An Unintentional Evil

by Elsie Charlotte

  Celeste barely knew anything about the previous generation. She knew they weren't from this planet. She knew that they lived their lives in a massive Mother Ship just to get to this second earth. She knew that her parents were part of the army, but she didn't know what it was like, what happened, and what either of them went through. She didn't know what to ask, but Harlow continued.

  "This was when I thought it was happening." She showed another snap shot of Aurora's statistics. "This was when I said I was taking out the implant." She skipped forward to another one.

  Aurora's numbers were reaching dangerous marks. Celeste was shocked. She didn't know Aurora was struggling that much. The images the implant showed him must have been horrific. Harlow had decided that it was time to take the implant out, but more had happened and she didn't get the chance.

  "This was when I actually did it." Harlow said, gesturing to the last image.

  The numbers were grey. He wasn't fit to contribute to society.

  Celeste didn't believe it.

  "Was he in a mental hospital?" She asked quickly.

  "I kept him asleep after the surgery for two months. After that I had to compromise with Human Resources. He had to go to therapy everyday, and had a strict medication regime, but because of the depression, he stopped." She said. "After a few months, he and Sirus left for the remainder of his medical leave."

  There was a gap where she didn't have information entered. Then all of a sudden, Aurora numbers were acceptable in September.

  "At that point, Aurora changed the settings again so no one would know." Harlow pointed to the acceptable statistics. "And he came back in November. He said he was afraid of Human Resources taking away his little girl so he wouldn't let me monitor him anymore." She looked at Celeste and smiled dearly.

  "Was he...?"

  Was he better? Celeste wanted to know.

  "Whatever happened when he was gone significantly improved his status." Harlow said. "But I don't know anything after that."

  "And what about Hariette?"

  "The implant messed with her physically." Harlow flipped through images of the spine. "There was electrical damage to her nerves on her right side. It wasn't enough to paralyze her yet, but enough to numb her." She said.

  There was red pulsing where the damage was.

  "I could only help the two of them so much. Hariette recovered up to ninety-five percent. Aurora's mental baseline after the surgery was eighty percent."

  Celeste thought to herself.

  She had already made changes to the blue print but she realized the mistake. Having a baseline at all was what caused the problem. Seeing Aurora's baseline, she knew it wasn't compatible with the implant because it wasn't one hundred percent. The baseline needs to be removed, that's the biggest change she needs to make. But there was more she had to improve on.

  "Sirus had an implant." Celeste said.

  "He still has it." Harlow turned to her. "He's just not allowed to use it."

  Celeste didn't know what to think. Was she glad that Sirus has his, or afraid of something happening?

  "I asked Sirus multiple times if he wanted his, and after a while, he stopped answering me." Harlow looked down. "I felt like I caused him so much trouble." she felt terrible about it.

  Celeste wanted to say that that's how Sirus is, that he doesn't like being bothered. If the implant didn't cause him problems, then he wasn't going to go through the trouble of surgery again. He was fine, he was lucky to be fine.

  Celeste didn't want Harlow to feel sorry about any of it.

  They hadn't known it was going to happen.

  What she wanted to know was why Sirus' implant worked the best out of all three. If he still had it, that meant nothing went wrong.

  "Do you know what made his work better?" She asked.

  "Sirus' implant allows him to show others what he's seen, but Aurora was afraid that adding the adaptability component would over load the system so he left that off."

  Aurora had the right idea the second time around.

  Celeste thought it through. Removing the adaptability component changes things about the implant. It would just be a foreign item in the body at that point. Aurora had to have added something in there to make sure it didn't malfunction.

  She had stared at the blue prints so many times but she still felt like she had to look at them again. There was something missing, something that she wasn't seeing.

  "Thanks, doc." Celeste turned away quickly so she could leave the room. She had a lot of changes to make.

  "Celeste?" She turned back when Harlow said her name. "I wouldn't continue the project." She warned her.

  All Celeste saw was how bad it was, how much damage it caused. But it wasn't done. Celeste found the flaws and knew how to fix them. She felt obligated to finish now.

  She nodded towards Harlow but she wasn't going to listen.

  She needed to find her surgeon, and she knew one already. She went back down to the emergency unit and looked for the young doctor she spoke with before.

  "Clover." She tugged him a different way. "We need to talk." She said to him.

  His face flushed red. He had no idea what she wanted to talk about but she was coming to him for it. It must be serious. What did his mom tell her?

  "I need your help." Celeste said when they were far enough away from people. "I need you to do a surgery for me."

  "That's fine-" he was going to agree without question but Celeste had to tell him what was going to happen.

  "It's not legal." Celeste didn't want him to get too ahead of himself.

  "Is this how I find someone?" He asked her.

  Celeste smiled at him. "I like your attitude." She said. "But, I'm being serious. I'm asking you to get involved in something that could get us in jail." She warned him.

  Clover was a quiet man. He didn't talk much, he didn't do a lot, he was just one of the trauma surgeons.

  The girl he likes was asking for help. He wasn't doing it because he liked her, well that wasn't all of it. He figured he should do something. Celeste doesn't always ask for help or favors, so it must be important.

  "Well, you have to tell me about it first, and I'll tell you if it can be done." He told her.

  "Great." Celeste said. "I'll get in touch with you, Clover." She said.

  Now she was getting started. She had changes to make before offering up the final product for her first trial. And she knew who she was going to give the implant to.

  Chapter Eight

  Celeste was walking inside NASA's main building. She passed by all the drones and robots, she didn't say anything to the engineers that walked by her. She didn't check herself in with the secretary. What she wanted was to speak with Hariette.

  "Celeste?" A woman with white hair approached her. When Celeste turned to her, she smiled dearly.

  She was an older woman, but when she smiled, it seemed she gave off such a young energy. She was friendly and kind, extending warmth to everyone she knew.

  "Hey, Taurus, how are you?" Celeste hugged her, surprised to see Taurus here.

  She was a family friend, someone that took care of her as well. Celeste was rather close with her but ever since she left home on her own, Celeste hasn't seen Taurus as much.

  It was always nice to see her.

  But to see her working was different. "None of you want to retire. You guys need to start living your lives."

  "My generation is full of workaholics." Taurus laughed quietly.

  Celeste didn't need to be told that. Her parents won't retire soon. Well, one might but it was taking too long.

  She was curious, would Taurus tell her stories?

  "Are you here to see..."

  "Hariette has been avoiding me. I need to see her." Celeste forgot she had to be somewhere. "Can you not warn her I'm here? I'm tired of her ditching." She said.

  "What's it about?" Taurus asked, genuinely curious but Celeste couldn't answer her question. She had an apologetic look on her face and Taurus
knew. "You're just like Aurora. He always snuck around doing something he wasn't supposed to." She shook her head.

  "Like father like daughter." That statement lingered in Celeste's mind. Apparently, Aurora used to do things that he shouldn't have but no one would tell her about it.

  She needed to find Hariette, she could ask Taurus questions later.

  "I'll see you around, Taurus." She waved back at her before continuing to one of the smaller hallways.

  Hariette had to be here, this was the main building and Hariette works a lot. Celeste wanted answers and she's been trying to get a hold of Hariette for a week.

  It was no surprise when she found her. Celeste barged into her room and made herself known. She wasn't quiet, no, Celeste was always a loud child and when she wants something, she's going to get it.

  Now she was owed answers.

  "I found out, Hariette." She said abruptly and loudly.

  Did Hariette think she could keep everything a secret?

  Celeste knows more about the project now. Hariette knew that Celeste had more knowledge considering the very forward and aggressive messages Celeste has been leaving. Hariette knew she was coming, she just didn't know when. It took seven days.

  It was seven days of Celeste getting answers and completing the implant.

  Celeste needed to know everything, that was the only way she would even think of giving Hariette what she had.

  "Gonna quit avoiding me?" She asked Hariette.

  Hariette looked at the young woman that was standing in the center of her room. Celeste was upset, Hariette could see that.

  But somewhere deep down, Hariette had a bit of regret. She shouldn't have given Celeste the blue prints, there was a nagging voice in her head that told her not to. She looked at Celeste and saw everything that happened with Aurora instead.

  Why would she want that to happen again?

  "I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to panic." Hariette finally told the truth. "You're not exactly stable." She said.

  Celeste narrowed her eyes at the comment and shifted uncomfortably. "I'm fine."

  She was a little anxious. Hariette knew.

  "Your numbers might not be red but you probably found out why they're elevated." Hariette tilted her head to the side and watched as Celeste shifted her weight again, drawing back further.

  Anxiety was hereditary.

  Celeste never thought she had that issue. And she can't say she hasn't been anxious because of the situation she's been dealing with. She found out the truth. Of course she would be anxious.

  She didn't know what to say.

  "The implant could've been fixed, but we weren't in shape to repair it." Hariette got up slowly from her chair, taking hold of her cane and walked around her desk to meet Celeste. "I didn't have the physical strength, and Aurora was..." She trailed off as she looked away. "He disappeared after a few months, and came back completely changed."

  That's what Harlow said.

  "He was happy again." Hariette remembered. "Actually, he was happier. I've never seen him in such a good mood for a while." She laughed to herself.

  Celeste knew why. "I was..."

  That's when she came into the picture.

  "I don't know what happened while he was gone, but when he came back with you, there was absolutely nothing that could get him upset." Hariette turned the spinning globe off before putting up another hologram. "I couldn't ruin his happiness after that." Hariette admitted.

  So she put everything on hold.

  "The four of us stopped talking about the experiment." She said. "It's like it never happened, and we knew it was a good idea to keep it that way."

  It was bad for a few months when everything went haywire. Why try again if that was going to happen?

  "As much as I felt bad for myself, I recovered." She said and tapped her cane on the floor. "I mean, besides the fact that I'm a little weak on my right." She did her best to stand up straight but she couldn't hold her strength on her right leg for long so she put her cane down again.

  "And Aurora?"

  Hariette took a deep breath as she looked at the ground, a troubled expression on his face. "If you were to ask him questions about the past, he'd give you two answers. What actually happened, and what the implant showed him. He says it's a blur now."

  "Harlow said the implant distorted his memories."

  Hariette didn't know Celeste went to see Harlow. She laughed quietly to herself. Celeste wanted answers and she was going to get them. "That's exactly what it did." Hariette said. "He felt everything. Imagine living your worst nightmares over and over again and not being able to stop." She turned back to look at Celeste, holding her weight with her cane.

  "Then why me?"

  "You're just as smart as he is. He might not be able to continue, but I know you can." Hariette believed in her. "I've never been more excited to complete something before, this would've changed the system." Hariette was still proud of the idea.

  Her close friends knew what kind of person Hariette was. She was a strong fighter, and she was smart. But she never did things on her own. She was great at leading. If others had great ideas, she would get others together to make it happen.

  That's exactly what she did when she thought of her implant. She got the right people together and made it happen.

  She was proud of that part of it.

  "Aurora's background was in mechanical and aerospace engineering but he was good at other things, too. He knew what he was doing when he designed the implant, but I needed Harlow because it wasn't just that, we didn't have someone who knew about bioengineering."

  "Harlow wasn't an engineer. Aurora couldn't have possibly picked up another background over night." Celeste said. "Bioengineering isn't one of the easy ones either, that takes extra years just to enter the field." She definitely wasn't going near that science.

  "It took months to get the implant running. All three of us did our best with everything we knew but it took time." Hariette put up all the diagrams and files. "When Aurora got the implant running at eighty-seven percent, he called it. He said he couldn't make the original work better than that."

  Celeste looked at the original blue print but that wasn't the one she used.

  She went up to the hologram and touched her fingers to it, bracketing a section.

  "This was the portion that gave the chip power it wasn't supposed to have." She said to Hariette. "The adaptability was supposed to work with the chemicals in the brain and body, and since the body changes the implant should've adapted. Theoretically, the system says it works." Celeste said and she knew that a computer system couldn't be a real person. "On a model, of course it would function higher than it truly does. That component shouldn't be part of an observant." She explained.

  At first she couldn't figure out why it was there, but it was to make up for the lack of biomechanics. It might have been enough for the body to not reject it, but it wasn't enough for it to match with how the brain works. That's why Aurora added that component in there, as compensation for what he didn't know even with Harlow by his side. They did their best, but even then it wasn't enough.

  Celeste knew this, and she had to figure out a way to delete the component without hurting the integrity of the implant.

  Celeste started talking to herself as she pulled something out and placed it on Hariette's desk. She mentioned to herself the changes she made and why she made it, what it could do, and why it would be better. She had thought everything through, just like Aurora did.

  She had been working on it throughout the night.

  Her own blue print flashed up for Hariette to see.

  And the system said it could run at ninety-seven percent which was incredible considering the amount of changes she had to make just to get there.

  Hariette recognized the main structure. "This is the one that..."

  "Sirus has this one." Celeste said. "But I removed the baseline and added a small adaptability margin so it's not a component on i
t's own. We don't want it to change on its own, we want it to age with the body." She said. "And we're still allowed to show what we see."

  She spent a while to get it right, but the system says it works.

  When she made the implant based off the blue print, it was fully functional up to ninety-seven percent. She was going to stop there because there were no more changes to add.

  "Celeste, you did it!" Hariette was surprised.

  Celeste was cautious. Three percent from perfect still wasn't good enough.

  "I haven't tested it yet, Hariette. It could be worse than what you've endured. And I'm actually a little scared knowing what it did to you and Aurora."

  Hariette walks with a cane because of what happened more than twenty five years ago. She could only do so much now. But she was happy, and Celeste didn't want to break her heart.

  She couldn't tell Aurora.

  Would he be proud she finished what he started, or upset that she's working on something that almost killed him?

  Hariette didn't say anything as she stared at the blue print. There was this glint in her eyes that Celeste never saw before. Hariette was always a strong person, she was guarded, she didn't like people knowing her. She was tough and she was like that for a reason. But Celeste was looking at her now and saw someone who had this passion to make a change. She never saw that in Hariette before.

  She wanted to know why Hariette clutched on to this project so hard.

  "I wasn't one of the engineers on the Mother Ship." Hariette said and looked at Celeste. "But I learned fast. I may not be as smart as Aurora, but I could definitely get there if you give me time." She laughed to herself.

  Celeste wanted to know more. After all, Hariette's signature was on the blue print, that meant she did something.

  "Sirus is the same way. He always pretended he didn't know what he was looking at but did most of his maintenances himself." She remembered.

  Celeste stared at Hariette, almost wanting to beg Hariette to tell her more. "No one wants to tell me..."

  No one told Celeste what it was like on the Mother Ship. Her extended family didn't talk about it either. The previous generation knew but won't talk.

  "It should come from them." Hariette smiled as she turned away, walking slowly back to her chair so she could sit down. "We thought we were amazing. Nothing could touch us then." She sighed. "It wasn't till we got down here that we realized how messed up we were."