Severance (42 page)

An image appeared of a sidewalk, shot from a sensor about
ankle high. He was impressed; he had been certain someone would have caught the
little guy and put a shot through its brain box by now. It was hard to tell
where it was, but the robot was still moving, so he sat and watched for a while.
There was a sign post. Blue. Still on the fourth level, then.

Amused, Bruce sat and watched the robot for the next hour or
so, hoping it would see something interesting. He had given it a few targets —
spots close but not too close to the barricades, the base of escalators, and so
on — but had told it to self–navigate to those locations using its own
judgment. The robot would be biased to do most of its traveling in the
belowground passageways, to keep it out of traffic, but spent at least some of
its time above ground. Bruce got a few distant looks at barricades and security
troops but nothing else of interest.

There was no way to check the status of the anti–friction
planer, but Bruce was certain it was out of lube. He didn’t have any other
bright ideas for the robot right now, but with it still alive, decided there
was no point letting it run around above ground any more than it had to. After
spending a couple seconds looking at a map, Bruce took over manual control of
the robot and instructed it to drop the tool. He then directed it to turn at
the next corner and go down the street, towards the nearest access point for
the belowground crawlways.

On the screen, where a barricade should have been, there was
nothing, just the last rays of sunlight setting in the garden well. He stopped
the robot, confused, zooming in, finally seeing the dispersed fortifications
staggered a block out into the well. It was America, the site of the hilariously
one–sided battle from a few days earlier.

Now, why are they hanging their asses way out in the
garden well?
It seemed far more vulnerable than the other barricades, all
well back from the garden well. He spun the robot around, looking back down
America. As he did, it panned past the ornate doors of the Bridge. He stopped,
getting it.

They were protecting the Bridge. And he knew why. The Bridge
was one of the few places on the ship where you could walk into a room at
street level and from there move up to the fifth floor and beyond.
You could
even walk right up to one of the fucking disconnects
. Bruce groaned,
recalling his earlier adventure.

Absentmindedly, he spun the robot around, moving it back
into the safety of the crawlways. Done, he leaned back on the couch, quietly
impressed with Helot’s tactics. There were a half–dozen ways to infiltrate the
aft from within the Bridge; it was no wonder they’d secured it. Which was also
why they weren’t moving into the garden well anywhere else. Other than the
elevators and a handful of emergency staircases — all already behind the
barricades — the Bridge was the only place in the aft you could move upstairs
from the fourth level.

His body stiffened.
Except for the wall–punchers!

Now, that was a hell of an interesting idea.
Getting
to it would be a little stupid. But stupid in a fun way. Stein wouldn’t go for
it, not at first. He would have to bring it up delicately. Seduce her with the
stupidity. Tease her with it.

He got up from the couch, mind racing, devising ways to blow
stupid little nothings into her ear.

§

Stein sat in the treatment room, watching as Dr. Berg
methodically probed the healing wrap on her arm. He hadn’t said anything other
than pleasantries since she had arrived; either he hated multi–tasking or was
still working up the nerve to say what he had found out about her parents. She
had to admit that he did look tired. The hospital has gotten a lot busier in the
past week. Stun weapons perhaps, but a lot of people had still taken some
pretty nasty spills during the last round of fighting.

Apparently satisfied with her arm, or just done with the
pretense of examining it, Berg sat down on the examination table, facing her. “So?”
she asked.

“You’ve got a data gene.”

She took that in stride, having lots of practice at absorbing
the insane bullshit which seemed to be regularly hurled in her direction. “Okay.”

“Do you know what that is?” Berg asked, surprised.

“I was waiting for you to tell me what it is, because I know
you’re very eager to do that.”

Berg recoiled a bit. He pursed his lips, then continued, “A
data gene is information artificially programmed into the non–coding sections
of the DNA.”

She tried to force the glazed look off her face. “Okay,” she
said, rotating her fingers in a circular motion, directing him to continue.

“You see DNA’s full of information, but only a fraction of
it appears to have any kind of useful effect on how an organism behaves. So, a
data gene overwrites some of this hopefully useless DNA.”

“Hopefully useless?”

“Well, that’s the thing. Just because we don’t know it’s
useful doesn’t mean it isn’t. There’s still kind of a lot of things we don’t
know about that stuff. If you overwrite it, it’s hard to say what the effect
could be. It could be nothing or, it could be instant centaur. Real mad science
stuff. Completely illegal.”

“Like a genetic tattoo?”

“Oh, yeah. Your eye thing.” Berg nodded, his back
straightening. He seemed to be livening up from the conversation. “Yeah, you
definitely have that, too. It showed up like a crater in your scan. But the
data gene was more subtle.”

She sat down in the chair opposite the table. She was
suddenly tired of it all. Any other time in her life and it would have been a
different story, but now? She was out of damns to give. If someone wanted to
spray graffiti all over her DNA,
fucking let them
. “What does it say? A
pep talk from my folks? ‘You can be anything you want to be! Reach for the
stars, kiddo!’ ”

Berg frowned. “Don’t know yet. The scanner’s only detected
the presence of artificially coded information, not been able to pick it out
yet. It tells me it has to find the table of contents first. Whatever that
means.”

“How long’s that going to take?”

“Don’t know. The progress meter on the terminal reads fourteen
percent. So eighty–six more percent, I guess.”

She rolled her eyes and looked away. She didn’t care. Didn’t
want to care. She stood up and smiled wanly at the doctor. “Thanks, Doc. When
that meter gets up into the triple digits, let me know if anything interesting
pops out.” She left the room abruptly, leaving the doctor before he could say
something else useless.

She had barely left the room when her terminal buzzed, which
she responded to with an incredible stream of obscenities. Frightened and dirty
looks chased her down the hall as she reluctantly dug the terminal out of her
webbing. Another, briefer set of obscenities when she saw the message was from
Abdolo Poland.

I’ve just thought of something incredibly stupid. Where
are you?

Harold tapped the door controls, his breath catching at the
slight delay before the door slid open. It always took about half a second,
right? Not a quarter of a second? It felt like it took a bit longer this time.

He had some right to be in the naval medical bay, just not a
lot. Normally, he would only remotely send his programs to the tinkering
engine, which would automatically handle fabricating and imprinting the
nanobots. Delivering the completed capsules to the treatment annex could be
accomplished by someone with far less education than Harold, which meant that
normally, he would never have to come anywhere near here.

Which was why he had spent the last month laying the
groundwork, a carefully balanced array of lies and excuses, to explain why he
had to be there at that specific moment. Repeated conversations with Dr.
Kinison about treatment efficiencies. Raising concerns about triage decisions. Very
public musing about methods of increasing the treatment rates. This was all
spectacularly rude of him, grossly overstepping his bounds into Dr. Kinison’s domain.
He was pretty sure if he kept it up for much longer he would provoke a
fistfight. But it was at least plausible for him to be interested, and that was
all he needed. A plausible excuse to visit the tinkering engine and examine its
statistics packages. He would claim he was here investigating whether the
engine was capable of handling a specific change in treatment methodology and
what effect that would have on their treatment rates. He had even spent weeks
coming up with this new, actually quite clever, change in treatment
methodology, lest anyone ask to see it.

He turned on the lights, finding the room empty, as well it
should be at this time of the morning. That had been the hardest part, actually,
cultivating a reputation as an early riser after years of being the exact
opposite. He yawned fiercely and walked to the other side of the room, to the
unmarked door there.

This door slid open in the same identically slow way the
first door had, which meant that he was paranoid and that everything was fine,
unless it meant the exact opposite. He stepped inside, allowing the door to close
behind him, sealing him inside with the scariest machine on the ship.

In spite of its terrifying capabilities, the gene tinkerer
itself was pretty harmless looking. A large transparent sphere comprised the
business end of it, filled with the carefully controlled population of nanobots.
At the base of the sphere, barely visible in the gray haze of the nanobot
cultures, sat the programming apparatus. Collected and compiled nanobot
populations were then packaged into capsules somewhere below there, before dropping
out of a little slot in the base of the machine. Harold sidled up to the small
terminal mounted on to the side of the unit and turned it on.

He covered his excuses first, instructing the unit to send a
package of statistical data to his terminal. That done, he looked over his
shoulder in what he would later decide was the most suspicious way possible, then
turned back to the terminal. He flexed his fingers, took a deep breath, and
triggered the engine into its low level command mode. Much harder to use but
necessary for what he needed to do next. There were no excuses for this, and he
began quickly tapping commands into the terminal, desperate to get it over with
quickly.

GT–20298 COMMAND? ENTER HELP FOR HELP.

>upload –i

UPLOADING NEW COMMAND KERNEL. WARNING! THIS MAY CAUSE YOUR
GT–20298 TO CEASE FUNCTIONING. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE? (Y/N)

>y

SELECT .TINK FILE

>splitplot.tink

splitplot.tink NOT FOUND. SCANNING NEARBY DEVICES….
splitplot.tink FOUND!

ANALYIZING..........INCOMPLETE KERNEL DETECTED. CONTINUE IN PATCH
ONLY MODE?

>y

BEGINNING PATCH PROCEDURE

PATCHING................COMPLETE!

>log

LOGGING SUBSYSTEM. ENTER HELP FOR HELP.

>ll –kernel

197836 U –p splitplot.tink 508 10/28/52 hstein

122465 U –p shp8patch.tink 1723 18/10/49 lkinison

103784 U –p shp7patch.tink 2128 4/2/48 lkinison

79844 U –p sheep6.tink 1343 1/3/46 lkinison

56733 U –n baseline–1–45–23.tink 1010 23/7/43 lkinison

30709 U –p s5.tink 1103 9/5/42 lkinison

^z ^z

>rl –l 197836

DELETED

>ll –kernel

122465 U –p shp8patch.tink 1723 18/10/49 lkinison

103784 U –p shp7patch.tink 1723 4/2/48 lkinison

79844 U –p sheep6.tink 1723 1/3/46 lkinison

56733 U –n baseline–1–45–23.tink 1723 23/7/43 lkinison

^z ^z

>exit

Harold smiled and allowed himself another suspicious look
over the shoulder. Still no one there to ask what the heck he was doing. Back
in the upper–level menus, he downloaded a final batch of statistical data,
looked at it while making thoughtful noises, then pushed himself away from the
terminal. He blinked, realizing he had almost forgotten something, and then
deleted splitplot.tink from his terminal, lest he get intercepted while walking
out.

Splitplot.tink did two things. The first was the hardest, at
least technically, programming the logic necessary to safely insert a data gene
into any given patient who got tinkered. This data gene contained all the text
that Kevin had sent him, along with a brief note authored by Harold, explaining
to any readers what the hell this information was doing inside them.

The second thing splitplot.tink did was substantially easier
but took him a lot longer to figure out: how to prompt his subjects to
actually find the data gene he had embedded. The solution to that came to him
while flipping through his genetic cookbook one evening. Towards the back, he
stumbled upon a section discussing genetic birthmarks, which immediately
sparked his imagination. Planting a message or a clue as a genetic birthmark
might work — a short hint that something funny was going on inside their DNA.
Something simple, but enough to prompt a visit to the doctor and a deep genetic
scan. It wouldn’t even need a doctor; really, an interested hobbyist with a
medical terminal could do it just as well.

But a birthmark would be incredibly and immediately visible.
His message would be discovered within days of the first baby coming out of the
womb. Too soon, too isolated. Too much chance the message would be read by the
wrong person. And too easy to trace back to him. Ideally, he wanted to set a
time delay so his message could be planted within more people before it was
found. What he needed was an information time bomb, something that wouldn’t go
off for years, but when it did, by the hundreds.

His eureka moment came when he read about the retinas. The
same genetic birthmarking procedure could be performed on retinas, where a
message would only be seen by the subject. It was even possible to make them
nearly invisible, to only fluoresce under certain lighting conditions, an
occasionally necessary step to prevent the mild insanity which seemed to
accompany retinal tattoos.