by Jason Taylor
The synthesizer pinged her interface, informing her that her meal was ready. She took a few minutes to finish a set of deep knee bends and then re-activated the filters. A scene of pastoral beauty replaced the buildings. What she was looking at was real in a sense. It was what the area had looked like 150 years ago, before the land had been developed and incorporated into the city. In the scene outside, the wind continued to blow and the leaves continued to fly past. She turned on the animal filter and a couple of deer appeared, grazing in the distance. A squirrel chattered in a nearby tree branch, holding on for dear life as the branch swayed violently in the wind. Below the squirrel, a dog wandered past, his nose down, following a scent that only he could smell.
Jill smiled and turned to the table. Her plate was piled high and a cup of coffee was waiting for her, doctored with precisely the right amount of cream and sugar.
Jill was lost in thought, the drive downtown to the lab passing easily. Her head was pressed back into the seat cushions, an astronomical chart projected in front of her. She was watching the progression of the stars as seen from Earth, accelerated one hundred thousand times faster than normal. It was a habit she’d formed as a child, memorizing the changes to the constellations over time. It had started when she’d watched a bad horror feed involving a time machine, and she’d decided that if she were ever involuntarily transported in time she would want to know, at the very least, what century she was in. So she’d started studying the stars from millennia in the past, and far into the future, memorizing their patterns. She was old enough now to see it as a funny side-effect of a child’s over-active imagination, but she kept at it. It was comforting, and it brought her back to her roots.
The car jolted to a stop, shaking her out of her reverie. Just in front of the car someone had projected a wide band of yellow tape, beyond which there were armored military personnel swarming around the lab building.
“This is a restricted area, you may not travel beyond this point,” an automated voice informed her.
She stepped out of the car and walked parallel to the tape, trying to get a better look. A clump of worried looking scientist stood on the corner at the end of the block. As she approached, Joanne, from the classification department noticed her and waved her over.
“What’s going on? Why are we blocked from entering the lab?” Jill asked.
Joanne looked upset, one of her hands tapping her leg, the other fidgeting with a virtual cigarette. “They locked it down earlier this morning. No one's talking, but I’ve heard some ugly rumors.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“They’re saying that Matt’s dead.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Joanne leaned in close, “suicide.”
“What?” Jill repeated, dumbfounded. “How could that be? I just saw him last night. He looked fine.”
“You know what they say about looking for the signs, right? It's all bullshit. I had a friend who committed suicide, and I had no clue. He told me he was going to meet me for lunch and then his wife found him dead. He left a note and everything. Ranting and raving about the state of the world and how hopeless he felt. Fucking men, right?”
“Wait, how do they know it was suicide? With Matt I mean.”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this. I mean the body isn’t even cold yet, if you know what I mean. But what the hell.” Joanne took a drag on her virtual cigarette, drawing out the drama. “They found him in his office. Neural overload. They also found stim packs and simulators. The whole nine yards. Nasty, right?”
Jill forced down a wave of nausea and looked back toward the lab building while she collected her emotions. “What’s going on over there? Why did they lock it down?”
“Oh, that? They’ve nationalized the lab.”
“They what?” Jill gasped. That was impossible. That meant the entire building would be converted into a cleared facility. She would never be able to set foot in there again. Her professional-node would be locked down. All her research. Her notes. Her… everything. Shit!
Before she knew what she was doing, she found herself running toward the lab, hoping she could somehow make it through the door.
“This is a terrible idea,” the rational part of her brain told her, “this will end badly.”
She made it just past the edge of the tape before they shut her down. Her nervous system spiked, sending a massive jolt through her body, and then she collapsed, arms and legs jelly, her head thumping against the street.
Her last thought, before she completely lost consciousness, was that she didn’t believe a single word that Joanne had told her. Matt could not have committed suicide. And the lockdown could not be a coincidence. She was going to find out what the hell was going on.
Chapter 6
Jill was surrounded by inky darkness. She could hear people, but she couldn’t see them. Her awareness faded.
Jill was on a path. It was dark, but her eyes had adjusted, and she could sense what was around her. She was surrounded by others on the road, all of them moving forward, like a pilgrimage. She couldn't imagine the destination. The sky was dusted with stars, their patterns unrecognizable. Her sense of time fled.
Jill was surrounded by open space, the night sky suffused with the light of a glowing city just beyond the horizon. The clouds were lit from below in a bright arc, orange and pink, the reflected light bright enough to cast long shadows behind her. The ground was blasted, somehow heat-melted into glass. The path she was on wound its way through the hard landscape. She avoided the rocks and thickets of dry, thorny sagebrush when they stood in her way. There were other people with her. Together they moved toward the city. She could not see their faces. She lost track of herself.
Jill was standing before a low barrier, her thighs pressed against it, a sense of yearning pulling her forward. Before her was a body of water lapping the shore by her feet. The water was alive with color, reflecting the light of a mighty, glowing city.
She could feel the texture of the barrier against her legs. The air was warm against her skin. A breeze blew her hair away from her face and kissed her cheeks. She leaned forward, desire to be in the city suffusing her. She knew the others shared her excitement.
What she could see of the city was fantastic. The buildings were slender and intertwined, rising in a confusion of shapes, textures, and colors. The roots of the buildings glowed brightly, nearly merging together, the gaps indistinct. She sensed that the structures were vibrating, the boundaries indistinct and shimmering. Occasionally, the tip of a building would pulse, and a globe of color would expand into the sky, a series of after-images fading behind it.
A joyous sensation formed within her, spreading its warmth through her body as tears rolled freely down her cheeks. She felt connected to all of the others around her. This was where she belonged. She never wanted to leave. She had pierced a veil that had previously been hidden to her. Something in the world had become permeable which had previously been opaque. She was a witness to truth. The experience was real in a way that she had never known. She felt as if she had returned home after a lifetime spent in the wilderness. To her despair, the scene faded and she lost herself once more.
***
Jill’s consciousness returned to the sound of chanting. She lay where she had fallen near the lab’s cordon, her head twisted awkwardly to the side. A group of protestors marched down the street, calling out in unison, slogans floating over their heads amongst a sea of raised fists.
Jill stood with a groan. Her head was pounding and her body didn’t feel right. Something deep inside of her was shaking. She was worried it would never stop. The wind blew cold against her face, and she squinted against the painful, pelting grit. Through wind-driven tears, she saw a mob of protestors surround the scientists, jabbing angry fingers and yelling, individual shouts rising audibly over the growing dispute.
Jill tried to get her bearings but she was all mixed up. She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. Why was she h
ere? She probed her memory. It was like touching a tender tooth with the tip of her tongue. She turned in place, saw the yellow tape, the lab behind it, the soldiers with their guns ready as the monitored the confrontation.
It all came back to her. Matt was dead. The lab was locked down. Like a dummy, she had tried to break the cordon. The soldiers had shut her down and left her lying unconscious in the street like a discarded piece of refuse.
She refocused on the protest, triggering her interface to enhance the image until she could make out individual faces and slogans: “Hands off my genome”, “My body is not yours to engineer”, “You can have my DNA over my cold, dead body”
The protestors had pressed the scientists into a knot, cornered between a building on one side and the glowing yellow cordon on the other. They looked scared, eyes darting as they searched for an escape route, arms up in poses of submission. Joanne just looked resigned, her virtual cigarette dangling from her lips as she waited it out. As the march continued toward Jill, she lost sight of the scientists, they were swallowed whole by the mob. It was time for her to go.
She took one last look at the soldiers, tense and alert, but not yet taking any action, then she turned to make a getaway before she, too, was swallowed by the protest. To her relief, her strength began to return to her as she walked the empty streets angling away from the lab. As she got further away, the shouting and chanting diminished until it was lost to her in the background noise of the city, and she started to feel safe again.
When she decided she had walked far enough, she stopped and called a car to take her home. While she waited for it to arrive, she triggered her interface and entered her personal-node. She was curious to see if she could still access her work material. Perhaps in the confusion they hadn’t locked her professional node down yet. It was unlikely, but possible.
To her surprise, as soon as she entered her personal-node she received a priority alert. There was a message waiting for her, and it was from Matt.
Chapter 7
“If you are reading this, then I am already dead,” the message from Matt began. “As a fail-safe, I took the liberty of loading my construct into your personal-node. I am aware that you don’t trust me. I know that I have given you specific reasons to distrust me, but please believe me when I tell you that you are in danger, and I may be the only help available to you. Activate my construct and it will do everything in its power to keep you safe.”
Jill re-read the message three times. The first time she felt numb. The second time confused. The third time she read it she was angry. She activated the construct. It wasn’t as good as getting answers from Matt himself, but if the construct was programmed well, it would be close.
Matt appeared in her room, standing in front of her. “Hello, I am Matt’s construct. I have been programmed in a limited set of domains and do not represent Matt’s complete personality. I have been programmed to tell you this.”
“What the hell is going on, Matt?” Jill spit out angrily. “Why are you dragging me into this…” she searched for a word, “this shit-show you’ve created for yourself?”
“I am programmed to help you in the following ways. I can tell you what has happened in the cleared facility and how it is related to your research. I can show you what happened to Matt on the night of his death. I can help you with strategies for survival. In what way would you like me to help you first?”
At this moment Pepe jumped up on Jill’s bed and brushed up against her leg, purring wildly. “Not now Pepe!” Jill hissed. Pepe shimmered and disappeared. Jill looked at the empty space for a moment. He hadn’t deserved that. She’d have to make it up to him later.
“Matt, I want you to tell me why you’ve been sneaking around and snooping into my research.”
“Very well. I will tell you about what has been happening in the cleared facility and how it is related to your research,” he responded.
Jill settled in. This had better be good.
“The lab where you work is built as a combined civilian and military installation. The reason for this is simple. The civilian research benefits from access to military funding, and the military research benefits from access to civilian results. My commanding officer’s orders were to monitor your progress closely, while interfering with your research as little as possible. Of all the research being conducted in the lab, she believed your approach was the most novel and the most likely to result in success.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Jill muttered under her breath.
“Over the past several months I was brought into a series of high-level planning meetings focused on a post-cloning world. Something happened that gave my commanding officer confidence that a solution to the cloning problem was imminent. After some probing, I learned the truth. While you had not yet found the solution, the military researchers had used your analysis to make enough progress to put human cloning within reach. It then became clear to all of us, that while you had not yet made a breakthrough yourself, it was only a matter of time before you found the solution as well.”
Jill listened in stunned silence.
“This was the reason I wanted to speak with you last night. I assume it is also the reason I was murdered. If I am right, Commander Tros will most certainly be coming for you next.”
“Why would your commander want to kill you?” Jill asked.
“In our planning meetings, it became clear to me that the power we were unlocking was beyond anything I had ever imagined. We had uncovered the Rosetta Stone for programming human DNA. This is a discovery that will allow us to mold humans into any conceivable form. As you can imagine, our planning has been primarily devoted to the active weaponization of this technology, and most of our discussions centered around the idea of cloning highly enhanced soldiers,” Matt explained.
“How would it be used to create weapons?” Jill asked.
“Imagine if you started with the highest performing soldiers in the military, then removed any reservations they might have had to killing. You could boost their awareness and physical strength, increasing their lethality while adding regenerative healing capabilities. Imagine if you removed all of their human propensities to fear or doubt, instilling instead a perfect dedication to following orders. Once these soldiers had been perfectly engineered, their clones could be mass produced. We could create an army of super-soldiers that would give us a huge advantage over our enemies. Unlike most military hardware, the clones would have no trouble blending in with civilian populations, making them ideal for mixed-warfare combat.
“The implications of these ideas are frightening on their own, but I don’t believe the project team has fully realized the possibilities available with this technology. We have entered a new age, one in which all our assumptions regarding human biological limitations will have to be rethought. What would stop us from giving these soldiers the ability to generate and deploy chemical or biological weapons? Imagine a clone that is the carrier of a deadly virus, but is himself immune to it. Imagine a clone that is designed to exhale a neurotoxin powerful enough to kill anyone nearby? These are just a couple of examples, with your background I’m sure you could imagine many others.
“These… things could be produced in the hundreds of thousands. They would be inhuman, designed and raised with no moral structure, programmed with an overwhelming compulsion to obey. And because they are clones, they would be expendable. I am horrified by the implications, appalled by all the way in which this line of experimentation might go wrong. We are like spoiled, arrogant children, suddenly given the power to play at God.
“Because of my gender, I was not cleared for full access to your research. Everything I’ve picked up about the breakthrough itself has been second-hand rumor and innuendo. So I have to admit that I attempted to infiltrate your files. I was desperate to learn more, hoping that what I learned would fail to confirm my worst fears and set my mind at ease. I wanted to enlist your help, but I couldn’t figure out how to gain your trust.
I wanted to warn you of what was coming, but I fear now that I am already too late,” Matt trailed off, looking disconsolate.
“I was right then?” Jill asked. “I was right that we should treat our genome like a hostile system that has been actively blocking us from modifying it?”
“Yes. As far as I can tell, you were right. This seems to be the insight that allowed the military team to create a breakthrough solution.”
Jill paused to think. “What is it then? What is this Rosetta Stone?”
“I can only tell you what I have been able to piece together.” Matt paused for a moment. “We have assumed that a form of genetic error-checking occurs at the cellular level, correct?” he asked.
“Yes, that's right,” Jill said.
“And the majority of our DNA, over 90 percent, is junk DNA?” Matt added.
“Yes, that fact was discovered by the Human Genome Project. Junk DNA is a holdover from our distant past, useless data left behind by the random nature of evolutionary processes,” she said.
“The military team discovered that some of this junk DNA is actually an encrypted storage mechanism that is used to error-check the active DNA.”
“What?” Jill stammered.
“From my understanding, there is a biological encryption algorithm that generates checksums within every chunk of our genetic code. These checksums are decrypted and checked by our RNA as part of normal cell growth. If the decrypted checksum does not match the algorithmic expectations, the cell immediately self destructs.”
“I knew it!” Jill exclaimed, then she went quiet, growing thoughtful. “Wait a minute. The mechanism you describe is incredibly unlikely. How could humans have evolved an encryption algorithm in DNA? Sure, there seems to be some form of error checking to limit harmful mutations, but why would encryption be involved? What possible evolutionary benefit would that provide?”
“The philosophical ramifications of this discovery are beyond my programming. It did not come up as a topic of discussion in the military planning meetings, and I cannot address that question. All I can say is that the new approach seems to work, where all other approaches have failed.”