by R. Z. Held
To business, then. “If one person already woke up, do you think the couple days we have food for will settle things one way or the other for the rest?” Genevieve stepped to the nearest pool and smoothed the woman’s hair. “I suppose they all could have been infected at different times. But they can’t have been too far apart, because they wouldn’t have a place to hold them for long before they sent them here.”
Pyrus shook his head. “No one bothers to keep those kind of records, much to my frustration. I always worked from a similar assumption that past groups had all been infected around the same time, though. They all...surrendered within about a day of each other.” He joined Genevieve at the pool, stress flickering visible in the way his fingers clenched over the rim, then smoothing under again. “What do we do, then?”
“Tell them steer into the skid.” Genevieve smiled thinly at the others. “Or similar metaphor. And it might have something to do with building trust ahead of time, so they pay attention when you speak, I’m not sure.” She feared she wasn’t very coherent as she poured it all out in detail, jumbled and out of order, but she stopped herself before she started repeating anything. She left that Infected to Pyrus, turned away to find one of her own.
Pyrus turned after her, perhaps about to say something more, but he frowned at her wings instead. “You’re badly out of alignment. May I have your permission to address it?” He was rivaling her for formality now. At her murmured agreement, he stepped behind her and Genevieve felt the sensation of shifting in that strange her body yet not her body limbo. “You can’t help them if you’re not functional yourself.”
His phrasing was a marvel, really, of making a caring statement sound cold. With nothing better to do as he worked, her thoughts drifted off the Infecteds to Pyrus. Which did he consider to be worse, the fact she was a fronti, or the fact she had lied about it? Did the average Pax Romana citizen really think of frontier planets as enemies, or just annoying younger siblings who had to be forced into following orders for their own good? But these were people who’d gone out to do the forcing.
In the realm of lies, she hadn’t told him or Eriope about the virus, either. And she wouldn’t, she decided, as Pyrus’s firm touch eased some of the ache in her wings. That goal was no longer…true, in a way, now she’d discovered her real mission for herself.
“‘Not functional herself’—is that how it is?” Eriope asked Pyrus. She locked gazes with him, then snorted. “Stupid locked channels. All right. Talk to you later. Right now, I think it’s story time. Genevieve, why don’t you tell him the story of how you jumped off the fortieth floor, to get here to do all this helping.”
Pyrus had spread his arms to pull Genevieve’s wings out close to their full extent, and now he paused for a beat with his palm still against the inner “feathers.” As if he was fighting a losing battle with his good sense, his touch slid to the skin between her wings, pads of fingers first, then heel of his hand contacting for a larger bar of warmth. The sensation, fully grounded in her original conception of her body, in contrast to that from her wings, made her want to shiver. “Do you ever allow yourself to rest, woman?”
“What?” Genevieve tried to twist around to see him, but her wings were in the way.
“Since I’ve met you, all you’ve done is throw yourself into things.” Pyrus lifted his hand, nudged her into folding the wings completely into her back. “There. You’re done.”
Genevieve thought about seeing the targeting visor across the eyes of Pax Romana soldiers and then across her own eyes in the mirror. “Sometimes one has to maintain sufficient momentum to avoid falling.” Was she imagining that his politeness had thawed a few degrees after hearing how she’d wrecked her wings? Probably.
Eriope lifted the hand of the woman in the pool nearest her. “Well, if I’m trapped in here, I might as well make myself useful.” She laced fingers with her, ignoring the gel. “I don’t have half the intensity of your true champion here, but I promise I’m very friendly. At least for the next day or so, so you’d better work fast.” She grinned, sharp, casting it down to the woman, though she couldn’t see it. Though perhaps she could hear it in Eriope’s voice.
Champion? Genevieve would call herself that when anyone else survived this. She strode away to choose a patient of her own to focus on, well away from Pyrus.
***
Over the next two days, two more Infecteds recovered, and three died. Eriope’s mood deteriorated rapidly after the first day, as she’d predicted. By the end of the second, she’d sunk to endless drawer- and cupboard-slamming circuits of the clinic, as if a hidden stash of drugs could have been missed the first twenty times she looked.
Genevieve wished, wished deeply, she could have left Eriope alone, but her crackling tension was hardly a good thing for the patients, though even the recovered ones spent the majority of their time sleeping heavily. The repetitive noise of it was even harder to bear. She waited until Eriope had finished a circuit and quivered in a relatively stationary state before the next. “If there was a way you could do something that makes less noise—”
“Yeah?” Eriope rounded on her. “Like what, stuck in here, with nothing to do but think?”
Stuck in here because of Genevieve’s hand on her arm, Genevieve’s yank. “I’m sorry I got you into this,” she said, not really expecting the apology to help, but still feeling it was needed. “I know it must be really hard to—”
Eriope snapped her wings out and wide, the better to loom over Genevieve, once-repressed violence right at the surface. “Damn fronti dirt-grubber. How can you know what it’s like? You’ve been an Install for, what, months, if that? Talk to me in years. Talk to me in decades, when all you can see stretching out ahead of you is decades more.”
With nothing else to offer but listening, Genevieve stayed put, bracing herself for a blow. But the touch, when it came, was from behind. Pyrus tugged her gently back, interposed himself, an immovable object of civility. “Eriope, that’s offensive. Don’t take your bad mood out on Genevieve.”
Genevieve tried not to read too much into it. He could defend her without having completely forgiven her, of course. But he’d had no problem with the epithet before…
“Bad mood? Ha!” Eriope prowled a few steps away. “You of all people should know there’s more to it than that.” She snapped back around to him, stepped up toe to toe. “Can’t you give me something medicinal?”
“I know it’s not physiological withdrawal, it’s emotional dependence, and there’s not a thing I can give you for that, other than to knock you out completely.” Pyrus raised his brows. Apparently that was an offer on the table.
Eriope raised her hand to him and Genevieve backed up. The struggle that followed was eerie in its abbreviated nature, however, like an old couple fighting entirely in disconnected phrases. Pyrus caught her blow, Eriope jerked, Pyrus flickered a movement to the other side, and Eriope turned her dodge into a wrench away. She snapped in her wings and collapsed into a corner, head on knees. When she seemed inclined to stay there, quiet, Genevieve managed to relax in stages.
“Could use some lunch,” she announced, generally. She turned away to fuss with the packs and the heater longer than necessary in hopes of diffusing things further. Pyrus joined her. She’d rested one hand on the counter as she waited for the heating to finish, and he settled his over it, overlapping partially. Genevieve twitched in surprise, lifting her own fingers, and that let him tangle his between. She felt very “suddenly” tears rising once more, but pressed them back this time.
“I’m sorry,” Pyrus rumbled, low voiced.
“For what, objecting to being lied to? Don’t think that needs an apology.” Genevieve could only hope that had been the true sticking point, as it was the only thing she regretted. She would not regret being born on Idyll.
“I rather think you did that in pursuit of a greater good. And with any luck, you’ll be able to continue doing so.” Pyrus raised his voice. “As when the higher-ups arrive, I’ll
be telling them how you may have deceived the cranky CFO—and who can blame you?—but your medic knew your status as an Infected all along, and judged that you were not only covered by the contract keeping non-military Installs here, but presented an important resource going forward, for dealing with Infecteds.”
“Thank you.” Such an unlooked-for gift, she found no other response. Then the meal made the little pop sound that indicated it was finished heating and Genevieve had to pull her hand from his touch. “I’ll give this to Eriope.”
She slipped over to set it on the ground before the silent, miserable shape. Eriope looked up as Genevieve turned away. “He’s right,” she said, letting it float context-less for a second. “You didn’t deserve my shit. Sorry. What I need is a fucking uninstall process, you know?”
Genevieve nodded in acknowledgment, before returning to her own lunch. The emergency meals were, ironically enough, as bland as the bars Genevieve had been eating until she arrived at Tsuga Security. Somehow she ended up sitting on her own patch of floor, hip to hip with Pyrus.
In the companionable silence, Genevieve turned Eriope’s words this way and that. Why wasn’t anyone talking about developing an uninstall process? She hadn’t thought of it as something that was possible herself until now, that was true, but pure survival tightened one’s focus. Her own survival, now the survival of the other Infecteds. But now, as Carex had said, what kind of life awaited them long-term? Was it so strange to work toward fixing that when one impossible thing had proved quite possible?
“Given long enough, maybe we can find a way to uninstall them,” she said, to see how it sounded out loud.
One corner of Pyrus’s mouth tucked up, making his face apologetic, rather than him scoffing in disbelief. “You can’t reach a moon you see in the sky simply by jumping.”
“No, seriously.” She turned her hand idly to look at the unblemished infection point at the base of her palm. “You’re acting like it’s a crazy dream, but why is it so crazy?”
“Because a lot of people have been working a long time on it. It’s obvious why motivation to save Infecteds would be nearly nonexistent. But uninstallation? Being able to increase recruitment, not…” Pyrus’s expression tightened with pain for a beat, but he smoothed it away before it reached his tone. “Not having to keep track of all us inconveniently ‘not in active military service’? That’s a holy grail.”
And Genevieve didn’t buy it. Pyrus might not believe that many people could be willfully blind for so long, but she’d believe it. Especially of the Pax Romana, who’d built their empire on pulling everyone into thinking alike. She didn’t see the point in pushing at the moment, however, when all she had was some idle philosophical thoughts. She dipped her chin to allow him the point, and returned to eating.
After the lull, Pyrus looked out across the gel pools, three filled to the brim for preservation. “I by no means want to minimize your accomplishment here, though. We don’t have too much farther to go to match the success rate of clean installations.”
Genevieve slid her spoon securely into her half-finished pack and set it aside. “Seriously? I always assumed—” But then the public sources she’d been using for research would hardly have been given that information, would they? Better PR to not mention how many of your own people were dying to make your super-soldiers.
“Why do you think that civilian applications are still nonexistent?” Pyrus shrugged. “Soldiers can make an informed decision to take such a risk, but—”
“I don’t buy it.” Genevieve shook her head. She hesitated, but he knew perfectly well her perspective would differ from the Pax Romana one. “People are always ready to take stupid chances, and there’s always someone medically unethical enough to let them. No way any government wants citizens with that kind of power outside a strong military hierarchy. That will be why they’ve kept such a tight hold on the technology.”
Pyrus gave her a look, and she glowered at him. “I’ve picked up as much political theory through my higher education as you. Don’t look at me like that.”
“No.” Pyrus looked back out into the wider room. “Probably more. I came from a poor background, and I enlisted early.” He settled those last words out slowly and carefully, giving them extra weight. Genevieve thought she recognized another apology, for being caught up in his society’s cycle of expansion without question, perhaps.
As much a product of his circumstances as herself.
The sound of the door opening initially registered as so mundane that Genevieve’s adrenaline spiked a beat late, leaving her off-balance. Pyrus must have felt the same, as he shoved to his feet as belatedly as she did. Eriope was quicker on the draw and made it to the door before them. Anticipation of getting out and getting access to her stash seemed to have perked her up considerably.
Genevieve tried to ask Eriope over a channel who it was at the door, but of course they were all still locked down. Even after two days, apparently she was still reaching for them unconsciously, but there was no time to pick apart how she felt about this new evidence of her comfort with the nanites, because she and Pyrus reached the visitor as she closed the door behind her.
The visitor was an Install, not a surprise, but she showed her age in silver threaded into the tight, dark braids along her skull and in the lines at the corners of her eyes. She must have been much older than any of the people at Tsuga when she got her nanites—if they were going to talk about informed decisions, Genevieve suspected hers had been much more so than those of young recruits. “I’m Abidjan Lemna.” She raised her brows. “Well. I certainly don’t see the point of that.” Their channels snapped back on.
Eriope’s gaze flickered to Genevieve, then back to Lemna.
“And you must be the Infected who beat the odds alone,” Lemna said and held out her hands to clasp Genevieve’s. Genevieve accepted the touch automatically, more worried about what the woman might say next. Science Division—did they want her for study?
“What line of descent are you?” Lemna asked. Before Genevieve could pull away, she’d pinched the skin on the inside of Genevieve’s wrist and collected a heavy, red dot of blood over the brown skin of her fingertip.
Genevieve jerked her arm back, though the cut was already healed by the time she got it to her lips in the ancient instinct to suck on it. Lemna touched her fingertip to her tongue and then spread the drop against her palate like a chef finding nuances in a gourmet sauce. Genevieve winced. She supposed Lemna’s system was analyzing her nanites, but there had to be a less disturbing way to do it.
“Interesting,” was all Lemna said out loud. “Not one of the newer nanite lines, either. Though if Malao Carex was correct and you got it out on a battlefield, it could never have been the very newest anyway.”
“We’ve saved two more since you were sent for,” Pyrus said. He was too polite to actually break in, but he didn’t hesitate when Lemna gave him the pause he needed.
“How extraordinarily helpful of you,” Lemna said. Genevieve couldn’t have said why, but she got the sense that this was some kind of test. Perhaps Lemna was planning to prod them until she saw how they defended themselves.
“If you don’t want to deal with enemy civilians being infected with your fancy technology, maybe you should concentrate on making that technology non-infectious,” Genevieve said with as much confidence and calm as she could manage. “Or uninstallable.” A crazy dream of jumping at the moon it might be, but it was so needed, she couldn’t help but bring it up. Who didn’t need it, among the Installs she’d met? Eriope with her drugs, Carex with the stick up his ass, Pyrus with his doomed crusades.
> Genevieve, who’d considered killing them all because she saw no other choice.
“Oh, believe me. We’re working on both. I’m afraid, having shown our advantage, pulling all Installs from the fronts isn’t an option, however. And the expense that went into the existing Installs would be lost if their nanites can’t be also replaced in situ by that new, non-infectious line.” Lemna smiled, thin and sharp. “Which we still haven’t managed to produce, yet.”
Genevieve wondered if the burst of probably classified information was supposed to rock her back, but she found it only helped her confidence. The woman was listening, not dismissing her. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted that slightly scary attention on her, but it was better than being brushed aside in a prelude to finding a way to make her system fail so she was no longer inconvenient either.
“Put the recovering Infecteds to work on the problem, then,” Genevieve said. The solution unfolded in her mind even as she spoke, meaning it could have obvious holes somewhere, but she judged it worth the risk to voice it immediately while she still had Lemna’s ear. “I was a scientist, before. Some of them won’t be, but if you can’t let them go, why not have them work on something? They’ll—we’ll—be motivated, I can assure you of that. When you solve this problem, you get to go home and pick up your life? Who wouldn’t throw themselves into that? And I’d bet you’d get a hell of a lot of takers from the retired soldiers here as well.”
“And why would you do any better than our scientists, all of them experts in the field?” Lemna countered smoothly.
Genevieve took her rising nerves and sent them down to clench her hands, leaving her voice steady and confident. “How long have your experts been working on this? At least a decade, even if you ignored the problem until the first-gens finished their tours. Much longer if you started when the first wash-outs couldn’t be fixed. Your particular brand of expertise isn’t working. You need new perspectives, new approaches. And how many of those experts are Installs themselves? I’d expect not many, given how intimately they know the risks. That’s the ultimate perspective, the one from inside.”
