by MJ Blehart
“Gray and Chuang is quite the beast,” Teru said.
“There are several other issues this raises,” continued Onima. “Nazari and Bettani each came from the opposite sides of the war, yet I got the distinct impression that this is not the first time they have worked together. The war machine, as we’ve been learning, made a lot of those leaders a great deal of ESCA. There are other former NEEA and NECC leaders who were either tried and found innocent—like Nazari—or believed to hold positions of little importance—like Bettani—still out there. They may be in on this and offer us further connections to explore with Gray and Chuang.
“Nazari told us a lot, but she did not tell us who is backing this financially. I suspect it’s Gray and Chuang, or at least some of the higher-ups from the company. That, of course, is why Mr. Cadoret was executed: to keep that information from getting out.”
“You’re certain it was Gray and Chaung who had him killed?” asked Teru.
“Yes,” Jace said. “I saw the killer, and they were wearing the blue armored shell with a black helmet we’ve seen repeatedly employed by Gray and Chuang.”
“You don’t think it was a frame job of some sort?” Teru asked.
“No,” Jace said. “I don’t believe in coincidence, and there is too much here pointing to that connection.”
“Agreed,” said Onima. “And what’s more, nobody gains a damned thing by framing Gray and Chuang. Even as a misdirection, too many of the pieces point right back there. If another company or individual were trying to frame them, I think we’d have uncovered them by now.”
“Don’t forget Ms. Varma’s murder,” Jace added.
“Yes,” Kara agreed. “Jun Varma was almost definitely killed by Gray and Chuang for the same reason Palmer Cadoret was.”
They were silent a moment. Jace noticed Kara looked uncomfortable.
“Kara?” he prompted.
She looked at him, then sighed. “Sorry. I know I came to the investigation late, and you were initially suspicious of me. And my governor—for good reason. What I told you about my implants and getting them during the war was true. What I haven’t told you before was that after I joined the Bureau, they were upgraded considerably.”
“How considerably?” asked Onima.
“Additional functionality for scans,” said Kara. “The long-range comm ability direct to Rand. And the nano-trackers. I know trusting me was not easy. I also know that, after Feroz’s betrayal, you are still leery. I am with you, and this investigation, and the team. Onima, I hope you know that.”
Teru asked, “Are you concerned that, with your implants and Director Rand sponsoring their upgrades, he may have also made you into an unwitting spy?”
“Could he?” asked Kara.
“Sure,” Teru said. “I can run a scan. But you should know that, unlike what they are trying to do to the clones, there’s nothing implanted in you or any regular human that can let someone else control you.”
Kara chuckled. “Science fiction, right?”
“Yeah,” Teru said. “You’d have to be capable of altering brain chemistry in some rather technical and complex ways.”
“Even taking control of clones had a price,” Jace said. “As Dr. Steingarten told us, it robbed my kind of our humanity—which defeated the whole purpose of using clones for war in the first place.”
“I’ll run a scan,” Teru said, “but I am pretty certain it won’t turn anything up. I tend to run passive scans regularly, especially—no offense to anyone here—among people new to me. If you were implanted with anything that could send some sort of signal, I would have noticed it before now.”
“That’s somewhat reassuring,” Kara said.
Teru stood and ran a datacard over Kara, down and then up, scanning her whole body.
“I appreciate your candor, Kara,” Onima said. “And with all we’ve been through so far, I do trust you. Yes, I am still leery of that, but I trust you.”
“Thank you,” Kara said.
“Clear,” Teru said. “There’s nothing on you that shouldn’t be. Just the implants you accepted and expected.”
“Good,” Kara said.
“You should know,” Teru began, “that the medical procedure they were offering me was both wicked expensive and super experimental—and, frankly, pointless. But some non-binaries want to go the extra mile to become as gender-neutral and sex-neutral as possible. But that’s just not for me. Anyhow, Dr. Gerber has done more than a dozen of these procedures, as well as dozens of gender reassignments.”
“You also learned something new, then?” Kara asked.
“That’s not all,” Teru stated. “Once Ms. Nazari and Dr. Gerber left me, as I monitored Onima and went to find the clones, I made a pitstop at Ms. Nazari’s office. Since I was sure you’d gotten your datacards confiscated, I downloaded everything my wi-fi could detect and pull.”
“Teru,” Onima said, “that’s incredible.” She sounded genuinely impressed.
Teru grinned. “No sense in wasting an opportunity. Then I met Hailey Wang, told her what we were up against, and she got me the help we needed to get you out.”
“You cut it close,” Jace commented.
“Not really,” Teru said. “When I told Hailey Ms. Nazari was monologuing, she rolled her eyes and said that was to our advantage. And it really was.”
“Teru,” Onima said, “thank you for joining my team. You’ve proven yourself a real asset thus far.”
“I know you’ve been through quite a lot in this investigation,” Teru said. “Deputy Director Samarin was very specific about asking me to join. And—as much as I recognize it’s inappropriate for me to say it—this has been fun so far.”
“You call getting shot at while running away like that ‘fun’?” Jace said.
“In a bizarre sense of the word,” said Teru. “But that’s neither here nor there. Now, then - shall we go over some data, new and old, and see what we can do with it?”
13
Onima loved a good puzzle.
This investigation and all it had turned up, unfortunately, was a puzzle—but not one she would call good.
Everything they had, to the naked eye, connected together fairly well. The story was convoluted, but it plausibly fit together.
Former leaders from the NEEA and NECC wanted to overthrow the AECC government that had replaced them. The reason for the overthrow, based on all they’d gathered thus far, was because the AECC wasn’t making those people the kind of money they’d earned running the previous governments.
Also, the greater autonomy of the individual systems under the AECC was seen as a weakness. Too much wiggle room, they seemed to think, made for too many people having access to more ESCA and control than these former leaders liked.
All of this was utterly presumptive, even with a recording of Diane Nazari sharing some of that information directly.
But Ms. Nazari had confirmed that she, Bettani, and others had been planning and plotting since the war had ended, if not before. Perhaps they had recognized that the war wouldn’t go on forever. Whatever the case might be, the plan had been kept on a back burner until the canutus had departed and the new government had been left without its powerful alien allies.
Despite her position in the CBI, Onima had zero information on the departure of the canutus—not even why they’d chosen to leave. Truth be told, her entire knowledge and understanding of the canutus was no better than general information.
But without their non-human allies, the IHCF would have been unable to strike at the two warring governments and end the war as swiftly and relatively painlessly as they had.
Twenty years of continuous war had made for enough pain. But, as Ms. Nazari explained, once it was between clone armies—and the rest of the population was infrequently impacted by it—it was a distant, ongoing issue of little importance.
Then there were the clones. They had been an intricate part of the plot Ms. Nazari and her associates were hatching. They had engineered a virus that only impact
ed clones. It was specifically designed to take advantage of previously unused information programmed into the clones when the brain scans of their donor templates were downloaded into them.
That used data that was not supposed to exist anymore. But it was part of the tie to Gray and Chuang—which had been a company by another name during and before the war—that had a hand in the whole soldier-cloning process.
Yet the virus had failed to do its job. Instead of controlling them, it was killing clones. However, Ms. Nazari had stated that, while it would not serve to give them a clone army capable of engaging with and weakening the AECC’s forces, the virus would be useful in misdirection.
Jace and Kara had heard the same thing. But what did it mean? In what way did Ms. Nazari and her associates intend to use the clone virus to cause a misdirection which might weaken the AECC, making them vulnerable to being toppled?
Perhaps they would make knowledge of the virus more widespread. There had been, over all human history, numerous global pandemics that had done tremendous damage and killed millions. From the Black Death of the 1350s to the first cholera pandemic of 1817 to the 1918 Spanish flu, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and the 2102 hemorrhagic fever pandemic, viruses could be terrifyingly deadly.
Despite massive improvements in medicine over the last four centuries, new viruses still emerged and posed a threat from time to time. Terraforming and colonization had unearthed many new and exotic viruses that took time to understand and counter.
If a new virus was killing clones, who were known to have been engineered to be virus-resistant, what if it found its way to non-clones? The fear of that alone could be a powerful tool of misinformation.
Thus far, all evidence pointed to the virus not being airborne. But lots of viruses began that way. Like other organisms, viruses could evolve. Even an engineered virus might change.
It was also possible that the virus’s creators were reengineering it to make it airborne.
That was where the discussion of all their evidence and information had brought them.
“What do we know about the virus’s dormancy?” Teru asked.
“We might want Dr. Patel here for this.” Onima tapped her comm to send a signal to ask Maira to join them.
“As far as I recall,” Jace began, “it was dormant in the two clones murdered alongside Palmer Cadoret. I’ve seen it up close, and it’s not pleasant.”
“Up close?” asked Teru.
“One of my roommates in Copy Slum,” Jace said. “Zee Alpha Three had the virus. John Doe, who is my other roommate, and I watched Zee lose muscle control and motor skills over the course of five or six days. Onima was there when Zee died and liquified.”
“It was fairly gruesome,” Onima recalled. She had witnessed death many times over the years. But watching someone turn into goo was uniquely disturbing.
“So Jace was directly exposed,” Teru said.
“But I have been checked by Dr. Patel,” Jace replied. “More than once. She didn’t find the virus in my system, so it’s not dormant in me.”
“Has she tested you recently? You’ve been exposed to a lot of clones recently, and if it’s airborne now but has a long dormancy, you could have it.”
As if on cue, Dr. Patel entered the MBCC and approached the team. “You called?”
“Dr. Patel,” Jace said, “we were just talking about the clone virus. Thus far, we know it’s not airborne, but Teru has questions about its dormancy. They wonder if you would still be able to detect it in me, even if it’s dormant?”
“Yes, I should be able to,” she said. “I’ve seen it in its dormant state. You tested negative for it previously.”
“I know,” Jace said. “But, as Teru pointed out, I’ve been among a lot of clones of late and have not been re-tested.”
“Do you want me to perform a thorough scan now?” asked Dr. Patel.
“Yes, please,” said Jace.
“Not that you technically need it,” Onima put in, “but I authorize whatever you feel the need to do.”
Dr. Patel chuckled. “Thanks. You, Mr. Rojas, have probably received the most medical treatment and examinations of any single clone since the war.”
“Or ever, really,” Jace said, rising.
Dr. Patel gestured, and Jace accompanied her to the medical bay.
Onima didn’t want to think about the possibility of Jace being infected. He had become more than just an asset to her investigation. Jace Rojas was a friend.
“Teru,” she said, “I think we should go back over the list of company directors that Jun Varma provided us. I want to see if we can make any direct or indirect connections between them and Bettani and Nazari.”
“You want to see if you can start painting a clearer picture of how Gray and Chuang might connect with the former NEEA and NECC leaders?” Teru asked.
“Yes. Also, I want to see if that, in turn, leads us to other former NEEA or NECC leaders out there who could be part of this plan.”
“I think I can distinguish that data from what I recovered,” Teru said. “Remind me who Jun Varma is?”
Onima proceeded to fill Teru in on their meetings with the late Gray and Chaung deputy director. Teru had not been made privy to everything they had at the start of their involvement on the team. Onima hoped they wouldn’t hold that against her.
Onima talked about how they’d returned to New Terra to speak with Ms. Varma after all they’d learned from the late Dr. Steingarten. After they had learned Feroz killed Steingarten, Onima suspected he’d been the one to let the company know to take care of Ms. Varma.
Kara had withdrawn a datacard as Onima was finishing her narrative. At its conclusion, Kara asked, “We brought back data from Dr. Steingarten’s apartment, right? Did we ever have Feroz run that, or do we still have it?”
“Feroz had some,” Onima replied.
“Right,” Kara said. “But did he keep the infodrives and datacards, or did we?”
Onima pulled out her datacard and did some checking on it. Teru had extended the tiny metal arms of the implant on their temples and had the holographic screen in front of them. Kara went through her data as well.
“Well,” Kara said, “it’s not a lot, but I do have some info here. I have a list of names from Steingarten’s data. Probably an address book, I recall. Let me pass it to you, Teru.”
“Okay. Here we go.” Teru made a swiping motion and placed a holographic screen before both Onima and Kara. “Company directors with highly probable ties to Vladimir Bettani and Diane Nazari.”
Onima looked at the data. Three highly placed directors of Gray and Chuang had some rather clear and direct links to both Nazari and Bettani. They were both business and personal, direct and indirect.
“This is good,” Onima said. “Kara, let’s take a closer look at these three and run some major background checks to see what we can learn about them.”
“Sounds good,” Kara said. “Divide and conquer, or check them all and allow for overlap?”
“Allow for overlap,” Onima said. “I don’t want to chance missing something, and both of us and our experience makes for a very thorough search.”
“Agreed.”
“Meanwhile,” Teru said, “I’ll start to take a look at what you provided me from this Dr. Steingarten and see if I can find any further ties.”
Onima pulled up the data on the three company directors. All had been part of Gray and Chuang and its previous incarnations from during, and likely before, the war.
“Interesting,” Teru said after a few minutes. “A lot of the people on this list are deceased. Quite a few. They are all doctors, scientists, and engineers.”
“Were any of them involved with the soldier-cloning program?” asked Onima.
Teru was silent a moment. Then, “Some were, yes. Most of the engineers were programmers, largely involved in advanced robots and cybernetic research. I suspect, though, lines could be drawn to cloning.”
“The brain scans and programming,” Oni
ma provided.
“Yes,” Teru agreed.
“Are any of the people on this list still alive?” Kara asked.
“Yes,” Teru said. “Two or three that are listed here are still living. Or were when you acquired this list, at least.”
An idea came to Onima. “Teru,” she said, “let’s cross-reference those doctors with the company directors. All of them. Let’s see if that provides any hits.”
“On it,” Teru said.
At that moment, Jace and Dr. Patel returned to the MBCC.
“I’m pleased to report Jace has a clean bill of health,” Dr. Patel said. “Not only that, but a deep scan shows no signs of the virus in his system, even dormant. Frankly, there’s nothing unusual in his system. Clones have got some interesting advantages.”