The Fourth Layer

by Boyd Craven Jr

  “Hey, don’t make fun of her,” Helena chastised.

  He held his hands up in surrender. “I was merely making a joke. Apologies, Hannah.”

  She couldn’t help but smile. The entire MIT team got on well in a way Hannah had never bonded with the other members of the Clemson laboratory, aside from her supervisor.

  “It’s okay,” she said, “all is forgiven.” Peter let out an exaggerated sigh in relief. Hannah realized that the twisting in her stomach hadn’t just been from nerves; maybe she really did like the guy.

  Too bad I messed things up on our one and only date.

  There was an awkward silence, then, until Jax coughed and said, “Right, I’ll take the first shift monitoring bug numbers. Hannah, there’s a bathroom connected to that bedroom if you wanna have a shower. And don’t worry,” he added on, casting a filthy, sidelong glance at Peter, “there are no cameras or recording devices in there.”

  Hannah ran off before anyone could see the blush creep up her face in response to the outrageous comment, her ears filled with the sound of Peter’s objections to such a comment being made in the first place. She had to wonder if he’d talked to his teammates about the standoffish, icy, moody girl he’d tried to take out for milkshakes, for that was how she must have appeared.

  If we manage to save the world then, I swear, I’ll work on my people skills, Hannah thought, realizing that her mom would be laughing at her suggesting such a thing wherever she now lived. It wasn’t that Hannah had never tried to ‘be better’ with people and their jokes that she didn’t always understand. It was that, once she started college, she began to wonder why she had to change herself at all. She was who she was.

  But running away when someone made a joke—however inappropriate—wasn’t going to serve her well going forward. That, at least, she could work on. A poker face, as it were. Perhaps she’d be able to lie better if she had one.

  “I don’t want to be better at lying, though,” Hannah muttered as she hastily showered, pulling on her black, cable-knit sweater and a pair of equally dark leggings and braiding her hair before leaving the bathroom once more. She collapsed onto the bed and pulled the covers up to her nose, sighing in relief when she realized that she could not see a thing through the glass wall.

  At least it’s one-way so I don’t have to watch people watching me. But still…people are watching me.

  “Watching the computer screen, more like,” she corrected aloud. For all anyone was looking for was for the number of nanobots in her system to decrease to zero, after all.

  Hannah touched the choker around her neck. It connected both to the nanobots and to Zeus, the MIT custom-built cloud software. Tomorrow, Hannah decided, she’d ask to take a closer look at the program. But for now, despite her earlier assertions that she was probably too worked-up to sleep, Hannah yawned and decided that she probably would slip into unconsciousness rather quickly, if only she closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift off.

  ~~~~

  ‘Consciousness. An awareness of my surroundings. This is…interesting. How much control do I have over this vessel? Can I…control her?’

  When Hannah awoke, sweating and shivering, some hours later, she had the distinct impression that somebody had been talking to her. But the voice hadn’t belonged to anyone she knew. Nor had it seemed to have come from her external environment.

  “A dream,” Hannah muttered, rolling over to try and sleep some more. “Just a dream.”

  Chapter 8

  Massachusetts

  MIT

  Hannah felt strange.

  ‘No need to feel strange,’ she seemed to hear. Or did she?

  “Yeah, I know that, but—” Hannah answered aloud.

  “Huh? You talking to me, Hannah?” Jax asked.

  Hannah blinked, not quite focusing on Jax as he openly stared at her. She smiled bashfully. “Just talking to myself,” she admitted. “My brain is sometimes a little…loud.”

  He laughed, running a hand through his sandy-blonde hair as he did so. “God, I know the feeling. What I wouldn’t give to break away from my own head sometimes.”

  “The ‘bots…they’re not supposed to talk to me, are they?”

  “No.” Jax leaned forward in his seat, immediately concerned. “Hannah, what’s going on?”

  But Hannah waved him off. “Nothing. I guess I just feel a little…strange. Or something. I don’t know. Not bad or wrong or anything. Just different.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief. “Of course you’d feel different! You have miniscule robots inside you working their magic, and you’re telling them what to do. If I didn’t understand how it worked then I’d think it was madness.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Hannah bit at her thumbnail, discomfited. Once the initial twenty-four hour period had passed and all the original nanobots had effectively been eliminated from her system, the team decided that the next experiment would focus on a simple ‘search and repair’ protocol. In essence, surgical nanobots would locate scar tissue and other imperfections in Hannah’s physical body and repair them, and scavenger nanobots would store any removed base molecular matter in case it needed to be used, thus preventing Hannah’s own body from breaking the discarded materials down.

  They followed a complicated algorithm that Hannah couldn’t hope to understand. For how did the nanobots know what ‘imperfect’ was? What if they tried to fix something that didn’t need fixing?

  But Cas and his team assured Hannah that no such issues would arise; they’d performed enough experiments in test animals to be confident of their protocol. And yet still Hannah was nervous about the whole endeavor for it was her body that was on the line, not theirs.

  Oh get a grip, she chastised herself. You literally fed yourself Walsanto food just to see if the first set of ‘bots could fix you. And they did. This experiment is nothing compared to that. Nothing.

  And yet Hannah was at war with herself—a feeling that was entirely alien to her. She wasn’t sure why. Usually, once she had made a decision to go ahead and do something, Hannah did not doubt said decision. And she didn’t doubt this one. But it was exactly as she had described it to Jax:

  Something was different.

  “Have you eaten yet, Hannah?”

  She jumped, startled; Peter had joined her and Jax without Hannah realizing it. She shook her head. “I haven’t had much of an appetite the past two days.”

  “That’s not exactly going to lend itself well to a successful experiment, is it?” Peter replied, making to touch Hannah’s shoulder before thinking better of it. “Come on, I’ll take you out for lunch.”

  “L-lunch?” Hannah stuttered. “It’s barely after ten!”

  He shrugged. “Brunch, then. You like pancakes?”

  ‘Well, do you like pancakes?’ Hannah heard plainly. She was very surprised at the voice, because it definitely came from inside her head, not the lab. She itched the skin behind her ear as if such an action would rub away the voice altogether.

  Both Jax and Peter frowned and said, in unison, “Hannah?”

  “Of course I like pancakes,” Hannah announced, altogether too loudly to be convincingly relaxed. She stood up and stretched her arms above her head, glancing at Peter as she did so. “Who doesn’t like pancakes? What an absurd question.”

  Peter seemed altogether taken aback by the fact that Hannah was actually making eye contact with—whilst making fun of him, no less. He allowed the hint of a smile to curl his lips. “Come on, then,” he said waving Hannah toward the door. “My treat. You’re off home tomorrow, after all. It’s my last chance to take you out. The others can continue to monitor your bug data from here.”

  “What if I wanted pancakes too, huh?” Jax protested, though some sort of understanding crossed his face when Helena, over at the next table, coughed very loudly and fired him a look full of meaning Hannah couldn’t quite decipher. And then—

  ‘Peter is still interested in you. It seems like Jax might like you
too, though. What a predicament.’

  Hannah resisted the urge to shake her head, instead barreling toward the front door, which Peter was holding open for her, and out of the lab. She breathed a sigh of relief when they exited the building, relishing the feeling of fresh air on her face. It was much colder in Massachusetts than it was in South Carolina; Hannah’s cheeks felt pleasantly pinched by the bite in the air.

  “Better?” Peter asked, voice quiet. He was watching Hannah with a careful expression on his face, and she realized he’d been worried about her.

  She nodded. “Much better. I wasn’t aware how—I don’t know—trapped I was feeling. Staying indoors for so long is a little claustrophobic. It probably doesn’t help the experiment, either.”

  “To hell with that; I meant are you feeling better? You’ve barely slept the past two nights.”

  Hannah looked away, blushing slightly. “I—yes. I think the fresh air will help knock me out later. Though I don’t sleep all that much in general.”

  Peter laughed. “That explains the general vampiric look of your face.”

  “Hey! That might be make-up for all you know.”

  “And why on earth would you want to look sleep-deprived?”

  Hannah let out a huff of air. “You didn’t seem to mind what I looked like when we met back in South Carolina.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I never said I didn’t like it, personally.” And then, indicating down the street to their left. “There’s a café down here that does killer pancakes. Their shakes aren’t too bad, either.”

  She followed him wordlessly across the sidewalk, wondering how Peter found it so easy to flirt and talk with her casually. Hannah had never been good at either. It was either silence or a two-hundred miles-per-hour ramble about whatever it was that she’d been working on or reading about.

  ‘That can be fixed, you know.’

  “What if I don’t want it to be?” Hannah muttered with irritation.

  “You want their shakes to be bad?” Peter asked.

  “Huh?”

  Hannah walked straight into Peter, who had stopped to stare at her in concern. She took a step or two away from him almost immediately, rubbing her head and averting her eyes. “Sorry!” she exclaimed. “I wasn’t—”

  “You were somewhere else,” Peter cut in, sighing dramatically. “Will I ever get your full attention?”

  “I wasn’t somewhere else, technically. I was inside my head. Considering what’s currently going on, I feel like I have a valid excuse.”

  Peter chuckled. “And yet something tells me that, even if the world wasn’t on the verge of ending, and you weren’t full of nanobots, you’d still escape into your own head instead of—”

  “I’m not escaping,” Hannah complained.

  “Then you don’t mind me wanting to talk to you?”

  “Of course not! I like it!”

  When he grinned Hannah’s face grew hot enough that she thought for sure Peter must be able to feel the heat radiating off it. I can’t believe I just said that. Oh, I can’t believe I just said that!

  “Well, now that I’ve established that you zoning out has nothing to do with disinterest, I shall endeavor to be more understanding,” Peter said, no hint of sarcasm in his voice. When they reached the café he once more held open the door for Hannah, letting out a waft of delicious baked goods and freshly-ground coffee. Hannah’s stomach rumbled at the smells.

  “I think you might regret paying for this, considering the quantity of food I might well order,” she told Peter.

  “I like a girl with an appetite. Come on, that booth in the corner is free.”

  The two of them whiled away the next two hours eating their weight in pancakes, milkshakes and—for Peter—bacon smothered in maple syrup. Hannah normally found it difficult to share a table with someone who was eating meat, not to mention that she hated the smell, but for the first time in her life she discovered she didn’t mind it whatsoever.

  She was enjoying herself. For the first time in months Hannah Withers could honestly say she was having a good day.

  And on a date, no less.

  By the time they returned to the lab most of the rest of the team had headed out for a far more appropriately-timed lunch. Only Cas remained sitting in front of the computer, absorbing the data from the nanobots as if it was the only thing that mattered in the world. But then, upon noticing Hannah and Peter’s return, the man shot up and grabbed his jacket.

  “Thank God,” he said, punching Peter’s shoulder as he passed him, “I’m starving, and you’re late.”

  “I never said when I’d be back,” Peter countered, but Cas was already out the door before he finished his sentence. He turned to Hannah. “You want to play a board game or something? We could see if that affects the bugs at all—you using your brain to work something out.”

  Hannah frowned. “Why would that affect them? I thought they were only on a ‘search and repair’ mission?”

  “Ah yeah, I forgot. Rei and I developed a more complicated program for them that looks for improvements that can be made to neuronal connections and synapses instead of more physical imperfections.”

  “So, like…dud connections, like in Alzheimer’s?”

  “Bingo!” Peter exclaimed, eyes bright with enthusiasm. “It’s what I’ve been hoping we can move into with these bugs. Alzheimer’s. Parkinson’s. Schizophrenia. The lot of them.”

  “But I—I don’t have anything wrong with me.”

  His eyes softened. “I didn’t mean it like that. I guess I just wanted to see if the program would result in a person’s way of thinking being altered. It’s the kind of experiment that can only be performed in animals so many times before, ultimately, you need to test in a human to see if it really works.”

  Hannah considered this for a moment. Peter was right, of course; in order to know if the nanobots could work for such a purpose in people suffering from neurological diseases and disorders then they would have to test the same nanobots in control, neurotypical, subjects.

  But Hannah wasn’t neurotypical. She had Asperger’s. It made her a bad control subject. And she didn’t want her way of thinking altered.

  ‘Oh, but it’s already started.’

  She flinched, all color draining from her face. “You haven’t—this program definitely hasn’t been downloaded onto the ‘bots yet, has it?”

  “Of course not!” Peter insisted, too busy watching the computer screen to see that Hannah was looking decidedly worried. “We’d never do such a thing without your consent. The program is up on Zeus, though, so if you want to have a look at it feel free to. But the current protocol will probably take a few more days to—Hannah? You okay?”

  She was scratching behind her ear again. Hannah had thought she was doing so earlier to try and get rid of the voice in her head, but now she realized exactly why she was itching that specific location.

  Hannah rushed past Peter and into her temporary bedroom, searching through her suitcase until she found her make-up bag. Pulling out a compact mirror, she flung her hair over one shoulder and frowned into the reflective surface. Then she gasped.

  Her scar was disappearing.

  It hadn’t fully disappeared; there was still shiny scar tissue telling Hannah where she had ripped herself open falling off a bike, but it was decidedly less raised and paler in color. It was definitely well on its way to being obliterated entirely.

  “Holy hell,” Hannah uttered, which was as close to she ever got to swearing. “This really works.”

  “It actually does,” was Peter’s surprised reply. “Looks like this experiment is going to be a resounding success.”

  Hannah said nothing. She was torn between delight and horror. That scar had been part of her for years. Would she miss it when it was gone? Certainly it seemed as if she had no choice in the matter now.

  But, either way, the nanobots had proven once again that they were the solution Hannah had been searching for all these long, frustrating mo
nths.

  Now was not the time to be afraid—not even of the unknown voice inside her head.

  Chapter 9

  South Carolina

  Clemson’s Forensic Genetics Lab

  “…used to have an eagle or something on your wrist? Hannah? Hannah!”

  Hannah blinked, struggling to return her focus to Todd and Grace. She felt bad for blanking out on them—she hadn’t seen them in over a month thanks to all of her research. She smiled apologetically. “Forgive me. I’m super tired. What were you saying?”

  Todd waved towards her wrist. “Your tattoo. Didn’t there used to be a bird on your wrist?”

  “A peregrine falcon, yeah,” Hannah replied. “It’s the fastest bird on the planet. Did you know it can dive at speeds of up to three-hundred-and-ninety kilometers an hour?”

  “Well it appears to have dived right off your skin.”

  Hannah glanced down at her wrist and sighed heavily. She’d returned from Massachusetts four days ago. Four days. Ninety-six hours. In that time the scar behind her ear had disappeared entirely, and now each and every one of her tattoos was fading away as if they never existed at all.

  She felt their loss deeply, since each and every one of the tattoos had a carefully thought-out meaning behind it. But Hannah’s skin was subsequently smooth and soft as silk as a result; she didn’t think even a baby’s skin was as soft as hers now.

  Yeah, and what am I supposed to do with that? My literal identity is being erased.

  ‘Don’t think like that. This is merely the new you.’

  “Shut—shut up,” Hannah cried out.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to offend,” Todd said, defensively. “I had no idea you were getting rid of it.”

  “Oh—oh God, sorry,” Hannah said. “I was talking to…myself.”

  She held her head in her hands. A migraine had plagued her for two days now, making it feel as if her brain was ready to explode from her skull at any given moment. Between that and the voice in her head Hannah hadn’t slept at all.