Fragments

by Dan Wells

  The Partial was almost on her, his heavy breathing sounding so loud in her ears, she thought for sure he must be only inches behind her, toying with her. She could smell his sweat, and the sour stink of his breath in the air. That’s it, she thought, it’s my scent. I’ve been running so hard, and hiding so long, I must stink. He didn’t see me or hear me or feel me on the link, he smelled me, like a bloodhound.

  But I’m not giving up.

  She lowered her head, pushing herself into the hardest sprint of her life, when suddenly her body went into a spasm and she sprawled forward on the ground, rolling end over end as her muscles failed her, and her inertia carried her in a tumbling crash. Her senses flickered and jumped; the world was upside down and backward. She struggled to right herself, but her entire body throbbed in pain. It was like she’d been hit full force with a baseball bat, but she couldn’t tell from where. Slowly her eyes focused, and she saw the Partial standing over her with a shock stick; he clicked it a few times, letting bright blue light arc back and forth between the contacts.

  “You’re a fighter,” he said, dropping the stick back into a ring on his belt. He knelt down and smiled, his teeth flashing white in the moonlight. “I might have to have a little fun before I turn you in to the boss.” Ariel tried to move, but her limbs still wouldn’t obey her. The Partial reached for her neck.

  “Stop,” said a voice, and the Partial froze. His hand hovered inches from Ariel’s face, motionless. “Stand up,” said the voice again, a woman’s voice, but Ariel couldn’t see the speaker. There was something familiar about it, but she couldn’t place it. The Partial stood, staring blankly forward. “Pull out your weapon.” The Partial obeyed. “Shock yourself.” The Partial clicked the shock stick on, raising it toward his own chest, but stopped a few inches away. His eyes seemed harder now, as if he was struggling, and Ariel could see sweat pouring down his face. “Do it!” the voice commanded, and the Partial’s defenses collapsed. He slammed the taser into his own chest, falling instantly to the ground, his limbs flailing as his nervous system short-circuited. Somehow his hand managed to keep the taser pressed to his chest, even as the rest of his body twitched and jumped, until finally he lost all control and slumped into unconsciousness. The taser fell inert to the ground.

  It’s Dr. Morgan, thought Ariel, still trying to move. She managed to get one arm under her, raising her head slightly off the ground, but her vision swam and she struggled to stay up. When Morgan was controlling Samm, that same thing happened—that was exactly how Marcus and Xochi described it. Dr. Morgan’s here. She has come for me herself, like a vampire in the night. She got her other arm under her and lurched up, still woozy, her eyes wandering in and out of focus. She turned and saw a figure in the darkness behind her, but her leg throbbed and she couldn’t run. “Dr. Morgan,” she croaked, but her voice wouldn’t obey, and the words were meaningless mush. The figured stepped into the moonlight.

  It was an old woman, hunched and dark, not a vampire but a wild-haired witch.

  “You,” said Ariel.

  “Hello, child,” said Nandita. “Come, we must find your sisters. Our world is about to end again.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Kira walked in silence through the dark subterranean hall, feeling the weight of the empty syringe in her hand. It seemed heavier now than it ever had when it was full.

  “I don’t know you how you do it,” said Kira.

  “That much was obvious,” said Vale, “since you kept insisting that I couldn’t do it at all. Now, I think, you have a glimpse of what it costs to be a leader.”

  “That wasn’t right,” said Kira. “It wasn’t the right thing to do. But . . . it was the only thing I could do.”

  “Whatever helps you sleep tonight,” said Vale. He sighed, and his voice became distant, pensive. “In twelve long years, every hour I haven’t spent tending the Partials and harvesting the cure, I’ve spent trying to figure out how to do it without them. They won’t last forever, but this colony needs to. These children will grow up and have children of their own, and what will save them then? I can stockpile enough Ambrosia for another generation, maybe two, but then what? Even a ‘cured’ human is still a carrier—RM will be with us forever.”

  “You have a year to figure it out,” said Kira. “Eighteen months at the most, before every Partial dies and we lose them forever.”

  “The expiration date,” said Vale, nodding. “It’s as tragic as the Failsafe.”

  Only the Trust knows about the Failsafe. It’s time to confront him. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” asked Kira. “The scientists who made the Partials. The Trust.”

  Vale paused in midstep, casting her a glance. When he started walking again his voice was different, though Kira couldn’t discern his mood—was he curious? Defensive? Had she made him angry?

  “You know a great deal about what I thought was secret,” said Vale.

  “The Trust is why we’re here,” said Kira. “I . . .” She paused, not sure if she should reveal everything. She decided to play it safe and keep everything as vague as she could. “I knew a woman named Nandita Merchant. She told me to find the Trust, with the implication that they’d have the answers we need to save both species. She disappeared before I could ever ask her about it directly.”

  “Nandita Merchant,” said Vale, and this time Kira had no problem reading his emotions—he was struck with a deep sadness. “I’m afraid she’ll never be able to recover from what she did with the Failsafe. She is as guilty as the rest of us.”

  It was Kira’s turn to stop in surprise. “Wait,” she said. “The Trust did this? The Failsafe was a virus, we learned that in Chicago, but you’re saying . . . you’re saying that Nandita, that all of you, built it to target humans? On purpose?”

  “I didn’t build it at all,” said Vale, still walking. “I built the Partial life cycle, their growth and development, the way they accelerate to an ideal age and stay forever—until, of course, they reach the expiration date. Sheer poetry, I assure you, one of the most sophisticated bits of biotech in the entire project.”

  Kira’s mouth fell open. “You created the expiration date?”

  “It was a kindness, I assure you,” said Vale. “When the government requested a Failsafe, I posited the expiration date as a more humane alternative—”

  “What’s humane about killing them?”

  “It’s not humane, it’s ‘more humane.’ Humans, of course, have an ‘expiration date’ as well, when we’ll die of old age. It’s the same principle. And expiration doesn’t put any humans in danger, which a Failsafe might have—and eventually did. But my arguments about the Failsafe and the expiration date were all in the beginning, before we could see the entire picture. Graeme and Nandita, who were tasked with creating the Failsafe, saw it long before the rest of us did. They were the ones who built RM.”

  “I knew Nandita,” said Kira. “I . . .” She hesitated again, but decided there was nothing wrong with a little more information. “I lived with her for years—she ran a kind of orphanage, and I was one of the kids she helped. She’s not a mass murderer.”

  “No more than any other human in her position,” said Vale, cryptically. “But by any measure imaginable, she, and the rest of us, are indeed mass murderers.”

  “But that doesn’t hold together,” said Kira adamantly. “If she wanted the human race dead, completely eradicated, she could have betrayed us to the Partials, or started spreading poison, or a million other things to kill us, but she didn’t. It had to be her partner,” said Kira, following him breathlessly as she sorted through the clues in her head. “Graeme Chamberlain, the one who killed himself. Could he have, I don’t know, re-engineered the Failsafe behind everyone’s back?”

  “You’re still not seeing the entire picture,” said Vale, never looking at her as he walked briskly down the hall. There was something he was keeping from her, something he was reluctant to tell. Kira pressed on.

  “But Chamberlain acting al
one doesn’t add up either,” said Kira, slowing a bit as she thought deeper into the problem. She ran to catch up. “The cure was part of the Partials’ design, embedded in their genetic makeup. Why would he make a virus obviously intended to kill every human on Earth, and then also build a cure perfectly designed to stop it? It doesn’t make sense. But it does make sense if . . .” The answer was right there, on the tip of her brain, and she struggled to grab it—to force it to coalesce into a simple, understandable thought. There were so many of them working, she thought, on so many different pieces. How do they fit together?

  Vale walked a few more steps, dragging slowly to a stop. He didn’t turn around, and Kira had to strain to hear his voice. “I was against it in the beginning,” he said.

  “But it’s true?” Kira approached him slowly. “You and the rest of the Trust—you did this on purpose? You altered the Partial Failsafe to kill humans instead, and you built them to carry the cure so that . . . Why?”

  Vale turned to face her, his face once again tinged with deep anger. “Think about the Failsafe for a minute—about what it is, and what it represents. We were asked to create an entire species of sentient creatures: living, breathing individuals who could think and, thanks to the UN Resolution on Artificial Emotional Response, feel. Think about that—we were specifically instructed to make a being that could think, that could feel, that was self-aware, and then we were told to strap a bomb to its chest so they could kill it whenever they wanted. Ten minutes ago you wanted to free ten comatose Partials, and you couldn’t stand to kill a single human child. Would you be able to condemn an entire race to death?”

  Kira stammered under the sudden onslaught, searching for words, but he carried on without waiting for an answer. “Anyone who could create a million innocent lives and, in the same moment, request a means to kill all of them, without mercy, is not fit for the responsibility of those million lives. We realized what we were creating in the BioSynths—creatures every bit as human as ourselves. But the ParaGen board and the US government saw mere machines, a line of products. To destroy the lives of these ‘Partials’ would be an atrocity on par with every mass genocide we’ve seen in human history. And yet, we could tell, even before we released the first of them for combat testing, that they would never be regarded as anything other than weapons, to be cast aside once they were no longer useful.”

  Kira expected his face to grow harsher as he spoke, more furious at this remembered horror, but instead he became softer, weaker. Defeated. He was repeating an old argument, but with all the fervor drained out of it.

  “At the most fundamental level,” he said, “humanity would not learn to be ‘humane,’ for lack of a better term, unless their lives quite literally depended on it. So we created RM, and with it the cure, both embedded in the Partials. If the Failsafe was never activated—if humanity never got to the point where they felt the need to destroy the Partials in one moment—then no one would have been the wiser. But if humanity decided to push the button, well . . .” Vale breathed deeply. “The only way for humans to survive, then, would be to keep the Partials alive. Just as disenfranchising the Partials would cost humans their humanity, so destroying them like defective products would cost them their lives.”

  Kira could barely think. “You . . .” She searched in vain for the words to make sense of it all. “All of this was intentional.”

  “I begged them not to,” said Vale. “It was a desperate plan, one of terrible consequence—even worse, in the end, than I’d prepared myself for. But you have to understand that we had no other choice.”

  “No other choice?” she asked. “If you objected so strongly, why not go to the executives, or to the government? Why not tell them it was evil, instead of going through with this horrible . . . punishment?”

  “You think we didn’t try?” asked Vale. “Of course we tried. We talked and persuaded and kicked and screamed. We tried to explain to the ParaGen board of directors what the Partials really were, what they represented—a new sentient life form introduced to the world without a thought for how they would live in it once the war was over. We tried to explain that the government had no plans for their assimilation, that there was no possible outcome but apartheid, violence, and revolution, that it would be better to shut down the entire program than to condemn humanity to what was going to happen. But the facts, as they saw them, were simple: number one, the army needed soldiers. We couldn’t win the war without them, the government was going to get them from somewhere. Number two: ParaGen could build them those soldiers, could build them better than any other company in any other industry. We were miracle workers; we made giant trees with leaves like butterfly wings, delicate and perfect, and when the wind blew they fluttered like a cloud of rainbows, and when the sun set behind them, the world lit up with iridescent shade. We made a cure for malaria, a disease that killed a thousand children a day, and we erased it from the world. That’s not just expertise, little girl, that’s power, and with that kind of power comes greed. And that’s fact number three, and the most damning fact of all. The CEO, the president, the board of directors . . . The government wanted an army, and ParaGen wanted to sell them one, and what good were the Trust’s arguments in the face of five trillion dollars in revenue? If we didn’t build their Partial army, they would have found someone else with more malleable morals to do it instead. You don’t remember the old world, but money was everything. Money was all that mattered, and nothing we did would stop them from buying, or ParaGen from selling.

  “We could read the writing on the wall. This army was going to be built, and there would be no plan to give these Partials rights equal to humans. There were only two outcomes: either the Partials would be killed with this Failsafe in a genocide on par with the Holocaust, or a violent revolution would break out, which the Partials, superior in every way, would win, destroying humanity as we knew it. Any way you sliced it, one species would be decimated, and the death of one would come at the expense of the soul of the other. All we had left was to try to, somehow, provide for a way in which both species could work together—that they had to work together just to survive. And so when Armin pitched us his plan we . . . well, we didn’t like it, not at first and not ever. But we knew we had a responsibility to see it through. It was the only plan in which both species made it out alive.”

  Kira’s breath caught in her throat. “Armin Dhurvasula.”

  “You know him, too?”

  She quickly shook her head, hoping her face didn’t give her away. “I’ve heard of him.”

  “A genius among geniuses,” said Vale. “This entire thing was his plan—he devised the pheromone system, and designed the entire interaction of the Failsafe and the cure and everything else. It was a masterpiece of science. But despite his plan and our best efforts, the worst still came to pass. I promise you that we didn’t mean for it to be this devastating; we don’t even understand how RM turned out as ruthlessly efficient as it did. I suppose it’s small consolation that, when it comes down to it, this was unavoidable. From the moment we created the Partials, from the moment we thought about creating them, there was no other possible outcome. Humanity will destroy itself, body and soul, before it will learn a simple lesson.”

  Kira was too stunned to speak. She had expected a plan, she had hoped and prayed that the Trust had a plan, but to learn that it was a plan of mutual annihilation—to force both species to work together or die apart—was too much. When she finally spoke her voice was small and scared, more childlike than she’d sounded in years, and the question she asked was not the one she thought she would. “Have you . . . seen him? Anywhere?” She swallowed, trying to look less nervous. “Do you know where Armin Dhurvasula is now?”

  Vale shook his head. “I haven’t seen him since the Break. He said he had to leave ParaGen, but I don’t know where, or what he’s doing. As far as I know, Jerry and I are the only ones left—and Nandita, now, I suppose.”

  Kira thought back on her list of the Trust.
“Jerry Ryssdal,” she said. “He was one of you, too. Where is he?”

  “South,” said Vale solemnly. “In the heart of the wasteland.”

  “How can he survive?”

  “Gene mods,” said Vale. “He came here once, in the night, and I barely recognized him—he’s more . . . inhuman, now, than even the Partials are. He’s trying to cure the Earth, so there’s something left for the meek to inherit; I told him he’d do better helping me cure RM, but he was always single-minded.”

  “And there are two more back east,” said Kira. “Two factions of Partials are led by members of the Trust: Kioni Trimble and McKenna Morgan.”

  “They’re alive?” His eyes were wide, his jaw open. Kira couldn’t tell if he was glad to hear it or not. “You say they’re leading the Partials? That they’ve sided with them, against the humans?”

  “I think so,” said Kira. “They . . . I’ve never met Trimble, but Dr. Morgan’s gone completely mad, kidnapping humans and trying to study them so she can cure the Partial expiration date. She didn’t know about it until Partials started dying, apparently, but she’s convinced she can solve it with human biology.” And with me, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. She still didn’t know what she was, or what Vale would do when he found out. And she had to ask him. She felt torn between paranoia and desperation.

  “Trimble knew about our plan,” said Vale. “Morgan and Jerry didn’t; they designed most of the Partials’ biology, but we weren’t sure we could trust them with the issue of the Failsafe, and since it didn’t touch their work, we didn’t need to.”

  “Who are the others?” asked Kira.

  “What others?”

  “I found all those names in my research,” said Kira, “but I never found yours, and I’ve heard of two others that I still don’t know anything about.”

  “My name is Cronus Vale,” he said, and Kira nodded in recognition.