Maladapted

by Richard Kurti

  Cillian looked at her warily.

  “So what’s it like to be home?” Her arm swept expansively across the high-tech cube.

  “You didn’t have to kidnap me.”

  “Having visitors isn’t really P8’s style,” Gabrielle said casually. “We need to keep things secure.”

  P8. That was where he had ended up. Finally. Cillian felt sick as he remembered the ControlBox in his bathroom, greedily sucking in data year after year. “Aren’t you ashamed of what you’re doing?”

  “I couldn’t be more proud.” Gabrielle studied his eyes intently. “Especially when I look at you.”

  Who was this stranger? Cillian’s mind raced to remember her face, but it kept eluding him.

  “It’s been 13 years,” Gabrielle said. “I looked a little different then.”

  It was unnerving how she seemed able to read his mind.

  “I ran the team that raised you. Here. In this very room. But it wasn’t just about the science. Some of my DNA was used to build you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cillian edged away.

  “Paul and I shared the same vision. It made sense to work together.”

  “You’re my mother?”

  “A rather outdated, simplistic concept.” Gabrielle smiled. “The future will be about strains of DNA that are designed and perfected. But if you really want to be sentimental … I suppose you could see me like that.”

  Gabrielle stepped forwards and put her arms around him. Gently her hands touched his face … she breathed in his smell … for a few moments it felt like a maternal embrace—

  Then with a jolt Cillian realized. She was scrutinizing him. Like a specimen.

  He disentangled himself. “Where’s Tess?”

  “She’s being looked after.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “All in good time. First you need to see yourself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s no rush. We’ve got plenty of time—”

  “No!”

  His sharp note of defiance caught Gabrielle off guard. “You should rest awhile.”

  “Whatever you’ve got to tell me, tell me now.”

  Gabrielle ran her fingers through her hair. “No problems with your self-esteem,” she muttered. “All right. I’ll show you what you really are.”

  63

  “No babies were ever as well loved as these,” Gabrielle said with pride.

  There were 10 glass cribs evenly spaced around the room, each one containing a tiny infant. Multiple cameras captured every second of their young lives, while sensors and probes fed streams of data back to arrays of computers and monitoring screens. But it was the RoboNurses looming over the incubators that transfixed Cillian.

  Each one was a complex robotic arm that fussed over its charge with infinite patience, gently adjusting the sleeping position, delicately changing nappies, stroking the infant with cotton wool when it was distressed. There was even an option to hum soothing nursery rhymes.

  “Was it like this for me?” Cillian tried to remember what it felt like to be nursed by a mechanical arm that rocked you to sleep with digital audio.

  “Of course. From the moment of conception, as a foetus, then as an infant in your cube, you were genetically accelerated.”

  “Normal just wasn’t good enough?”

  “Normal is disease and death. Normal is cancer and pain, disability and dementia,” Gabrielle clarified. “That’s what started all this – the dream of liberating us from disease. But the deeper we dug into the genome, the more remarkable we found it. If there ever was a God, he hid all his miracles inside the double helix of DNA.”

  Gabrielle smiled as she used a touchpad on the side of an incubator to tickle the baby inside. “Once we’d glimpsed what was possible, it would have been ignorant to stop. We had to keep going.”

  “The screening room’s ready,” Cole announced.

  Cillian turned and saw a man scrutinizing him.

  “This is Cole. One of my assistants,” Gabrielle said. “There’s not much he doesn’t know about you already.”

  “Think of me as your guardian angel,” Cole said with a wry smile.

  “We’ve prepped a few home movies to fill in the gaps.” Gabrielle ushered Cillian towards a viewing gallery above the control room in the centre of the incubator hall.

  “It’s the first 3 years of your life, condensed into a few minutes,” Cole explained. “We wouldn’t want you to feel you’ve missed out on anything.”

  64

  The gallery reminded Cillian of a planetarium – a large curved screen with a bank of reclining seats in the middle. He sat a little apart from Cole and Gabrielle, then braced himself as the video started.

  Phase 1: Ectogenesis. Music pulsed. A dot of light glowed on-screen. At first Cillian wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but as the dot grew larger he realized it was a tiny embryo, just days old. It floated serenely in the darkness, then microscopic needles loomed into shot and began manipulating it, transplanting cells, injecting hormones and marker genes.

  Coils of beautifully wound DNA twirled in a dance as hundreds of different sections were extracted, moved and replaced.

  A string of coding ran across the bottom of the screen like an electronic ticker: GATC AGTC CGAT TGCA CATG. It looked like an abstract pattern, but Cillian knew that was his own DNA he was watching.

  As the embryo grew, it was placed in an artificial womb, floating in synthetic amniotic fluid that glowed a soothing blue. Rotating images showed different enhancement techniques at each stage of development: genetic splicing, chromosome replacement, enzyme treatment, stem cell therapy.

  At 39 weeks, valves opened, the fluid was drained and the baby was plucked from its glass womb, ushering in:

  Phase 2: Infancy. A hard cut and Cillian saw himself in a prototype incubator, tended by an early generation RoboNurse; then as a toddler crawling around the glass nursery, playing with brightly coloured toys, oblivious to the antennae emerging from his sleepsuit.

  Cillian glanced at Gabrielle. She was enthralled. “Look, here comes your first word.”

  He watched himself burbling contentedly, and somewhere in the sing-song jumble was “Dada”.

  “But where was he?” Cillian asked pointedly.

  Gabrielle waved her hand in irritation to pause the film. “Who?”

  “Dada. Where was he?”

  “You didn’t need him at this stage.”

  “Did he know what you were doing?”

  “The one thing your father wanted was that you would never suffer the way his wife had suffered.”

  “So you turned me into a … mutant?”

  “That’s not a word we ever use,” Cole corrected.

  “But it’s the truth. The obsession with numbers and patterns, the weird time-shifting—”

  “You’ve already felt that?” A frown creased Gabrielle’s forehead. “How long has it been going on?”

  “Since the Metro crash.”

  “Interesting.” Gabrielle turned to Cole. “Make a note of that. We’ll need to filter out any instability with the next generation.”

  Cole tapped away on a tablet. For a moment Cillian felt like he didn’t even exist.

  When Gabrielle turned back, she caught his eye and sensed his discomfort. “There’s nothing mystical about time shift,” she explained. “The way animals experience time is connected with the speed of their metabolism. A fly races through life in a few weeks, processing information 7 times faster than humans. To a fly, the world unfolds in slow motion, which is why it’s so bloody hard to swat them. When the world slows down for you, it’s because your metabolic rate is speeding up. The trick is to control when that happens.”

  “With practice, you should be able to do it at will,” Cole added.

  Gabrielle stretched out her arm and put a hand on Cillian’s temple. “The mind is so much more powerful than you can imagine. It’s breathtaking.”

  65


  Tess thrashed and struggled as she was lowered into the huge tank of dark liquid, but her limbs were held in rigid manacles, and no matter how hard she fought it made no difference.

  As her feet were pulled into the viscous fluid she braced herself for the shock of cold, but strangely it didn’t come. The liquid matched her body temperature exactly.

  Deeper the manacles pulled her, immersing her legs, stomach, torso … as if they were going to drown her.

  Paige had to turn away from the control room window. It was too much like watching someone being tortured.

  “If we’re going to prevent more terror attacks, we have to open up the girl’s mind. Find all her secrets. We don’t have a choice.” It sounded so clean and clinical the way Gabrielle had described it, but she wasn’t here now to see the reality of Immersive Drug Therapy.

  “OK, she’s in position,” the operator said calmly.

  Paige studied the monitors. Tess’s body was now completely submerged in the liquid, with only her face breaking the surface.

  “Inject the hormones,” Paige instructed, anxious to get this over with.

  If she stayed calm, she could breathe: that was the only way. As Tess stopped struggling, the ripples subsided and the liquid settled in a neat oval around her face. She remained absolutely still for a few moments, trying to regain her composure.

  She was in a large, surgically clean room, flooded with diffuse light. Except for a narrow walkway around the edge, the entire space was taken up with the immersion tank. To the right was a long strip of reflecting glass. Whoever was doing this to her would be hiding behind that.

  Lights started flickering on the domed ceiling; slowly they pulled into focus and coalesced into a billowing cloudscape, continuously moving, infinitely varied.

  Needles emerged from the steel cuffs and a sharp scratch in her wrists punctured the tranquility. Tess tried to pull away, but as the drugs pumped into her veins she found it impossible to keep fighting.

  At first there was just a tingling sensation, like mild electric currents swirling around the tank, caressing her skin, making it feel alive. Then as the seconds passed Tess started to lose all sense of her own body, as if the liquid was seeping into her flesh, dissolving the inhibitors in her brain.

  The blossoming cloudscape became hypnotic. She knew she should close her eyes, try to resist, but the images were so soothing she couldn’t bear to shut them out.

  And as she let herself get absorbed into the space, Tess felt the doors in her mind swing open…

  Memories started to spill out…

  Long-forgotten images, trivial details loaded with emotion … the sweet, comforting smell of her pillow … a favourite pair of red shoes … a robin sitting on the branch of a tree … the sound of her mother’s laughter; and each memory was brilliantly vivid. It was like randomly sampling her life, with every moment distilled to its essence.

  Tess tried to take control, tried to focus on a single thought, but the flow had become unstoppable. It was like a flood of images bursting its banks, and as the walls that partitioned one memory from the next were washed away, all sense of privacy and identity started to break down.

  Desperately Tess tried to protect the obscure corners of her mind, guard the quiet places where she hid her most personal moments, but it was no use. It felt as if she was drowning from the inside, and the only way to avoid suffocation was to let her memories out…

  To talk.

  At first it sounded like jumbled nonsense, meaningless words whispered at random.

  “Send the feed upstairs, as well as to the recorders,” Paige told the operator as she put on some headphones to listen.

  Gradually Tess’s whispering became more articulate: moments from favourite movies … snatches of conversation with friends … fragments of a pop song; then plunging deeper to memories of tastes and scents … secret words … traces of pure happiness and escape …

  … until finally the things Tess kept most tightly locked away started to spill out: training drills, numerical codes, passwords, names of people, places, targets.

  “It’s all pretty mixed up,” the operator said cautiously. “Let’s hope the pattern recognition software can make sense of it.”

  Paige listened intently to the soft current of words, trying to find some coherence … and then she heard, “Derespino.”

  It was just a whisper, but it made Paige’s blood run cold. She pulled off her headphones and gazed through the control room window. This girl must have been caught up in those clinical trials. And now she’d returned. Like a vengeful ghost.

  “When will it stop?”

  The operator shrugged. “We were told to extract everything.”

  “But you must know how long it takes. From previous subjects.”

  The operator hesitated. “We’ve only ever searched for specific information before. We’ve never tried to empty an entire mind. But it can’t last long.”

  Paige heard the ominous tone in the operator’s voice. “Why not?”

  “The more barriers you dissolve, the greater the risk of psychosis. After a few hours of this …” he glanced at Tess’s floating body… “there won’t be much of her mind left.”

  66

  “This is the simplest demonstration,” Gabrielle said, ushering Cillian into a test rig. “Doesn’t involve any mental triggering. All you have to do is sit back and relax.”

  As the chair folded around him, it reminded Cillian of going to the dentist, only this chair had 2 high-tech box-arms that swung into position on either side. Cole guided his right forearm into one of the extensions and secured it with metal clamps that were padded with soft leather, then sprayed his skin with a cold blue gel.

  “Anaesthetic,” he replied to Cillian’s questioning look.

  “Doesn’t sound very reassuring.”

  “A precaution, that’s all.”

  There was a soft whirring as titanium plungers emerged from the sides of the box and pressed onto Cillian’s forearm from opposite directions.

  “We’re going to try and break your arm,” Gabrielle said calmly.

  “No!” He tried to pull free.

  “Don’t worry. We won’t succeed.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “Cillian!” Gabrielle raised a finger to her lips. “Don’t make such a fuss.”

  Cole swung the opposite box extension into view. A thick wooden strut and a heavy steel bar had been clamped inside it, just like Cillian’s arm.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.” Gabrielle touched the control panel and the hydraulics sighed into action. “I just want to show you how well you’ve been made.”

  Immediately Cillian felt the plungers push into his forearm.

  “Your arm, the wood and the steel are all being put under the same pressure,” Cole said, watching the force readings.

  Cillian’s eyes darted to the wooden beam, which was starting to bend, then back to his own arm. Already the flesh was distorting and swelling from the force of the clamps.

  As he heard the hydraulics gear up to the next level he felt an intense pressure. It wasn’t pain, but it was really uncomfortable.

  Suddenly a horrible splintering sound cracked across the lab. Cillian flinched, but incredibly his arm was still intact. It was the wooden strut that had snapped into jagged pieces.

  “This is when the tough get going.” Gabrielle smiled.

  A dull ache throbbed deep in Cillian’s bones. He looked at the steel bar as it started to twist out of shape … then at the force meters on the control panel, the numbers changing up so fast it was hard to read … then at his arm which was finally starting to bend out of shape.

  “STOP!” He struggled to pull his arm from the rig.

  “Nearly there,” Gabrielle said.

  A horrible metallic groan echoed around the room as the steel bar buckled, then snapped clean in two, and still the pressure gauge was spiralling upwards.

  “I think maybe that really is enough.” Gabri
elle leant across and touched the control panel.

  With a sigh the plungers relaxed their grip and withdrew into the sides of the rig.

  “Shit…” Cillian whispered, panting, staring at his arm as if it was something alien.

  67

  “It may seem hard to believe, but it’s really just physics,” Gabrielle said as she led Cillian deeper into the lab. “We’ve taken everything there is to know about materials science and applied it to genetics.”

  “It’s why you’ve never had a broken bone in your entire life,” Cole added with pride.

  Cillian nodded cautiously; only now did it occur to him how odd it was that he was never ill. He’d always thought it was just luck.

  “And it’s not only your skeleton that’s enhanced, but your muscles and ligaments as well. That’s why you can leverage such strength.” Gabrielle pointed to one of the RoboNurses parked in the corner. “You want to try that?”

  “And do what?”

  “Lift it up, of course.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “There’s no room for small-mindedness in P8.”

  Cillian heard the flash of irritation in her voice.

  “Unless you try, how will you ever know?”

  “You could easily do it,” Cole said smoothing over the awkwardness.

  Cillian walked over to the RoboNurse and ran his hands over the solid casing. It was a formidable piece of machinery, with a massive counterweighted plinth to make the whole arm stable. “I don’t think so.”

  “When you were fighting for your life, you didn’t think,” Gabrielle said. “Your body reacted to threat. Your survival instinct was the trigger.”

  Cillian’s mind flashed back over the last week, remembering the incredible power that had surged through his veins as he rescued his father from the Metro, then fought with the intruder. “I can’t really get angry with a nurse, though.”

  “Now you need to move to the next level. Because it doesn’t have to be about emotions. Really it’s about letting go of your boundaries,” Gabrielle explained. “The human mind can be its own worst enemy, putting limits on what it can do.”