by Anna Gaffey
“Christly messiahs. Get to the point.” Jake shook the tablet.
Vid-Jake scowled. “I am getting to the point. Con’s gonna help me make sure the research doesn’t magically disappear if there’s some kind of power grab after we go public. Silverman’s in charge of data storage and recovery, and I don’t trust her. Never have. It’s why I left her out of the prelim test. Gods, she was so mad about that, ha. So I’m sticking it here. It’s an underlying layer on this video, just press here—” He circled his fingers in the upper corner of the screen, and smirked again. “And it’ll recognize your thumbprint, and load. A condensed string, you’ll need a processor to read it. Nice, huh? It’s nothing we don’t know. Probably won’t even need it, but, backup, backup, backup. What a stellar son I am. I’m betting I only get smarter in the future, am I right?”
Jake grimaced.
I’m sorry, Con had said. You said I’d have to choose the time. I’m choosing now.
If vid-Jake was reliable, if Rachel was wrong and Con wasn’t bullshitting, then Con had been with this prick, too, had loved him, too. It was a little disquieting. No, it was a lot disquieting, because he, felon-Jake, couldn’t remember it and Con had said nothing in the last decade.
Vid-Jake was still smirking out at him, his fingers wordlessly circling the air. Jake scowled and thumbed the upper corner.
The screen exploded into noiseless data. Numbers. Findings. Research. All compressed into a power stream fit for a couple of gem matrices, and his head pounded with a sudden, feverish headache. Jake reeled.
The lift shuddered and dipped into darkness.
An intricate pattern of blinding blue lights wheeled overhead, bathing Jake in azure. Lindy peered down at him. She patted his forehead, her wrinkled hand dry and cool. Her face was shrouded in shadow.
“You’re fine, as far as I can tell. No anomalies. The implant’s working normally. Can you talk me through the problem?”
“I am not fine.” Jake clutched at the lift walls, but he couldn’t feel them. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but fine is absolutely without a doubt not what I am right now, I’ll tell you that.”
“Now, now. You shouldn’t open your eyes under the scanner.”
“Old midwives’ tale, Doc,” Jake whispered. “You should read more of the latest research.”
“Let him,” Santos hissed, looming over his other side. “Let him look till he’s blind. He’s watching and those eyes, they don’t shut.”
He was back in the corridor but the lights were out, and Con’s arms around him. He was by the lift, and Con catching his breath at the corner, one hand splayed against the wall. Con’s mouth against his, over and over and infinitely refracted inside a memory gem matrix. He saw his own face, reflected in an endless tunnel of recursion, lost and out of time.
“I told you.” Lindy frowned down at him again. “You’re fine. As far as I can tell.”
Jake looked up at her, at Santos. “We already did this.”
“Twice now,” Lindy chided him. “No anomalies. The implant’s working normally. Normally. For a normal person. But you’re not quite normal, are you?”
“No, I’m a special shooting star. Let me up.”
But she crushed him down with her wrinkled, impossibly strong hands, and Jake couldn’t move. Nat appeared, cradling a thick, ancient tome. She blew dust off the cover and flipped through the onionskin pages, her forehead creased. Then she exclaimed, delighted:
“Special footnote 5-8B. Successful implantations may degrade over time, and the committee recommends…oh. Well. You’d probably like to read it for yourself!”
She turned the pages to him, but the text was nothing more than her fingerprints, smeared and dragged over the paper in streaky nonsense. His sister Rebecca hovered over her shoulder and nodded.
“You read it,” Santos commanded. “You have it memorized, don’t you? You memorize everything. You know everything. You just can’t remember it.”
“Read it,” Rebecca said. Her brown hair fell into her eyes. She shook it away ceaselessly.
“Read it,” Vid-Jake chirped happily. “This prick says so.” He was still between Jake’s hands, except the tablet had disappeared and Jake was holding his own young face, flat and soft and intruding between Jake’s fingers. He cried out and flung it away. It banged loudly against the lift doors, like a metal ball.
The lift doors?
“Level two,” Lindy said in Heart’s voice, and they all stared down at Jake. He clutched his throbbing head and hid his face.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I would just like to say that I find the lack of response to my repeated queries regarding Dr. Jake Jeong exceedingly disturbing and unprofessional. The man is a narcissist with the collaborative skills of invasive lichen. If you continue to disregard my complaints along with their full and official documentation I will have to send copies to the official Science representative of Selas Station mission to the Governance Board, Dr. Grena Mahine. I will not be ignored, do you understand me? I will not. As a valuable contracted member of United World’s space expansion, I protest.”
Excerpt: commtext to UWC Governance Board
Official Complaint Division
23 October 2242
Dr. Kai Murakami
Assistant Head of Science
United Worlds DS 2075-5 [Selas Station]
Satellite 1H-24HM, 24HM System [updated: Eos]
[Archived: United Governance Board tri-system mission records, Earth]
1 November 2242 AEC
20:01
“…Jake?”
His ass ached from sitting on the lift floor. The blue lights had vanished, along with the trippy vision of Lindy, Santos, Nat, and Rebecca. The overhead lift lights were functioning, too—they were bright against his eyelids. Jake opened his eyes.
A burly figure in a blindingly white lab coat leaned over him, and Jake recoiled.
“Where’s Lindy?” the figure asked.
“Kai?” Jake stood himself up with a little help from the wall.
Kai leaned down and picked up something small and square next to the lift door: Jake’s tablet, with the dark blue memory gem still affixed. “Do I need to call the infirmary?”
“No! No, I…no.” The lift console burred.
“Your vitals just tanked.” Lindy’s voice rang through loud and clear. “What happened? Where’s your commbud?”
“I think I left it up there.” The transmitter patch. He’d already forgotten. I memorize everything, indeed. A burst of unfamiliar, squealing laughter came from somewhere beyond Kai, in the lab. Jake rubbed his temples. His headache had vanished, despite Lindy’s vocal attempts at resurrection. “And nothing happened. I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
“Better than a pulse in your case. Anyway, you’re fine.”
“At the moment,” Jake hedged.
“All right, then. Results from the brain scan.”
“Brain scan.”
“I told you it wouldn’t be long.” She sounded exasperated. “The results came through about five minutes after you left.”
“Sure.” Yes, he had had the scan before Con gave him the gem, before Santos pulled the frygun, before he’d had the brain-dribbling flashback in the lift. The shock of seeing himself? Or the explosion of data?
“Your chip seems to be working fine. No malfunctions. The cerebral tissue still looks healthy, and you’re making mental connections without any stuttering. Looks good, cowboy.”
“Do not call me that.”
“Right. No ‘cowboy.’ Gotcha, sonny.” She clicked off.
Jake toggled the console into standby mode. He was going crazy. He had to be. He had to go back up to the infirmary and check himself in, and he had to bring Con’s memory gem along with him, because whatever was on there had knocked him for a loop. Unless the scan had done it. And at some point, he’d probably have to show Lindy the vid. Did he want to do that?
“She was never in the lift. What, you think I�
��d leave you in there?” Kai offered him the tablet.
“Without a doubt.” Jake shook his head, and then his breath was squished out as Kai threw his arms around him.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but thank gods you’re here.” Kai’s voice was muffled, his face mashed against Jake’s shoulder. “Now you can stop them.”
“Get off.” Jake extricated himself. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Sorry, right.” Kai ran his hands through his hair—ponytail integrity, check, Jake thought—but then he patted Jake’s arms and sides and head with quick, professional touches. “You’re okay? You were hurt, you were down. And I just did what anyone would do, I was trying to help you, but Jake, Mei scared the baby Jesus shit out of me, she really did, not that I’m going to show you my pants, but honestly I thought we were all dead monkeys—”
“Kai, I’m fine.” Jake swatted Kai’s hands away. Kai worrying about him, Kai hugging anyone, that was as uncanny as anything he’d dreamed. “We all are. Carmichael, too, I think.”
“Well, she’s all right, too, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
She. Mei and Kai had never been close. Still, his own friendship with Mei wasn’t helping Jake process whatever had happened to her, especially when his choices seemed to consist of horror, self-defense, and a useless and fearful compassion. “I think Mei’s pretty far from all right.”
“Hey, don’t take it personally.” Kai retreated, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “If you die, your lab security codes die with you. Anyway, you’ve got to stop them. They’re encroaching on my contractually-obligated lab space, and you need to put the fear of Stationmaster into them.”
“Call Santos if you want that. And who are ‘they’ and ‘them’?”
“Our newts,” Kai hissed, and he dragged Jake down the corridor and into the main lab.
Jake withdrew just outside the door. The lab looked the way it always did: portholes, sleek walls, cold metal floors. Kai’s junk currently took up every table on the left side of the room, while instruments and sample cases littered the others. No bodies or blood or signs of scuffing boots. No Mei. No Con twitching helplessly on the floor. No horror show at all. It was fine.
Kai frowned at him, clearly without any recollection. “Come on already.”
Two rumpled-looking young women were unpacking sample cases loaded with carefully padded petri dishes. The nearest lab newt grinned at them, her arms full of interstellar cold packing and deletion foam. She was a tall, dark woman with a shock of kinky auburn curls and a figure like an Erlenmeyer flask. “Hi. Lashti Vanna, path-bio, and this is Quinn Wendyflue Hark.”
“Path-gen,” dark-haired, dark-eyed Quinn chirped. She looked as though she weighed ninety pounds in heavy grav. “Just like our esteemed head of Science, back in his day. But I also bake pies, if you ever get any butter or lard out here.”
They gave no indication of recognizing him. Kai opened his mouth, snapped it shut, and gave Jake a feeble shrug.
The newts had deposited their stacks of boxes and cases on the back lab tables, close to the creeping green profusion of Jake’s Selas samples. Long, twining green creepers strained the containment field, extending to approximately half a meter from the floor. The field buzzed angrily as it attempted to surround the length of the vines. He’d never seen anything like it, and his indignation diminished into a tiny curl of apprehension.
And there was still the fact of plant-growing-from-stone that threw Jake for a loop. Previous samples had given no indication that such a thing was possible. He picked up a scanning tablet and took a reading. For a moment, the data froze, and a mess of shining, wobbly colors pervaded the scan of the leaves. Jake smacked the tablet. The data unfroze, the colors faded, and the fresh green leaves quivered in perfectly normal innocence on the screen. He set it down again.
“What’s going on with that?” Quinn asked. She and Vanna weren’t obvious about it, but they were keeping a decent, if interested, distance from the leaves.
Jake snapped on gloves and dug in the table drawers for a snips. He slowly pushed through the masses of leaves to the edges of the shimmering, sparking containment nodes. The stress was starting to tell, but they hadn’t yet shorted out. Good ol’ reliable containment coding. “Did the power blink at all down here?”
“Yes,” said Kai. “But containment didn’t go out because it’s auto-set to bypass to auxiliary. Lindy has the same setup—”
“I know. The infirmary’s fields still dropped out for a few seconds.” Jake snipped at the first creeper and, after a moment’s thought, stuffed it into a sample container. “I don’t know about the med lab.”
“Hmmph. Well, it might have. But my samples are still all contained, and yours were like that when I came in this morning. I didn’t touch them, ever.”
“Kind of you to remind me.” Jake snipped and clipped and sawed and finally dragged out the whole leafy bulk so he could see the stone again. The furry greenish-brown mold substance he remembered from the previous day was now gone, as though the rock had scoured itself of interlopers. Or maybe there had been a fungal exodus? He looked at the containers full of greenery, at the now happily humming blue field.
A scan couldn’t hurt. He flicked on the handheld scanner and ran a pass over both the rock and a selection of leaves.
Almost instantly the display awoke, and the results began to crowd the scanner’s tiny viewscreen. The plant originated from Selas, not Earth. It was a common one found in multiple sectors all over the planet, a hardy, ground-covering specimen they’d classed as Selas creeper fern. At a glance, the stone appeared unchanged from his initial scan before the welcome gala. He tapped up the earlier data for comparison, and it confirmed his suspicion: the plants had undergone full germination and a month’s growth over the space of twenty-one hours.
“Kai. You really didn’t do anything to these samples. No chemicals, no accidents, nothing?”
Kai sighed. “I told you, no.”
The time-date stamp on the initial scan was 21:32, 31 Oct 2242. Less than a day ago, Jake and Carmichael had been here in the darkened lab, talking about Con and paranoia, motivations and parties. Whatever this contradictory botanical mess of growth and sterility meant, it had started then, just before they had left for the gala. He certainly hadn’t noticed.
Danger and death and no one to trust.
Distantly he heard Quinn say, “Dr. Murakami, that’s not a real Warringer?”
“See what I mean?” Kai muttered at Jake. “Okay, so it’s not like I was trying to hide it, not from you, anyway. But still? Nosy?”
With an effort, Jake gave his attention to the conversation. “Curiosity and critical thinking. Lamentable traits for scientists, Kai.”
“Curiosity is fine for us, but do we really want to encourage that in lackeys?”
“Does it open?” continued Quinn. She was prodding the case. “It looks even more anachronistic than in those old pictures. I mean, actual latches, who thought those would last, stylistically speaking?”
“And that is certainly more than close enough.” Jake pushed her gently out of the way. It took more strength than he expected, and she glared at him.
“Sorry, didn’t realize I was in a museum…”
“I still couldn’t get it open, Jake.” Kai crossed his arms. “The sheer complexities of the opening mechanism preclude any reasonable scanning.”
“And you just can’t shove me around. I’m a contracted employee.”
“Hush, Quinn,” Lashti murmured. “He said Jake, that’s—”
“Your boss, yes,” Kai supplied. He waved a nonchalant hand. “So get out of the way already.”
Quinn blanched and took a giant step back. “Dr. Jeong? Dr. Jeong. Sorry, Dr. Jeong, I—”
“Yeah, yeah, grovel later,” Jake said absently. What had his vid-self said? Silverman’s in charge of data storage and recovery. It was one thing to envision Con’s possible involvement with Silverman and quite another to lea
rn of his own. He’d hoped to learn something, anything from her, and clearly there had been something to know.
And I don’t trust her, vid-Jake whispered in his ear. Very helpful of himself to be so plaguing vague. Jake ground his teeth. “Did you try any codes?”
Kai threw his hands up, narrowly missing Lashti. “Only the first nine hundred possible permutations. Obviously.”
“What about the Archives?”
“They got nothing, not even your little History club saved anything significant on Warringers—
“Nothing? Nothing? That’s bullshit, Kai. There was a twenty-first-cent conference just last year. How could you not find anything?”
“Look, I searched, all right? There just wasn’t anything there.”
“Your kind of searching, right, you probably did a keyword of ‘Warringer’ and skimmed the first page of the first collated collection out of, oh, only five million results.” Jake rolled his eyes. “If you weren’t learning the history of this thing, what the hell were you doing all day?”
“Don’t try to play the fearless leader. At least I wasn’t sleeping it off in sickbay.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Jake said. “Carmichael and I, we were having a fucking blast up there. Cards, booze, babes, near death, the works. Even Mei—” He cut himself off. There was a brief, defensive silence.
“Only archivists and their sycophants would understand such a stupid, convoluted retrieval system, anyway,” Kai ventured. “But I was trying to search and then the whole archived ‘net went offline. Some glitch, Santos said.”
Jake dragged his hands through his hair. “So, at the end of all that, we’ve still got nothing.”
“Unless you know something I don’t.”
“Nine times out of ten, sure.” The edges of the case were too smooth, even for aged leather. He ran his hands over them. Not a tactile generation. It was real—but still fake, illusory in some indeterminable way he couldn’t yet see. “But not about this.”
“Oh, ha, ha, ha. Yes, ladies, you too can explore exoplanets under the ruthless, derivative wit of a genuine enemy of the people.”
