by Emily Suvada
It’s a wild underground city, and part of me loves it instantly.
The people in the park look like they’re setting up for the party that Regina was talking about. Everything is the same glowing shade of cobalt as the pigeons’ feathers. A group of people are opening barrels of luminescent paste, dabbing it in patterns on their clothes and skin. Algae paste. It’s probably hacked with the same gene that makes the pigeons’ feathers glow. We step into the park, following one of the walking trails that cuts to the other side.
“I can’t believe they just have those doors open,” Anna says, looking up at the giant opening above us. “It’s amazing they’re not all dead yet. How did they make it two years without getting infected?”
“That’s what the border is for,” I say, “and there are doses.”
“Ugh, gross,” Anna mutters. “This place is a freak show.” She wrinkles her nose, watching a woman walk past us, a backpack on her shoulders with a breathing tube coiled out of it and plugged directly into her throat. “I don’t understand why people actually want to screw up their bodies.”
I look Anna up and down. Her legs are long, her muscles sleek, her skin so smooth it’s practically shining, and there’s no way that her face was always as perfectly proportioned as it is. She’s stunning, and none of her upgrades are obvious, but she’s clearly running a lot of aesthetic code. “You’re no different from them,” I say. “Not unless you were naturally going to be a six-foot goddess.”
Her lips quirk briefly. “Yeah, but I’m using normal apps, to look like a normal person, just . . . better.”
“So you share Lachlan’s view on the human form, then?” Mato asks, plucking a leaf from one of the trees on the trail’s edge. “Interesting.”
She whirls on him. “I don’t share Lachlan’s view on anything, asshole.”
“He’s talking about gentech,” Leoben says, his hand sliding to Anna’s shoulder. “Dax talks about this shit a lot. Just ignore him and he’ll stop.”
Anna rolls her eyes and picks up her pace along the trail, dragging Leoben with her.
“What about you, Catarina?” Mato asks me, folding the leaf between his fingers, smelling it. He flicks an annoyed glance at Cole, as though he’d prefer to be talking to me alone. “What’s your view on the human form?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I haven’t made my mind up yet.”
He’s talking about the craft hypothesis—the question of whether the human form is good or if it’s just what we’re used to. Most people fall on the craftist end of the spectrum, believing that weaknesses in our DNA should be patched as unobtrusively as possible. They’re okay with upgrades like colored hair and aesthetic tweaks, but they wouldn’t like Regina’s scales or the tails on some of the hackers around us. Skin should be skin, they argue. Legs should be legs, with limits to the definition of the human form. They argue that people with a few years of coding experience shouldn’t mess with the result of millions of years of evolution.
On the other side of the argument, the genehackers see human DNA as a starting point and their bodies as tools to change as they please. They think evolution has always been chaotic—it’s just been slow, and now we finally have the tools to speed it up.
During the outbreak the craftists focused their research on ways to upgrade the body’s natural immune responses. That’s how Lachlan cured Influenza X—by recoding human antibodies to hunt down the virus more efficiently than before. But the genehackers took a different view. They pointed out that since the virus was transmitted through breathing, the best cure was to remove everyone’s lungs.
Simple, effective, and wholly alien.
“I take it you’re on the hacker side of the spectrum?” I ask Mato.
He tilts his head, considering, the glowing flowers on the trees tracing arcs of light across his mask. “Mostly. I think there were a billion roads that humanity’s evolution could have traveled down, and that it’s dumb luck that we ended up in a body like this. Two legs, two eyes, two ovaries. Our digestive system is a pile of nonsense. None of it suits the way we live, but we’ve built so much of our society around it that I don’t know if we’ll ever really be able to change.”
I nod, slowing my pace as we reach the edge of the park. I’ve never really aligned myself with either faction, but I always felt drawn to the genehackers and their dreams of the future. They wanted to solve the world’s resource crunch by shrinking the average human down to three feet. They wanted to fill our skin with chlorophyll so we could feed on sunlight. Part of me loves to imagine what humanity could become if we step past the constraints of our ancestry.
And yet Lachlan’s plan to alter a single gene in humanity’s DNA horrifies me.
“What about you, Lieutenant?” Mato asks Cole, a slight edge to his voice. I get the feeling he’s trying to embarrass Cole—to get him to say that he doesn’t know what we’re talking about, and it makes the back of my neck heat with anger.
“I think I might be a naturalist,” Cole says.
Mato stops short, staring at him.
“Are you serious?” I ask. “You don’t think we should use gentech?”
“Not beyond medical code, no,” Cole says.
“That’s . . . very interesting,” Mato says, looking between us.
“Can we get the hell out of here?” Anna shouts, leaning against Leoben at the edge of the park. “I’ve seen enough freaks to last me a lifetime. Lee thinks he can use the cameras to flush the old man out.”
“Just yell the plan into the crowd, Anna,” Leoben says, throwing up his hands.
“It’s this way,” Mato says, striding toward a hallway leading back into the bunker’s walls.
I follow behind with Cole, glancing at him from the corner of my eye. “Did you mean that, or were you just trying to rile Mato?” I ask him.
“I meant it,” Cole says, but his face is blank, a wall over his features that I haven’t seen all week. “It’s too late for me, though. Black-out tech can’t be removed.”
I reach for his arm, but he picks up his pace, walking just too far ahead for me to be able to ask him what he means. We wind through a series of branching hallways and up a flight of stairs to the apartment Mato is leading us to. There’s a steel door with a programmable lock that blinks green when he swipes his panel over it, swinging open into an apartment big enough for the five of us.
Metal bunks are built into the walls, a bathroom in the back. There’s only a plastic pipe jutting from a blank wall where the kitchenette should be, and the walls are covered with a genehacker’s scribbled notes, but it’s more comfortable than the back of a jeep, which is where I’ve been sleeping for the last week.
“We’ll need to split up and search in a grid,” Anna says, pacing across the room. “There’s a billion more places to hide here than I thought.”
“The lab I saw was outside,” I say. “If he’s in the same place, it had a view of the sky.”
Anna nods. “That helps, but we can’t assume he’s in the same place.”
“You can use network signatures,” Mato says. “Wherever Lachlan is, he has a solid link to Cartaxus’s satellite network—probably a hardwired mainline connection. He wouldn’t be able to hook into people’s panels like he’s doing, otherwise.”
I walk across the room, taking in the graffiti scrawled on the wall. There are boxes of paperback books in the corner covered with a layer of dust, and a collection of metal pens in a glass jar on the floor.
“Was this your room?” I ask Mato.
“It was,” he says, smiling as though he’s pleased I figured it out. “I didn’t live here, but it’s a place I came to think and work. My first lab, in a way.”
Anna cocks an eyebrow, looking at the genetic diagrams covering the walls. “What were you working on? Ways to change the human form?”
“No,” he says, watching her, a strange look in his eyes. “Those are gene diagrams for the processes that govern aging and cell death.”
I turn to the wall, scanning the scribbled diagrams. Almost everyone studies apoptosis and aging soon after they start learning to code. Unraveling the mysteries of cell death is the holy grail of gentech. We can heal our bodies, cure our illnesses, and change the way we look, but there’s still no magical cure to keep people from dying. There’s not even a scientific consensus on just how we die in the first place. There’s decent work being done on anti-aging, but it’s only in its infancy and hasn’t been around long enough to test properly.
“Ugh, you nerds are so boring,” Anna says, scowling. She strides to one of the bunks and sits down heavily.
I lean back against the wall, staring at the diagrams a young Mato must have sketched. One is an analysis of the DNA of the only family of organisms whose cells don’t age—tiny aquatic creatures only found in a few places around the world. Coders still haven’t managed to figure out the mechanism that keeps them alive. I’ve seen the same analysis in some of Jun Bei’s work while I was reading through the code stored in my panel, but I thought the files she wrote were about the virus when I first saw them. The name of the files was misleading.
Because the creature’s name is hydra.
A knock sounds on the door. Anna jumps from the bed and paces to it, pulling it open. The pale-furred genehacker I saw in Regina’s lab looks over the room.
“Catarina?” she asks, giving me a smile that shows a row of curved, sharp teeth. “Regina will see you now.”
CHAPTER 20
THE PALE-FURRED GENEHACKER LEADS ME back through the park toward a set of stairs built into the side of the atrium. My stomach twists with nerves as we walk, even though I know I’m not alone. Cole and Anna are shadowing me at a distance, slipping through the crowd. They won’t be able to follow me into Regina’s lab, though. I’ll be alone with her there. I don’t know what she’s going to want from me. A DNA sample? A scan of my body? A biopsy of my brain?
Suddenly this whole deal feels wildly dangerous.
The hacker and I reach the stairwell and start to climb. It’s concrete, with metal railings, one side of the stairwell open to the park. As we rise, I can see that the walking trails and the trees have been laid out in a rough circle with a jagged line cut through it. It’s Regina’s symbol—the one I saw on the screen when Mato was hacking the implant in my head.
The hacker stops at a steel door with a security scanner built into the concrete beside it and swipes her panel across it. It swings open to a hallway that leads to the same room I saw in the VR simulation—the vast circular lab with plants and animals covering its walls. I pause on the landing outside it, looking out at the park, spotting Cole standing beneath one of the trees with his arms crossed. He gives me a nod, and I swallow and head into the lab.
“Welcome back,” Regina says, walking across the floor to meet me, spreading her arms. The raven is back on her shoulder, but not the snake that was looped around her neck. She moves with perfect, eerie grace, her dress rippling across the floor. She smiles at me, the scales around her black eyes crinkling. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Thanks for letting us in,” I say.
She waves one hand dismissively. “Of course. Thank you for agreeing to my terms. I know it was unreasonable to ask for you as a trade, but I couldn’t just let Mato back in, not after his little coup. Entropia is where he belongs, and one day he might be a good person to lead it, but he needs to earn his place here like everyone else.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Does that mean you’re not going to study me?”
“Oh, no,” she says, beaming. “We’re definitely doing that.”
She heads across the room to one of the lab benches. I pause in the entrance, my eyes drawn to the coding terminal built into the wall. It’s definitely a Cartaxus model, and from the spinning icon on its screen, it looks like it has a connection to Cartaxus’s network. I don’t know why Cartaxus would give Regina that kind of access. I follow her, walking past the circular platform hanging in the middle of the room. It’s holding a metal shelf full of cylindrical vats filled with a dark, viscous liquid. A cold breeze blows up from the foot-wide gap between the platform and the hole in the floor. It’s hard to see what’s beneath it, but I catch a glimmer of light on water somewhere far below us as I walk past.
“The platform’s movements help,” Regina says, following my eyes, gesturing to the vats. “We discovered that our mammalian samples grew faster when subjected to small motions like this. A more perfect re-creation of the in utero environment.”
I peer more closely at the vats. There are hints of pale, rippled flesh in the dark liquid. Lungs. There must be a dozen of them inside each vat, connected to one another by slender veins and snaking wires. Regina is probably growing them to test patches for the vaccine on.
“I still have that weevil in my hand,” I say. “It didn’t come out.”
Regina pauses, her eyes glazing. “That’s strange. I sent the ejection command. It must have destroyed itself inside your hand. It happens sometimes. Your own tech will clear it out eventually, don’t worry. It’s harmless now.” She walks to a lab counter on the far side of the room, a pattern of cobalt lights blinking across her skin. They’re not just clustered in a typical panel formation, though. Her forearm holds the bar of light I expect, running from her elbow to her wrist, but there are also blinking LEDs set into her shoulders and across her chest, dotted across her cheekbones. I can just make out the faint glow of more lights flickering beneath her dress. I frown, staring, suddenly realizing what the pattern on her skin is for.
The black splotches aren’t random like I thought. They’re designed to hide the path of leylines traveling across her body. They’re set into the pattern of her scales, low and flat, branching across her face and weaving down her back. There must be dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe.
“Do you like them?” she asks, following my eyes. “Each of the lights is just a single core. Microscopic, really. It was only after I’d designed the original panel and seen it distributed to billions of people that I realized how limiting it was. One single object in your arm to control your body, using wires to transport nanites throughout your bones and muscles? It feels archaic even describing it. It was only later that I came up with the idea for these cores.”
I stare at the glowing cobalt dots on her skin. “They’re panels?”
“Single-function panels,” she says. “Most only hold one or two apps. That’s not what makes them special, though.” She smiles, lifting her forearm, turning it to look at a constellation of tiny blue dots on her black-and-green skin. “Normal panels need a bud to begin, like a seed ready to grow a tree, but these panels are so lightweight that they can be grown with just a few synthetic genes. I could never have designed this kind of technology for Cartaxus, though.”
“Why not?”
She smiles. “They’d be worried people would try to add it into the human germline.”
“You mean people could be born with these,” I say.
Her smile grows wider. “Indeed. What a terrifying thought.”
She’s being sarcastic, but the thought is unnerving. The one line most genehackers agree never to cross is the altering of their children’s DNA. Gentech can’t change your natural DNA once it’s in your cells, but it’s still possible to alter it and then grow a hacked person, like Cartaxus did with me and the other kids. But that hack would be passed down to their children, too, and it could make its way through the population over enough time. There are some minor approved genetic tweaks that people are allowed to use when they’re having children, but they’re mostly for health reasons. People don’t tend to try it much, though, because a baby can just get a panel once it’s born and use apps that are reversible instead.
“I’m interested in how you tracked Lachlan here,” Regina says. “You said it was related to the neural implant? I’d like to analyze it, with your permission.” She opens a cabinet, touching a few boxes before sliding one out, then flips it open, revealing a small black
nub. “This is a processor that should fit in the port in your head.”
I shift uncomfortably. The last time the implant was analyzed, I ended up with wires bursting out of my arm. “I thought you wanted to look at my DNA.”
“I do,” she says. “This is just a passive scan. It’s going to listen to the implant’s output and tell me what it’s doing.”
“I . . . I don’t know,” I say. “Mato hacked it earlier, and it wasn’t a lot of fun.”
She sighs. “My, he’s very young, isn’t he? Mato needs to learn to take a more delicate approach. He learned to fraction too young, which is my fault, but it means that he approaches everything with brute force. I hoped Cartaxus would put him with Lachlan when he joined. Lachlan might have taught him the value of care and patience, but Brink invited Mato into central command almost instantly.” She lifts the nub. “This won’t affect the implant at all. You won’t even notice it. If you really do have a connection to Lachlan’s panel, then I think there’s a chance we can exploit it even more than simply tracking his location. But first I need to see what kind of tech this tracker is based on.”
She offers the nub to me. I take it warily. It’s surprisingly heavy, made of a dull black metal with a silver port connector in one end.
“It’s wireless,” she says, nodding at my cuff. “You can run the scan yourself if you prefer. I’d just like to see the output.”
I turn the nub in my fingers, pulling up my cuff’s wireless controls. The silver port connectors glow white in my vision, an access code beside them. I’m still not sure Regina can be trusted, and I’m not thrilled about the idea of putting anything in my head, but she’s right—if there really is a link between the implant and Lachlan’s panel, we might be able to do more than just find his location.
There’s a chance we could use it to hack him.
I pull my hair to one side and slide the nub into the port, using my cuff to switch it on. The lab flashes for a moment, and an image appears in my vision—the same one Mato showed me of the transparent human head. It still shows the implant in red, with the forest of wires coiling through the brain. Only, now the brain has a blush of blue stretching in a slender line between its two lobes, and a giant dark patch over part of the left one.
