Binary

by Stephanie Saulter

  ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Not yet. Not suppertime.’

  ‘He had lunch,’ Callan interjected. He did look a bit weary, Eli thought. ‘We went up to the canteen today. Someone said you had just left. It wasn’t bad, eh, Herran?’

  ‘Not bad.’ He was absorbed in the tablet.

  Eli stood by him for a few seconds longer, trying to work out what he was streaming. It looked like Festival news and socialstream commentary, but interspersed with code in the weird mashup that only Herran could decipher.

  He shook his head and went over to Callan. ‘How about you?’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t seem quite so chipper.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ The answer came out on reflex, then he caught Eli’s look and sighed. ‘I’m a little tired, that’s all. Didn’t sleep so well.’

  Eli tilted his head to indicate they move out of earshot. Sevi turned politely away to her screens as they stepped clear of the lab.

  ‘What’s going on? Is this bringing too much back for you?’

  ‘No. I mean, the first day wasn’t great but since then …’ They had reached the damper field by the window. He stared out of it. ‘It’s like that old story, you know, about falling through a mirror and everything on the other side is sort of the same but not really? Takes a bit of getting used to. But I can’t fault Sevi or her people. They’re trying really hard.’

  ‘I know you used to have nightmares … If this is bringing them back …’

  ‘No, it’s nothing like that.’ He hesitated, took a deep breath. ‘You know what’s happening with Rhys, right? This condition he has?’

  Eli began to understand. ‘Aryel told me about it. They’re trying to identify the illness? Work out how serious it is?’

  ‘Yes. And the news isn’t good so far. It looks like just about as bad as it could be.’

  ‘You mean—?’ The look Callan gave him was confirmation enough. ‘Oh, Callan, I’m so sorry. That must be so hard on you. Both of you.’ And on Aryel, he thought. And Gwen, and Reginald.

  Callan looked steadily out of the window for a long time. Eli got the feeling that whatever he was seeing was elsewhere.

  ‘I’ve only just met him, you know?’ His voice was hardly louder than a whisper. ‘Onstream doesn’t count. I’ve only known him, in person, in … in the flesh, for a couple of weeks. So maybe it doesn’t make sense for me to be this torn up about it. But I … he … it feels like I’ve only just found him.’ He twisted his hands together unconsciously. ‘He makes me feel connected.’

  ‘You’re in love with him.’

  Callan nodded. ‘Completely.’ He glanced sideways at Eli. ‘Am I mad?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, my friend. I once managed to marry a woman I’d known for so long I thought I must be in love with her. Turns out I wasn’t.’ He shook himself clear of the memory and rested what he hoped was a comforting hand on the other man’s shoulder. ‘No, I don’t think you’re crazy, and I think Rhys is lucky to have you. Do they know what it is he’s got?’

  ‘Not really. It looks like some of the old neuromuscular diseases, things that shouldn’t show up in anyone any more, gem or norm. But it’s not exactly the same as any of them.’ He rubbed a distracted hand through his hair. ‘They’re running profiles on his genome, but it’s so highly engineered they’re struggling to match it to anything they recognise. If they had his genetype, the genealogy and all the modification markers, that would help. A lot. But they don’t.’

  He raised his shoulders, let them drop, and Eli took his hand away. ‘Do you want to get out of here? Go and be with him?’

  ‘No. I mean I can’t yet. He’ll still be at the hospital. They kept him in last night so they could pump him full of drugs and see what happened. He’s spending the day getting scanned too.’ He glanced back to where Herran was busy swiping and tapping at his tablet. ‘He gets home in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Well let’s get ourselves home before then if we can. And if juggling that and this gets to be too much, don’t try to do it. We’ll work something out.’

  ‘Thanks, but I want to be part of this. Not just for Herran’s sake.’ He smiled wearily. ‘Rhys knows what we’re doing here. How important it could be. We both want it to work.’

  *

  The bots were still trawling when he got back to the survey, after a word with Sevi and another, almost cheery assurance from Herran. He spent some time organising interview notes before he checked them again.

  A string of alerts flashed up, and he scrolled quickly through. Mostly on the current system, nothing recent or too serious. Some derogatory language, quickly slapped down; a couple of questionable proposals similarly rejected. A few more from the archive, innocuous and easily explained: cancelled projects, defunct departments.

  The last item on the list had been thrown up by the mergers and acquisitions bot and he realised with irritation that there must have been a mistake in the setup. It pulsed invitingly, though the icon was the dull grey of an inactive link. He tapped at it. Nothing happened. Back into the archive, copy over the linkcode, wait an unfeasibly long time for it to come up …

  File not found.

  He blinked at the banner, and went back to the searchbot panel. The file icon was still there. He tapped it again, waited, again went back to the archive. This time he typed the link in manually.

  File not found.

  So whatever the searchbot thought it was flagging up wasn’t actually in the archive, though the dead link still pulsed on the panel. Had to be an error of some sort, a system-generated glitch, a ghost in the machine. Such things used to happen, pre-Syndrome. Get rid of it, run another searchbot in the morning. Eli yawned and swiped in a deletion command, and frowned. It wasn’t responding to that either. Nor would the tablet now respond to any other commands. He stared at it in frustration, dreading having to call Khan, already thinking guiltily of asking Herran for help instead. His finger tapped a steady tattoo as he considered the options.

  The icon bloomed under his finger, and he jerked back in surprise. A cascade of links shot into life, one after another, file text flashing across the screen and disappearing faster than he could read. A few words and phrases popped out of the maelstrom and stuck in his consciousness, even as the links that contained them were lost in the whirlwind.

  Extreme modification tolerance.

  Weapons potential.

  Batch cull.

  Klist.

  The torrent stopped, finally, on a link that flashed blue before expanding into a message, in a format that felt oddly archaic.

  1503114AS

  TO: Zara Klist

  FR: Jonah Wycliffe

  RE: Phoenix Project – CONFIDENTIAL

  Appreciate your surprise at learning of this. Assure you it was news to me as well. Circumstances unique to say the least! How it has been kept embargoed this long remains a mystery, though no doubt Dr Panborn can shed some light. She does not quite seem to grasp the necessity of this – autonomy has become rather a bad habit, I fear. I think she feels entitled to keep the details a secret even from you and I, although she has hinted at modifications I frankly cannot credit. I am making haste to gain some clarity, and to make clear to HER that the fiefdom she appears to have enjoyed is now at an end. However, the little I have been able to gather suggests it essential to maintain absolute secrecy until we know exactly what we are dealing with.

  I will revert soonest.

  Eli read the message again, twice, feeling his own surprise harden into suspicion. Another link pulsed at the foot of the message. He slowly reached out, and tapped it to life.

  PLANNING

  She has the shape of it now.

  She glances at the map openly but without expression, knowing that they are more likely to notice her if she appears furtive. So her blue eyes blink in studied disinterest, while the brain behind them analyses and memorises, filing away contour lines, river courses, place names.

  The name of this place.

  She already knows a grea
t deal about it. Its outer walls describe the limits of her existence, its inner corridors and compartments the ambit of all her days. She knows every nook and cranny, every line and seam; even the forbidden spaces are familiar shapes, their boundaries explored under the guise of play or aimless wandering.

  She knows some of what goes on in them; she knows that the upper reaches of the complex house more freaks than her, that others have replaced her long-dead batch siblings, though she is rarely permitted to see them. She suspects that some at least may be destined for a life beyond the laboratory, and precautions must be taken to ensure no knowledge of her departs it with them. She knows the lab itself has been here a long time, from well before her own inexplicable advent. And she knows that it is secret – so secret that the world beyond these walls is largely ignorant of its existence. She gleaned this first from diligent eavesdropping, and confirmed it when she learned to daisy-chain her truncated tablet to less limited devices and access the infostream that flows invisibly through walls as wide as the span of her arms, past the double-locked doors with their retscanners and armed guards, up the lift shaft she has never been allowed to enter. Up and out, into the world.

  A world in which the place she inhabits appears to be both named and unknown. The irony amuses her.

  She contemplates this, knowing it helps her remain detached, helps hide any hint of excitement. She has dreamt of escape for as long as she can remember, but the edges of the dream have always been indefinite, amorphous. Escape into what? Where? She realises now that this has worried her far more than the mere mechanics of departure, the difficulties of how to get out. She has been planning for how since she broke the first level of encryption on that first tablet, maybe since she first took hold of Dr Owen’s lab coat and called him by name. She has cultivated forbearance, and accumulated knowledge, for just this reason.

  Now, finally, she knows that above her head is a strangely named forest, and anticipation makes her lift and rustle the newly fledged wings on her back. No teeming city in which she would be spotted and brought down before she has gone two steps, no wired encampment patrolled by armed guards. They have no need of a secondary prison. Forty yards of earth and rock beneath fifty miles of wilderness is more than enough.

  They have wandered away from the map, and she listens to them talk loudly about expansion, reallocation of space, improved access. Even now it never occurs to them to consider what they say in front of her, and she almost shakes her head in wonder. She knows so much more than they imagine, and this buried citadel is not as impregnable as they think. She has been planning for a long time, observing and calculating, assessing habits and shift patterns, compiling a mental inventory of what she will need and where to find it when the time comes. Teaching herself the chemistry of damage.

  She takes a last look at the map. There are other names on it, names she recognises from her illicit excursions by tablet. Outlaw places that promise sanctuary to such as her. Places she can disappear into.

  She will have to act quickly, before the plans they are making can alter the patterns that she knows. She drifts towards the door, the dorm, her tablet. She is already composing the messages she will encrypt and send, seeing in her mind’s eye the steps she must take, the risks she must run, to win herself a life.

  There will be casualties. Of that she has no doubt. But then, there already have been. She remembers a boy with a twisted spine and barely a face, and eyes as blue as her own, and she has no qualms.

  The shape of it is clear to her, and she knows what she must do.

  20

  Rhys tucked a pillow behind his back and tried to find a comfortable position in the endlessly adjustable, perfectly ergonomic institutional armchair he’d dragged over to the window. The pain was not as bad as the first time they’d found the formula that would trigger his muscles to spasm out of control, but the trembling and residual twitches seemed worse, and there remained a pervasive soreness throughout his body that made him want to do nothing more than curl up and sleep it away. He kept his back firmly turned to the hospital bed he’d vacated as soon as the doctors had left the room, and focused on his tablet.

  The pattern was about to reveal itself; he could sense it, like a word just out of reach on the tip of his tongue, like the cacophony of a crowded room the instant before sit-sense rendered its actors discrete and comprehensible. The genetypes were ready to give up their secrets.

  He had delved down, past the shorthand of labelling systems and lists of key features that told only what the gemtech engineers had considered important, down into the core language of amino acid sequences and the subtler cues of the epigenetic control switches. And found nothing; layered one atop the other they neither merged nor strongly contrasted. These were, as he had explained to Sharon, transitional genetypes – the intermediate stages before the final assembly, the spectacular splices, that would result in a supernormal human. They were in themselves both crucial and unimportant.

  That shared insignificance, the realisation that each sample of stolen genestock represented no more than a thing on its way to becoming another thing, was the first connection between them he had found. Then there were the haunting similarities between certain chunks of code, random alignments of sequence that were neither baseline normal nor identical to each other, but that felt like echoes, seeming to repeat and recur with variations major and minor across the archaic genestock of half a dozen gemtechs. If you looked at the genetypes in their entirety the resemblances appeared coincidental. But if you popped those sequences out of the chromosomal array, mapped the engineering markers not just back to baseline but against each other …

  He had it.

  The sequence strings he had isolated slid across the surface of his tablet, organising themselves into a hierarchy, a fractal pattern with antecedents and dependents. There were gaps in the structure, pulsing question marks where further links should logically occur, but the overall shape was clear. He felt the breath go out of him.

  For a long moment he sat there stunned, the ache in his back and legs forgotten. He knew he needed to check and double-check, run tests to audit the relationships he had found, prove whether or not they were robust. He also knew, with a certainty that he recognised as the subconscious calculus of his own altered brain, that what he was looking at was right, it was real. The audit would be for the reassurance of others, not for him.

  He tapped more layers of information into being. Provenance, possible avenues of transcription. The missing pieces, the gaps, sprang into sharp relief.

  And began to tell their own story.

  *

  He had the full picture, and more, when Gwen arrived half an hour later. He looked up as she slipped into the room, blinking in surprise as she pushed back the hood on one of his larger and more shapeless jumpers. Instead of springing free, the long curls of her hair had been pulled back and pinned up. It made their glimmer almost as tame and constrained as his own short locks.

  ‘What’s that for?’ He glanced out of the window, then back at her. ‘It’s not raining.’

  ‘It’s raining fans. Well, not exactly, but I keep getting recognised and, you know, you have to stop and talk to people. I didn’t want to be late.’ She dropped her satchel onto the bed and unfastened the jumper. ‘How’re you feeling?’

  ‘Okay. A lot better than this morning. Where’s Da?’

  ‘Airwalk. The meeting’s running late. Apparently the aquatech buyers don’t see why they should be required to maintain the same environmental standards in their onshore operations as well. Don’t think it should be any of the gillungs’ concern. Da needed to stay and be the voice of moral authority, and I guess he’s taking you at your word about prioritising the contracts.’ She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘He did say he’s really sorry, he’ll see us back at Ari’s. As long as you’re cleared to come home, of course.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m supposed to take it easy for a couple of days.’ He caught her look, and shrugged. ‘Even easier than u
sual, which would be bloody difficult.’

  ‘You’re not exactly doing nothing.’ She jerked her chin at the tablet. ‘When they say complete rest I don’t think they mean spend hours investigating a criminal conspiracy.’

  ‘If I were staring into space doing nothing I’d be a hell of a lot worse off, I think. And it’s incredible, Gwennie, what I’ve found …’

  He trailed off under her steady stare, a look he knew to mean she was not remotely interested in what was swirling on the screen of his tablet, and was not about to allow the subject to be changed. He decided to wait it out, pointedly settled himself deeper into the chair, and stared right back.

  She blew out a sigh, mouth quirking into a startlingly accurate impersonation of Aryel’s ironic half-smile. ‘So. What’s the verdict? Or are you going to tell me second again this time?’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘How d’you work that out? It’s what happened.’

  ‘Gwennie, I already know you’re going to stand by me to the end of time, come what may, all of that. That’s us, that’s who we are.’ Rhys did not mention how absent she’d been even when they were together, how often he’d thought over the past weeks that he was little more than a distraction as she focused on building her career, how much his words felt like hope instead of certainty. ‘Callan – it’s like I told you before. I can’t just assume the same things about him. You weren’t around, you were off doing music stuff, Da was down at the river … Callan was there and he wanted to know what was wrong and I needed to tell someone. Plus I didn’t think it was fair to keep it from him.’

  ‘Were you worried he wouldn’t be up for it after all?’

  ‘I guess I was, a little. I didn’t know, not for certain.’ Rhys did not try to downplay his relief at the memory of Callan’s reaction. ‘I couldn’t just go on what I hoped would be true. Will be true. Sticking around through this – it’s not going to be pretty, Gwen. He may change his mind yet.’