She heard Cassie rinsing the cups in the sink, running as little water as she could. She must have thought she was asleep. She heard her put the cups away and quietly leave the room. She liked this Cassie, the non-kid Cassie. It took the edge off her loneliness to have her around to talk to or just sit there with her, and Cassie spent all her time with her now, mothering her, feeding her, making sure she got at least a little bit of sleep every night. She half suspected that Cassie spiked her tea with some sleep-inducing herb at times. She got good at this herb thing. They fascinated her, so she let her start a small nursery under the fake lights in the little space next to the lab that hasn't been used for anything in years. That's probably where she went to now, to talk to her plants.
She had to make the call, but she couldn't bring herself to do it yet, not without knowing what was causing this, not when there was still some hope that this was a fluke, or that maybe they did something wrong reworking the formulas for the shots to test on rats instead of Bonobos. Nobody wanted to wait for decades, so they had to do it this way. Still, there was a chance it wouldn't affect human females the same way, there had to be.
She forced herself to get up and went to look for Jason at the lab. He didn't even turn his head at her from behind the microscope. He’d aged so much in the last few years, his hair almost entirely gray and it was hard for her to look at him without feeling that she'd done this to him, cost him all of his youth with her experiments. But he seemed to belong here now, like the Bonobos and the damn rats belonged here, she thought without humour. That's what she did to people in her incessant search for the cure and now for the cure from the bloody cure. She walked up behind him to see what he was looking at, and watched, fascinated, as he was staring at fully mapped out genetic profiles of every subject female born here in the last three years.
That's what he'd been locked up in here doing for weeks. She knew he had something, as he still hadn't even acknowledged her, so she waited, looking at the screens in front of him, and then she saw it, the thing that seemed to hold his attention, the flaw. The bloody fail-safe in the SG17, in case some women were immune to the effects of the meds, even if only in the smallest of margins. A nanogen signal to the Mi2 gene to turn off. That's it. A flaw that had no more chances to become inheritable than say a person catching the flu being able to pass it on to their offspring, and yet, there it was.
"Jason, I need you to do something, as quickly as you can. I need you to map the infertility rate in any city's sample of females who were born to the treated group. We should have about nine years of those to work with. Comb the main nets, pull up every known clinic, whatever you need to. We need a statistically viable sample, a thousand at least. Send it to my screens. I have to go."
He looked at her, eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, at least she hoped that's all it was. "I don't think I can fix this, Sandra. I can't figure out a way to. I'm going to keep at it, of course, but I think we'll need help, maybe a lot of help and a few miracles, because this—it latching on and propagating itself—this doesn't make any bloody sense. This shouldn't even be possible...."
She knew he'd feel guilty, the fail-safe being his idea, but it was harmless. And he was right, this shouldn't be possible.
"It doesn't matter, Jason. Nobody could have seen this. We just have to find a way to fix it. I'm going to try to get us some help. Get me those stats, will you? And please get some sleep. You look like shit." She smiled at him, so he knew she didn't blame him for this, couldn't blame him for this, and left to make arrangements that would likely take her away from here for the next few months at least.
She'd have to find a way to explain all of this to a bunch of non-doctors, a bunch of politicians really, and hope they would understand the implications of this. They had the resources to help fix this, and she desperately needed all the resources she could get. She didn't even want the credit. They could do it elsewhere, hand it to Darius Huxer, for all she cared. He seemed to want fame and something named after him. She had plenty of that now, on every bloody vial of the SG17 shot.
She'd likely have more of it than she could take when the flaw comes out. The headlines again, only now, they'd have a right to call her the killer of babies after all. Bloody hell. Maybe she'd get lucky enough to die before that happens. Before Cassie wakes up to those headlines again.
She was sitting in a stuffy white-walled room in a tiny hotel in Stockholm when she got the data she was dreading from Jason: 13.9 % infertility with all other factors accounted for. So 4.6% increase in the first generation over current population averages, the margin of error at under 1%. The feeling of dread returned. These numbers were too high for her not to know that the flaw propagated in humans. It simply couldn't be anything else.
But how do you convince a bunch of politicians that an increase in infertility of roughly 4% in a still overpopulated and economically unstable world merited their attention, and more importantly, their fear? How do you ask them to invest already limited resources into fixing something that has been making the immediate situation better? Birth rate within the city populations was under control for the first time in probably the history of the human race. It was becoming manageable again to provide for the basic needs of their populations. How could she convince them to pull the SG17, at least until they could find a fix for the damaged genes?
She had no idea how to make them see any of it through her eyes. How to make them see that it wasn't a fluke and that it would get worse and worse with future generations. And not for the first time this week, she wished she never took that walk among the corpses on Madeline all those years ago.
15
Serpent Stew
Amelia, April 22, 2236 Woods, 220 Kilometers Outside The Compound
She wished Drake was with them. She missed the giant, missed the sage smell on him and that gentle way he had of making everything seem better, and safer. And she missed feeling safe. For so many weeks now she hadn't felt completely safe. None of them did, and this slow going through the woods was getting to her.
She'd never gotten to so much as climb a tree before, and now they were climbing over things all the time, branches ripping holes in her clothes and slashing her skin. And the bugs, the bloody bugs–that was the worst thing of all. There never were any bugs at the compound, save for an occasional caterpillar or a butterfly in the garden. But these bugs were different, a million different kinds of bugs with their different noises. And then all the itching from the ones that bit, as if they deliberately starved themselves until they got there, and the bugs were making up for lost time. She hated the bugs.
Laurel didn't seem to mind any of it, not the bug bites and the occasional freezing rain that they didn't have any place to hide from, nor eating nothing but tasteless slave bars, the only thing they still had left. Or maybe she did mind, but she didn't talk to her about it or much of anything lately. She seemed entirely unlike the Laurel she'd grown up with, and she didn't know if she liked this new Laurel yet.
They had at least a week-long walk to the closest city, one where nobody would know any of them, far enough from the compound. They needed to find a place to replenish their supplies at least, and a city, any city, seemed the only place that one could do that sort of thing.
But it wasn't just that she was always hungry, and bug-bitten, and tired that was getting to her. It was that she felt like a complete idiot. Her implanted knowledge had almost zero biology in it. She had no idea about these plants, or mushrooms, or even bugs. She didn't even have names for them. Riley tried to help her, give her the names for things she didn't know, but she was still angry at him.
She couldn't help being angry at him, and he let her be by walking with Ella, finding water with Ella, making fire with Ella, even skinning that squirrel he shot with Ella. She couldn't eat it when they cooked it that night. Couldn't bring herself to do it. Not even after Laurel told her how good it tasted, and how it was already dead, and something about protein that she needed. She didn't care. S
he wasn't going to eat anything that she watched get shot and skinned like that.
Amelia caught herself in the face on one of the branches, and it tore a small gash in her cheek. She could feel a trickle of blood running down her face. She stopped and crouched against the trunk of a tree. She wiped at the slash with water and was putting HealX on the wound when she saw a ridiculously long, ropy thing with patterns all over it sliding across the ground toward her. It had a triangular face and two beady eyes, and it seemed dangerous. Then she remembered what it was, a serpent, from the old books in the library. This thing was definitely a serpent, only she couldn't remember what it could do to her.
She held her breath, forgetting that she had the stun gun on her. And suddenly, it stopped moving, just like that, and just lay there. She saw Riley put away his stun gun as he ran to her, pulling her up and wrapping her in his arms, asking her something, rapid-fire, un-Riley-like, but she didn't know what he was asking. She just knew that it wasn't coming at her anymore, the serpent thing, and she felt safe for the first time since they ran.
"It's a snake, Ams. That's what we call them anyway. They can kill you, this kind at least. If you see one like that again, please shoot it, or yell for help or something. They're poisonous, Ams, and there is nothing Ella has on her that could fix that." He was still holding her and breathing hard.
He was worried. Worried about her. Nobody but Laurel, and later, Drake, ever worried about her before. This, the worrying, it felt right, so she let him hold her like this for a while, until Laurel and Ella got there, looking at them, and at the serpent snake thing, and she could read the fear in their eyes, and she didn't feel so safe anymore.
They made it as far as they were going to today, which wasn't as far as they wanted to, but this little clearing might be the last one they’d find until the sun sets, so they had to stop. She could smell the fire starting. She was getting used to this smell now. The bugs would move away from the smoke too, and she could take a nap on the grass by the burning branches and try not to think of what it would be like when they finally make it to the city.
She'd never seen one, except for the pictures of the old ones in those books she used to flip through, but she couldn't imagine anything looking like that anymore. Buildings with pretty red roofs and windows that had paintings right on them. She didn't understand why someone would paint these intricate pictures on the windows if windows were there to let in light and to see out of.
And bridges, the few that she saw in the books, looked like someone took the time to weave all the support cables in that way by hand, just to make them pretty, and she didn't know anyone who'd think of doing something like that.
Nothing in the compound, except for the old library, struck her as beautiful, not even the lawn or the garden. It was all too flat, too symmetrical as if whoever did it was in a hurry just to get it done. That was the thing about the old stuff. It didn't look like anybody did anything in a hurry. It was as if nobody worried about wasting time, as if they had more of it back then, enough time to paint on windows and make pretty bridges.
Riley crouched in front of her, looking at her face, reading her. "Hungry, Ams?" He's been calling her that ever since that night they left the compound. She never asked him if he had a nickname, but she didn't think he did.
She shook her head. "Not hungry, not yet." But she was hungry. She just didn't want another one of those bars. She didn't think she could ever want one of those again. He seemed to understand.
"We're making stew, Ams, and no, we didn't kill any squirrels today. But we did catch us a snake. You can eat them. They are not bad at all. Plus, it sort of tried to eat you earlier." He smiled a little at that. She could probably count the number of times she’d seen him smile on one hand, and most of those were for-Ella smiles.
She nodded then, to the snake stew, leaned back, and closed her eyes.
She couldn't get past what he had told her, about her memory being right. She always felt that it was. It seemed more real than all the other memories she had, the implant memories. This one was like her memory of all things Laurel, the ones she made by seeing, and hearing, and being. The other ones never felt like that to her. It was like the part of her that knew everything she knew wasn't really hers at all. She always felt a little uneasy when she remembered things just as she needed them, only she always knew that it wasn't quite a memory, not a real one. It felt as if there was a whole other person someplace in there that didn't belong to her. And it bothered her more than a little that her implant didn't know anything about these woods, the bugs, the serpent snake. It's as if whoever put that thing together never expected her to walk through anything that wasn't completely walled-in, completely safe. Maybe that was it. Maybe they didn't. She wondered if Laurel ever felt like that about the things she knew and didn't know, but she didn't want to ask her. She didn't want Laurel to think about these things yet. Anything that referred to their life at the Compound seemed to make her sad lately, and she didn't want to do that to her.
She knew why it was bothering her so much, about the memory and things she knew and didn't know, but she couldn't talk to him about it. It was too embarrassing, and he'd know that she cared about how he saw her. She couldn't even admit any of those things to herself, the coward that she was. She had to ask him, had to make herself if only so she'd stop driving herself crazy.
She found him after a little while by a small stream of water, washing his shirt in it. He wrung it out and flattened it on a rock to dry, and she watched him lean in and wash his face and his chest. The scars on his back were almost completely healed, but she knew they'd always be there. There was no fixing that. He didn't seem to mind it anymore when someone saw his back. It didn't scare him like it used to.
"Can I ask you something?" She hoped it sounded flat.
He walked over to her with a nod and sat down on a rock at her feet.
She plopped down next to him. "If I could find where that implant in me is, and we could find a way of taking it out, will all the things that I think I know just be gone, or are they already in me? Basically, am I an idiot without that thing in me?" She looked down, embarrassed.
"I don't know, Ams. I don't know anything about how these things work... I don't think you would be an idiot without that thing, but I don't know what you might lose or what else might happen if we take it out. Maybe Ella knows something about them. I'll talk to her, okay?" He got up.
No, it wasn't okay. None of this was okay, but she just nodded to him, hiding the not okay-ness of it by not looking at him. She couldn't explain it to him after all. Everything he knew was his. How do you tell someone like him what it's like for all the stuff you know to not really be yours? What it feels like to never quite know if it's you doing the thinking or this thing in your head. To never feel like you have any questions for long enough to need to think about any of them—because they get answered before you can think—before you can ask. That's really the thing, the not having questions about anything, except for the things that the implant couldn't know about, Riley things, and Drake things, and Laurel things.
"So when you said okay, it meant definitely not okay." He sat on the rock below her, looking at her, not smiling now. "Whatever it is, Ams, you really can tell me. I never thought about you as someone with an implant anyway, so I'm sorry if I don't have any answers. I just don't know what about it upsets you like this. But I wish you'd trust me enough to tell me...."
And then she knew, knew what she felt like, and how to tell him because her bloody implant had it in her all along. "I’m a lab rat, Riley, a bloody lab rat. An experiment. A drone. And even if I'm not exactly those things, I feel like I am, and I don't know how to be okay with that." She looked at him, to make sure he understood.
He looked down. "I'm sorry, Ams. Sorry for being so stupid and not seeing this. I should have, but I... it's just... When I was growing up, we all knew that you had these implants. We didn't know what they put in them, we just knew that you had them and t
hat you didn't need to go to school and learn things the way we did. So my whole childhood I kind of thought of your kind as drones, we all did. But that morning you found me, and didn't shoot me, couldn't shoot me, and you asking me all those things after, the human things, it didn't add up. I knew you weren't a drone then, and that whatever or whoever you were I liked you, Ams, even back then. I never thought of your implant again, until now. But I know you’re not a drone, and I know Laurel is not a drone. All the dates, and numbers, and words that this thing gives you don’t change any of it. It doesn't change you ... it can't get to the places that make you you."
She hoped he was right. Hoped that whatever these things were, they couldn't get to the places that made her her. But it was the other thing he said that roamed around her head now, waiting for her to make sense of it, needing her to know for sure. "Is that why you were going to make me come with you?"
He winced and nodded, not looking at her.
Still ashamed then.
"I think it's the worst bad thing I ever did, Ams." He stood, keeping his eyes down.
She smiled at him, couldn't help it. She could deal with anyone who didn't do anything worse than that. "Come on, serpent stew should be ready." She took his hand because now she felt she could, and she laughed, for the first time in what seemed way too long. She laughed as the image of a serpent trying to eat a rat and instead, getting shot and made into stew popped into her head, and she knew that her implant couldn't do that.
It didn't do jokes or pictures. And it didn't do this boy liking her. This she could hold on to.
16
Silent City
Laurel, April 25, 2236, Just Outside of Reston
They weren't supposed to come upon any city so soon, and yet, there were buildings ahead of them. They all stared at them, surprised, but happy, too. They could all use a decent meal if nothing else. She thought they'd see lights and smoke maybe, from people cooking, and hear noises, the many noises one should hear coming from a city, but there was nothing. Nothing but the dark looming shapes of buildings, some looking impossibly tall to her, going all the way up into the sky, higher even than that it seemed, as the tops of them disappeared into the evening, like ghosts. There were no lights and no sounds anywhere as if this entire place was asleep or deserted. But a whole city couldn't possibly be any of those things, so it wasn't adding up for her again. There was no Reston in her memories, none that she could access anyway, and Ams didn't recognize the name either. The sign that read, "Welcome to Reston" hanging crookedly off the pole on the side of the road was the only reason they knew where they were. Even Riley didn't seem to have ever heard of this place, and he'd been to more places than any of them.
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