This Vicious Cure

by Emily Suvada

  I close my eyes, tilting my head back into the seat. All the people we just rescued from Cartaxus were in that compound. There were hundreds of Novak’s people there too—surely some of them made it out alive. How could Dax have risked bombing the base when Leoben was there?

  “How are you feeling?” Mato asks.

  I lift an eyebrow. “How am I feeling?”

  “Neurologically,” he says. “I checked the satellite feed, and the horde of Lurkers around the city’s perimeter is bigger than I thought. It isn’t going to be easy to send the code out to all of them. It’ll take a fraction.”

  My stomach tightens. He’s right. I’ll definitely need to fraction—use the implant in my skull to split my thoughts into distinct, separate instances. I can hack the Lurkers’ panels wirelessly, but there are too many of them to handle at once. If I fraction, I can double my focus, and I might just be able to do it.

  Fractioning will strain the implant, though. That’s why I haven’t tried it. The implant is the only thing keeping Catarina locked in her half of my brain, which means it’s the only thing stopping us from destroying each other. I don’t know how close the implant is to complete collapse, or if a single fraction will even damage it. I have to test the Panacea, though, and the horde of Lurkers is the best way to do it. It’s a risk I have to take.

  “What kind of encryption are you using to send out the code?” Mato asks.

  I glance over at him. “I’m still not sure I want to encrypt it at all.”

  He means to send out the Panacea, but not give the world access to its source code. Keeping it encrypted means I’d have control over it when it’s released—I’d be giving people the ability to change their minds, but only in ways that I allow. It would give me the ability to change their minds too. I don’t know how I feel about that.

  “This code is too important to give away,” Mato says. “Cartaxus will take it if you release it freely. They’ll use it against you, and against their own people. You need to keep control over it.”

  “But it isn’t just my code,” I say. “The Panacea is merged with the vaccine. I don’t think it’s right for me to keep control over something so important. Everyone should be able to read it, and change the code if they want to. Is it right for me to keep access to their tech? To their minds?”

  “I think so,” Mato says. “Cartaxus’s control over its people is too tight, but places like Entropia have always been too lax. They’ve never been able to unify, to rally together for a cause, and they’ve never accomplished anything big because of that. We’re going to need big things to get the world back on its feet again. Someone has to be able to guide us, to make difficult decisions—and it should be you.”

  I drop my eyes. “I know what you’re saying, but this code was designed to set people free, not open them up to being controlled. If I encrypt it, then I’m just like Lachlan and Cartaxus. We should trust people to make the right choices.”

  Mato snorts. “The right choices? What do you think people will do with the Panacea? What would you have done with it if someone had given it to you a few years ago—when you were in the lab?”

  I lift my eyes again, meeting his. “I know exactly what I’d do. I was hurting, but I was brave, and I didn’t want to let my childhood destroy me. The Panacea could have given me a chance to be happy. It could have wiped away the pain that was building up inside me. I wrote the Panacea as a cure for pain, and anger, and all of the emotions that turn us against each other.”

  “Not a chance,” Mato says, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t have tried to be happy. Neither would anyone else—not in this world, not after the outbreak. You came out of that lab broken and frightened. At first, all you wanted to do was figure out how to go back there and help the others escape, but you couldn’t do it. You were scared of Lachlan, and scared of facing everything you’d lived through. You threw yourself into the Panacea to find a way to harden yourself against that fear. If you could have used it back in the lab, you and the other kids would have wanted to become better at surviving, better at lying, maybe even better at killing. If you’d had the chance to alter your instincts, you wouldn’t have made yourself happier. You’d have made yourself more vicious. The Panacea isn’t a cure for pain and anger, Jun Bei. It’s a cure for weakness.”

  I shift uneasily, staring at him. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but Mato’s right—I spent my childhood turning my anger into a blade, sharpening it with every day I was locked away. If I’d had access to the Panacea, the first thing I would have done is given myself the strength to kill Lachlan and everyone else who’d hurt us.

  My head spins. I lean back against the seat, covering my mouth. That’s one of the things I haven’t figured out from the months I don’t remember—why I never went back to save the others.

  I didn’t go back because I was terrified, so I tried to make myself harder and crueler. And maybe that’s what the rest of the world will do with the Panacea if I give them a choice.

  “Shit,” I say, bracing my hands against the dashboard. “What the hell have I done?”

  “You’ve coded a miracle,” Mato says. “But it’s one you have to keep control of for now. It’s your code, Jun Bei—make sure that it follows your vision, too.”

  My thoughts are whirling. I don’t want to be like Lachlan, but I don’t want to hand the world a weapon, either. What if people use it to turn themselves into cold, heartless monsters? What if Cartaxus uses it against their people to make them more obedient?

  That isn’t what I wrote the code for. None of this is right.

  “You’re supposed to own this code,” Mato says, reaching across the seat to take my hand. “This world is going to be yours, and its people will be too.”

  The road curves down a rocky, scrub-covered hill. We’re nearing Entropia, and my mind is a storm. I’ve never been this unsure of the Panacea or of how I feel about sending it out. Maybe Lachlan’s plan was better—maybe we should just fix the vaccine and take the Panacea out of everyone’s panels for good. Maybe the world isn’t ready for it.

  “I don’t know about this, Mato,” I say, my voice wavering. “I’m starting to wonder if this is a good idea.”

  “You’re doing the right thing.” He looks over at me. “This is the only way to bring down Cartaxus.”

  “Is it? What if we release the vaccine, they open the bunkers, and all of this is over?”

  “You know that’s naive,” he says. “They’ve been in power for too long to give it up now. Even if they open the bunkers, they’ll still have control over the world. We can’t let that happen. They see people as property—they created us as tools. You keeping control over people will be infinitely better than them.”

  I frown. “They created you? I thought you grew up in Entropia.”

  He blinks. “I did. I keep forgetting you don’t remember me telling you this before. I was raised in Entropia, but I was born in a Cartaxus facility, if born is the right word. It was a new program they were trialing—Project Gemini—a few years before the Zarathustra Initiative. They weren’t having any luck coding a vaccine and were getting desperate. Cartaxus’s scientists thought they’d isolated genes for good coders, and they decided if their people weren’t cracking the virus, they’d try making better coders instead.”

  “Wow,” I say. The intersection between genetics and intelligence is messy at best—people were trying to make their kids smarter by altering their DNA years before gentech even existed, and once panels were released, there was a surge of illegally hacked babies born all over the world. But the results weren’t great. Most of them weren’t any smarter, and those who tested higher weren’t always able to turn their intelligence into anything useful. Some of them resented their parents for changing them and chose not to use their enhanced intellect, wanting to prove that their choices were what counted, not what had been chosen for them.

  “So Cartaxus created supersmart kids?”

  “Not quite,” Mato says. “The
y wanted something better. They created embryos with tweaked genes they thought were good for coders, then they used those embryos as donors to create a second generation.”

  I blink. “So it would be like if the smart kids they created grew up, and had more smart kids with each other.”

  “Exactly,” Mato says. “And then they did it again. Each generation only took a few weeks, but it would have taken decades if it had happened naturally. They had to start with a huge stock to make it feasible. They must have created thousands of us—tracking the spontaneous mutations, seeing what happened. It’s hard to change these genes with code, but it happens neatly in nature. And they just kept going.”

  A shiver runs down my spine. “How many generations?”

  “Thirty, to get to me,” Mato says.

  I sit back, reeling. “That’s… centuries of evolution. A thousand years.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I don’t know how many they made around the world, but in the main headquarters where I was created, they ended up with two.”

  “Two?” I lift an eyebrow. My mind spins back to the confrontation at the lab, and it suddenly hits me. “You, and Dax.”

  Mato looks down. “Yes, Dax. He’s my… well, brother isn’t technically correct, but it’s the term we use. He’s more like the only other one of my species. Regina got me out of the lab and had me brought to Entropia, but she couldn’t get to him. He was raised at Cartaxus’s headquarters, coding as soon as he was able to read. We got in touch when we were kids, and he helped me stay hidden. When I went back to them, it was on the condition that they let him go. We aren’t exactly close, but we’re… the same. Nobody else really understands. At least, I didn’t think they would until I met you.”

  “Wow,” I say again. “So Cartaxus is being led by someone they created?”

  “Very few people understand Cartaxus like he does. He’s doing what he can to keep the organization alive, but he doesn’t love them. I think part of him would like to see them burn as much as you would. Once he sees that the Panacea works, I think he’ll join us.” He squeezes my hand. “We can start a new world peacefully. And that world begins today.”

  We reach the crest of a hill, and Mato slows the van as the full sweep of the city comes into view. The midday sun glints on the windows of the buildings on the mountain’s slopes. The farmlands are still swathed in dark feathers, pocked with craters from Cartaxus’s attack. The razorgrass border is a gleaming river encircling the city.

  And there’s a swarm of people grouped around it, forming a shadowy, writhing mass. This isn’t just a group of Lurkers—it’s a horde.

  “Are you ready to try the code?” Mato asks. “You can heal these people, and you can stop the war just by testing it. You don’t need to decide anything else right now.”

  I swallow, his hand warm in mine, and look down at the mass of bodies in the distance. There are thousands of them. Their minds have been twisted because of me. It’s only right that I at least do what I can to make them whole again. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  I close my eyes and bring up my cuff’s interface, kicking off a script to send the latest version of the Panacea through an encryption engine. Mato is right about it being too dangerous to send out unprotected—we can’t let Cartaxus get control of it. But I don’t know how I feel about encrypting it for the whole world. I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of responsibility, or if it’s even the right thing to do. I don’t have to decide that now, though. I just need to focus on the Lurkers. Sending the code out to them means hacking into their panels and installing it myself. I can do that with a small group who are close to me, but there are too many here. We’ll need to drive in a loop around the city and pass by them all, sending the code as we go.

  “I’ve set up a route for the van to follow,” Mato says, his hand still locked in mine. “Let’s do this together. I’ll fraction with you to send it out.”

  “Fraction with me? I… I don’t know how to do that.”

  He laughs, his mask glimmering with light. “Trust me. We’ve done it before. Neither of us is at our strongest right now. You don’t have to do this alone.”

  “Okay,” I say warily. The van turns before it reaches the horde, cutting east, driving in a loop around the Lurkers. I draw up my cuff’s interface again, linking it to Mato’s mask, then find the Panacea’s encrypted code and share it with him. I send out a pulse for the Lurkers, sketching out the hack I’ll need to do in my mind. The implant feels weak, but it holds as I fold my mind into itself, pushing myself into a fraction.…

  And then I feel him fraction too. Something stirs inside me at the sensation. An instinct, learned and held even though the memory behind it is gone. It’s the feeling of Mato’s hand on mine, his voice, his presence, the way he looks at me. It pulls at a dark, buried core inside me, tentative at first, but growing quickly until it comes rising up to take my breath away.

  I trust him. I know him. Everything I thought I’d lost from the six months we spent together is still there—it’s just missing the memories to tie it together. It’s like I’ve forgotten the words of a song, but I can hear the music of what we used to be. I can sense Mato’s trust in me—that I’m strong enough to do this, and that we should be doing it together. I don’t know why I’ve spent the last few hours doubting myself.

  I feel suddenly wild—like I could do anything. Like I should do everything. I turn my head to the swarming, writhing crowd of Lurkers, and fraction again with him, our hack rippling through their panels, sending the Panacea into the horde.

  The van veers around the city’s border, skirting the group. The code spills into their panels as we pass, until we loop back to the road we came in on and screech to a stop. I snap out of the fraction, breathless. I can barely see, but I feel like laughing. The two of us just went to a place that’s outside the boundaries of merely human. Mato squeezes my hand, and I stare at him, a whirlwind of emotions taking flight inside me.

  Wonder, elation, nervousness, and a hint of something deeper. I don’t know Mato as well as he knows me, but I think I’d like to. He frightens me, on some level, but not because I’m afraid he’ll hurt me. I’m afraid of where I might go if I’m with him, and of who I might become. He makes me feel powerful, and it’s intoxicating. When he tells me I should send the Panacea into every panel on the planet, it seems like the right idea.

  Maybe Mato is the person I need beside me to build the new world I’ve been dreaming of.

  “How long should it take to work?” he asks.

  “Not long,” I say, looking out at the horde. They’re already acting strangely, their snarls quieting, but it’s still not clear if it worked. A whining sound starts, and I look up, spotting a drone in the sky above us.

  “Someone’s watching,” I say.

  “Looks like Cartaxus.” Mato straightens, his mask darkening. “That drone isn’t armed. It’s just recording. They probably sent it to capture footage to show the people in the bunkers how bad things are out here.”

  “Let them watch.” I swing open the van door, and Mato’s eyes fly wide.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  But I don’t answer. I just climb out of the van.

  Then I walk into the horde.

  CHAPTER 30 CATARINA

  “HOLY SHIT,” ANNA SAYS, STARING at the screen. The countdown is at nine and a half minutes. I don’t know what’ll happen when it reaches zero, but we’re underground in a concrete bunker, and there are a hundred ways that Cartaxus could kill us all. The suspension tanks around us gleam, the bodies inside them eerily still. The voices from the loading bay outside are dulled by the steel door we’re locked behind, but they sound frightened and confused. None of the soldiers know what’s happening, or what the hell this means.

  I didn’t know that the bunkers even had self-destruct protocols. I guess Cartaxus would rather kill their own people than lose control over them.

  “You have to be kidding me,” Anna says. “How is it gonna se
lf-destruct?”

  “It shouldn’t be doing it at all,” Cole says, striding to the door, yanking at the handle. It doesn’t budge. “There are dozens of security measures to stop this. Cartaxus would never include a self-destruct sequence in case it glitched or was hacked.”

  “Well, obviously they have,” Anna says. She paces across the room. “We need to get the hell out of this place. I’m not staying in here to die.”

  Cole pounds his fists on the door, yelling for the soldiers, but Anna grabs his arm. “They’re panicking,” she says. “They’re not gonna let us out. We need to blow the door.”

  “Maybe I can jump outside and talk to them,” I say. “They have to let us out if this place is really going to self-destruct.”

  Anna wheels on me, her eyes hard. “You’ve already done enough, Agatta. It’s your fault we’re down here. Just shut up and let us figure this out.”

  I step back, stung, not knowing what to say. She’s right. I lied to them and brought them into Cartaxus’s custody, and now they’re trapped in here. Cole grabs the cover of a sensor beside the door, trying to wrench it open. I look around, searching for something I can do to help them escape. My eyes glide over to the gleaming tanks lining the walls. There are hundreds of people trapped down here and thousands in the civilian levels. Families and children, helplessly watching these numbers count down. Even if we can get out of here, we can’t just leave them all to die.

  A clicking sound starts up in the ceiling. Cole looks over his shoulder, still working on yanking the cover off the door’s sensor. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, scanning the ceiling. There are cameras, lights, and metal vents built into the concrete. The vents are humming, but they sound different now. “I think something happened to the air-conditioning.”

  “That’s not air-conditioning,” Cole says. He pauses, his hands gripping the sensor’s cover, and coughs. “We’re underground, in a sealed room. That’s oxygen.”

  My chest tightens. He’s right—the door to the loading bay is sealed, and Homestake’s levels are designed with tight airlock controls. I close my eyes, tilting my focus into my cuff to connect with the bunker’s life-support systems. They’re firewalled, but I’ve hacked into this bunker before, and I remember the way its controls are designed. I work my way into the built-in systems—the heating, the air filters, the elevators. Everything is still running, but there are hundreds of warnings scrolling through the system logs.