Ellie Quin Episode 5: A Girl Reborn (12 page)

‘I don’t know. Maybe…we should.’

CHAPTER 16

‘This is it?’

Ellie nodded. The three of them stared at the unmarked door.

Shelby shone his torch up and down it. ‘You’re quite right…there’s no identification number for this storage vault. Very odd.’

‘You’ve never noticed this room before?’

He sighed impatiently. 'I haven’t been down on this deck in years,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never had a need to. And believe me, there are a LOT of storage vaults. Decks and decks of them.’

Ellie studied his face. He didn’t seem to be hiding anything. If anything he seemed keen to press on and see what it was that Ellie wanted to show him.

‘So what exactly is in here that you’re so very keen for me to take a look at?’

‘Let’s have a look shall we?’ said Jez. She pulled down on the locking handle and shoved the heavy door. It’s creaky pneumatic hinges echoed down the passageway as it swung slowly inwards. They stepped over the bulkhead lip into the gloomy space beyond. Soft crimson safety lights along the bottom of the walls blinked on.

Shelby shone his torch around. ‘Hmmm. Well, it’s mostly empty.’

‘No…over there, the crate? See?’

‘A crate. Yes, I see a crate. So what?’

‘Just go take a look at it,’ Ellie replied.

They walked across the vault towards it. Closer, Shelby swung his torch beam across it. ‘What’s that? A blanket?’

They came to a halt and looked down at what appeared to be a quilted purple bath robe, and, carefully placed across its folds, like pieces of jewellery in a store window, were a number of personal effects.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘They’re all things that once belonged to your colleagues I think.’

He frowned. He reached out and picked up a hairbrush. A number of dark hairs were tangled into a nest at the base of the bristles.

‘ID tags,’ said Jez. She reached across and picked up several of them. ‘Dr Diana J. Sembala? Who was she?’

‘A senior botany geneticist,’ replied Shelby. ‘A very boring woman.’

‘Dr Ron L. Hibbard…’

‘Enviro-Systems programmer.’

‘Jonathan T. Kemble…’

‘He was an irritating man.’ Shelby picked up a pair of antique spectacles. ‘Financial Oversight. A corporate bean-counter.’

‘Shelby,’ said Ellie, ‘they all died…horribly. Don’t you even…’

‘Miss any of them?’ He shrugged casually. ‘Not really.’

‘So,
you
didn’t set this place up?’ asked Jez. ‘
You
didn’t do this?’

‘Nope. Why would I? Annoying bunch…the lot of them.’

The girls looked at each other. ‘Then Gray must have done this?’

Shelby picked up the remaining ID tags. ‘I suppose he could have. Never thought of that idiot as the sentimental type though.’

‘This isn’t sentimental,’ said Jez. ‘This is weird.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Ellie shone her torch across the robe. ‘It’s like a trophy table….’

‘Like some videe-gamers tag-room,’ added Jez. She looked at Ellie. ‘You kill another player in a shooty game…you get to keep one of their avatar’s accessories. Kinda like that.’

‘Right.’ Ellie looked at her. ‘That’s why it feels creepy. Like whoever did this was sort of pleased with himself.’

Jez nodded, her face was beginning to drain of colour. ‘My God. Have I been hanging out with some psycho weirdo?’ She looked at Ellie. ‘Me and Gray…we…we…’ She looked like she wanted to sit down.

‘I really don’t think you should go back to his world, Jez.’

‘No shit.’

‘This…this doesn’t make sense,’ said Shelby.

‘This doesn't seem like him, is it?’ Ellie turned to him. ‘I know what you mean. You think you know someone inside and out then-’

He shook his head. ‘No. Not Gray. He's an idiot. But not a murderer.' He stared intently at the ID tags in his hand. ‘This doesn't make sense.’

‘What?’

‘I…I remember these people. I worked for years with all these people. I knew them all very well.'

'I'm sorry,' said Ellie. 'This must be horrible to…'

'Don't be sorry. I said I knew them. I didn't say I particularly
liked
them.'

'You said 'it doesn't make sense',' said Jez. '
What
doesn't make sense?'

'There were twelve of us employed to maintain this place. The system log reported ten fatalities on that date.' He held out the ID tags. 'And there are eleven tags here.'

'And then there's you and Gray.'

'That makes
thirteen
,' said Jez.

Shelby nodded. 'That means log has been altered by someone.'

CHAPTER 17

My plan
…
my project
…

Mason had been a much younger man, in his forties, when he’d first realised the enormity of the impending crisis facing humanity. It had come to him as a sudden epiphany…not the problem…but the
solution
.

The crisis, the growing problem had become - to use a curious Old Earth saying - the Elephant In The Room. Among the corridors of power, among the ruling elite on Liberty, the problem was right there, front and center and had always been right there in front of them. But, while it was manageable, containable, it was something that could be labelled and filed under ‘somebody else down the line can worry about it’.

So, while the issue could be disguised and brushed under the carpet, given a department and an increasing year-on-year budget to keep it out of sight and mind…it was a problem left alone.

The crisis, the 'Elephant', so to speak, was the increasing fragility of the human genome. Mason had realised not long after being appointed to run The Department of Genetic Analysis, that he and his department were an integral part of the problem. The meddling, tinkering, engineering of generation after generation of babies was producing a steadily increasing number of failed growths on the vast floors of foetus incubators. The percentage rate of death-in-vitros, stillborns, misshapen horrors that had to be ‘terminated’ before full-term, increased year on year, month on month. Far worse than that, were the number of apparently ‘normal’ babies being sent out to their waiting parents, only to later develop grotesque abnormalities as they matured and reached puberty.

Even managing to reach adulthood without some genetic code mis-firing was no guarantee of immunity. It was the fear that every citizen in Human Space quietly lived with the fear that one day, a slight skin discolouration, or a mild ache, or a strange lump might be the very first symptom of a mutation.

And every citizen unfortunate enough to fall foul of this cruel genetic lottery dealt with it in exactly the same way. Denial at first. Then, as the condition developed, resorted to hiding it. At first from loved ones…then as it became more difficult to conceal, sharing the dreadful news with their nearest and dearest, soliciting their cooperation in keeping the condition a secret for as long as was possible.

The Administration’s method of dealing with this was to deny the issue and hide it. And Mason could see they really had no alternative. Human Space, being such a sprawling thing…spread out across so many star systems, so many hundreds of worlds…so many billions of people, was an almost impossible province to govern. The only viable method for maintaining any semblance of cohesion was to maintain control of one thing…the supply of future generations of citizens.

The year 2751 :OE, nearly four hundred years previously, was the year in which the last recorded
natural
births had occurred. The Administration had used the expedient that after the disastrous colonial war, in which far too many worlds had been completely ‘glassed’, new worlds needed to be tamed and terraformed by hardy first-generation colonists. People would need to be made tougher, more resistant to harsh ecosystems, to new strains of exotic alien bacteria. They
needed
to be engineered.

Thus, fertility had been edited out of humankind. Between fifteen to twenty generations of tinkering had occurred since, and like any one of millions of software engineers out there, Mason was well aware that code, in the hands of too many programmers becomes prone to bugs, instability and eventual catastrophic failure.

Twenty-five years ago, Mason had discovered and subsequently decoded a segment of genetic code that had been encrypted, much like a scrambled digital signal. It’s purpose was quite simple; to switch off the production of luteinizing hormones that stimulated oocytes to become human egg cells.

That day, two and a half decades ago, Mason realised something quite astounding. Up until then he’d assumed the ‘editing’ by previous generations of genetic programmers had rendered women irreversibly infertile. But on the contrary, every woman in the galaxy was perfectly capable of having a baby. The equipment was there, right inside of them and ready to get to work…it was simply inert. Switched off by that strand of DNA. And he’d asked himself…

What if that switch could be flipped back on?

Now, Mason lay on the cot in his cube and looked out of the small window at the underbelly of the pedestrian plaza above. The neon lights of passing holoboards flickered against it bringing the pitted slab of plasticrete to life.

About the same time, back then…something else had happened. Something that turned Mason’s wistful thoughts into a very real possibility. Through a friend of a friend of a friend, a chance encounter, Mason had met a man with sympathetic views towards a new cult who’s numbers seemed to be growing
daily. They called themselves ‘a religion’, but as far as Mason could see they were just a cult - they believed a Big Change was fast approaching and that a final prophet from God would come and live amongst humanity.

Mason had been about to laugh at the man’s superstitious nonsense, until the man had mentioned one of the faith’s core beliefs…that this prophet would blessed with a gift from God. The gift from the Almighty, would be the gift of natural childbirth.

And that’s when Mason first conceived of The Idea.

Several years passed, and somehow, the cult, by then they were calling themselves The Rebornist Church, had discovered that Mason was a sympathetic ear. Their approach was cautious and secretive, over several months, but finally resulted in a meeting with one of their most senior ‘Teachers’. He’d given Mason no name and Mason knew only that his followers referred to him as ‘The First and The Last’.

‘
We are not luddites
,’ he’d said. ‘
We know God works his miracles as much through us, and technology, as through his own divine powers
.’

The man, slender, leaned-faced and dark-skinned, with a thatch of unfashionable facial hair grown as a symbol of an absence of vanity, had presented Mason with a sealed package; a small box the size of his palm.

‘
What is that?
’

‘
It contains something quite wonderful
.’

‘
Contains what?
’

‘
God
.’

Mason recalled smiling at that. And the man, to his credit, had smiled back, milk-white teeth framed by a dark brush of bristles.

Mason had been flippant. ‘
He
’
s certainly much smaller than I
’
d imagined
.’

The First and The Last appreciated the joke. ‘
He is as small as a quantum particle, as vast as the universe my friend
.’

‘
And he
’
s, what? He
’
s sitting in there
…
right now?
’

The man had nodded. He’d reached into his loose robes and pulled out a pair of thin plastex gloves. He snapped them onto his hands like a surgeon preparing to go to work.

Mason had been unsettled by that. Wondering what the hell
was
inside. The man unlatched the box and it hissed softly as the lid came off. A curl of nitrogen vapour unfurled, rose between them and thinned to a ghostly spectre.

It was a refrigerated container.

‘
Look, if that contains any hazardous or infectious substance
…’ he’d started.

‘
There is nothing dangerous in here, my friend
,’ he’d replied. He’d wafted aside the vapours then carefully reached into the small box with his gloved fingers. ‘
Like I said
…
this is God
.’

Mason had leant forward, suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity.

The Teacher had lifted it up…held it delicately in the palm of his hand for Mason to see.

‘
Shall I explain to you what you are looking at?
’

Mason had nodded. ‘
You better had
.’

Five minutes later, Mason understood what they were asking him to do, and it was then, that he comprehended how his nebulous dream and their prophecy, could be combined. That this man and his followers could help him, and he them.

It was that day, twenty-one years ago that the idea of Ellie had been born.

CHAPTER 18

‘DataBase enquiry, Mother.’

‘Of course, Shelby…how can I help you today?’

Ellie and Jez looked at the projected cartoon image of Mother hovering in the air beside the work station. Her grey hair was in a tidy bun, she was wearing a tartan shawl…
and doing knitting for crud
’
s sake
.

She wondered who the software designer was who’d come up with this kind of avatar for the system’s AI. Presumably some lonely guy with granny issues.

‘Mother…can you please access the personnel records for WonderWorld.’

She stopped her knitting and put some reading glasses on. ‘Of course, Shelby.’

‘Oh…nice touch’, said Jez nodding at the animation.

‘What information in particular are you after, Shelby?’

‘I would like the names of the caretaker crew please.’

In the air above the workstation another projection appeared. A list of names, ages, genders and employment numbers.

Shelby looked at the girls. ‘Those are the people I worked with. The
eleven
people I knew. Mother?’

'Yes, Shelby?'

'The accident that killed the others…the log report specified ten fatalities.'

'That is correct, Shelby.'