Origins of Hope

by Anastasia Drapievsky

  “What the hell did you do that for?!” one man yelled as Ayzize approached the humans cowering on the outskirts of their small farming town. “You just destroyed a quarter acre of crops!”

  So much for ‘thanks for saving us!’, Ayzize thought sardonically as the other humans loudly agreed. He tapped his helmet and the nanotrites retreated around his skull into the spine of his armor. Several people stared at the tech and at Ayzize’s eyes, dark gold with streaks of silver that looked too large for his sockets. “Unless you had plans to join those things,” he gestured behind him to the charred remains of the crops and the H-XIK bodies in the distance, “I did you a favor and my job. Now, all of you will need to stay here and wait while I scan you for—”

  “That is our livelihood!” a woman yelled. “How are we supposed to be paid now?”

  “The crops were some of the sickliest I’ve ever seen and scorching them will fertilize the earth for better wheat,” Ayzize waved his hand dismissively. Whether that was true he didn’t really care, but the wheat had blackened stalks when he had shown up, and the Verakas virus only spread to sentient beings—Mostly, he thought as he eyed the locals. “As I’ve said, please make yourself comfortable and I’ll scan everyone to make sure—”

  “You think this is a joke?” the man who had yelled earlier, with dull beige skin and blond hair, stomped to Ayzize and glared down at him; no small feat since Ayzize stood over two meters tall. “Those crops you destroyed were worth more than you make in a year. We’re not paying the full sum that we agreed—”

  Ayzize flicked a hand, producing a hologram of their contract in front of the man’s hissing face. “Alan Hunter signed the contract that clearly stated that Raxdrýn Enterprises was not responsible for any property damage, loss of life, or business failings when the requesting party signs the form. It is right above the signature line.” The several dozen humans all leaned in to squint at the contract then silently stared at the man that glowered at Ayzize. “As a business owner, perhaps you should read a contract when presented to you.”

  Hunter’s face continued to redden as the other humans glared at him. “How dare—”

  Ayzize lazily brought up a hologram of the two H-XIKs that he had just fought. One had been a man and the other a woman, having the usual XIK appearance of tattered clothes and bones poking through the skin. Humans had their own variety of appearance as XIKs, with the visible skin both melted and scabbed over, with pustules all over their body. If fully mutated, human XIKs were one of the weakest yet most contagious varieties, but the two he had just fought looked to be newly formed and thus not as grotesque; their skin had a waxy appearance and many pustules, as if eggs were buried just underneath the epidermis, with only a femur or two poking out of their skin.

  The group all collectively drew back at the sight of the life size holograms, some of their faces morphing into a shade of green and turning away to gag.

  “Anyone want to look like this? Any takers?” Ayzize asked the crowd, who either gaped in horror at the H-XIKs or sounded like they were about to retch. “I thought not. You three,” he shut off the hologram and pointed to the people who hacked loudly, “contain yourselves. You can vomit on your own time after I’ve vaccinated you. Now someone fetch some chairs and tables.”

  Once the locals reluctantly did so, Ayzize then made everyone sit down and interviewed them regarding the H-XIKs to determine where they came from, while he scanned the locals to see if the virus had spread. According to the locals, a shuttle had crashed several days ago, and they had pulled two surviving humans from the burning wreckage. The locals at the time thought the burns on their skin came from the crashed shuttle, which exploded shortly after getting the two survivors out. The local doctor identified the virus too late, becoming the first and only victim of the H-XIKs. The moment the H-XIKs escaped the doctor’s office, the humans then locked themselves in their homes, desperately seeking Raxdrýn Enterprises when planetary security only wanted to bomb the place.

  The anger over the loss of their crops seemed to die down when recounting the story, since several of them started shaking, perhaps realizing how lucky they were. That didn’t stop some of them wildly looking at their neighbors in suspicion as if seeing them for the first time.

  “What’s that on your hand?” one man with red hair demanded, pointing at his neighbor’s burn scar.

  “Edris, you know it was from that fireworks accident a decade ago,” the neighbor scowled.

  “Nah, that was on his left hand!” A woman leaned in to examine the neighbor’s right hand, while the twenty-two others slowly looked at each other and backed away from the man. “This is on your right!”

  “I burned my right hand that night!” He gaped at the red-headed man and the woman. “Milly, really, stop it, you’re scaring everyone—”

  “Sit down, all of you,” Ayzize ordered harshly, and at once most everyone sat down, though Milly and Edris scooted away from the exasperated man with the burn scar. “I will not have you mob-kill someone because of your ignorance. Listen up, since I will only explain this once.”

  At everyone’s silence, some looking down in guilt while Milly and Edris still cast suspicious looks around at everyone, Ayzize continued, “There are four stages of the virus. This does not include incubation, which lasts over two weeks. The first stage is another week long and the vaccine is effective at this stage.” By a ninety-nine percent rate, but these people were paranoid enough as it was. “I received this contract eighteen hours ago, and the shuttle crashed not even three days ago. No one here has caught the virus,” he emphasized, and everyone blew a sigh of relief.

  It wasn’t totally accurate. Milly, Edris, and two others had the virus in the incubation stage when he scanned them, but they didn’t need to know that; at least not in front of a bunch of scared humans who were setting themselves up to murder anyone who as much coughed in their direction. Ayzize would send the patient files to the biohazard team and the new town doctor. “However, it is standard procedure to be up to date on the vaccine, and all of you are behind or never received it. Form a line, now.”

  More enthusiastically, the humans lined themselves up. Ayzize fortunately had his own supplies to vaccinate everyone, and once they received and applied their micro-patches, the day had turned to early evening. After giving them additional instructions, he ordered them to show him the shuttle site and the doctor’s office. Wisely, as even with accelerated tech the vaccine would take three days to be fully effective, the locals only pointed out the locations and stayed away as Ayzize went to both sites to scan the areas alone. Some people insisted on coming along, but others had the sense to stop them.

  The Doctor’s office itself looked like a typical rural clinic. A short and stout building that would only have a lounge, record keeping room, and an office built of wood native to the planet, with vintage style glass windows. Nothing looked to be out of the ordinary except the glass shards sprinkling the swaying grass and the doors half open, their circuits fried. A strong stench of iron and gore blew between the doors, causing Ayzize to turn away for a moment, pressing the back of his armored spine to activate his helmet and filtration system before heading in.

  Breathing recycled but odorless air, Ayzize looked inside the darkened lounge, the setting sun behind him casting eerie, long shadows. Native insects akin to flies buzzed loudly, and pulling a small disk from his pocket, he tossed it up in the air. It suspended itself by the ceiling and whirred around, light slowly glowing to brighten up the room.

  “No wonder they avoided this place,” he mused to himself, looking around. Beyond the furniture smashed into splinters, the glass that separated the lounge from the record keeping room had shattered against the tiled floor, and the servers that held the records sparked and gaped with ripped-out wires. It wouldn’t have been much of an awful sight if it weren’t for the dismembered arm and leg laying on the wooden reception counter. Ayzize’s eyes followed the blood trail back to another dark room with the metal
doors crushed open from the inside. Begrudgingly directing the disc mentally into the next room, Ayzize followed it.

  He only needed to take one look around the room to know that it would take little to convince Doth to send a Biohazard Team. Smashed counters, glass vials strewn across the room, and the examiner’s table lay broken in two. Nothing remained of the doctor but pieces of tissue and organs, while the rest either stained the walls, oozed on the floor, or dripped from the ceiling. The flies’ buzzing reached a crescendo, gorging themselves on whatever they could. Insects were not a vector to spread the virus, though they served as a nuisance.

  “Poor bastard,” Ayzize muttered upon spotting a broken skull in the corner, and turned away. Recalling the light disc back as he walked to the entrance, he withdrew several small tablets that expanded into holo signs and a barrier over the entrance for the locals to stay out. The barrier decontaminated his suit as he stepped through and out into the open. While he wanted to burn the place to the ground, he doubted he could contain the flames to this building; that and the Biohazard team would need to analyze an intact site.

  The crash site smoked in another grain field about half a kilometer away. The sun had set by now, and Ayzize produced several more discs on the way over, lighting his path a dozen meters in front of him. Pushing aside stalks of wheat that fared better than the other field, he heard pops and fizzes before coming upon the wreckage.

  The shuttle looked to be a small passenger craft, one that flew from orbital stations to planet-side, but capable of making small hyper-jumps from a nearby system. The craft, now blackened and coughing wisps of smoke in certain parts, looked like it had been torn from the inside out. Still intact portside, but something had cracked the starboard open, the edges curling outward from the passenger cabin, with three charred remains inside.

  Ayzize frowned, staring at the remains. None of the locals had mentioned another XIK on board, which made him wary. The starboard side had been ripped open physically, and unless a Kath’laka or Prism had been on board—highly unlikely since this was Galactic Accord territory—nothing could punch a hole in a passenger craft and wrench it open, save for a stage three or four Verakas virus victim, or a XIK.

  Looking inside the craft, he turned from the small door to the wrenched open cockpit. More charred remains sat in the pilot and copilot seats, along with a third body. The skeleton looked humanoid, but the bone density looked thicker, and certain bones, such as the humerus and pelvic bones, had been elongated unnaturally. He scanned the cabin and the cockpit. The bodies were human, though the one in the middle of the cockpit had Rovanian DNA tainted with the Verakas Virus. While Rovanians occasionally came to Endeavor, this was a stage four Verakas Virus victim.

  Just to be sure and get information in case the Biohazard team arrived a little too late to salvage data, Ayzize searched for the black box human ships retained. The cockpit didn’t have it, nor did the passenger cabin. Frowning again, he stepped outside the craft. Mimõkian and human crafts were similar in design, as humans tweaked their ships to match their allies of twenty-five thousand more years of space travel. Scanning the engine in the bottom of the craft, his neural implant overlaid the engine in AR form. Crude, shoddily put together, and signs of long-term leakage: human design. Which meant the black box was missing.

  Circling the craft and gradually increasing the perimeter, he found no sign of it amongst the wreckage nor the debris. Scanning long distance, he spotted several bits of metal northwest, in the direction that the craft had crash-landed from, but not a black box. Not even a signal of one. Ayzize gritted his teeth. Unless a new protocol regarding black boxes had been instated, then this black box had purposefully been removed.

  Marking the location as unsafe and as a signal for the Biohazard crew, he walked back to the town where some locals waited for him outdoors. Alan Hunter stood among them and still wore a perpetual frown on his face.

  “So?” Hunter asked, his arms crossed in front of his jumpsuit. A younger woman, likely his daughter since she shared his green eyes, and another man with hands in his pockets looked at Ayzize, their faces worn and tired. “Is it over?”

  “No,” Ayzize said after pressing the back of his neck, the nanotrites scurrying off his face so they could look at his face instead of a nano-helmet. Hunter’s features soured as he met Ayzize’s eyes. “I do not think another XIK is on the loose,” Ayzize added, holding up a hand as the other man looked like he would faint and the woman grabbed Alan’s arm, “but I am sending a Biohazard team to be sure. Do not go near the Doctor’s office and keep others away from that and the wreckage.”

  “But aren’t we vaccinated?” the woman asked, who looked only fifteen. Hunter gave her a biting glare.

  “Young lady, you are not going near it.”

  “But I wanted to know if Doctor Renard was OK—”

  “Everyone inside the clinic is dead,” Ayzize stated, and the woman stared up at him, eyes wide and mouth gaping open. “I do not have his DNA file on record, so I cannot confirm if what I saw was him, and the record room had been torn apart. The Biohazard team will take care of it. For more pressing matters, I need to know if anyone took the black box from the wreckage.”

  “The what-box?” the man beside Hunter asked, scratching his wiry chin.

  “Shuttle recorder,” Hunter scowled to him. “No; no one did.”

  It was Ayzize’s turn to cross his arms. “How do you know?”

  “I was at the scene when it first crashed,” Hunter said with such childishness that Ayzize felt surprised the man didn’t stick his tongue out at him. “Besides everything being on fire, we needed to get those two… things out, then look for a flight recorder. If our mechanic hadn’t pulled us out when she did, we would’ve been in that explosion,” he shrugged, though it looked more to be a shake to get his mind off the memory. “So, no, no one has it.”

  “Hm.” Black boxes were specially made to survive an explosion, even of one of this caliber. Perhaps it had been flung out during orbital entry or even in space, and he didn’t have the tech to track black box signals from what had to be at least a thousand-kilometer distance, let alone a sector of the galaxy. Biohazard might need to bring in the techies, Ayzize thought. “Well, then that is all. You will receive your bills within an hour.”

  Hunter grunted, his face scrounging in disgust. “What do you mean, ‘bills’? There should only be one.”

  “Two. One for my services, the second for the biohazard team. Not to worry; we have repayment options,” Ayzize said, waving his hand as he moved around Hunter to depart for his rental vehicle that sat just outside of town.

  “Wait a minute.” A hand grasped Ayzize’s shoulder as he passed, fingers digging through the plating into his muscle. Ayzize exhaled through his nose, already deeply annoyed, but turned back to Hunter. “Nothing in the contract said—”

  “Paragraph three stipulates that if a Varôk determines a biohazard team is warranted then the requesting party will be billed for it,” Ayzize said, managing the most professional attitude he could put on with an easily incensed agricultural worker. Wondering if he could at least appeal to Hunter, he attempted to soften his voice. “Trust me when I say that you need it. A lot of work and money goes into a colony being fed, so I wouldn’t recommend it if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

  Persuasion check failed, Ayzize thought grimly when Hunter only looked angrier at Ayzize’s words, his hand on Ayzize’s shoulder gripping tighter. “Don’t pretend that you know what we go through. We bust our humps, and for what?”

  “Dad—”

  “Not now, Sylvia,” he hissed at his daughter, who fell silent, her face red.

  “Alan, you’re stressed, we all are, but this guy—”

  “Shut it, Mateo; it was your idea to get Raxdrýn involved in the first place,” Hunter snapped, and the other man glared at him.

  “You want to be more in debt but alive, or just as in debt and dead?” Mateo asked softly; though a good six inches
shorter than Hunter, he held his ground. Sylvia’s face continued to turn red out of embarrassment.

  “Screw off; this ‘man’ is like the rest of them!” Hunter’s voice changed to a hysterical pitch of near ranting, though he dropped his hand away from Ayzize’s shoulder. “Aren’t you sick of being nickeled and dimed? We supply this colony its food and yet we have money taken out of our contracts since we’re more expensive than Agricultural Robotics Corp.”

  Wouldn’t that make you more inclined to read the contracts then? Ayzize thought, feeling tired of entertaining Hunter. Ayzize wished he could deal with Mateo instead, since Mateo at least would be logical if not pleasant to deal with.

  “And then you have the gall to come down here, flaunt around like you know everything, and then act like you pity us?” Hunter rounded back to Ayzize. “Shove off, we don’t need your—”

  “Miss Sylvia, please look away,” Ayzize interrupted Hunter, and his daughter thankfully looked in the other direction.

  Hunter bristled. “Don’t even look at my daughter and—”

  Tapping his temple, Ayzize brought up a holographic image of the doctor’s office, perfectly laid out in stunning 3-D detail of the carnage that he had recorded on the disc. It took two seconds for Mateo’s deep tan skin to turn white, something Ayzize felt sorry for, and for Hunter’s face to turn a sickly green, something Ayzize did not feel at all sorry for.

  “This is something that I cannot do on my own, nor am I trained to do it. No one on this destitute planet—no offense,” Ayzize told Mateo, who still stared silently at the image, his eyes wide in horror, “has the experience needed to thoroughly clean out the clinic. They are more liable to get themselves infected and then spread the virus to others, and since two XIKs easily threatened this town, imagine if that number were greater.”