The Mother Code

by Carole Stivers

  “Uh?” she murmured.

  James almost cried out as she lifted her head to look at him. “Sara,” he whispered. “Are you okay?”

  “James?”

  “Oh, Sara . . . !”

  “Yes. I’m fine. I think.” She sat up slowly, her eyes glazed, her thin fingers carefully adjusting her loose nightgown. She cleared her throat, a sound that made him wince.

  “You took the medication, right?”

  “The inhaler? Yes, but—”

  He held his ear to her back, listened. There was only a slight rattle, higher up in the chest. “It seems to be working . . .” Sitting down next to her on the side of the bed, James ignored Sara’s puzzled look. “Sara, I know you probably don’t feel up to it. But we need to get you to the lab.”

  “The lab?”

  “Have you listened to the news today?”

  Sara’s eyes were glassy, red rimmed. “No . . . I have been . . . so tired.”

  James swallowed. “Things have happened. I’ll explain later. But we’ll both be better off at the lab. The air in the building is filtered . . .” He stopped himself. First things first. “I’ll tell you everything, I promise. I just need you to trust me right now.”

  He helped her get dressed. His hand cupping her elbow, he escorted her outside to the car. As they crossed the Omega Bridge toward the lab’s north entrance gate, he turned to look at her in the light from the dash. Her eyes were closed, her skin sallow, her capable hands lying limp in her lap. He prayed that her doses had started in time.

  But he was worried about something else too—Blevins. He hadn’t been able to reach Kendra on her mobile. When he’d finally called the lab’s general line, Mac had picked up and handed the phone straight to the general. Blevins had been furious, accusatory, jabbering things that made no sense. But when Mac had come back on the line, he’d tried to explain. “He suspected you, James,” Mac had said. “He thought it was you who tipped off the Russians.”

  James supposed it all made sense now—the animosity, the scrutiny that he’d always undergone. Blevins and his ilk were trained to fight terrorism. His uncle had been a terrorist. But he himself had never known—his father had carried that secret almost to the grave.

  He shook his head. He shouldn’t have left Los Alamos without notifying someone of his whereabouts. And now, the sight of Sara wasn’t going to make things any easier.

  The heavy entrance gate barred passage, the post abandoned. Again, he keyed in Kendra’s number.

  “James?” This time, Kendra answered. Her tone was anxious but at the same time relieved.

  “Yes. I’m at the north gate. Can you open it?”

  “Will do.” The arm of the gate hefted slowly upward. As the car sped down Pajarito Road, its headlamps cutting a path through the gathering dark, it could have been any evening in late May, the smell of pine fresh in the air. But the air was poisonous now, James reminded himself, or soon to become so—a death sentence to anyone not on the protocol. They passed the rear of the XO-Bot building, then veered right down a small side road, then right again, pulling up in the empty front lot.

  Behind the double doors of the airlock at the front of the building, Kendra was waiting in the dim interior of the lobby. Paul MacDonald, holding something long and thin in one hand, was standing next to her. James helped Sara from the car, and together they went inside.

  “Hi, Kendra,” James said. But Kendra only stared at them, her eyes wide. “Kendra, I know this is unexpected . . .”

  Groggy, her eyelids at half-mast, Sara offered them a wan smile. “Mac,” she said. “Kendra . . . How are the Mothers doing?”

  As Mac lowered his arm, James took in the steely glimmer of the man’s service rifle. “Well,” Mac said, putting his weapon hastily aside. “This is interesting.”

  PART TWO

  22

  FEBRUARY 2054

  RICK AWOKE AS a sliver of early-morning sunlight wedged in through the transport window. He rolled over on his back, stretching his truncated leg, enjoying for just a moment the feel of the soft, clean blanket beneath him. He pushed himself up to peer out the window at the desolate terrain, a jumble of upheaved rocks cut through with a deep, dry canyon.

  The world he’d once known, it seemed, had vanished. Broadcast booths went unmanned. Phone and radio calls went unanswered. Websites went dead as power waned. Nighttime satellite photos, images of once busy cities and thoroughfares, slowly went dark. The brass back in Washington and their enemies abroad, the computer programmers and those who hacked them, those who launched deadly missiles and the fighters who intercepted them—were all gone. He imagined autocabs waiting beside empty curbs, worker bots constructing and packaging appliances for now-vacant homes, inspection bots waiting for travelers who would never arrive. By now, nine months past the Epidemic, even those hardworking machines must have gone silent.

  He sat up to cough into the crook of his arm. Not too bad. Better. Over the past months, he’d had to make peace with his new limitations. The antidote wasn’t perfect—according to Rudy Garza, it couldn’t undo the damage done prior to the time he’d begun taking it; a prior exposure to IC-NAN, perhaps during one of his many trips to California, might have put him at risk. In any event, for reasons yet to be explained, it seemed he was more susceptible to attack than the others; he’d have to work harder to protect himself from the noxious air of his once friendly planet.

  To that end, he’d commandeered one of the two aerial transports previously housed at Los Alamos—he had Mac to thank for keeping this one in good working order, and for upgrading its air filtration system. It was his home now, serving both as a mobile unit capable of rapid air travel and as a stationary ground base. And outside his little bubble, he wore a face mask to block out whatever he could of the infected archaebacteria and their poisonous NANs.

  He didn’t have the luxury of sheltering within the confines of the XO-Bot building with the other Los Alamos survivors, watching and waiting as the world outside came to an end. He had a mission—one of his own making. He was intent on undoing the terrible mistake he’d made—the preemptive release of the Gen5 bots into the desert wilderness. He needed to find the Mothers. He needed to bring them back home.

  He’d thought that finding them would be easy—Kendra could just call them, and he would deal with their defensive capabilities as need be. But Kendra had been wrong about the homing sensors. “I wasn’t thinking straight,” she said. “They do have sensors, but when we selected Code Black, the sensing mechanism was deactivated . . . I assume the design team wanted to avoid an enemy calling the bots in.”

  And so he’d been left to comb the vast desert, searching for the Mothers he’d sent away. In all these months, he’d only been successful in locating three crashed bots, parts strewn across the desert floor like so much trash, their incubators obliterated. None of them had been Rho-Z. But every one of them was a reminder of his own lack of foresight, his own failure in the face of pressure.

  He’d never commanded troops in the field, but he’d heard the stories: the poor decisions made under fire, the remorse, the never-ending guilt. Now these were his to bear. Everything he’d done on that fateful day when he’d launched the Mothers had been based on a fantasy created in his own addled mind, one forged in the heat of the moment—the fantasy that James Said was a terrorist.

  Of course there had been other considerations, he told himself. He’d had no idea what the hackers had discovered about the Gen5s, no idea what real threats might have existed. Certainly, it seemed that Rose had sensed danger. Why else would she have mentioned Code Black? No—Said or no Said, Rick would have made the same decision. Still, a postmortem of what had happened that day clearly demonstrated that his decisions had been flawed. Los Alamos had never been attacked. As the few survivors of the New Dawn team had waited with dread, nothing at all had happened to the XO-Bot lab.

 
He had yet to apologize to the doctor—though upon Said’s return to Los Alamos, Sara Khoti on his arm, the others had been quick to forgive his absence. Now James and Sara were both part of the team. And Rick was the one who needed to regain everyone’s trust.

  From the window, he spotted the smoke of a campfire. At least he wasn’t alone out here. Ever since William Susquetewa had rescued him from beside the road in Kayenta and taken him to the Hopi mesas, the two had been constant companions. The Hopi had suffered severe casualties of their own, leaving William, his brother, Edison—a doctor trained in Phoenix—and their mother, Talasi, among the mere twenty or so Hopi survivors still living on the mesas. But Rose had been right in her hope that some populations might naturally be immune to IC-NAN. Miraculously, these few had survived, free to breathe the air.

  For William, their quest had become a search for the sister he’d lost—Nova, a woman whom the Hopi believed now lived on as one of their “Silver Spirits.” The only proof that William had needed was his sister’s necklace and Rick’s reassurance that Nova had indeed been an unknowing participant in the program that created the Mothers.

  Talasi, the woman whom everyone referred to as “Grandmother,” took it one step further. The Mothers were all sacred, all worthy of being watched over. For her, the Gen5 bots were the embodiment of her husband’s promise—armor-clad goddesses who would one day return to the mesas, heralding the rebirth of humankind. Rick didn’t know if he believed this. But he wanted to.

  He strapped on his prosthesis, wincing at the unwelcome pain. He wondered if the fallen Mothers they’d found had felt any pain. No, that was impossible. Nor would those Mothers who still wandered the desert ever stop to appreciate how lost they were. They’d been programmed to hide from view in the canyons and ravines, sheltering their precious cargo during the incubation process. And if they were still out there, they were doing an admirable job of it.

  Now, with the incubation period over and the Gen5 births imminent, the hope was that locating them would be easier. But again, it would not be as easy as Kendra had predicted. She’d assumed that once birth occurred, the Mothers could be tracked to the locations of the supply depots toward which they would inevitably migrate—since the bots were programmed with these locations, she would simply retrieve the coordinates from the upload parameters. But as she’d soon discovered, the depot locations weren’t a part of the generic upload file. Rather, each of the Mothers’ flight computers had been hardwired with her own set of coordinates; when she left Los Alamos, the coordinates left with her. Kendra had been unsuccessful in downloading the coordinates from the charred remains of the three bot computers they’d recovered from the desert. Nor could she find records of the locations on her mainframe at Los Alamos—those had been securely stored by the military units who’d erected the sites, and she had no idea now of their whereabouts. William’s scouts had searched for signs of the signature water towers, leaving a motion sensor camera near each one they found to await a Mother’s arrival. But so far only thirteen of the seventy-six sites had been located, none of them yet occupied.

  The pilot’s-side door of the transport cracked open. Rick heard a loud buzz as the positive-pressure fans kicked in, almost drowning out William’s deep voice. “Rick . . . we’ve spotted something down in the canyon. Edison’s on his way.”

  * * *

  IN THE CLUTTERED cave that was Mac’s Los Alamos office, James’s gaze traced the arc of Sara’s neck, the graceful curve of her jaw. In front of them, Kendra rifled through a series of menus on Mac’s computer screen, selecting the BotView data feed.

  As part of a government effort to cut long-term energy costs, the XO-Bot building had been capable of sustaining life “off the grid,” collecting and storing its own power, since its initial construction two decades earlier. And though precious power and water still had to be monitored and conserved, the building now served their little group well. It was no mistake that New Dawn had been housed here, in a structure outfitted with massive solar panels and power storage walls, ventilated via a self-contained air filtration system, with water pumped from artesian wells in the nearby Valles Caldera via its own small water purification facility.

  James focused on Mac’s screen, a series of empty fields waiting to be filled. Rick Blevins and his team of Hopi scouts in the Utah desert maintained contact with Los Alamos via a secure NSA satellite hookup. Hours ago, the general had called in with news of a crashed bot at the bottom of a narrow canyon, east of a place called Escalante. The climb down to the site was treacherous; according to Blevins, it might take a while.

  James reached out to grasp Sara’s hand. In the past nine months, she’d endured enough pain for a lifetime. Unlike Rudy, Kendra, and Mac, unlike Blevins or even James himself, she’d had no time to come to grips with the reality of losing everything and everyone. She herself had almost been lost.

  And she’d lost her baby—their son. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise; their child was of the old world, not immune to the plague that gripped the earth—and Sara herself was far too weak to bear a pregnancy. But it was a sorrow that neither of them had come prepared for. They’d buried the baby in a small plot visible from the window of their quarters at Los Alamos. “We’ll have the Gen5s soon,” he’d promised Sara. “Perfect, immune babies.” But since then, the sight of Sara staring out that window each morning, her hands clasped in her lap and her lower lip quivering, had become almost more than he could bear.

  Still, they’d survived. Rudy had set up a C-343 synthesis operation at Los Alamos, a scaled-down version of the one destroyed at Fort Detrick. With it, he could produce enough of the antidote to replenish the existing inhaler units. Once a day, the Los Alamos survivors dutifully dosed themselves. And there was hope. The new sequence used for the antidote was the same as that engineered into the Gen5 embryos. If it afforded the survivors immunity to IC-NAN with no ill effects, perhaps the Gen5s could count on it too. James looked around the room. It might be safe, living out in the world. But except for the general, none of them had yet been ready to try that experiment. Perhaps after the Gen5s were born . . .

  His thoughts drifted to Talasi Susquetewa, the old woman whom Rick Blevins called “Grandmother,” and to the handful of other Hopi, still thriving on the harsh tract of land that had been their tribe’s home for centuries. Judging from what had happened when the Epidemic struck, these people carried a trait that allowed for a different pathway enabling programmed cell death. The gene coding for this vestigial pathway, it seemed, was recessive; one had to be homozygous for the trait, carrying two copies of the recessive gene, in order for it to be expressed to the extent necessary for survival. Talasi, whose husband, Albert, had died of natural causes three years previously, was homozygous. Her sons, William and Edison, had survived, but Edison had lost his wife and two of his three children to the Epidemic; only his daughter Millie remained. William’s wife and two sons had all survived. These, together with a few other families, would form the core of a new Hopi lineage. James’s theory about silent DNA, about inherited functions that could reawaken when called upon, was proven out in them.

  What was more, these people had proved a godsend for the inhabitants of Los Alamos. Long skilled at living off the land, the Hopi provided abundant food—corn and lamb, beef, beans, and squash—all carefully prepared and delivered through an airlock to the XO-Bot cafeteria. But perhaps even more importantly, they offered hope of an ultimate cure for Sara, the only one among them with a confirmed previous infection by IC-NAN. James and Rudy had begun harvesting stem cells from the tracheal aspirates of willing Hopi donors, developing methods for isolating and storing the most potent. It was a long shot; in the world before the Epidemic, similar experiments to remediate lung damage had always failed. But again, it offered hope. And now, hope was all they had.

  He was startled by a loud crackle as Blevins’s voice piped over the speaker to his left. He heard a cry, an uncharacteristi
c yelp of happiness. “Okay . . . we have a little girl!”

  His heart leaping nearly into his throat, James imagined the general in full protective gear, a spaceman on his own planet, a satellite phone gripped in one meaty hand and a baby in the other.

  Kendra turned on her mic. “Alive?”

  “Barely,” came the general’s raspy voice.

  James felt Sara’s grip tighten around his hand. From Blevins’s side, he could hear shouts. Thank God, Edison was on-site. “Access the birth records,” he whispered to Kendra.

  “Patch us in to the life systems control module,” Kendra ordered.

  “Done!” came Blevins’s reply.

  Kendra leaned toward the monitor, frantically flipping through display menus. She stopped at one line of output: OXYGEN SATURATION LOW OUT OF RANGE. PULMONARY DISTRESS.

  James sat forward, squinting. “The incubator drained. Resuscitation was initiated. But it doesn’t seem to have worked . . .”

  Beside James, Sara was holding her breath, a tear leaking from one eye. After what seemed like an eternity, a second voice came over the phone. “James, this is Edison. The little one is doing well enough, considering the state of the Mother. The cocoon was damaged in the crash and admitted sufficient ambient air to keep her alive. But the transfer to the nest wasn’t completed. The baby was trapped inside the broken incubator. We’ve put her on supplemental oxygen . . .”

  Nudging Kendra to one side, James barked out the orders, his brain on automatic. “Get her to the med center ASAP. And keep her on filtered air until we have a chance to check her out, okay?”

  Sara was on her feet now. She leaned against the desk, steadying herself. “Edison?” she said. “Is she . . . normal?”

  “Yes,” came the reply. “She’s perfect, Sara . . . but her extremities are bluish. Definite signs of cyanosis. We’ll do everything we can.”