It came back to Chrysalis, of course, because everything came back to Chrysalis. It had changed the world so drastically and all at once, that what came after – a new way of living in the name of national defense – was expected, embraced even. Changes came, always in the name of the Greater Good. Changes in everyday life, like the subtle expansion of surveillance and police powers. Like the restrictions of rights, after few had questioned it and even fewer opposed. Incremental steps that, looking back, had amounted to gradual surrender by the people of what little freedom they’d had left. When another bomb came, this time on the East Coast – Kannikin Redux – the government’s course seemed to have been validated. But then it took a further, final step, across what should have been a red line: the Harvest. Willa wasn’t formally educated, but she was a student of her own six decades, and from that she’d identified a pattern: tragedy begat patriotism, patriotism begat opportunism, opportunism begat poverty.
And poverty begat blood hackers looking to compromise unfortunate phlebotomists.
She’d lost her way along with everybody else, went right along with it when her blood bank had been commandeered by Patriot years back – not that she’d had any choice. Willa never stopped loving her country, and she wanted to help those suffering in the Gray Zones, yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that the Harvest and the trade were doing more harm than good. They’d become locked in a perpetual loop. Wouldn’t the country be stronger, better able to defend itself against whoever kept it pinned to the mat, if the population were strong and upright, veins full?
Willa watched Isaiah blissfully spoon a gruel-like “Hearty Grain Stew With Beef Flavoring” into his mouth and thought about what it was like to have eaten real beef stew back in the day and how much she missed it. Watching the boy eat she considered what a gift it was to have no frame of reference. After finishing his meal, Isaiah hopped from his chair, skipped to his room, and then bounced back to the table. Willa collected the dishes and brought them to the sink for a rinse.
The water gurgled from the tap and she ran a sponge over the spoon and bowl, and her mind turned back to Everard. If he was serious – and if he truly worked for the Locksmith, then he was – she’d have to quit. Better to have no job at all than to end up in prison, or worse. She’d saved some money. They’d always figured things out before.
A sound, like the crinkling of plastic, tickled her eardrum. She turned to Isaiah.
He’d unwrapped the lollipop that Hunter had given him and was about to put it in his mouth.
“Hold on now,” said Willa, walking over. “May I have a lick of that before you eat it?”
“Sure,” said Isaiah, happy to share in the wealth. “You can even have two licks.”
Willa smiled at the boy’s generosity and took the candy. It wasn’t that she necessarily thought there was anything wrong with it, but Isaiah was all she had, so she forgave herself some paranoia. She touched the candy to the tip of her tongue.
Now, there were a lot of things that Willa hadn’t experienced in the decades since the bombs started falling: riding in a car, going to see a movie, sleep, a glass of wine. But there was another, the absence of which she had long stopped missing, lost to the years. What was once as common and ubiquitous as water or air before it disappeared from the world altogether soon after Chrysalis. Sugar.
Her tongue felt like it’d been struck by lightning and saliva poured into her mouth. Gone was the sickly-sweet and lingering film that came with the artificial sweeteners that had become the norm. There was no mistaking the real thing. And Isaiah had never had it. A child who’d never had sugar! Her smile bloomed as she leaned forward, eager to share the new experience. And then she stopped, and her joy evaporated.
There wasn’t supposed to be any sugar anywhere. Fallout had destroyed or contaminated most crops, including sugarcane and corn. Everyone knew that. So how did sugar end up in a piece of candy? Her stomach knotted.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said, locating the wrapper. “There might be something wrong with this. It could be dangerous.”
“What?” he said. “I can’t have it? Are you serious? You had some!”
“Isaiah, I want nothing more than for you to be able to eat your lollipop. But we don’t really know the people who gave it to you, right? I tasted something that I don’t trust. It might not be safe.”
She could see him working through his disappointment, fighting to hold back tears. “OK, Grandma,” he said, still eyeing the treat as she dropped it into the trash.
By the time she got Isaiah to bed, her brain was churning. Once his breathing took on the even meter of sleep, she left his side and went back into the kitchen and dug the candy from the garbage. She placed it onto the counter and stared. How was it that Patriot had anything, much less children’s candy, made with sugar? And why? The sugar was contaminated. Radioactive.
Unless it wasn’t. Scenarios unfolded as she envisioned a world where sugar had made its return. What if the fallout was no longer a problem? It had been eight years since Goliath. Maybe it had all dissipated. It had to go away sometime. Of course, all of that had to do with half-lives and whatnot, stuff she didn’t have any clue about. Claude probably would. It was nice to think that sugar might be worked back into the system, and that they might be able to afford some from time to time to sweeten things up. All of the different foods they could add it to, the thought was like reopening a mothballed amusement park. A little glimmer of normal coming back.
Willa straightened from the counter and turned back to the room. Something nagged. A thing that she’d once known but had forgotten, squirreled away in the dusty crannies of her memory. Sugar was important for another reason, she was sure of it, but try as she might, she couldn’t suss it from the cobwebs.
She went to the bookcase underneath the window. Careful not to topple the few struggling herbs on top, she ran a finger across the books stacked neatly inside. Years back, when everyone else had tossed all of their paper records and uploaded their lives to the Cloud, Willa had taken the opposite course, retaining the most important volumes from her life in tangible form. Control was autonomy, so why hand it over to an invisible chamber in the sky? She remembered her incredulity as friends and acquaintances had jumped to save everything digitally, storing it all in the ether. Willa had asked them what would happen if somebody decided to deny them access to their files, their records, their photographs – their lives; why they had so much faith in the benevolence of things they couldn’t see. They rarely answered with anything more than a retort about her own paranoia. After the third nuke, Astrid, when the Cloud was finally sealed for national security reasons, she’d known she’d been right, but took no joy in it.
War and transience had whittled her physical collection, but at least she had some evidence of the life she had lived. Two photo albums, a coverless dictionary, missalettes from the year of her confirmation, and a plastic folder with Isaiah’s birth certificate safely tucked inside Elizabeth’s. Underneath the rest, she found her old phlebotomy technician’s workbooks. She flipped through one of them, its paper made soft by the years, and came to the chapter entitled APHERESIS. This was fractionation, the lost practice of separating whole blood into fractions: plasmapheresis, plateletpheresis, etc. The practice, if resurrected, would allow Patriot to pull just the components of blood it needed without taking everything at once. It had the potential not only to end the Harvest and the Trade, but it could knock the legs out from under a caste system based on the tumbling dice of heredity. More importantly for Willa, it would render blood hacking – and blood hackers – obsolete.
She turned the pages, scanning quickly over the paragraphs with a finger. Halfway into the chapter was a two-page layout of the fractionation process, a diagram showing the connection between donor and the extracorporeal unit where a centrifuge separated the blood. One line ran from the donor’s arm into the apheresis machine. A second tube carried the unused serums from the machine back into the donor. Between t
he donor and the unit was a flag that identified the location where anticoagulant was added. A footnote identified the chemical. “Trisodium citrate.” She’d forgotten the name, but that was it, citrate. It was the scarcity of citrate, an anticoagulant, that prevented Patriot from being able to fraction the blood.
Her heart thumped as she flipped to the index and found the entry for it. “Trisodium citrate: A salt of citric acid derived through fermentation of molasses with yeast.”
Molasses.
Molasses came from sugar.
Patriot had sugar. A million questions came to mind. If they had the necessary ingredient for the anticoagulant, then why weren’t they fractioning? Did they not know that sugar was back in production? Who was making the lollipops? She needed to get through to Patriot. And they needed to listen.
Early the next morning, Willa swooped into Donor Eight like a gale. Claude, who had the responsibility for all of the pre-shift equipment checks, wandered in from the cooler with a bag of A-neg. A small red dribble ran over the backs of his gloved fingers.
“Oh my God, are you OK?” Willa exclaimed.
Claude almost leapt through the ceiling. “No, no – Willa, I’m fine,” he said, presenting the leaking bag for her to see. “These new bags – the suturing at the needle siphon is weak. I’ve notified Patriot. Just back there trying to clean out the bad ones.” He looked at the clock. “Since when do you show up for unpaid minutes?”
Willa pursed her lips, happy, trying not to be too excited. “Claude,” she said, “why don’t we fractionate?”
“No anticoagulant. You know that.”
“Right. Nukes took out the sugar. What manages to grow is contaminated.”
“Yeah,” said Claude. “What’s up?”
Willa dug into the bag that hung crossways over her chest and held up the lollipop in its wrapper.
Claude considered it a moment. “What’s that?”
“Candy, Claude.”
“OK, and?”
“It’s made with sugar.”
He snorted. “That’s impossible.”
“I haven’t tasted sugar in almost forty years, Claude,” she said. “This is sugar.”
“How do you know it isn’t some new sugar sub and it’s just really good.”
“First of all, there has never been a sugar substitute I would call good. And if you had seen little girl Willa you wouldn’t doubt my ability to recognize it. This is made with sugar.” She shoved it toward him. “Go on, have a taste.”
Claude waved it off. “No. This is nuts.”
“Patriot doesn’t grow the food, right?” she asked.
“I don’t know, honestly,” said Claude. “Maybe they do, they do everything else.”
“Well whoever made this put sugar in it. And Patriot needs to know, don’t they? Either there’s radioactive sugar on the market that’s got to get recalled, or sugar is back in production because it’s clean.” Willa got closer, excited. “If I’m right – and I am – that this is sugar and it turns out to be clean? Then it means we can make anticoag and reinstitute apheresis now.”
“Best keep all that to yourself,” he said. “You go spreading that around, it’ll be your job. I won’t be able to keep them from firing you.”
Willa was baffled. “Why?”
“Because it’s nuts. First off, there is no sugar, and if you start spreading a crazy rumor that we can split blood again, we’ll have a riot. It will throw the entire program off.”
“But what if I’m right, Claude? Think about how we live.” She pointed through the front doors. “Think about how everyone else lives. The Harvest is killing people.”
Claude softened, aware that Willa’s daughter had been among those taken. “You think you know these people, but you don’t know them like I do. One, they’ll never give you the time of day.”
“Ah. Well. I thought you might, um, run it up the chain,” said Willa. “You could take credit for it, I don’t care about that. Patriot is a huge bureaucracy. Maybe the food people don’t talk to the blood people.”
“I’m the supervisor of Station Eight in Southern City, Willa. Have been my whole career. They don’t care what I have to say either.” He looked at the cameras on the wall and lowered his voice. “But second of all: you think they want anything to change? You think they want things to be easier on the donors? Willa: listen to me. Drop this now. For your own good.”
Willa knew Claude’s we’re done here tone and let him return to the cooler. But she wasn’t about to let it go. The clock said ten minutes until open. She went outside, brought her touchstone to life.
BEGIN PATRIOTEXT CONVERSATION
W. M. WALLACE: Mr Olden, it’s Willa Wallace, Station 8, from the other night at SCS distrib. I would like to ask for a short meeting with you to discuss an important issue that might be very helpful to the company.
A parcel service drone zipped by while she waited for a response. Her touchstone dinged with a reply.
JESPER OLDEN : I’m sorry, Ms Wallace, I do not have time to meet with you. Have an excellent day.
W. M. WALLACE: I apologize for the bother. It’s just about the non-disclosure agreement. I needed to tell you something.
JESPER OLDEN : What do you need to tell me?
W. M. WALLACE: We need to have a conversation. Besides, you probably don’t want me typing it out. I will if you want though.
No immediate response. She prayed that her gambit would work and checked the time. Two minutes until open. Donors began to collect outside the doors.
JESPER OLDEN : Connecting you with an associate. She will handle. Good day.
SCYNTHIA SCALLIEN : Hello, Willa. I will be at your precinct directly after close today.
W. M. WALLACE: Thank you ma’am. I will be here.
END PATRIOTEXT CONVERSATION
Willa quickly messaged a neighbor she trusted to get Isaiah safely home from school and headed back inside. She felt like pacing, but her stall kept her stationary. She teetered back and forth with anticipation. Nerves. Nine hours to go until Scynthia Scallien found out she hadn’t been summoned to talk about an NDA. Willa wondered how long she’d have to discuss her idea if the woman stormed out, or worse, wrote her up. She banished the thought of termination from her mind. Certainly that wasn’t in the cards?
As the day wore on and she relaxed a measure, only then did her thoughts turn to the AB Plus blood hacking syndicate and her limbo within it. They wanted her to pass blood for them, presumably their own AB-pos as highblood. During their impromptu dinner the night before, Everard had suggested that he’d already done it, bringing in low blood as B-neg, a slightly better phenotype in terms of price than AB-pos. Even though he had invoked the Locksmith, Willa still thought it likely that his claim was bluster. Sure, they’d sent her some money, but that didn’t necessarily mean they’d pulled it off. If anything, it was just another point of pressure to get her to join their scam. Executing a bag hack was next to impossible anyway, even if a phlebotomist was in on it.
For every blood bag removed, there was a highly regulated process that had to be followed in order for blood to be accepted. Before a donor could receive credit, the phlebotomist removed the bag and felt it for imperfections or alterations. This was more of an art than anything else, but over time, each phlebotomist knew exactly how a bag should feel; its weight, thickness, pliability, balance. Willa had done it so many thousands of times, that her fingers and hands were sensitive to the tiniest deviation from standard. Next, the donor’s blood bag was pressed against a reflective square from which a sterilized needle-probe emerged in a random spot to pierce the resealable poly. It registered blood type, temperature, antibodies, diseases and organism of origin (it wasn’t unusual for people to try and pass animal blood). And then the test repeated. Two probes for each bag. If any of the data read outside of parameters, the blood was rejected and incinerated. If it checked out normal, it received a laser-etched label and a blood-type designation before going into cold storage.
As security systems improved, so did the skills of those trying to fool it. Desperation was a mighty fuel for innovation, which meant that AB Plus was crawling with hackers, trying to trick the system to get better value. Willa understood their plight – she shared their curse – but their deception could lead to bad transfusions. It could kill. And she couldn’t be a part of it.
All the more reason her meeting with Scallien had to go well.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IMMUNOREACTION
A defensive reaction to the presence of a substance which is not recognized as a part of the body.
The front door coded open at 5:30 sharp. Seeing Scallien now for the second time, Willa found herself mildly amused by the young woman’s airs. Gliding elegantly atop stilted heels, she wore a trim black dress with a white scalloped collar, set off by an old-style Patriot insignia pin. Her gait was smooth, with no wasted movement, as if every step had been choreographed and rehearsed – a corporate robot in high fashion programed for upper management.
“Ms Wallace.” Businesslike.
Willa straightened. “Hello, ma’am, er – Ms Scallien,” she said. “Thank you for meeting with me.”
“Of course,” said Scallien. Then lowering her voice, “Now, what is this business with your NDA, please.”
Claude came in from the freezer and froze when he saw the young woman.
“Mr Vergenne, good evening,” she said, smiling powerfully. “Give us a few minutes, will you?”
“Sure,” he said, and disappeared around the corner.
“So,” Scallien continued, raising an eyebrow that temporarily eased the strain of a taut, golden ponytail, “about the NDA.”
Willa had practiced what she would say, how she would broach the sleight of hand she’d performed in order to get the face-to-face, but decided to adopt a direct approach. “I have to apologize, Ms Scallien, I needed a meeting with Patriot management and this was the only way I could think of to get it.”
The Phlebotomist Page 6