughts. I had had enough time to mull over what had happened on Pygar to know that I had likely been compromised in some way.
“What did you do exactly?” I ventured the question, strangely calm. The rational part of my brain was telling me that becoming agitated wouldn’t achieve anything, and if my memory served me right, the entity was arrogant and wouldn’t stand with insolence. I knew I wasn’t infected. They would’ve realized it right after pulling me out of that cave where I had collapsed.
Explaining it to you in detail would deprive you of the intellectual challenge of figuring it out yourself, the voice gave back, sounding almost scolding.
“I guess it would,” I replied, sighing. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the brightness and slowly, I was able to make out a vague shape of the entity. It seemed to consist of a solid core that was suspended in the air. Its shape reminded me roughly of a dodecahedron, with the edges being swung so the edges would be more pointy. From each of these points, a tendril of solid light seemed to extend, swaying back and forth in a rhythmic fashion. In a certain way, it was mesmerizing. Not to the point where I would approach to make contact, though. “Whatever you did doesn’t seem to work on anything related to the incident I had with you. Normally, it works like an extended memory. I focus on a bit of information and the ability fills in the blanks, closing the gaps in my knowledge. If I work of an incorrect first information, the ability will give me wrong information, too. It doesn't work with anything that would require inner knowledge of another person, so only scientifically falsifiable statements can be expanded upon, while emotions, memories of someone else, or their thoughts are off-limits.”
There was a small pause. Well done, Doctor. It was a weird statement coming from the entity. It seemed to be genuine praise, but more the sort of praise one would give to a child that was exceedingly slow and the parents were merely saying this to make the child feel good while wondering if they would ever be a fully functioning adult. And I see you’ve also been quite productive.
I arced an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.” Like hell I was going to admit that the ability was pretty much the only reason why I had been able to perform the task Lyell had asked of me.
An amused sound resonated in my head for a moment, making me flinch. You know exactly what I mean. Regardless, though, what do you plan to do with the money that woman promised you for cheating death?
I pursed my lips. I hadn’t really thought about what I would do with the one hundred fifty million credits that Lyell had promised me for the services I had provided. “I suppose I can always save it.”
Really? That sounded almost disappointed. It’d be a shame if a woman like you wouldn’t continue providing her services to humanity. Imagine the influence you could wield, the capital you could move.
“I’m a woman of science, not a stock broker,” I countered dismissively, though the message rang something in me that gave me pause.
I think you know that money is not the end, but a means.
The answers were eerie, as if the creature knew what to say in order to make me listen. “I know,” I conceded. My mind was foggy, and it was hard to retort anything of substance. “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.” As an afterthought, I added: “What is this, even?” Gesturing around, I signalled what I meant.
I figured a familiar place would be the best place for us to talk.
“Hmm, so I am not actually here,” I stated, confirming what I had known since the start. “Some sort of mind game, then.” This could be troublesome. It could mean that the creature either was able to affect me regardless of its distance, or that there was something nearby that enabled it to.
“I have a theory,” I said, putting a finger to my mouth for a moment. “You are not actually omniscient. You are able to affect me in places where there is some sort of catalyst for your Nomad manipulation to work. I would bet there is a cloaked ship outside the station.”
You would be wrong.
What? No report ever indicated that Nomads were able to telepathically affect anything if they weren’t really close, relatively seen.
Just assume that I am right for a moment.
“Supposing that you are,” I started, rethinking my theory. Why did it let me do this? Did it want me to figure it out? “It would mean that you are, in fact, able to affect me without any ranged component being an obstacle in the equation.”
Correct.
“One thing does not add up in that case, though,” I replied, lowering my arm again, looking at the light hovering before me. “Why Pygar? There are two possibilities here. You needed me to be on Pygar in order to do something to enable this. You said you were watching me for a while, so I am willing to bet that you were not able to act unless Pygar somehow enabled you to affect me in some way.” I waited for a response, which didn’t come.
“The other possibility would be that you did, in fact, not need Pygar but actually wanted to confuse me by letting it happen when it did. I am willing to bet the former.”
Silence. All that I could hear was the occasional noise of insects scrabbling around in the stone crevices. Exactly, the creature replied, and this time, it actually sounded mildly impressed. I knew you would be able to figure it out.
“You won’t be telling me what all this is about, are you?” I asked, venturing an attempt to maybe tick the creature’s pride so it’d reveal something valuable.
You’re big enough to think for yourself in some places, it simply replied. You should probably respond to that woman. I think she is getting impatient.
“What is that supposed to mean now?” I asked, but I would understand soon enough as the world around me seemed to melt, the colors shifting until all was just a blur that coalesced back into the image of the glowing screens in front of me.
I was back in front of the monitors in the laboratory. There was a window popped up on one of them, showing Lyell’s face giving me an impatient look. “Uh, what?” I blurted out, rubbing my eyes.
“Are you well, Doctor?” Lyell’s voice sounded from the speakers, sounding suave as always. “You seemed a little beside yourself.”
“I, uhm, I guess I fell asleep for a moment,” I said, hoping that this would be enough to satisfy her curiosity and that I hadn’t spoken in my sleep. That would be catastrophic.
“I noticed. Your head was resting on your chest while you sat upright.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“You should sleep. Overworking yourself will achieve nothing except a chance of burn-out, and I doubt that’s something any of us wants,” she told me, reaching for the button on her desk to turn off the communication. Why had she even called me? I was awake now, so she could’ve just asked what she wanted and that would have been it. Looking up, I got my answer as to why. I had been in this lab for a little more than sixteen hours now. My back was complaining as I stretched, making it pop audibly. Turning around, I could see the patient on the bed he had been brought into this room with, still unchanged.
Giving the life support one final glance, I stood up from the chair and headed out of the laboratory for now. If anything, the interruption by the creature has told me one thing: It had altered me physically. I had the means of conducting a quantum scan of myself tomorrow. I would be sure to use it.
I put down the spoon after having stirred my tea and looked across the table at Lyell who was sitting in front of me. It had now been another two weeks since the initial tests and the results were promising. The problem was that we couldn’t be absolutely sure it would work until something did not work, but I was fairly certain that whoever underwent the procedure would be, for all intents and purposes, immune to biological aging. They could still be killed, but the little telomeres wouldn’t be the reason for it.
“I must admit, you are quite generous,” I stated in response to what Lyell had said before. She had offered me a private meeting before I would leave Durban and head back home, just in time for my leave to end and me being able to return to my work at the university.
“I award excellence. Nothing else is appropriate,” she gave back putting down the mug onto its little platter. “If I hadn’t seen the results with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed them. What are you going to do with your newfound wealth, Doctor?”
I hesitated. “I don’t yet know. My work here has given me a lot of ideas. I believe the general therapy applied here can be modified for all kinds of purposes. Nanotech is incredibly versatile, and with the ability to manipulate even the smallest building blocks of the human condition, I am sure I could theoretically use them to give people better senses, better condition, better health in general.”
“That sounds like superpowers,” Lyell commented, giving me a look that was almost amused. I figured she enjoyed my kind of thinking. And I had to admit, the idea of trying to apply this to other areas excited me.
“We’re way past the age in which comic books sounded like fairy tales. If people don’t understand something, they’re all too eager to call it magic. A few thousand years ago, people would have called an immortal human a god. Today, we know it’s merely the simple manipulation of the mechanism that actually causes us to die of old age.” I looked at the fire crackling in the fireplace. I had to admit, I liked this place. It had been strangely out of place when I had first visited it, but now, it had grown on me. Maybe because this was the only place I had actually gotten something approaching relaxation during my stay.
“By no means I intended to be condescending,” Lyell clarified, pointing at me with a finger, lifting it from where she had her hands folded in her lap. “I’m merely wondering if this kind of meddling wouldn’t make you the target of certain other forces who’d not like you meddling with the human condition. You are more than aware by now that the Core is very much trying to achieve the same goal as you.”
“You’re talking about the Order,” I stated, knowing it to be true. Was she trying to recruit me. “I actually wanted to talk to you regarding equipment. I would like to procure what I had available here.”
She arced an eyebrow. “That wouldn’t be cheap,” she stated after a few moments. “I could provide everything you need in addition to a hefty salary in return for your services instead.”
“I believe I would like to keep my scientific independence,” I replied, trying to remain as polite as possible. “At least for now.”
Slowly, Lyell nodded. “Very well. I will make you a generous offer, Doctor, for having helped me personally here. You may have all equipment that was provided to you in your workspace here for a hundred million credits. Subtracted from your initial salary, that would make you fifty million richer now.” She raised a finger. “However, we will need a place in which we can install the equipment. It’s quite bulky, as you could see.”
I mulled it over. “I’m sure I can find a solution to that problem. Fifty million should be more than enough to get a small transport, maybe.”
“That would probably work,” Lyell said while I finished my tea and stood up.
“I should prepare for my departure. I’ll see to it that I can help you ship my equipment.”
Standing up herself, Lyell extended a hand to me and I shook it. For a woman her age, Lyell had a surprisingly firm grip with her boney hand. “So long, Doctor. I hope to hear of you in the future.”
I nodded in response before leaving the room. I had initially been a bit unsure of whether it was a wise idea to remove the patient from the quantum scanner chamber, but my curiosity was killing me. If I didn’t figure out soon what the creature had changed about me, I would break something, and I hoped it wouldn’t ruin my efforts. Pushing the bed with the patient away a few metres, I carted over another bed and lied down.
A PDA in hand, I pushed myself into the chamber. It would probably be easy enough to scan myself. Thank god for remote controls. Pushing a few buttons, I signalled the machine to begin its work, and I could hear the coils around me start to work. This technology worked on a tachyon basis, shooting singular particles through ones body and catching them again in order to create an in-depth analysis of everything the particle encountered while traversing through me. It was deceptively easy and belied its brilliance. This would take a while.
Breathing deeply, I tried not to concentrate too much on the fact that I was in a tight, enclosed space with little to no breathing room. I’d never thought I was claustrophobic, but being locked in like this, I could definitely understand the fear of suffocating in such a small place. Calm breaths, Teresa.
After what felt like an eternity, the humming of the coils finally stopped and I hurried to push myself out of here. Shivering, I sat up and slid off the bed to walk over to the computer. Then I noticed I forgot something and quickly pushed the patient back into the chamber before someone would notice.
I sat down in front of the monitors and switched the windows, going to the recordings. The patient was feeding in new information continuously while my own stay in that chamber had only produced a recording of a few data points. I could’ve watched this from the PDA, but I really hated the way that worked. I preferred keys instead of a touchscreen.
The anomaly in me actually needed a few minutes of searching, but soon enough, I noticed what was amiss. There was a region in my brain that wasn’t supposed to look this way. It also wasn’t supposed to function this way, all things considered.
Part of my frontal cortex looked like it had been enlarged, but that didn’t quite fit in terms of description. It looked more like a cyst beneath the frontal cortex. The cancerous growth had the tendency to interact strangely with all kinds of radiation as far as I could tell. I sat back, mulling over the find.
A cancerous growth in my brain that for all intents and purposes reminded me of an antenna was allowing an alien entity to influence me. What would be the consequence if this part really was some sort of receiver?
It would make sense in the fact that the creature was able to manipulate my senses. The impulses had to enter my brain in some way. What did it say about my ability, though? Where did the information it fed me come from?
Asking the question like that, the answer was pretty obvious. It could only come from the creature. Well, unless another creature could access this connection with me, though I had nothing to make me believe that was possible. Occam’s Razor demanded that I take the easiest conceivable solution to be the most likely.
Leaning back, I had to laugh. There was something funny about the idea of that creature feeding me its knowledge. I might as well use it against it.
From a window of the Pendragon, I was watching the workers of the Core haul in copious amounts of crates into the ship. I had bought a Pelican civilian transport from the money I had been given and dubbed it the Pendragon. Maybe it was a needlessly Bretonian name, but I am a self-aware woman and well aware of the fact that I am trying overly hard to compensate for my Cretin heritage with Bretonian cultural gestures, even if they are small.
Part of the ship’s exterior had needed to be removed in order to allow some of the bulkier equipment to be inserted into the ship. One of the computers was as tall as three decks, much to my chagrin. One would assume people would be able to keep things more compact. Maybe at some point, I could take a look at these things and see if I could make them a bit more compact. Then again, this would be a bit redundant after they were already in here.
I looked over my shoulder at Adrian. “Pretty nifty, huh?”
I had told him about what I had been up to during my vacation. His indignation about me having worked while I was supposed to relax had quickly given way to jaw-dropping surprise as I told him about my accomplishments. Of course, I hadn’t told him about the peculiarities of my ability, but I hadn’t needed to. I had showed him the result and he had insisted on checking them over for himself. I had seen him again the next day, looking dishevelled but otherwise okay. He had handed me back the PDA with the procedure and told me he was convinced.
“You still should’ve taken some time out,” he said, sighing. “Still, this is impressive. I wouldn’t have expected you to attempt something this radical and succeed.”
Turning around, I patted his shoulder. “Well, why stop here?” I asked, looking at him. “You are working on your magnum opus yourself. I’m sure we both can figure out how to make it work.”
He gave me a sceptical look. “That’s not even your field of research, though.”
I wagged a finger at him. “Doesn’t mean I can’t be useful. We’ll make due.” With a sly look, I added: “So, you’re in?”
“In for what?” he asked, looking at me as though I was a madwoman.
“Well, simple. The formula used for the immortality vaccine can be modified. I’m sure with a bit of fine tuning, we can sell this and grant people all sorts of benefits — for a price, of course. The sky is the limit.”
The same look that Lyell had given me. Not really condescension or doubt, but something more akin to mild amusement. “You talk as though you’re sure this would work.”
I simply nodded, wanting him to continue speaking. He sighed. “Sure,” he meant, though his voice didn’t sound too enthusiastic. “I guess the entire stuff on this ship would go to waste if I didn’t help.” Then, in a lower voice. “Man, you could’ve taken that money and retired.”
“I’m not interested in sitting on my ass,” I replied to that, looking back out of the window before turning around. “Well, I’ll go sleep some more. We’ll be done here in twelve hours or so, then we can bugger off. I suggest you get some sleep. Or run around here and get lost now, so you don’t do it later.” He rolled his eyes and I snickered before I left the room.
The sound of his shoes on the unpadded floor reverberated maddeningly in the, admittedly, spacious quarters that had been provided to him. Still, it was more than evident that the ship he was quartered on, was, in fact, a warship, and so simple things that he wouldn't have missed on a cruise ship, like a rug, were simply missing.
Dr. Adriant Wight leaned forward, supporting his upper body through the use of both his arms as he looked down at the asserted schematics that were strewn across the table. Paper, no PDAs or electronic displays. He was old-fashioned like that. They showed various drawings of the Amenhotep's interior that he had done, drafts on constructions and mechanisms that would necessary to anchor the device into the ground of the engineering section. He had to request the ship's schematics for this first, and it had of course been digital, but that didn't matter. This wasn't rocket science, as adventurous as installing a device capable of shunting an object as large as a warship through an artificially induce worm-hole in space and time might sound. The technology was well-established. One had to understand the physics of it and be an acceptable enginner to fit the parts. Anyone with a degree in this sort of thing would probably be able to do what Jonathan Kalh had asked of him, but Adrian didn't mention that, of course. The worst thing one could do when brokering for a deal was selling oneself short.
He had given the schematics he'd drawn to the engineers of this ship with the instruction of powering down the main power and establishing the main infrastructure for the device later. Simple. It didn't require more than the analogue to rewiring a plug so it for for an AC adapter. Taking a pen, he started adding details to another page. This continued for what felt like hours to him until he put down the pen again and rubbed his eyes. Quarter past six in the evening. The engineers wouldn't be done with the task he had given them until noon tomorrow. There was no use in working too quickly. It'd only lead to him sitting on his ass for hours on end waiting for things to happen.
He sat down on the small couch that was in front of the chair, crossing his legs. While he understood the necessity of this work, he still loathed it. Teresa might be right in that they needed the money if they wanted to finish Skyhook, but he hadn't reckoned that he would need to work like a henchman for it.
Skyhook.
He leaned his head backwards so it rested against the couch. It was a simple idea. Hyperspace travel was common nowadays for space ships and Adrian was quite convinced that the technology would make jump gates superfluous sooner or later. What wasn't possible currently, though, was transporting people using this technology. Just people, without the ship around them. Instantaneous personnel transport across the entirety of Sirius — and even further, if coordinates were found. The entire project just had one fatal flaw, however.
Humans wouldn't survive it.
In space, it didn't rightly matter if you landed accurately or not. Five kilometres off the mark were nothing compared to the vast emptiness of space. However, materializing a human five kilometres above the surface would mean certain death. To this date, Adrian was not able to really solve this connundrum and it was driving him mad.
Looking down from the catwalk he stood on, Adrian observed how the engineers heaved in one part after the other. The device mostly consisted of capacitors that were intended to store the massive charge necessary in order to break reality and move through hyperspace. Most of the device was already done by now, and only the casing was missing. Well, heaving wasn't really the right term anyways, given that they used hovering platforms to transport them, but still. The initial energy readings of the ship had been good when they had tested the energy drain with a dummy device to emulate the drain on the power core. It was a good thing the Amenhotep was a relatively new ship. Older ships sometimes had problems with their reactors. They just came with age and there wasn't really much one could do against that.
If there was one thing he didn't like about the ship he had spent the last two weeks on, it was the fact that it was too utilitarian. Even this engineering section didn't have any sort of architectural flair to it. No curves, only straight edges and bare metal. It was a like a cage, in a sense. He could leave at any time, but the sheer weight of the place seemed to weigh him down and he knew it affected his mood since he had gotten aboard.
He had thought that the time doing the menial task of drafting the hyperspace jump drive for Jonathan Kalh would give him the time he needed to think about continuing Skyhook, but his mind had always come to the point where the inaccuracy of the technology would benothing any progress. It was infuriating.
"Ugh." He hadn't meant to utter the sound, but it had come unbidden, annoying him even more. Turning around suddenly, he collided with a person who had been standing behind him, and the surprise of the impact made the PDA they held fly out of their hand and hit the wall behind them before dropping to the floor, though not breaking. "Oh, shi- I'm sorry," he apologized to the woman, he now saw.
"No problem," she replied, and Adrian realized that she was part of the engineering team he had been given to install the device. He always forgot her name. It sounded like a Rheinlandian eldritch encantation to him. Kneeling down, she went to pick up the pad, though Adrian suddenly placed his hand on her shoulder to stop her.
"One moment please," he said, sounding a little distant while his eyes stared at the spot that the PDA had smacked into the wall. What if... While the woman remained where she was, looking at him with an arched eyebrow, Adrian had one hand half-raised while thoughts were racing through his head. Slowly, he lowered his hand again and took off the one that was resting on top of the woman's shoulder. "I'm sorry," he apologized again, trying to give her a smile. "It was nothing." That was a blatant lie, but he couldn't do anything but complete his work before he could get to his room and contact Dr. Martinez about his idea.
The woman nodded and stood up again, holding the PDA in hand. "We will be ready to start the first test of the device in five minutes. I wanted to fetch you so you could be on the bridge while we power it up."
Taking a breath, Adrian took another look down, where the engineers were welding the last plate of sheeted, heat resistant metal in place. "Yes, please." In truth, he couldn't wait to get out of here, given that he knew that the device would work. He had done the math. The test was little more than reassurance for those who weren't able to understand the numbers. Following the woman out of the engine section, Adrian took out his PDA from the poket and made a note for later.
The glasses clanked a little as the waiter placed her glass on the old table together with a bottle. Water. She didn't really drink anything else if she could help it. There wasn't much use to drinking coffee or anything containing alcohol, as the agent neutralized the effects it had on her anyways. At least this way she would drink something that was as healthy as it would get.
"Thank you," she told the waiter with a slightly forced smile. He was a boy, and she didn't really guess him older than eighteen. He nodded slightly in response, and it occurred to her that he might not even understand her, given where she was. Raising her head, she looked around the little café on the dismal Deck 23 of Bouglogne Base where she was supposed to meet her contact. Raising the bottle slightly, she tipped it over, letting the liquid pour into the glass. There were other guests here, but it was all around quieter than she would have expected. Then again, this station had the same problem as many others. There just wasn't a set time where people slept and woke up. On a planet, you had day and night cycles which roughly dictated these things, but most space stations didn't bother simulating something like that, which resulted in a weird phenomenon where everyone was just having their own sleep cylces which was determined by the shifts they worked. It made it so that a café like this one would always have customers to any hour of the day, yet never too many.
Thoughts like these would keep her occupied while the contents of the water bottle slowly drained and the minutes ticked by without anything happening. Once the bottle was empty, she checked the clock on her PAD. Roughly fourty minutes she had spent waiting here. Sighing, she stood up from where she sat. It had been foolish of her to come here anyways. Only the agent had really given her the confidence to attempt this, as she was essentially immune against most forms of deception. Now standing, she went to fetch her jacket when she heard a posh voice behind her.
"Going already?"
She turned around, coming to face a mid-sized, dark-skinned woman with brown hair that was bound together in a tight bun. Her hands were stowed away in the pockets of her white overcoat that reminded her of a lab coat.
"Miss von Westefeld." The brown woman gestured for the booth her opposition had been seated in before and the both of them sat down again. "I must appologize for the delay. I hope you are not upset."
Maren von Westefeld shook her head. "Not upset, no." She pushed away the glass she had drank from with one hand. "I have questions."
"I can imagine you have," the brown woman replied, folding her hands on the table. Maren knew from the agent that the woman in front of her was completely relaxed, and made her frown. For all she should know, Maren might just as well try to harm her, especially given the circumstances of their meeting. "Do you want to ask or should I just explain?"
Raising an eyebrow, Maren tilted her head slightly. "Beg pardon?"
"I noticed that most people in this situation start with a question along the lines of 'how did you know what I was looking for on the neural net'," the woman explained matter of factly. The young waiter came back and deposited a bottle of the same water Maren had ordered in front of the woman. She must have ordered before approaching. "This is rather easy to explain. In your search, you visited certain sites on the neural net. Most of them are scams, though some are maintained by associates of mine, which allowed us to collect your data and create a profile. We needed to know how serious you were, among other things."
"Other things?" Maren repeated incredulously, shifting a little so she would sit further away from the woman in front of her. "What is your name?"
"Martinez, though I prefer if you just call me Doctor. It is what most of my patients do and I must admit that I became rather vainly attached to the moniker." Taking the bottle, the Doctor drank from it, not bothering to ask for a glass. "And yes, the other things include that we needed to know whether you could pay for the services provided. We do not work for free."
"Who is we?" she gave back, looking at the now empty bottle. Ezrael had a lot of money, she figured. There wouldn't be too much of a problem getting him to pay in the end. "And I hope you're gonna pay for that water."
The comment made the other woman laugh dryly. "Well, if these fifty or so millilitres meant so much to you, I'd be happy to oblige." There was something akin to condescension to the tone, although it was very well masked. Not overt at all.
Maren rolled her eyes. "Spare me."
"Gladly." Reaching under her overcoat, the Doctor withdrew a PAD and swiped to unlock the screen. "Von Westefeld, Maren, born on Nuremberg, Rheinland, 29 years of age, no chronic diseases except maybe an overly pathologic predisposition towards neural net media consumption. Is that correct?" She eyed Maren over the edge of the PAD.
"I challenge the last part, but yeah," she gave back, looking at the back of the PAD, then at the woman in front of her. How old was she? She definitely wasn't young anymore. There were creases in her facial skin that belied her age. There was no grey hair on her head, though. Dye? "Why's that important?"
"Why is what important?" the Doctor gave back absently while scribbling away on the PAD with a touch pen. "Diseases may interfere with my work. You'd also not want that I perpetuate errors that you have, right?"
Hearing that made Maren squirm slightly. "Actually," she began, then biting her lip. "Uhm, can we maybe..." she trailed off, though the woman in front of her interrupted her.
"-change locale?" the Doctor finished for her, as though she had expected the question. "As you wish. Though one day I wish I could actually skip dinner so a client stays like this." Shifting, the Doctor stood up and put away the PAD again, offering Maren a hand daintily.
"You reconed that I wouldn't want to stay here?" Maren asked incredulously, taking the offered hand and getting to her feet. "Then why the hell'd you want me to come here in the first place?"
Shaking her head, the woman in front of her shrugged. "No reason." Gesturing for the exit, Maren followed her, letting her take the lead.
I stepped out first onto the moderately busy recreational deck of Boulogne Base. Since the Brigands had fought over it with the Forlorn mercenaries, it was quite apparent that a few spots here and there needed repairs. However, people went quite a bit of of their way to make the recreational areas of the station look presentable. I assumed that was because, when not working, people merely wanted to forgot where they actually were. I could hardly fault them for that.
Turning my head, I forced the other woman indirectly to catch up to me, since I had no real intention of letting her merely be led by me. While I was not a talkative person by nature, I realized that most clients preferred it if there was a little bit of back and forth, as it created the illusion of lightheartedness. "You seem tense," I observed, watching Maren's reaction from the corner of my eyes. She was marginally taller than me, even though I tended to keep myself upright. I sidestepped a swarthy man speaking in quick French to not get run over. "I know it's technically a doctor's appointment, but contary to the dentist, I don't drill into your teeth."
The comment seemed to garner some sort of reaction, as she other woman gave a very un-ladylike snort in amusement. "Well, my teeth are pretty good," Maren gave back, obviously not rightly knowing where to pick up from that point.
"Oh yes, I noticed. While I never was too interested in dental medicine, I know a few things, mostly from association," I continued seamlessly, not minding the topic, as it would allow me to break the ice, as it were. It occurred to me that it might seem creepy that I had just admitted to have looked at her teeth like that, but it wasn't that bad, right? I wasn't a creep. "Most people with dental problems develop them either due to lack of care in their early life or due to destructive tendencies, like smoking or excessive consumption of drinks like coffee, or generally being too lazy to find four minutes of their day to brush."
"Uhm, yes." I was quite sure that the other woman was merely going along with what I was saying without thinking too much, as I thought she would. "My mother always took care that I brushed my teeth, even though I probably would've done that myself as well."
Evasive answer. Likely brings up associations to less pleasant memories. Mother overprotective. Partially unbearable at times.
In the last year or so of when I had gotten my "precognition" (if you could call it that) from the entity on Pygar, I had learned to ignore it most of the time, as it endlessly prattled on even when I didn't intend to do anything with it. It had been bad for me at first, where it had kept me awake at night to the point where Adrian had wanted to drag me to a doctor who'd be more sensible than myself. That was before I had told him what it was all about. I hummed. "You don't sound to happy about it," I spoke, picking my words in accordance with what my power had given me to work with. After all, one always had plausible deniability when it came to interpreting one's tone of voice.
"You could say that," came the guarded response, my companion taking a sidestep to avoid a gaggle of small children being herded by a particularly hairy babushkha type of woman. Did Boulogne had a kindergarten? I sorta doubt it. Who'd entrust their child to someone who looked like they collected mothballs?
Actually uncomfortable speaking about it. Likely never talked to anyone about her childhood. Would not even do it with her significant other.
Now that was interesting. A significant other, eh? I hid a smile behind a hand, acting like I was coughing for a moment. Given her request, I had suspected something like this, but it wasn't necessarily true that she needed to have one. We left the area in favour of a confusing mess of tight corridors that showed more the damages the base had sustained when it had been assaulted. I had been particularly pissed when I'd heard about this and found out that some of the equipment we had brought here had been rendered positively useless due to the tremors that had shook the station. You should never shake machinery that relies on quantum precision, kids. "Are you doing this for him, then?" I asked, again using my superior knowledge to phrase my question.
"Partially," she replied, and I knew this was something she actually wanted to talk about. Good. Would be more than awkward if I had to discern everything from happenstance. "He hates children."
That made me laugh. I couldn't help it. I laughed until anyone who would pass us would give me a look as though I was crazy, but they were harmless otherwise. Wiping a tear from my eye, I pointed a finger at the other woman, who'd put her arms to her hips, giving me a disgruntled look. "I have to say," I began, part of my genuinely superb vernacular slipping in favour of more utilitarian wordings. "Props to you for that one." I took a deep breath, trying to not appear like a mess.
"Are you always that much of a dick?" Maren asked me and I put my hand to my chest in a motion of faux offense.
"Pardon me? How uncouth."
"So yes," she concluded, giving an exasperated sigh. "Look, can we move on?"
"I believe so," I replied, motioning for the other woman to follow. "And just for protocol: Only to those I know can take it. Don't be such a girl."
Maren gave a snort that was half-chuckle, half-snort, which I interpreted as a 'yes, mom' kind of answer. To be honest, I was old enough to have given birth to her, but that was beside the point. I refrained from prodding further until we had reached our destination. Since our deal with the Brigand Warlord Rousseau, we had a comfortable little section of the base to ourselves. While I was a fan of aesthetics, we had never actually changed anything significant about the way it looked, even though we could have asked Rousseau for a new pain job, I'd wager. Still, it was ours. Mine, technically. We passed two of Rouseau's guard who'd put up a foldable table and chair by the side of the entrance and were playing some game I didn't recognize but involved cards, dice and some sort of spindown die. They saw me and let me pass without too much hassle. They couldn't speak English anyway. Bloody Gauls.
The Cauldron wing of the base was spanning three floors, with only one entry and exit, sadly. However, we had our own elevator, which I found useful. "Quite spacious," Maren commented after we had passed a few rooms which we hadn't yet found any use for.
"Our benefactor was pretty generous, yes," I gave back, humming as we rounded a corner. "We are on the lowermost floor by now. There isn't much here besides some empty quarters that we haven't yet found any use for besides storing service robots. The second floor is where I have most of my equipment, whereas on the third floor, we sorta just have Contessa's play area."
The woman beside me blinked. "Whose play area?"
I bashed the button of the elevator once we were in front of it. "Eh, it's a bit complicated." I really regretted ever having made Contessa. Then again, it was my own fault and I'd by damned if I didn't somehow fix it. "Imagine you have a really bright idea and want to test it, but for testing it, you have a really bad idea."
The other woman just gave me a blank stare. "This isn't something ethically questionable, now, is it?"
Oh, that was totally what it was. Remember how I said I wasn't a creep? "Uhm," I began, coming up with an answer rather slowly. "The joy of life never is pernicious, right?" The door opened and I was pretty glad for it. Stepping in, I pressed the button to the second floor. "In any case, I take it you have with yourself what I'll need to work with?" The other woman nodded, retrieving a vial from her jacket and handing it to me. I turned it in my hands. "Well, that makes it easier than hair," I meant dryly, looking at the glob inside the vial. "In truth, the most difficult part of it will be creating a zygote with your altered egg."
"I never told you about the Cardamine addiction," Maren said exasperatedly, giving me an upset look. Oops. I shouldn't be this blunt, maybe.
"Simple deduction, Miss," I replied, smoothly salvaging the situation. "You mentioned complications before. Also, you wouldn't be talking to me if it were not something related to fertility. It is not that difficult."
The answer seemed to mollify her somewhat, although I suspected that she wasn't really convinced that it was that simple. "Right," she said as the elevator reached the second floor and I stepped out. The second floor looked a lot more like you'd expect my evil secret lair of genious to look. Vats lined the farthest wall from us, the middle of the room taken up by a large apparatus with a tub-like indent in the middle, shaped so a body could lie spread-eagle in the middle.
"What the hell is this?" Maren asked, motioning for the machine and I rubbed the back of my head.
"Well, it's not really done," I answered, wondering if I could even explain it to someone so vastly inferior to me in terms that would be fitting for the genious of the contraption.
"That wasn't the question," she deadpanned.
I rolled my eyes. She surely was one of the more sassy clients. It was almost as though she wasn't at least a bit intimidated by the entire surroundings. "It's a sub-molecular rearrangement outlet," I explained, getting a confused look. "It prints out people," I said, feeling dirty for having simplified it that much, but it seemed to click for the other woman and her mouth formed a round O in comprehension. Sort of like the world's most undignified cheerio. The sight almost gave me a throbbing headache if it hadn't been for the elevator behind me heralding the arrival of someone else.
Turning around, I saw Adrian stepping out of the elevator, Contessa behind him, holding his hand. The scene had something of a big brother and little sister, only that the little sister was an immortal but mentally panda plushie science experiment I'd quasi failed. I was going to fix her head, though, eventually. I looked between Adrian, Contessa and our guest.
Not the least bit surprised that Adrian and Contessa arrived.
I suppressed the urge to arc an eyebrow at what my power was telling me. Either Maren was just completely carefree and without trepidation, or she had just expected more people to be here. "Adrian," I spoke up, offering him a handshake while he opened his arms to go for a hug. Awkward~ In the end, we opted for the handshake. Dominance successfully asserted.
"Hey," he gave back, "I was just, uh, you know."
I looked them down again. "You bought her new clothes."
"Yes?"
"Why didn't you just do it over the neural net?" I asked, knowing the answer though. The guy had been way too protective of Contessa. I raised a hand to stop him before he could answer. "You know, it's okay. Just let me work for a while here, okay?"
"Right," he replied, looking a little sullen. Damn you and your puppy eyes, Adrian. He half-pulled Contessa with him to fetch something before returning to the lift.
I turned back to my guest. "Well, now that you know the team, why don't we start? It'll likely take a week or two to work around your special impairments, so why don't you tell me what you can and cannot eat later for dinner?"
Taking off my glasses and unceremoniously dumping them on the table in front of me, I gave an exasperated groan as I sat back on the chair, rubbing my eyes. It had been four days since the arrival of the new client, but I didn't rightly seem to progress with her request. We had talked, of course, to assess the general rules, as it were. Something like this was inevitable when working on something that was supposed to be tailored to the needs of an individual. I had inquired about what exactly it was she wanted. Fair enough, I could fertilize one of her eggs with the sample she had provided me with. However, the discussion had soon turned towards the more pressing issue, which was her Cardamine usage. I had spent the last three days trying to untangle the genome of this woman from that of the Cardamine, and even though I am quite possibly the only person in Sirius who could do it, I soon learned that it was physically impossible. The information I would need to extract from her would not yield a zygote that would survive. Of course, I could simply go ahead and fertilize the egg, but then the zygote would have the same genetical modifications as the donor of the egg, which was not what the client wanted.
Pushing my chair away from the table, I repeated the motion a few times, finding it childishly pleasing before I got up, realizing that there wasn't much that I could do to better the situation. Looking at the screen, then to the side, I set off towards the quarters that Adrian had assigned to our guest. I hadn't had any say in it, as it was administrative work, which I was happy to not even touch with a ten feet pole. Poking my head in, however, I didn't see our guest. I arced an eyebrow. Where could she have gone. I knew she wasn't just any normal person, of course. However, my power had prognosticated that the woman would not be hostile as long as I pretended to play along with her game, which I didn't mind doing. It was just that much more civilized and less stressful. Pulling out my PAD from my overcoat, I opened the tab with which I could track locations within the Cauldron compound. I saw one signature on the mid floor, which was me, and two additional ones on the uppermost one. By process of elimination, I deduced that, since Adrian was not displayed in the compound, it had to be Contessa and the client.
I frowned, putting the PAD away. I didn't really know what to think of our guest and Contessa having that much contact. While I didn't believe there would be any complications arising from it, I was unsure what kind of impact this woman could have on a mind as underdeveloped as that of Contessa. Turning around, I headed for the lift. I really needed to find a way to help Contessa. It was my fault, after all.
Upon arriving on the third floor and searching around a little, I was greeted with a rather strange site. Contessa and the client were sitting in a room that, for all intents and purposes, looked like a child's playroom. We had found that this was the only real way to keep Contessa from wandering around short of imprisoning her. Neither Adrian nor I had really wanted to do that. We had briefly considered getting a companion animal for Contessa that could keep her from wandering into dangerous places and would provide more kinship than a robot, but we had discarded that idea. Too much maintenance. Too much that could go wrong if Contessa didn't understand something about the animal and hurt it on accident. We had noticed that Contessa was quite interested in mechanical toys, and so, we had opted for that route instead.
Peering into the room from the other side of the corridor, it seemed like the client was trying to explain a rubik's cube to Contessa. It wasn't so much explaining as the client was trying to convey a meaning, given that Contessa could neither speak nor understand language. However, even though Contessa didn't seem to grasp what the other woman wanted from her, she seemed to listen attentively, as though she didn't mind and was merely enjoying the attention. I cringed inwardly when I remembered that only Adrian was really paying attention to her since I tried to not think about her most of the time. I wasn't proud of that.
Slowly, I retreated to leave the two alone for now. It didn't seem right to interrupt anymore.
It was early in the evening when I heard the elevator herald the arrival of another person on the mid floor. I wheeled around on my chair, rubbing my eyes and waved over the client, as I wanted to talk to her. "Miss von Westefeld, a moment of your time," I said, sounding more tired than I had imagined I would be. Having seen the two of them upstairs, I had focused my attention towards helping Contessa's developmental issues. They were numerous, but I was certain that a one-size-fits-all approach would be feasible here. After all, my precognition had never let me down when it came to making Contessa. I didn't think it'd betray me here.
"Uh, sure," Maren replied, sounding a little unsure about my sudden forwardness. Usually, during the last couple of days, I had simply let her roam around as long as she didn't touch anything. I had a feeling that the woman wouldn't really understand what she would be looking at anyway, so there was no actual danger coming from her looking. After all, who'd know the difference between a self-built hyperspace matrix and any other haphazardly cobbled together looking device without doing some sort of test? "What is it?" She wheeled over another chair, sitting opposite of me by my work station.
I should have thought this more through. Scooting back a little, we had barely thirty centimetres between us, which at least I didn't recognize as a comfortable distance, especially when the woman you were facing was a potential biohazard. Sighing inwardly, I folded my hands in my lap, legs crossed. "I have had time to look into the possible routes we could take with your request," I stated, wanting to gauge her reaction first before continuing.
"And?" she said, and I did pick up a hint of trepidation.
"There is a reason why nobody has ever through physical means been able to rid themselves of the alterations done by Cardamine, Miss von Westefeld." I held up a finger to preempt her speaking. "Which is not to say that we cannot force nature, as it were, but I believe you should know the options prior to us continuing."
She seemed to deflate somewhat. I realized that I might have worded this a little too destructively, but I was no friend of sugarcoating. "What do you mean?"
I briefly considered showing her the altered genome on the screen we were both sitting next to, but decided against it. I doubted it would help the explanation when I was facing someone who wasn't savvy in these sorts of things. "Well, firstly, I could create a zygote just using what you have given me. I would let it grow for two days in a proverbial petry dish and then implant it inside you. However, just doing that would let the offspring inherit your Cardamine alterations."
"So they would be dependent?" she asked, then out of the left field. "Can I choose the sex?"
"Of course you can," I replied, arcing an eyebrow. Where had that come from suddenly. One would think she would have mentioned that she wanted a male or female child when they had first spoken about what she wanted. "You can also pick hair color, skin tone, eye color, and pretty much everything else right down to bone density." For a price, of course. We would be getting to that at some point.
"Right," she replied, sounding a little unsure again. I pulled out a small bottle of water from my desk and a glass. "What are the other options?"
"Option. Singular." I poured the water slowly. Carbonated water had the habit to sprinkle out while the gas escaped, which I loathed. "We could," I began, setting down the glass and screwing the bottle shut. "knock out the altered parts of the DNA and replace it with functional one." I let it swing in my tone that I didn't rightly favour that option. "However, the resulting zygote would genetially be less related to you to the point where it would be easier to merely take any other egg to make it simpler. It is also tedious and difficult work to replace all the altered parts. I project it to take about a month of my time. Of course, the cost will reflect this time investment." I gave her a hard look. I really didn't want to force anyone to do anything, but I really wasn't looking forward to sitting down like this for a month, given what I intended to take as payment.
"That sounds," Maren began, looking uncertain, "bad." I could tell that she didn't rightly have an idea of what to say, so I changed topic slightly.
"You have been spending time with Contessa," I stated, wanting to find out a little bit about that. I was going somewhere with this question that was pertinent to her request, however, I would need to find out a few things first.
"You know?" she asked, sounding more surprised than guilty. I supposed she didn't need to, as nobody had ever said that Contessa was off limits. She wasn't, as we didn't believe her to be dangerous. "Was that wrong?"
"No," I meant, taking a small sip from the glass, humming. "It has just been difficult for her, I could imagine. Adrian is the only one who rightly pays attention to her. I know that I should, too, but if I am honest with myself, I think I feel guilty for what I have done to her. I didn't really think ahead."
"What have you done to her?" Maren asked, apparently unable to contain her curiosity. If she had spent time with Contessa, I was quite sure that she would have found the girl to be in perfect health. At least physically.
"I created her," I answered, wanting to keep this short as to not overly dramaticize what had happened. "I created something to prevent death by aging. I tested it on Contessa, making her expressly for that purpose. I altered her so that she would age at 64 times the speed of a normal person."
Maren blinked. "That sounds needlessly excessive when it comes to testing something."
I made a half-grimace. "Yes." There really wasn't any other way to describe it. I had gotten carried away in the moment. I thought I had created something amazing. I still believed that. It evidently worked on keeping Contessa young as well. "There is a way I can help her overcome her problems in this regard. I just need to find it." I sighed, wanting to get this back on track. "Why'd you play with her? Today wasn't the first time, right?"
The woman in front of me squirmed slightly. "It's terribly boring here." How rude. "And she sorta is a sweet girl. Cute laugh." I arced an eyebrow. Contessa had laughed? I had never heard her voice before. "Why are you asking all of this?"
And here came the one billion credit question. If what I believed was right, I could save myself a lot of work and do something good in the process. "Because I believe it isn't really having a child that you are after, but caring for a child," I stated, raising my finger again to signal her to let me finish speaking. "A lot of women have this drive. Especially after menopause, when a woman isn't able to have her own anymore, the evolutionary instinct switches from 'proliferate' to 'protect'. I believe that your subconscious has in reaction to your Cardamine dependence flicked that switch."
I leaned back a little, wanting to really take in her reaction. If I were to guess, I would put my odds of being right at about 80%. However, I didn't know this person well enough to know whether she would go into flat out denial of what I believed was reality.
For a while, Maren appeared to be lost in thought. It was a good sign, I figured. "It might," she eventually said, looking at me as though I was some sort of genie from the lamp. "What are you getting at?"
I hummed. "Well, I can't give you Contessa," I stated, "and I don't believe that you rightly want to consider the options that we have already discussed, right?" I traced the rim of my glass with my index finger, slowly.
"I don't believe it would be fair to have them inherit my dependence."
Nodding, I offered the woman in front of me a second glass.
The English language was always something that she had found funny. The word could refer to a stack of cards, the floorlike topping of a ship, or to the act of sending someone to the floor with a single punch. She looked down from where she sat atop a flight of stairs, legs dangling down from the ledge, secured by one of the railings. Her head was leaning against the cold metal rods while she watched two relatively old boys knock down a younger one, doubtless to take the bit of allowance that the Saint Lucy Foster Home afforded each one. It increased by a set percentage the older one became. Given that she was thirteen, she received one thousand credits per month. None here was old enough for an own bank account, so they handed the allowance to us as credit chips. She had her own way of making sure nobody could steal it from her, even though her room had been searched by a few of the older children before.
Looking down past her legs, she could see that the bullies had found what they had come for and quickly retreated. She remained where she was, three flights of stairs above the victim. It was his own fault for carrying this with him like that. Or maybe it wasn't and she was just trying to justify a blatant act of robbery in her mind. She was young, but she wasn't dumb. Nobody wanted to adopt the older children for two reasons. Firstly, those who wanted children usually wanted to make the experience of raising them themselves as well, which was difficult if someone was already sixteen. Secondly, the older the children here became, the harder to handle they became. Maybe it was because they realized that nobody wanted them or because they simply had no real role models to aspire to. She was quite aware that nobody likely wanted her as well, and hey, she could live with that. She liked to think of herself as someone who didn't really need hugs anyway. Boys were gross, too. Who needed a dad?
"Hey, runt," came a voice from behind me and she upstarted slightly, banging her head on the railing. Trying not to tear up, she rubbed the sore spot on the top of her head, her black hair getting in the way. "Wow, damn, you alright?"
Turning my head to see who was speaking, she saw who it was. "Damn," she muttered, rubbing her head still, "don't sneak up to me like that, Sophia."
Sophia plopped down on the ground next to her apparent friend and leaned against the railing of the stairs, facing the other direction as her counterpart. "Heard two of these numbnuts were looking for you before. You alright?"
The girl raised an eyebrow. "Uh, no, didn't hear about that. I saw two dudes beating up a boy down there." She nodded to where she had been staring just moments prior. Checking again, it seemed like the victim had gotten to his feet again and moved away, doubtless to complain to someone without getting anything accomplished. "Know what they want?"
Snorting, Sophia fished out a pack of cigarettes from her front pocket. She was two years older than her companion. Noticing her eyeing the pack, she held it out. "Want one?" The girl shook her head. It smelled like ass and probably tasted worse. "Suit yourself." She lit one of them with a dodgy looking lighter. It looked like it had been used before to pop bottle caps. While it was technically forbidden to smoke inside the building, the employees did it as well, and if they were caught doing it, all that would happen would be that the cigarettes would be confiscated and they were sent to their room. All in all, it was half-assed. "Guess they wanted from you what they took from the kid down there. I guess they make it sort of a sport to try and catch you because you're probably the most difficult to get a hold of."
The girl snorted. "Not really. I just hide like a pussy and I'm small." It was quite the blessing, she found. While a normal onlooker might question why Sophia wouldn't just stick up to her if it came to an altercation, they didn't understand that, in here, people tried not to get involved. It was just asking for trouble. Really, it was already quite selfless of Sophia to tell me these things, even if she wasn't technically my friend. You didn't really have friends in a place like this, she felt. It was more like 'companionship'. "Guess they'll need a few hours of running around trying to find me to calm down. Reckon I should dip?"
Sophia shrugged. "Whatever works for you, I guess?" she said, actually sounding desinterested, even though she probably did care to some degree, else she wouldn't have come here. While the girl was disentagling from the railing, Sophia hummed and rummaged in her jacket. "Hey," she called out as her companion was halfway towards the nearest window. Sophia tossed her a credit chip. "Don't mind bringing another pack, right? Also, why aren't you wearing shoes?"
"They got me too big ones. Guess they expect me to grow into them or something. They look like crap anyway." She paused, looking back for a moment, the credit chip in hand. "Might do," she replied, putting the chip somewhere it wouldn't get lost and headed over to the window, shoving it upwards. It was one of these sliding windows that the Libertonians were so fond of, or so she had heard. Annoying. A year or so ago, she had been able to climb onto the roof easily, but she had grown a lot in the last year. She figured that she'd need to find another way to sneak out soon. Once on the roof, she bound her hair to a ponytail quickly. Good thing she'd learned from the older girls to always carry a hair band on herself. They'd said she'd understand when she was older.
Stalking over the roof on her tip-toes, as to avoid unnecessary noise, she reached the other side of the roof. The building below was the canteen slash recreational room that was mostly occupied by older children to use the free wifi for their possible stolen phones. She figured she should get one as well at some point. Getting to her knees, she climbed down a fire ladder before jumping the rest of the way down. Essentially falling two meters, the impact left her winded for a few moments before she continued on her way. Doing this in the light of day likely wasn't the best idea, as she could easily be spotted from the courtyard, but given that it had recently rained and puddles had formed everywhere, she figured that nobody was rightly willing to play football or whatever else one could do under the open sky except languish.
Regardless of whether her shoes were too big or not, she figured that it might have been a good idea to wear them, simply because the ground was a tad cold. She didn't have a problem with the bit of dirt, as nobody was going to really give her a hard time over it if she brought it back into the house, but the cold did start to bother her at some point. It wasn't ten minutes into walking down a relatively lively street that she heard something.
"Psst!"
She froze, looking around frantically. Standing still like that exaserbated the feeling of numbness in her toes, causing her to perform something of a tip-toe dance in place. Her search yielded a person sitting on an empty fruit crate in a nearby alleyway that looked like they had watched a few too many B-tier detective movies, complete with duster and wide-brimmed hat that didn't really fit color-wise. "Psst, hey kid," came the voice again, definitely female. "Want a puppy?" The person reached below her duster.
Cocking her head, she stopped stepping in place slowly, as her feet had warmed up the spot below her to a certain degree. Or they were just frozen solid, one of the two. "If what you're getting out of there is anything but a puppy, I will scream," she warned the B-tier detective knockoff, motioning around herself. There actually wasn't anyone in the immediate vicinity. Oh well.
Pulling out the hand, the person withdrew a puppy from a truly deep pocket and put him down on the ground. The dog yipped and she knelt down to pet him. "Who the hell are you?" she asked while the dog rolled onto his back, getting wet in the process. The ground really was not the cleanest here.
The person, meanwhile, pulled the hat off her head and shook it, causing the brown hair to fall over her shoulders. "Uh, name's Maren," the person said, looking just as lost as the girl petting the dog felt currently. "And who'd you be?"
The girl didn't answer the question directly, instead picking up the dog and carrying it like a baby. "Dinah," she replied eventually, pronouncing it as 'die-nah'. "You know, you don't seem like a kidnapper. First, you're a girl. Aren't kidnappers always boys? Second, I'm pretty sure I'm faster than you."
Putting the hat on her lap, Maren gave a confused look. "Uh, why'd kidnappers always need to be male?" she asked, not really seeing how this girl would get this idea, given that she was likely not old enough to look at statistics. She wasn't wrong, but Maren doubted that it was for the right reasons.
Dinah shrugged. "Dunno. Girls just tend to pull hair and stuff." She used a finger to poke the puppy's nose. "I'm gonna call him Woofers the Indomitable, brave warrior of, uh, Cambridge." The dog sneezed. "See, he likes it." She continued like this for a few moments, before looking up at the other woman again quizzically. "So, uh, if this isn't a kidnapping, then why are you sitting here in an alley wearing this and giving out puppies to a girl passing?"
To her surprise, the other woman didn't really seem to know either. "Well," she drawled, crossing her legs while sitting on the crate. "A friend of mine told me that my wish would come true if I sat in this alley and offered a puppy to the first one who'd come through here while wearing these clothes," she explained matter-of-factly.
Was Dinah supposed to believe that. She rolled her eyes. "Sounds to me like your friend wanted to get you arrested." Then a fiendish grin snuck itself onto her face when she got an idea. "Heeeeey~" she intoned, her grin widening. "Wanna buy me some cigarettes? I'll scream if you don't."
The other woman gave her a flat look. "You're extorting me for something you shouldn't even be having yet and do it with the threat of getting people to beat me up because they think I'm molesting a little girl that is in reality quite possibly a crime lord on the inside?"
Dinah tilted her head in confusion. "Uhm, it is more something like, uh, 'forced negotiating'," she meant, waving her hand dismissively, almost dropping the puppy. "Now come, it's cold." She held out a hand as though she expected the other woman to take it.
"What is this now?" she eyed the offered hand quizzically, as though she expected hidden spikes to come out of it and skewer her hand once she touched it.
"You're gonna take my hand, dumb-dumb," Dinah retorted, giving her best impression of a sweet grin. "If you go on your own, you can just walk away and that'd make me sad." She pouted for emphasis. "So we'll go hand in hand and act like I'm your daughter when we go to the corner shop."
The flat look got even flatter. "You're joking, right?"
"No, and now come. My feet are freezing." At least the puppy was not thrashing around, otherwise holding it with one arm would be really difficult.
There wasn't really any telling whether Maren was humoring the girl or not, but she took the offered hand and promptly got half-dragged through a city block before they reached a corner shop that was actually in pretty good shape. The building seemed new, at least. Dinah seemed to be fairly eager to get inside and Maren understood why when she entered herself. It was warmer. Giving a content sigh, Dinah elbowed Maren to urge her to go up to the counter, where a bouncy looking woman was trying to build a house of cards. Suppressing the urge to destroy the work of ten minutes, Maren cleared her throat when the woman didn't react to them standing in front of her.
Raising a hand, the cashier gave a sharp "pssst" noise before slowly placing the last card on top of the card house, as though she was asking for someone to ruin it, as was the fate of all houses of cards. "Hi!" she exclaimed after finishing, making Maren half-jump in surprise at the sudden noise. "What can I do ya for?"
"Uhm," Maren intoned, her mojo sort of lost at the grammatically unsound question posited to her. "Lemme get, uh, pack of cigarettes." The cashier motioned to a shelf behind her where a lot of different brands were stacked up in rows. Damn, Dinah hadn't said which. "Uh, the red one." The woman fished out the pack that Maren pointed at and put it on the counter. However, before the cashier could mention the price, Dinah tugged on Maren's arm. "What is it?" Maren asked, maybe a bit sharper than intended.
Dinah pointed at the slush ice machine behind the counter, giving her best impression of puppy dog eyes. "Can I get a slushie, mommy?" she asked, and her voice was completely different from the one she had spoken with earlier and sounded more appropriate for her age.
Maren was visibly bristling at the nerve of this kid, but the cashier behind the counter gave Maren the eyes of someone who'd find it an absolute atrocity if this adorable kid didn't get its slush ice, and Dinah was underhandedly giving her a stare of getting arrested for gifting puppies to children on the sidewalk creepily, and so Maren sighed. "Fine, you'll get a slushie," she intoned listlessly.
"Yay!" Dinah exclaimed, clapping into her hands with a bright grin. It made Maren question where the puppy had gone, but then she noticed that Dinah had put it into her jacket's front pocket. "I want the red one with some of the blue stuff." While the cashier was getting to making Dinah's slush ice, Maren noticed that they weren't alone in the corner shop. There was a suspiciously familiar looking, brown woman in a white overcoat leafing through some of the magazines in the back of the shop, and Maren rolled her eyes.
"There ya go, missy!" the cashier chirped happily after finishing an extra large cup of teeth-rotting goodness for the little devil by Maren's side. Slurping audibly, Dinah waited until Maren had pocketed the cigarettes and paid for their things before holding out her hand again. Little brat!
Maren could almost hear the amusement in the Doctor's casual whistling as she leafed through another magazing while they passed her for the exit.
Once outside, Dinah pulled Maren at least half a block away before letting go of her, the slushie by now empty. "Well, that was good, wasn't it?"
"Define 'good'," Maren deadpanned, holding the cigarettes in her hand. "I really hope you get a tummy ache." She stared into Dinah's eyes. "A really bad tummy ache."
"I just extorted you and you still talk to me as though I was five?" Dinah asked, arcing an eyebrow before throwing the slushie cup into an alleyway without care. Filthy litterbug!
"I mean, what are you, ten?" Maren eyed Dinah up and down. Brown hair that was haphazardly bound into a pony tail and reached barely past her shoulders, fairly shabby clothes and no shoes.
"Thirteen," she bristled, huffing slightly.
"Aren't you a tad small for thirteen?"
"I'm not small!" Dinah exclaimed angrily, throwing up her hands, which made Woofers yip in surprise. "I am just," she seemed to be finishing for words, "compact."
Another flat stare. "Right."
Dinah held out her hand in a demanding manner, putting the other to her side like an angry mom, the puppy poking its head out of her pocket. "Now gimme the cigarettes."
"Yeeeaaah," Maren intoned, putting them back into her pocket. "Go fish."
"I will scream." She gave her best impression of a hard stare.
"I somehow don't think you will do that, but suppose you did," Maren meant, motioning back in the general direction of the corner store. "There are two people in there who saw us being all normal. Who do you think would be believed more, a bratty prebubescent or its 'parent'." Dinah's bravado deflated slowly, her outstretched hand sinking to her side. "That's better." Maren nodded. "And now you'll tell me where you live so I can talk with your guardian."
"You go fish."
"Well, I could call the police instead."
At least then Dinah finally talked.
It was in the evening when Maren finally changed out of the ridiculous costume the Doctor had asked her to wear for this. She honestly had no idea what was going on in the head of that woman. At first, Maren had thought that there was some sort of karneval type of deal going on in the part of Cambridge that they had visited, but instead, she had been flung into this totally absurd situation. Putting the cowboy boots away, Maren made her way to the bridge of the Grizzly Freighter that the Doctor and she had used to come here.
Dinah had told Maren where she lived. While it had been a little weird to bring her back to the Saint Lucy Foster Home, she had made true of her promise to talk to the administrator of the facility, although she didn't really believe that it had gotten her anywhere. In some sense, it was astounding just how little surprise the man had shown to her when she had explained the situation to him. What was more, though, was that Dinah had only been grounded for a week. Either stuff like this happened more often than they should, or he had just been indifferent. Maren suspected the former.
When she arrived in the cockpit, the Doctor was already there, nibbling on a sandwich. "Not even gonna ask," Maren stated once she got into the room, the doctor wheeling around on the cockpit chair to face her, eyebrow raised.
"Aren't you at least a bit curious." the Doctor asked after having carefully chewed the bite in her mouth. Maren had sat down on the other chair in the meanwhile.
"Nope." She motioned for the Doctor to rev up the engine so they could leave. Maren truly felt like the entire ordeal was pointless.
"Fair enough." The Doctor began the starting sequence and remained silent. She was quite sure that Maren was more than curious what she had intended with the entire visit, but the sad part was that she couldn't tell her all of it without revealing too much about her uncanny ability.
While the two of them sat in the cockpit, one of them sulking and the other silently amused, a small set of feet stalked slowly through the ship. Poking her head around corners, Dinah wanted to make sure that nobody saw her. She had figured the woman she had seen was a spacefarer and had come to confirm her suspicions. When she had seen an opportunity to sneak on board, she had, figuring that, if nothing else, she could pilfer something valuable to sell for even more slushies.
She almost landed on her nose when the ship lurched forward with the engines coming alive and she almost panicked, not having expected them to take off now of all times. Crap, this was bad! Sneaking further, she came across something that seemed like a meeting room in the middle of the ship, judging by how a bunch of doorways led to other parts of the ship. A table in the middle caught her eye where she saw an actual PAD lying around. Jackpot.
Tip-toeing into the room, she quickly snatched the device and retreated back where she had come from, huddling in the doorway to some room on the end of the corridor. An actual PAD, and it was all hers now! She could watch all sorts of TV on this! The only problem really was that she had no idea how to use this thing. After trying around for a while, she managed to turn it on. There was a little green light on the top that kept blinking and irritated her. If Dinah knew anything about these devices, she might have found the lack of a password or verification strange. As it stood however, she merely tried around with the PAD until she had sort of understood how it worked. After all, it was quite intuitive.
The device seemed to belong to a Maren von Westefeld, which Dinah was willing to wager was the woman who'd bought her the slushie. She had a new message. Opening it, she read the few lines, arcing an eyebrow. Who was Lorena Hawkins, and why was she dead? Opening the attachments without much of a thought, Dinah was faced with a lot of data, most of it transcribed into words. She overlooked that there was an option to have the audio file be read to her, so she squinted at the letters. Idly scrolling through it all, she read the occasional line in between, but nothing to really form a concrete picture. It was all so terribly booooring. Reading was boring. She didn't want to read this anymore. Trying to close the tab wasn't as easy as it looked, though. The weird messenger app didn't have the big red X in the top right corner like the other apps had had. Getting slightly angry, Dinah tried every button in the hopes that one of them would yield the desired result.
Do you want to delete this message?_
She pressed yes without really thinking and just like that, the message together with its contents was moved to the bin with the other read messages.
No new messages._
It took Dinah another five minutes of trying around before she finally managed to close the messaging app. Time to look for the TV app.
As they headed back to Boulogne Base, the Doctor couldn't stop smiling.
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