Altered Reality

by Eliza Green

  Her mother began to cry. Laura had seen the crocodile tears on numerous occasions and was largely immune to their effects, but these tears seemed different somehow, more reflective, spontaneous, and not laced with the usual dramatics. Laura felt a little sorry for her.

  ‘Come on, Mum.’ She patted her gently on the arm. ‘Crying isn’t going to help your recovery now, is it? Dr Sorenson said you shouldn’t exert yourself. Positive thoughts, remember?’

  Fionnuala wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. ‘I’m sorry love. I don’t like it when you see me all vulnerable and such. I know I’m not a very nice woman sometimes.’

  While Laura agreed, she didn’t say as much. Instead she tried to placate her. The quicker her mother recovered, the sooner Laura could deal with more pressing matters, like Anton’s whereabouts.

  ‘Go away out of that,’ Laura said in a thick Irish accent. ‘You’re fine. Now stay where you are and I’ll get you that tea.’

  She headed for the kitchen to rustle up a pot. She found Fionnuala’s illegal black market stash hidden behind a baseboard in one of the cupboards. Her mother insisted on being prepared for any visitors that might drop by. Even though the occasional friend did call, there was still enough tea to supply the population within a six-mile radius. She grabbed a handful of plain Marietta biscuits, Fionnuala’s special stash from the black market.

  Laura placed the tray with the biscuits, a steaming pot of tea and two cups onto the low table in the living room and poured them a cup each; Fionnuala liked it black and strong. Laura handed her the cup. Her mother took a big mouthful and instantly seemed to feel better.

  ‘Ahh, that’s the stuff! I’m sorry to be such a nuisance. I know you had to take time off to be here. I hope your workplace doesn’t mind.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. They were quite accommodating, funnily enough.’ Laura nibbled on one of the biscuits.

  The two women sat in silence, Fionnuala drinking several cups while Laura nursed just the one. There was nothing left in the pot. Her mother drained the last drop from her cup. Fionnuala stacked the uneaten biscuits carefully in one corner of the tray.

  ‘He was my best friend, you know,’ she said wistfully.

  ‘What?’ said Laura, startled out of her half-doze.

  ‘I said he was my best friend.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your father of course. Who else?’

  Laura said nothing.

  Fionnuala went on. ‘We used to do everything together. When he died, it was like a piece of my heart had been ripped out.’

  Laura turned towards her mother just in time to see the tears well up in her eyes.

  ‘Did you know we were planning a trip away?’ Fionnuala said. ‘It was going to be a second honeymoon to celebrate forty years together.’

  This was new information. ‘Where were you going to go?’ Laura asked quietly.

  ‘To Istanbul, of all places!’ Fionnuala laughed. ‘Apparently they have the most amazing food—’ she broke off just as the tears began to fall. ‘I was devastated when he … you know. I hated him for changing our lives like that.’

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ Laura said quietly, rubbing her mother’s back. ‘Don’t you think he’d want you to live in the present instead of pining for the past? He made his choice. What’s done is done.’

  ‘Have you ever been in love, Laura?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then you don’t know how it feels to lose that special person in your life. It takes time to heal. I’m not there yet, but I am trying to make positive changes.’

  Laura looked around the apartment she had spent the last week cleaning from top to bottom and wondered where the positive changes were hiding.

  ‘I’ve been going to a healing group every Thursday. The Order of the Dearly Departed it’s called. I think they can really help me put my life on track.’

  ‘But what about your back and neck?’

  ‘I have to use the chair, but they don’t mind pushing me around. Cecil, the leader, has agreed to pick me up next Thursday when you’ve gone home. I should be a lot better by then.’

  Laura smiled. ‘Odd. Ha! That’s funny.’

  ‘What’s funny? What’s odd?’ Fionnuala asked, perplexed. ‘Laura, you really can be cruel sometimes, you know that? I’m unburdening myself to you and all you can do is tease me.’

  ‘What? No— I meant Order of the Dearly Departed—the initials are O. D. D. That’s all.’

  ‘Oh! Oh yes, so they are.’ Her mother laughed. ‘How strange. I guess they are an odd bunch!’

  Laura tried to be supportive. A healing group might be just what her mother needed, especially if it meant it got her out of the apartment.

  They spent the next couple of days talking about the things that Fionnuala wanted to change in her life, and Laura wondered if she might now be open to the idea of a move to Exilon 5 after all.

  On Thursday, Laura handed the responsibility of her mother back to Dr Sorensen. She arrived at the ESC, craving the distraction of work after her extended stint with Fionnuala. But she sensed something wasn’t right as soon as she entered the levels below.

  Chapter 8

  August 2163, Earth

  ‘STOP!’ Caroline Finnegan yelled. ‘Go back to the last data entry, MOUSE. You’re scrolling through it too fast.’

  ‘It is not necessary for you to watch everything I do, Dr Finnegan,’ MOUSE said. ‘I am programmed to run all known algorithms on the data. I will let you know if a match comes up.’

  Caroline remained where she was and tapped a finger against her lips.

  ‘Doctor, you are making me nervous just standing there like that,’ MOUSE said.

  ‘Good,’ Caroline replied.

  She was examining the information that Susan Bouchard had sent over about Annie Weber, Susan’s most difficult patient. They needed to study what didn’t work as well as what did.

  Caroline sighed deeply. ‘Nothing. Okay, you can move onto the next page.’

  ‘I already told you there was nothing there. Why don’t you take a break? You have been at this for hours. I will call you if anything crops up.’

  Caroline stifled a yawn and was about to protest, but MOUSE had already started scrolling through the data so fast it was just a blur. Reluctantly, she turned away from the screen and called out to her assistant to come get her if anything new emerged.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on MOUSE for you,’ Felicity said.

  MOUSE mumbled something unpleasant. The Maximum Operations Unit with Sentient Emotions lived inside the furniture, the fake lighting system and the medical equipment. It existed in a world of its own, and was an integral part of theirs. It didn’t need human form to have representation, or an opinion.

  Caroline left the laboratory and headed to the hydroponics bay to pick up some fresh mint for her tea. She walked the tunnels inside the specially designed bunkers that housed the government’s medical facilities. The bunkers were buried deep below the Irish landscape, directly underneath the former site of the National University of Ireland in County Galway. The facilities housed every piece of medical equipment they might need, while interstellar wave communications allowed them to keep in touch with similar facilities on Exilon 5.

  The entrance to the Galway facilities was through the skeletal remains of the Regenerative Medicine Institute’s biomedical research centre (REMEDI), located close to the main university structure. It had been destroyed by a meteor in 2081 and never rebuilt, the derelict building the only reminder of its existence, but the work of the research centre had continued over the years, carried out deep below the original site.

  Caroline shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her white lab coat as she walked. She shuddered when she thought about how close a few had come to discovering the entrance points. The bunkers’ location remained a secret because of the threat from elitist groups. While genetic testing was common practice at the manipulation clinics, the groups’ threats to expose the clinics’ use o
f data for purposes beyond simple genetic manipulation were too great. The clinics were very popular; most people approved of having their genetic structure altered. The ‘outraged elitists’ often turned out to be businessmen eager to get their hands on the expensive medical equipment that the bunkers housed.

  Caroline arrived at the hydroponics bay and was greeted by the in-house gardener and cook for the facility.

  ‘Dr Finnegan! Taking a break from the madness, I see. Have you come to help an old man out?’

  Caroline laughed. ‘Not today, Sam. But someday. I think I promised to show you a thing or two.’

  ‘Well, if your family’s reputation is anything to go by, we should have the most beautiful Parrot’s Beak growing in the back. Complete with fruit!’

  Caroline held her hands up. ‘Look, I might have inherited my grandfather’s green fingers, but please take me off the pedestal. I said I knew how to grow some things, but Parrot’s Beak? I’m not sure anybody has ever managed to get it to grow fruit.’

  ‘Okay, okay. No pressure.’ He laughed. ‘So what are you here for today?’

  ‘A sprig of fresh mint, please. I’m going to make some tea.’

  Stooped from a lifetime of manual gardening, Sam scurried along the centre aisle of the bay with Caroline following close behind. She caught the heady bouquet of various herbs, from thyme to coriander, as they ventured further into the bay. The space was divided into rows with heat and light lamps and a sprinkler system overhead to encourage growth.

  ‘Come on now, mint tea won’t fill you and you have to keep your strength up. How about some nice asparagus to go with that?’ He took a knife from his pocket and carefully cut a couple of stalks. He studied them for a moment. ‘They’re only small, but they’d go lovely with a nice risotto. I could make some up for you if you’d like?’

  ‘Sorry Sam, just the mint. Maybe later, when I’ve gone through more data.’

  He put down the asparagus stalks and cut a few leaves off the mint plant. He handed them to Caroline. His eyes lingered on her for a moment. ‘How on earth did you get involved with all of this?’

  ‘I did research on a newly discovered pseudogene for my PhD thesis. I investigated the pattern of transcription of different pseudogenes across tissues and cell lines to examine their potential functionality—’

  Sam held his hands up and smiled. ‘You’ve lost me already. I’m just an old man with no medical background and no idea what any of it means.’

  Caroline laughed gently and brought the leaves up to her nose. She breathed in deeply. She was going to miss fresh food when the latest project wrapped up. Then it was back to replicator food. Sam was a good cook—a rarity in the twenty-second century—and she thought about asking him for some recipes before she left. ‘Genetics is quite interesting work, actually,’ she said. ‘There are so many possibilities.’

  ‘It’s just—I don’t know how you do what you do. What about the poor people you experiment on here?’

  Caroline smiled. ‘Don’t feel too sorry for them. They’re all regulars at the genetic manipulation clinics and asking for the experimental treatments on offer. Besides, they were using nanotechnology long before I came along. In the early twenty-first century, they used nano particles to sneak cancer-fighting drugs past the immune system to the site of the tumour. Our immune systems tend to attack all cells, healthy or otherwise, so if they hadn’t perfected that, all known types of cancer would still plague us today.’

  A biologist in nanoid-controlled gene therapy, Caroline had been drafted in by Charles Deighton to work on the current project. Back when the government had been trying to figure out how to manage their new Indigene creation, Caroline had been in her first year of medical school studying the government’s earliest genetic experiments.

  The old man clucked his tongue in disapproval. ‘That was then, when it was put to good use. Now it’s all about vanity—used for cosmetic purposes. What would your father say about you getting involved with this kind of work!’

  ‘The same thing I am now probably.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry Sam, but I come from a long line of scientists, and not all the work we do centres around appearances.’

  From her mother’s passionate interest in pathology to her father’s involvement in genetic modification, her family’s background in biology stretched back to her great grandfather who had spent most of his life working in the Forensic Science Laboratory in Phoenix Park, Dublin.

  Caroline gently squeezed the old man’s arm. ‘Thanks for the mint.’

  She headed to the kitchen to get some hot water. Along the way she thought about the Indigene the military had captured two months ago, and wondered how she had wound up involved in the biggest secret the World Government had ever kept from its people.

  It was when she had been at medical school that she first came to Charles Deighton’s attention. Apart from her work with pseudogenes, or non-functioning genes, she examined the effects on the genetic structure when nanoids added new genes to a host. Nanoids had a specific role to play in genetics—to repair damaged cells or deliver a repaired gene to where a defective gene had been spliced. She had been keen to take it a step further and experiment with different species, to see how the addition of extra genes would affect their growth, abilities or immune system.

  She had only found out that the military had captured a second-generation Indigene on Earth when Deighton called her personally and requested that her team study it. Her involvement in analysing the data of the first hybrid, a job Deighton had given her directly after medical school, meant she was familiar with the race’s existence. But she hadn’t seen how the race had evolved since then. When the Galway facility was handpicked to host the second-generation Indigene, she’d felt equally excited and apprehensive.

  The Galway team buzzed with excitement at the prospect of studying a second-generation Indigene, although they weren’t going to have much time with it. The Indigene would be moved from one facility to the next until one of the teams unlocked its secrets. With just four people in her team, Caroline knew they had more to prove than the others with a higher personnel count. Her request for additional staff had been turned down. Instead, Charles Deighton had sent them extra military.

  In the kitchen, Caroline grabbed a mug from the cupboard and dropped the mint leaves into it. She found the hot water option on the H2O machine and filled the mug. She sat down at the table and stirred the leaves with a metal wand, enjoying the aroma wafting upwards and feeling her body and mind relax a little.

  She welcomed the temporary distraction from the World Government competition that pitted the medical facilities on Earth against each other to find the secrets hidden in the new Indigene generation. Half of the facilities had already failed to come up with the answers, but Caroline was confident that her team had enough data from the partial success of the other host labs to build on. Once they found the key, the World Government had promised to prioritise them for transport to Exilon 5 where they could experience the new planet for themselves.

  She took a sip of her tea and dropped the metal wand into the sink. Mug in hand, she walked back to the laboratory, finding it difficult to sit still while so many unanswered questions remained. When she arrived back, Felicity was poring over the data while MOUSE cursed at her.

  Her two male assistants walked through the door, chatting and joking with each other. They stopped talking as soon as they caught sight of her.

  ‘Sorry Doctor. We were just—’ Julian began.

  Caroline jerked her head towards the stream of new data that was currently transmitting from the Berlin medical facility, the last place to host the second-generation Indigene. Heads lowered, the pair rushed to the area where she indicated.

  She took another sip of her hot tea and leaned against the large island in the middle of the room. She looked around the ostentatious laboratory facilities. A virtual screen floated on each end wall. One screen streamed live data, images and incomplete calculations. MOUSE checked reams o
f incomprehensible data and formulae while Felicity argued with him to slow down. The other screen looped peaceful images that were intended to be motivational and calming: trees and falling leaves, Serengeti animal reserves, gently babbling brooks. It was the government’s visualisation of what Exilon 5 would become, once all the engineering work was complete on the planet. The images served as a reminder to the Galway team to keep working towards the final solution.

  In one corner of the room, her two male assistants studied the new data stream. In the other, Felicity continued to yell at MOUSE. In stark contrast to the harsh world that existed above them, the bunkers were a dreamy haven. Each room was illuminated using an artificial sun prototype inset into the ceiling, a glowing ember the size of a golf ball that required tight controls to restrict its size and emissions. The prototype was first trialled as a replacement for the sun back when the World Government had considered building living containment units on Earth. That was before they had discovered Exilon 5.

  Virtual environments set up in specific rooms satisfied their need to escape. Living quarters stretched out for miles beneath the contaminated soil. The atmosphere, controlled by a filtration unit, converted the putrid air into fresh, clean air. The hydroponics bay was on hand to supplement the replicated meals with fresh produce. They were some of the healthiest humans on Earth, but maintaining such healthy environments didn’t come cheap.

  Caroline stood beside her male assistants and studied the Berlin data. Anton, the Indigene, wasn’t a danger to them at this early stage. Bound and sedated in one of the detention rooms not far from the lab, he would need a great deal of strength to break through the force field surrounding his bed. The drugs dulled his mind. Hearing of Deighton’s problems with him, Caroline had played it safe and ordered an extra dose of sedatives. According to the cumulative data from the other medical facilities, they had subjected the prisoner to a dangerously high number of experiments. Since his initial capture, Caroline understood his attitude had shifted from mistrustful antagonism to reluctant acceptance.