Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  He got up from the couch, mind racing, devising ways to blow stupid little nothings into her ear.

  §

  Stein sat in the treatment room, watching as Dr. Berg methodically probed the healing wrap on her arm. He hadn’t said anything other than pleasantries since she had arrived; either he hated multi–tasking or was still working up the nerve to say what he had found out about her parents. She had to admit that he did look tired. The hospital has gotten a lot busier in the past week. Stun weapons perhaps, but a lot of people had still taken some pretty nasty spills during the last round of fighting.

  Apparently satisfied with her arm, or just done with the pretense of examining it, Berg sat down on the examination table, facing her. “So?” she asked.

  “You’ve got a data gene.”

  She took that in stride, having lots of practice at absorbing the insane bullshit which seemed to be regularly hurled in her direction. “Okay.”

  “Do you know what that is?” Berg asked, surprised.

  “I was waiting for you to tell me what it is, because I know you’re very eager to do that.”

  Berg recoiled a bit. He pursed his lips, then continued, “A data gene is information artificially programmed into the non–coding sections of the DNA.”

  She tried to force the glazed look off her face. “Okay,” she said, rotating her fingers in a circular motion, directing him to continue.

  “You see DNA’s full of information, but only a fraction of it appears to have any kind of useful effect on how an organism behaves. So, a data gene overwrites some of this hopefully useless DNA.”

  “Hopefully useless?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. Just because we don’t know it’s useful doesn’t mean it isn’t. There’s still kind of a lot of things we don’t know about that stuff. If you overwrite it, it’s hard to say what the effect could be. It could be nothing or, it could be instant centaur. Real mad science stuff. Completely illegal.”

  “Like a genetic tattoo?”

  “Oh, yeah. Your eye thing.” Berg nodded, his back straightening. He seemed to be livening up from the conversation. “Yeah, you definitely have that, too. It showed up like a crater in your scan. But the data gene was more subtle.”

  She sat down in the chair opposite the table. She was suddenly tired of it all. Any other time in her life and it would have been a different story, but now? She was out of damns to give. If someone wanted to spray graffiti all over her DNA, fucking let them. “What does it say? A pep talk from my folks? ‘You can be anything you want to be! Reach for the stars, kiddo!’ ”

  Berg frowned. “Don’t know yet. The scanner’s only detected the presence of artificially coded information, not been able to pick it out yet. It tells me it has to find the table of contents first. Whatever that means.”

  “How long’s that going to take?”

  “Don’t know. The progress meter on the terminal reads fourteen percent. So eighty–six more percent, I guess.”

  She rolled her eyes and looked away. She didn’t care. Didn’t want to care. She stood up and smiled wanly at the doctor. “Thanks, Doc. When that meter gets up into the triple digits, let me know if anything interesting pops out.” She left the room abruptly, leaving the doctor before he could say something else useless.

  She had barely left the room when her terminal buzzed, which she responded to with an incredible stream of obscenities. Frightened and dirty looks chased her down the hall as she reluctantly dug the terminal out of her webbing. Another, briefer set of obscenities when she saw the message was from Abdolo Poland.

  I’ve just thought of something incredibly stupid. Where are you?

  Previously

  Harold tapped the door controls, his breath catching at the slight delay before the door slid open. It always took about half a second, right? Not a quarter of a second? It felt like it took a bit longer this time.

  He had some right to be in the naval medical bay, just not a lot. Normally, he would only remotely send his programs to the tinkering engine, which would automatically handle fabricating and imprinting the nanobots. Delivering the completed capsules to the treatment annex could be accomplished by someone with far less education than Harold, which meant that normally, he would never have to come anywhere near here.

  Which was why he had spent the last month laying the groundwork, a carefully balanced array of lies and excuses, to explain why he had to be there at that specific moment. Repeated conversations with Dr. Kinison about treatment efficiencies. Raising concerns about triage decisions. Very public musing about methods of increasing the treatment rates. This was all spectacularly rude of him, grossly overstepping his bounds into Dr. Kinison’s domain. He was pretty sure if he kept it up for much longer he would provoke a fistfight. But it was at least plausible for him to be interested, and that was all he needed. A plausible excuse to visit the tinkering engine and examine its statistics packages. He would claim he was here investigating whether the engine was capable of handling a specific change in treatment methodology and what effect that would have on their treatment rates. He had even spent weeks coming up with this new, actually quite clever, change in treatment methodology, lest anyone ask to see it.

  He turned on the lights, finding the room empty, as well it should be at this time of the morning. That had been the hardest part, actually, cultivating a reputation as an early riser after years of being the exact opposite. He yawned fiercely and walked to the other side of the room, to the unmarked door there.

  This door slid open in the same identically slow way the first door had, which meant that he was paranoid and that everything was fine, unless it meant the exact opposite. He stepped inside, allowing the door to close behind him, sealing him inside with the scariest machine on the ship.

  In spite of its terrifying capabilities, the gene tinkerer itself was pretty harmless looking. A large transparent sphere comprised the business end of it, filled with the carefully controlled population of nanobots. At the base of the sphere, barely visible in the gray haze of the nanobot cultures, sat the programming apparatus. Collected and compiled nanobot populations were then packaged into capsules somewhere below there, before dropping out of a little slot in the base of the machine. Harold sidled up to the small terminal mounted on to the side of the unit and turned it on.

  He covered his excuses first, instructing the unit to send a package of statistical data to his terminal. That done, he looked over his shoulder in what he would later decide was the most suspicious way possible, then turned back to the terminal. He flexed his fingers, took a deep breath, and triggered the engine into its low level command mode. Much harder to use but necessary for what he needed to do next. There were no excuses for this, and he began quickly tapping commands into the terminal, desperate to get it over with quickly.

  GT–20298 COMMAND? ENTER HELP FOR HELP.

  >upload –i

  UPLOADING NEW COMMAND KERNEL. WARNING! THIS MAY CAUSE YOUR GT–20298 TO CEASE FUNCTIONING. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE? (Y/N)

  >y

  SELECT .TINK FILE

  >splitplot.tink

  splitplot.tink NOT FOUND. SCANNING NEARBY DEVICES…. splitplot.tink FOUND!

  ANALYIZING..........INCOMPLETE KERNEL DETECTED. CONTINUE IN PATCH ONLY MODE?

  >y

  BEGINNING PATCH PROCEDURE

  PATCHING................COMPLETE!

  >log

  LOGGING SUBSYSTEM. ENTER HELP FOR HELP.

  >ll –kernel

  197836 U –p splitplot.tink 508 10/28/52 hstein

  122465 U –p shp8patch.tink 1723 18/10/49 lkinison

  103784 U –p shp7patch.tink 2128 4/2/48 lkinison

  79844 U –p sheep6.tink 1343 1/3/46 lkinison

  56733 U –n baseline–1–45–23.tink 1010 23/7/43 lkinison

  30709 U –p s5.tink 1103 9/5/42 lkinison

  ^z ^z

  >rl –l 197836

  DELETED

  >ll –kernel

  122465 U –p s
hp8patch.tink 1723 18/10/49 lkinison

  103784 U –p shp7patch.tink 1723 4/2/48 lkinison

  79844 U –p sheep6.tink 1723 1/3/46 lkinison

  56733 U –n baseline–1–45–23.tink 1723 23/7/43 lkinison

  ^z ^z

  >exit

  Harold smiled and allowed himself another suspicious look over the shoulder. Still no one there to ask what the heck he was doing. Back in the upper–level menus, he downloaded a final batch of statistical data, looked at it while making thoughtful noises, then pushed himself away from the terminal. He blinked, realizing he had almost forgotten something, and then deleted splitplot.tink from his terminal, lest he get intercepted while walking out.

  Splitplot.tink did two things. The first was the hardest, at least technically, programming the logic necessary to safely insert a data gene into any given patient who got tinkered. This data gene contained all the text that Kevin had sent him, along with a brief note authored by Harold, explaining to any readers what the hell this information was doing inside them.

  The second thing splitplot.tink did was substantially easier but took him a lot longer to figure out: how to prompt his subjects to actually find the data gene he had embedded. The solution to that came to him while flipping through his genetic cookbook one evening. Towards the back, he stumbled upon a section discussing genetic birthmarks, which immediately sparked his imagination. Planting a message or a clue as a genetic birthmark might work — a short hint that something funny was going on inside their DNA. Something simple, but enough to prompt a visit to the doctor and a deep genetic scan. It wouldn’t even need a doctor; really, an interested hobbyist with a medical terminal could do it just as well.

  But a birthmark would be incredibly and immediately visible. His message would be discovered within days of the first baby coming out of the womb. Too soon, too isolated. Too much chance the message would be read by the wrong person. And too easy to trace back to him. Ideally, he wanted to set a time delay so his message could be planted within more people before it was found. What he needed was an information time bomb, something that wouldn’t go off for years, but when it did, by the hundreds.

  His eureka moment came when he read about the retinas. The same genetic birthmarking procedure could be performed on retinas, where a message would only be seen by the subject. It was even possible to make them nearly invisible, to only fluoresce under certain lighting conditions, an occasionally necessary step to prevent the mild insanity which seemed to accompany retinal tattoos.

  He spent a long while debating what message to write, strongly considering ‘README’ and ‘LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU,’ before finally settling on ‘DATA GENE.’ That would be enough to prompt someone to do a bit of research — a simple search for ‘data gene”‘ would be enough — which would lead to a scanned genome and, finally, the data gene itself. And with a rare, but not too rare, lighting condition to serve as the trigger, that would take years to happen.

  Leaving the naval medical bay, he couldn’t help but marvel at how easy it had been. This elation almost immediately triggered a wave of self–doubt, and panic, convinced he had forgotten something. As he walked back to his office through the still slumbering Argos, he replayed everything that had happened, trying to figure out what he had overlooked.

  But there was nothing.

  It was done.

  Chapter 9: Breakthrough

  The security van fishtailed around the corner, its rear–end sliding lazily into the wall on the far side of the street. The van regained traction, slammed into the opposite wall, bounced off of that, and continued in this way for another half block before it finally straightened out and bore down on the Africa–1 barricade.

  The officers at the barricade, having had some experience with reckless van attacks, reacted smoothly. The commanding officer ordered his men to back away from the center of the street, out of the van’s path. This was only a precaution — the van would certainly bounce off this time, the barricade in its path having been immensely reinforced since its last time through.

  Five seconds later, the van did not bounce off the barricade, instead opting to violently explode. Barricade and van parts rained down on the street. Moving away from the impact area ended up saving the security team’s lives, though it was safe to say that their day was completely ruined.

  “Go!” Linze shouted, leading her team out of its hiding spot two blocks shy of the barricade. Down the sides of Africa, running towards the smoking crater, clatter and shouts behind them as the bulk of the Loyalist army set into motion. They reached the remnants of the barricade without encountering any return fire and picked their way through the wreckage. The barricade was completely gone, replaced by an enormous hole with the smoking hulk of a van in it. Stepping carefully around the van, Linze snap–fired at anything that moved, picking off the blinking and helpless security officers writhing on the streets. “Hey, co–workers. Remember me?”

  Leaving the smoking hulk of the barricade, her team continued down Africa. At 8th, a security officer blundered around the corner at a run, only to be picked off in a scattered flurry of shots. Linze stepped into a hairdresser’s studio on the corner of the intersection and methodically blew out each window, before ducking down behind the counter inside. From here, she could see down streets to the south and west and began shooting at the disorganized security officers unlucky enough to approach from those directions. Outside, the rest of her unit took up similar positions around the intersection, while the second wave of Loyalists leapfrogged them. This group didn’t do as well, many of them seeming to slip and fall on something on the ground. Most of the rest were knocked down by fire as they crossed the intersection, the security forces having regrouped a bit by that point. The attack stalled, as the still conscious members of the second wave sought cover in not terribly useful locations, the middle of the street being one popular choice.

  “Keep moving!” Linze yelled out of the window. Their beachhead had to get a lot bigger, down to 6th, at least. And that had to happen soon, before the bulk of the security reinforcements showed up. Frustrated, she squeezed off a pair of useless shots at silhouettes well out of range. More gunfire, this time from the north, as the braver and dumber third and fourth waves began to arrive, taking a ridiculous amount of abuse, but overwhelming the remaining security forces with numbers alone. At that point, the trickle became a flood, a wave of hooting and hollering Loyalist soldiers surging past Linze’s position and spreading out into the neighboring streets. Linze left her perch, moving out to the street, where she began serving as a traffic cop, directing the arriving help to where it would do the most good.

  Ten minutes later, when the security forces eventually attempted a counterattack, they were easily beaten back by the overwhelming, if slightly uncoordinated, mass of Loyalist guns that had recently arrived. The lines on the map had been redrawn.

  §

  Stein hurried to keep pace behind the assault team as they picked their way through the crowded streets, filled with bored Loyalist troops who couldn’t figure out where the fight was. The assault team was a little more organized than that, the best that Kinsella supposedly had, though Stein hadn’t asked what qualifications earned them that praise. Capable of dressing themselves? Not currently doing needle–drugs?

  “Ahh man, my van!” Bruce said as they crossed the wreckage of the former barricade.

  “We’ll get you another one,” she said.

  “But I liked that one.”

  They were playing the most critical part in the night’s exercise and had been held in reserve, waiting for Kinsella’s maniacs to establish a beachhead. It had taken surprisingly little effort to convince Kinsella to attempt her plan; the look on his face when she had told him suggested he had been expecting her to come up with something like this anyways. The other surprise had been her introduction to the commanding officer of Kinsella’s maniacs, her old friend Sergeant Hogg.

  “Don’t say I told you so,” he had said.

>   “Fine,” she had replied. “So long as we’re both thinking it.”

  As they pushed deeper into the aft, Stein stopped at one of the elevators, trying its controls, an unfriendly squelching sound its only response. Helot had already locked it out to prevent any maniacs from accessing the upper–decks. That would have been too easy. She hurried to catch up with the rest of the team. They weren’t really banking on using the elevators anyways, having another route in mind.

  They were forced to slow down as they pushed further south, the crowd of morons growing denser. Hogg’s mob outnumbered the security forces five to one now, but he had labored to explain why that was less impressive than it sounded at every opportunity he had had over the past month. Because his soldiers “were idiots” who “sucked” seemed to be the general problem.

  “Why are we stopped here?” Croutl shouted, somewhere ahead of her. He was the leader of the assault team and part of Hogg’s original security unit. During their introductions, Bruce had pantomimed shooting him in the crotch. Relations had been strained ever since.

  Stein finally caught up to Croutl and the rest of the team, who had piled into the back of crowd that was unwilling to move any further into the intersection. “Why’d everyone stop?” Croutl yelled again.

  “They keep shooting at us!” someone complained.

  “Well, shoot back!”

  “It’s really hard!”

  Croutl backed away from the mob and gathered the team together a short distance away. “This place? You’re sure it’s just over there?” he asked Bruce, pointing over the crowd’s head, across the intersection to a corner apartment.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Bruce said.

  “Well, it looks like the dipshits stopped short of where they were supposed to. And if the dozen dumb bastards napping in the middle of the street are any indication, there’s a lot of angry security that way who are shooting anyone who steps out of cover.”