Digital Chimera

by J N Chaney

  I was sure it couldn’t get out of the bioprinting tank, but even so, I stepped into a position where I could open fire immediately if I had to. The whole situation was making me nervous. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it, but I had never trusted anyone less than Sasha Ivanovich. I could only hope Andrea felt the same way.

  “Okay, Dr. Ivanovich.” Her voice was calm. “I’m going to get you out of here, but first I need to know what happened out there in that lab.”

  The smile faded out from Ivanovich’s face. He shook his head and sighed. “Tragic business. Some of the finest researchers I’ve ever worked with.”

  She glanced back in the direction we had come from. With both doors open, you could still see the empty eyes of one of the corpses staring in at us.

  “Who did it, and why? And how did you survive?”

  “Ares Terrestrial must know I was planning to defect.” His eyes flashed angrily. “You have a leak, and a lot of good people died because of it!”

  Andrea was unflustered. “Are you saying you personally saw Ares Terrestrial staff carrying out these murders?”

  “I was in here working before anyone else this morning, but I saw corporate security officers come in the lab on that monitor there.”

  He pointed to a nearby monitor, which showed a split-screen image of each room in the lab. He must have seen us come in, and he must have watched us trying to figure out where he was.

  “Security lined everyone up in the clean room, made them lie face-down on the floor, then executed them one by one. But they didn’t know about the Nursery.”

  There was that little smile again. The man seemed genuinely angry about the deaths of his fellow researchers, but he also seemed pleased that he had not been forced to share their fate.

  Andrea frowned. “You’re saying the company didn’t know about this lab at all?”

  That seemed beyond unlikely, but it would also undermine his bargaining position considerably if it turned out to be true. After all, his only value to us as an informant was his ability to testify about the company’s wrongdoing.

  “No, no.” Sasha frowned, holding up both his hands. “They knew, of course they knew. But it was a secret lab, yes? You can see this.” He gestured vaguely at the tanks, which certainly looked like the sort of thing you would want to keep secret. “Need to know, I believe you call it. Well, the security guards didn’t need to know.”

  He was having trouble holding in the laughter. As ghoulish as this was considering the twelve dead bodies, I had to admit to myself that it was perversely funny. Send a death squad down to kill everyone in the lab, but don’t tell them about the secret room. Why? Well, it’s a secret, isn’t it? Sasha’s survival was the punch line for a joke about corporate incompetence.

  “Weren’t you worried they’d come back?” she asked. “I mean, someone had to figure it out at some point, right?”

  “I’ve already changed the pass-code.” He pointed to the door. “They’d never get in here.”

  “Dr. Ivanovich, the door was unlocked.”

  His eyes got huge as he realized that anyone could have come in at any time. He rushed over to the door to examine the keycode terminal then whistled quietly. “I sometimes leave it unlocked when I’m waiting for people. I must have forgotten.”

  Andrea shook her head. “You got lucky today, Doctor.”

  He didn’t know how true that was. Hours ago, I was standing a few inches behind him grasping a splinter gun loaded with nanite poison.

  “I truly did.” He shrugged. “I just assumed you used one of those universal keys or whatever they are. You’re a spy, right? It’s a good thing the guards didn’t know about the Nursery, or…”

  I decloaked suddenly, causing our informant to jump like a spooked horse. He stared at me in a panic for a moment and then pointed. “You! The asshole from the train station!”

  “What do you mean by the Nursery? What is this?”

  Andrea threw me an exasperated look and sent me a text message.

  You just broke protocol!

  I didn’t answer her. She might be pissed, but she wasn’t stopping me from asking my question, so I kept going.

  Sasha shook his head then said, “He’s the asshole from the train station…”

  I could see my new nickname becoming The Asshole from the Train Station all too easily, especially since Andrea wasn’t too happy with me right now. Luckily, she intervened to get the conversation back on track. “We’ve been planning this extraction for days now, doctor. My colleague asked you a question.”

  He looked at her blankly, then back at me. Did he suspect?

  “The Nursery,” Andrea repeated.

  Sasha blinked. “Yes. The Nursery, because it’s where we grow all our little friends here. It’s just a joke really.”

  “A joke?” asked Andrea, her face darkening.

  “Okay, a dark joke. A joke in poor taste. But it’s essential work, believe me. The research here requires live test subjects, but sourcing an animal from Earth is prohibitively expensive.” He shrugged again. “So… we clone our own.”

  He said it casually, a throwaway comment, but it was a major admission.

  I nodded. “If the Sol Federation knew Ares Terrestrial was performing illegal cloning, it would lead to more sanctions East Hellas can’t afford. They must be really afraid of those sanctions to kill the whole team, though.”

  Cybernetic augmentation research on humans was banned by law everywhere, but animal research wasn't. Still, cloning was illegal outside of very specific circumstances, so what Ivanovich had just said was already an admission of a crime.

  “I suppose they must be.” He nodded thoughtfully, apparently pondering the sheer wickedness of his corporate masters. I couldn’t figure out what this guy’s deal was. One moment he was indignant about our hypothetical security leak or mournful about all his murdered colleagues. The next moment he was chuckling to himself about his own cleverness and the stupidity of the company bureaucrats. A few seconds more, and he was contemplating the evil of which human beings are sadly capable. He was like a gallery of every human emotion, and which one you saw depended on whatever you had just said to him.

  Andrea took a deep breath. “Let’s get back on track here. You say the corporate security guards didn’t know anything about this room. Who did?”

  He gestured vaguely. “Company men. Bigwigs. No one here.”

  “Let me get this straight. No one at this facility knew about the existence of this room?”

  “That is correct. It’s also what I just said a moment ago. No one knew except my team here.”

  “What about your own bodyguards?”

  He scoffed. “My bodyguards? Their job is to get me to work and back safely. They don’t come in here.”

  “Okay. Next question, Doctor…”

  “Don’t call me Doctor. Call me Sasha.”

  Andrea glanced at me and I gave her a wink. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who liked to use first names.

  “Okay, Sasha…”

  It felt weird, hearing her speak in familiar terms to someone I’d been planning to kill less than twenty-four hours ago.

  Andrea continued. “My second question is this. Is there another way out of here?”

  This one seemed to delight Ivanovich. “Another way out of here? Oh, that’s wonderful! A secret room, with a secret passage out of the secret room! You spies are delightful!”

  “So, there’s another way out?”

  “No. There’s no other way out. Silly Sasha Ivanovich. He built a secret room, but he forgot to include a secret underground passage.”

  “There’s no need to refer to yourself in the third person,” I said sternly. If I wasn’t going to kill him, I certainly wasn’t going to let him develop delusions of grandeur either.

  “Alright then,” he replied. “But no, there’s no other way out.”

  “Okay,” Andrea said as she checked her rifle. Satisfied, she slung it across her back, then she ch
ecked her sidearm to make sure it had a magazine in it and a round chambered. I did the same, figuring that if Andrea was anticipating a fight, then I should probably do the same.

  “Are you two getting ready to go to war?” asked Sasha. He seemed a bit anxious.

  “It’s a standard precaution,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Andrea looked at Ivanovich. “Considering all those bodies, I think we ought to be ready for anything. Don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. He just gave her that weird smile of his.

  She turned to me. “We’re going out the way we came in. We’ll go cloaked, so unless they’re looking closely, the only thing they’ll see is this guy. You’re on point. If there’s anything suspicious, just start shooting and we’ll make a fight out of it. Clear?”

  An order to open fire the moment anything unusual happens is not the sort of thing you receive every day. It was almost like something had spooked her, like she had a feeling that things were about to go wrong. In the moment, I just thought she was being paranoid. Sure, there was a big pile of bodies between us and the door, but I’d seen mountains of bodies on Venus. How hard could it be to get one creepy scientist out of East Hellas?

  4

  Sasha had lapsed into a mood I couldn’t really describe. Glum, perhaps. Andrea briefed me on our exit strategy.

  “We’re not going to use our own scramblers; I want to be able to see who’s near us. But it’s going to be slow going at first. The jamming system in this lab will keep Thomas from reaching us, and it will keep us from knowing who might be out there. So, we’re going to move slowly until we get a signal back. Check the scans before you step out, then clear every room, even if the scans didn’t show anything. Got it?”

  “Got it, boss.”

  “Go with Cap, or Chief. I like those better.”

  “Got it, Chief.”

  Sasha chuckled. “Ares would make me take a training course for this sort of behavior.”

  “What sort of behavior?” asked Andrea. He didn’t elaborate, but it seemed like he interpreted our banter as a form of flirting. I wouldn’t say it was, but at best it was the innocent kind. Our sniper, Raven, liked to banter with me too, though Raven could turn that sort of thing on and off like a switch. With Andrea, I wasn’t sure she could help it if she wanted to. Now that she was my boss, she was supposed to be enforcing a tighter standard of behavior, but it just didn’t seem to take.

  “Here we go.” Andrea dropped out of sight, and I followed suit.

  Ivanovich seemed disconcerted. “How am I supposed to follow you?”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and pulled him more or less gently into place. Andrea must have put her hand on his back and started pushing him along, because he was soon grumbling about it. “Pulled by a ghost, pushed by a ghost… how wonderful…”

  Following Andrea’s instructions, I checked the lab’s monitors before cautiously edging out back into the room with all the bodies. She didn’t close the doors behind us, maybe because she was no happier than I was about the idea of leaving those creatures in their tanks. Despite the fact that we’d found him talking to one of the things like a favorite pet, Sasha didn’t seem concerned at all about leaving them behind. The thought of them starving to death in a secret room was not a happy one, and I would have liked to see them all destroyed humanely. I didn’t take any pleasure in killing, even a man as twisted and murderous as August Marcenn, but I felt I would have been more comfortable with our original mission than with this new one. In saving the life of Sasha Ivanovich, what else were we enabling? For a moment, I thought It might be better for the solar system if he just didn’t make it.

  Because we were using active camouflage, anyone we ran into would see only Sasha unless they were unusually observant. That wouldn’t necessarily make me any safer, though. If they were under orders to kill Ivanovich, they’d try to shoot him and hit me instead. The only thing I could do was shoot them first, which was probably the reason for Andrea’s unusual shoot-on-suspicion order.

  I stepped cautiously around the bodies on the floor, with Sasha muttering the whole time.

  “Poor Jensen. He was a good man, a good scientist. And oh, there, that’s Rebecca. Such a kind woman. But what is Maximilien doing there? He should never have been there. Poor Sasha, left all alone…”

  Poor Sasha, indeed.

  The protocol for clearing a room is different when you’re doing an exfiltration. Normally the first person through the door would go either right or left along one wall, getting out of the kill box in front of the open door as rapidly as possible. The second person would then follow, moving along the other wall, so if I went right then Andrea would go left. In a situation like ours, that would just result in Sasha taking the full brunt of any ambush, so the tactics had to be adjusted accordingly.

  Relying on the camo to keep me from being seen, I walked straight through each door we passed and into the open space in the middle of the room. As I did, I rapidly turned from left to right and back, visually scanning the room for any potential threats.

  As we proceeded cautiously into the false lab, it occurred to me that they could have done a much better job of making the room believable. If there had just been a few dirty coffee cups or family holos lying around, we might never have kept looking for the missing researcher.

  I was so keyed up as we crossed the room that I don’t know how I would have actually reacted if we had run into anyone. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the sight of all those staring, lifeless faces of people executed in cold blood by their own employers. Maybe the image of those creatures in the bioprinting tanks, man-made monsters as pitiful as they were horrifying. Maybe it was just the unsettling, muttering man walking behind me.

  We reached the door leading back into the hall. I opened it and stuck my head out, looking both ways to make sure we weren’t about to run into anyone. Sasha kept walking right into me, so I had to reach one hand back and hold him in place. He sighed in irritation until I stepped forward and let him go.

  As we left the lab, my dataspike automatically reestablished a connection to Thomas and uploaded the facial topography file I had tried to send him before. With our own scramblers deactivated, backscatter scans came back online. I could suddenly see where all the people were, marked on my schematic as glowing dots.

  I sent Andrea a message.

  Avoid contact?

  If she said yes, I would try to avoid being seen at all. This wouldn’t always be possible, because most of the doors were locked on either side of us. However, it might keep us from having to kill too many people just to get out of this facility. Andrea saw it differently.

  Priority is speed. Red alert if you see security.

  Very well, then. Now that I could see whether anyone was ahead of us or not, I started moving much more rapidly. Sasha seemed to understand the need for speed, because he more or less kept up. The corridors were largely empty anyway, and most of the people in the facility seemed to be concentrated in one room.

  The room was marked on the schematics as a cafeteria, but my guess was that it doubled as a safe room in the event of an emergency. As far as I could tell, the demonstrators outside had not succeeded in breaching the facility. Most likely, they had never even tried, though it’s hard to say what might have happened if those drones hadn’t been released on them.

  In my experience, corrupt authorities typically fear the worst because they secretly believe the people they rule would be perfectly justified in killing them all. That paranoia leads them to do things that then actualize their fears. By the time their people actually get serious about a revolution, there’s so much hatred built up that things end up worse than they would have been if those in charge hadn’t been so paranoid in the first place.

  I sent Andrea a message, which unfortunately came out a little bit garbled. I think there’s less secure for me this time.

  Unfortunately, it’s not easy to articulate clearly enough when subvocalizing, and it�
��s much harder when you’re on the move and paying attention to other things. The imperfections of dataspike texting were a frequent source of humor for us, but Andrea tried to keep her humor on lockdown when we were on a mission, even if she didn’t always succeed.

  Less sugar in tea?

  I almost laughed to myself but managed to keep it under control.

  Can confirm.

  I knew my answer would irritate her a little, but she wouldn’t be able to say anything. I could always claim I’d only been responding to what I knew she meant to say.

  We passed a person for the first time, a lab tech by the look of her, jogging down the hallway with an anxious expression. When she saw Ivanovich, she stopped for a moment and stared at him.

  “Hello, Tanya,” he said, in a voice I would describe as either oily or seductive. I could well believe he was often forced to take extra training courses.

  Tanya gulped. “They’re calling everyone to lock down. Things are crazy out there. You should come with me!”

  “In time, my dear. I have something urgent to complete before then.”

  “Oh…well, okay then.”

  She scurried off, and Sasha chuckled to himself. We got moving again, and another message came through from Andrea, this time mercifully ungarbled.

  Where were we?

  Security, I replied. It seems lighter. I haven’t even seen a StateSec officer, and the people up ahead of us aren’t in any kind of tacky ghoul formation.

  She replied with Tactical formation?

  Yes. Is anything happening to divert StateSec?

  I’ll ask Thomas. Hold on.

  She switched channels while I led us past a small knot of researchers on their way to the safety of the cafeteria. None of them spoke to Sasha, or even looked at him. They were all too wrapped up in their own thoughts and fears.

  We finally passed a lone StateSec officer. I went on high alert, fully expecting the man to open fire as soon as he saw Sasha Ivanovich. If he had raised his weapon, I would have shot him through the neck before he even had the chance to pull the trigger. He just waved Sasha back.