by Ilsa J. Bick
He forced a devil-may-care grin. “I’m sorry. For the life of me, I can’t fathom that.”
“Yah, for the life of you,” she said. “I’d say that’s about right.”
No idle threat there. His eyes wandered to the room’s vidscreen again, and he watched as a soldier—clearly, Kornak—aimed a rifle at the back of a prisoner’s head. He turned away. Any fool knew what came next. “So what are my options?”
“I’ll show you. And take a good hard look, Julian. Then, you choose.”
He took her in: her blue skin and that left eye and her left hand. “What if I still choose my way?”
“Then heaven help you,” she said, keying in the code that opened his door. “Because I won’t be able to.”
Chapter
5
When Lense got news that Saad was back, it was midmorning nine days later and she was in the middle of changing bandages. She wasn’t prepared for that tug of happy anticipation and the queer fluttery feeling in her stomach.
So this is what it’s like to be smitten. She hadn’t even felt like that when she and her jackass of an ex-husband started dating back at Starfleet Medical….
She pawned the bandage-changing job off on one of her assistants, then hurried down passages and ducked through corridors. She got some queer looks and bobs of the head in greeting from the others. No secret about her and Saad. The look on that guard’s face when he found us on morning patrol after that first night…But, God, this felt good. Everything looked brighter somehow; she felt better, more acutely aware of textures and smells. She liked exploring his body; she loved the feel of his skin, and his smell was rich and spicy. She liked pleasing him, and receiving pleasure. She just wasn’t, well, depressed, and she certainly slept better. Her grin broadened. When Saad let her.
Even if it’s just infatuation or lust, I don’t care because I’m happy. I’m on this godforsaken world and every day is blood and more blood, and still, at least for now, I’m happy….
“Saad,” she said, as she rounded the last corner, “I’m so gla—” She stopped. “Mara.” Then, awkwardly, to Saad: “I’m sorry. They said you wanted to see me.” She edged the way she’d come. “I can come back.”
“No.” Saad beckoned her forward. “No, no, I want you here. I asked Mara to join us. Please, come.”
For a fraction of a second, she wasn’t sure how to behave. That made her angry, like she was some giggly, gawky adolescent with a crush. “Of course,” she said, sliding down to sit cross-legged on a low flat rock. She spotted a lumpy bundle of something heaped a short distance away. Saad sat across from her, but Mara hung back, leaning against the cavern wall.
She looked from one to the other. “Why do I think this has nothing to do with planning some raid for medical supplies?”
Mara just stared. Saad smiled, though only with his lips. “Oh, we still plan a raid. But something else has come up.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’ve just gotten word that General Nerrit is on his way to the Kornak complex at the edge of the sea. I think I might pay him a visit.”
“And it would be suicide, Saad.” Exasperated, Mara pushed off from the wall and paced, the clap of her boots banging off rock. “That you’re even thinking of getting anywhere near Nerrit again.”
Again? “Who’s Nerrit?” asked Lense.
“Supreme Commander for the Kornak Armed Forces,” said Saad. “His command center is about five, perhaps six days’ travel. But he’s on his way, apparently. About four days out at this point.”
“Oh. Well, you want to kidnap him, take him out, what?”
“Under other circumstances. But now I have new information that makes me wonder what to do next.”
The sound of Mara’s pacing was giving Lense a headache. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see how I can help here. You want a list of supplies, I’ll give you a list. I’ll give you ten. But anything tactical, military…”
“It’s not that clear-cut, Elizabeth. Trust me on this.”
It was the first time he’d called her by name since she’d entered. Her gaze flicked to Mara, who paced and looked black as a thundercloud, and then to Saad. Something else going on, something to do with her…But what?
You’re being paranoid. It’s probably nothing.
She said, “Well, what does this—your source say? How many people do you have on the inside, anyway?”
“We had a few. Three, to be exact. One was discovered, and the other’s gone silent. This one…the last time we had contact was a little over a year ago.”
Mara cut in, her voice quaking with fury. “I don’t care if we’ve had ten, a hundred sources…that you’re even thinking of going back there—”
“Back. What does she mean, going back?” Lense looked from Mara to Saad, who was staring daggers at Mara. She switched her gaze back to Mara. “What do you mean? Going back to what?”
Mara opened her mouth. Clamped it shut. Threw Saad a look so charged that if it had been fire, he’d have burst into flames. She said, “You need to tell her. She needs to know. You need to ask.”
“Ask me what?” Lense said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Mara…” Saad’s voice thrummed with frustration. “I will ask questions when I…” Then he let out his breath, looked at Lense and said, more calmly, “Mara isn’t very fond of a particular portion of that base.”
Mara was unable to contain herself. “Gee, you think?”
Ignoring her, Saad squatted on his haunches beside Lense and drew a wide circle with the tip of his index finger. “Here’s the layout. Perimeter security, checkpoints—here, here, and here.” He jabbed his finger dead center. “The main hospital’s here, at the heart.”
Lense’s eyes clicked over the rough drawing. “That’s a lot to cover, and even if you get in…how are you going to do that, anyway?”
Saad’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Nerrit may have new parts, but he’s an old man with ingrained habits. He always travels with a rear guard. We’ll ambush the guard, steal their ident tags and then slip into the complex. The beauty is that Nerrit isn’t going to the main facility. Once he’s in,” he sketched a rough square, “my source tells me that he’ll peel off here.”
“A separate building?” Lense looked over at Mara. Mara just shrugged, looked away. “What is it?”
“A specialized research wing, underground. Totally cut off from the main complex. The only way in or out is a tram tunnel, and a separate foot tunnel.”
“Why the special tunnel?”
“They’ve had to cut power there in the past. And there were…disturbances.”
“So, is it for a SWAT team?” Lense knew of them, of course; all prisons had them if inmates got loose and cut off power. Underground tunnels ensured speed, stealth, and surprise. “What is it, a stockade?”
“No, I told you. It’s a research wing.”
“Well, then that level of containment usually means a biohazard.”
“Yeah,” said Mara. She was holding up the wall again. “What the lady said. Biohazard. Right, Saad?”
“Well, no,” said Saad. “I don’t think that biohazard really does it justice.”
Chapter
6
They’d taken a left from his room, away from the guards at the end of the corridor, and then doglegged right. Bashir spotted an adjacent, nearly dark corridor on his left, and he thought he saw some kind of sensor winking like an angry red eye.
But they didn’t go there. Instead, they turned right and passed room after silent room through a maze of corridors. They didn’t speak. The only sounds were the taps of their shoes and the whoosh of a ventilation system. They finally dead-ended at a thick metal containment door. The door’s sheen reminded him of Deep Space 9, all that Cardassian gray. Access required retinal scan and a thumbprint ID. Kahayn submitted to both, and the door slid open with a whine of hydraulics.
The door gave onto another corridor that was much shorter, and now Bashir recogniz
ed familiar smells: the sharp bite of fixative mingling with a fuller musk-ripe odor of feces and the wine odor of fermented fruit. The right wall was painted yellow cinder block, he thought. Midway down, the wall was faced with a large rectangle of clear glass. Inside was something that looked like an exhibit in an old-fashioned museum: specimens suspended in jars; a long gurney that gave onto a metal sink and adjoining counter; a ring of metal counters on which stood equipment, analyzers of various sorts. Another metal door, wide enough for a gurney. A freezer, probably. Bashir knew the basic setup of an autopsy suite when he saw it.
But they hadn’t entered. Instead, Kahayn went left to another door. She’d pulled it open and a fruity smell pillowed out, one mixed with excrement and hay for bedding.
Animal room. But there was something very wrong here. Bashir turned a slow circle. That strange air, it felt…His skin prickled. Alive, and all edges and sharp angles.
“Cold, isn’t it? But you feel it.” Kahayn stirred the air with her index finger. “How thick it feels?”
Bashir nodded. “Yes. Crowded. Like I’m being jostled.” He did another turn. The room was perhaps six meters square, and bathed in fluorescent glare. Wire cages lined three walls, two to a wall. Each cage held an animal similar to Terran Pan troglodytes, chimps, but with orange fur like orangutans and a bit larger.
And they were very strange. For one, they were absolutely silent. Not that this was unusual; Earth chimpanzees hooted only in panic or fear. But these animals were…sizing him up, yes. They sat on their haunches, but their heads followed him to and fro, like perfectly behaved spectators to a slow-motion tennis match but in a kind of ripple, like a wave, as if the next picked up where the one before left off.
“You can get closer,” said Kahayn. Her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the hush. “They don’t initiate.”
“That’s an odd way of putting it.” Cautiously, Bashir sidled up to one cage. The primate inside squatted, watchful. Waiting. But Bashir noticed it right away: a shift in the air. A sense of…he frowned. Expectancy?
And that’s when he saw an odd bulge tenting the crown of the primate’s scalp. The bulge was a rough circle with a diameter of six, maybe eight centimeters. But there was nothing external, no protruding wires or electrodes. A quick glance at the other cages revealed exactly the same bulge in roughly the same place.
He turned back to Kahayn. “It’s an implant, right?” When she nodded, he continued, “For what?”
“This.” She stirred air again. “What’s it remind you of?”
Bashir closed his eyes. Thought. Almost smiled. Quark’s. “A bar,” he said, opening his eyes. “Too many people in a small space and they’re all talking at once, so there’s only this general buzz but you can’t make out the words.”
“Do you feel as cold now?”
He blinked. “No, it’s gone.”
“That’s because they’re not as worried about you.” A pause. “What would you say if I told you there was a conversation going on?”
“You mean the animals? But how—” He stopped. Pulled air in a quick gasp. “My God.”
“Yah,” she said, softly. “That’s right.”
“Neural regeneration,” said Saad. “The Kornaks are good at developing prosthetic limbs and eyes and ears and a whole host of other appliances. Someday, they’ll build a man from scratch; count on it. They’ll have to, eventually.”
“Why’s that?”
“Can’t have kids,” said Mara. Her expression was bland, and her tone matter-of-fact, as if she were talking about something no more important than the weather. “Kornaks, us. Oh, we get a couple. But usually something’s wrong with them. Most of them die.”
“The Kornaks have focused their energies on replacing themselves piece by piece,” said Saad. “But that only works up to a certain point.”
Lense nodded. “The brain’s the limiting factor. It doesn’t regenerate. You can rebuild a lot of the body, but if you’re senile, who cares? It’s like a fail-safe device. We’re pretty much wired for obsolescence.”
The cave was silent. Then Saad said, “Well, not all of us.”
The autopsy suite smelled just as primitive as it looked: a strong tang of some disinfectant mingling with the gassy odor of rot. The microscope was also primitive. Binocular eyepiece, adjustable objectives, a slide with a specimen in paraffin mounted on a staging table. But Bashir saw well enough and he didn’t like it one little bit.
“Massive rejection. Looks like a battlefield after a war.” He exhaled. “Dear God. The tissue’s absolutely ravaged. How long did you say the process took?”
“In the primates, within two weeks,” said Kahayn. She stood by his right shoulder. “The problem is that with all the damage done to our environment and the weird bugs that developed over time, our immune system is quite reactive to just about everything. To get around that, all our prosthetics are biomimetic and possess a DNA chip that allows for recognition and then integration into the host body. Still, the trick is to make prosthetics as antigenically neutral as possible.”
Bashir arched his eyebrows. “Hard to do, with DNA as a template. You produce RNA, which produces proteins, and you’ll get rejection. The only way to get around that would be some sort of, I don’t know, universal DNA donor. On the other hand, the brain’s privileged, relatively antigenically isolated, so it might work. But there’s no such thing as a universal DNA donor.”
She gave him a strange look. “Well, I tried something different. There were a few records left from before the Cataclysm. I stumbled on some literature about certain species of sea life that regenerated neural tissue.”
“I see,” said Bashir. Yes, she was on the right track; many Earth species of starfish and amphibians, not to mention Ludian halofish on Lentrex VII, could regenerate entire nerves and whole limbs. “What did you try next?”
In reply, Kahayn switched out slides, peered through the eyepieces, adjusted the focus, then straightened. “Have a look.”
Another brain section, but now something in the center…When he changed magnifications, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Entire neuronal tracks had been reconstructed; the membranes bracketed with an overlay of…“That microglia’s much too dense, and those axons…my God, is that metal?”
“A combination of silica and copper. You’re looking at what happens to a primate’s brain when it’s exposed to MEMs. Microelectromechanical machines, a variant of nanotechnology developed for computer systems. You’re familiar with their function?”
“Not really,” Bashir lied. Thinking: Ancient history; computers and hard drives, copper and silica chips and tungsten for an interconnect.
“MEMs can rewrite and repair information on nanodrives. So my thought…our thought, was to replicate this function within a brain. It’s one thing to hook up an artificial eye or ear.” She touched the corner of her left eye. “Everything works just fine because it’s a discrete system, a totally dedicated subunit, you might say. But it’s quite another to jury-rig whole tracts of interconnecting neural tissue, or an entire lobe. So my initial idea was to use DNA chips as the programming matrix in a MEM. But in order to facilitate axonal repair, I inserted DNA from a species of diatom. Plankton, actually. Very hardy. Their cell walls are made of silica.”
His mind bounced around the problem. Simple biology: there was usually only five to ten grams of silica in the body, either ingested or absorbed from the environment. Silicic acid dissolved in water; silicates in dust. So long as the silicon remained bound as siloxanes, not much of a problem, health-wise. Why, look at any fracture site in bone and the ratio of silica to calcium was nearly double.
On the other hand, these people lived in a kind of pollutant stew: silicates, chromated copper arsenate, copper oxides in the air. So Kahayn looked to rebuild brain by armoring it with a substance that could not be rejected. Ingenious.
“So this would be like encasing your regenerated neurons in an exoskeleton of silica and copper that was antigenically neutral,
” said Bashir. “Quite elegant, Doctor.”
She bobbed her head at the compliment, but her expression was still grim. “Everything went fine. We induced disease in the primates, put in the MEMs, and the primates regained function. It was like a miracle and…”
He read the struggle in her face. “And? But?”
“Things we…I couldn’t explain, didn’t see coming.” She put her hands into the pockets of her white lab coat and shrugged as if suddenly cold. “What is it that a complicated computer does?”
“Information processing. Data storage. Problem solving.”
“Plus, the capacity to relay or manufacture commands, tell different parts of a program to run at a certain time or in a certain way, right? But what if a machine wants to share information with another machine?”
“Oh, that’s easy enough. Primi—” He caught himself before he could say primitive. “Microwave, for example. Beaming messages back and forth; I mean, really, all communications technology relies upon transmission of encoded energy. But a machine can’t decide things like that. The capability has to be put there.”
“Yah, you’d think. But that’s not the way these implants worked. The MEMs decided…they began to rewrite portions of healthy brain. The MEMs interpreted normal brain as damaged. And then when I was doing imaging studies, the primates—maybe the MEMs, I don’t know—they decided to link. I couldn’t stop them, and they didn’t stop with just one machine. These scanners hooked into more sophisticated systems, and then other systems linked to those computers in a cascade. They were like a virus. But instead of crippling the network, they and the network—our computers—became dependent upon one another. They joined forces.”
Networking; brains meshing with a computer, behaving like a computer the way a Bynar’s must; an amazing discovery…“What happened when you tried to disconnect them? Shut down the computers?”
