Nineveh's Child

by Gerhard Gehrke

“I’m sure there’s a blood vein in that arm somewhere,” Dinah said.

  “Sit still.”

  Dr. Hel finally tapped a vein. Dinah watched the tube fill with blood as Dr. Hel drew the plunger back. When she finished, Dinah received a swab of gauze and she curled her arm to put pressure on the wound while Dr. Hel labeled the sample. The orderly appeared bored.

  But why is he here in the first place?

  The doctor moved on to other tests. She checked Dinah’s eyes, nose, and ears and looked down her throat with a small flashlight, all things that apparently had to be done at that tender hour of the morning. She then had her lie down. She filled a syringe from a small vial and squeezed a few drops through the tip of the hypo needle. The vial had red juice in it.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s to help you relax.”

  “I’m already relaxed. I’d like to take a pass on that, if you don’t mind.”

  Dinah sat up. When Dr. Hel tried to place a hand on her shoulder, Dinah pushed the doctor away. The attendant instantly became alert and moved toward her. Dinah hopped off the opposite side of the table, keeping an eye on both of them. The attendant had a long reach and would be able to grab her quite easily if she stopped moving. Dr. Hel held the needle pointed up at the ceiling, as if it was a fragile thing.

  “Get away from me!” Dinah screamed.

  She was surprised when the attendant paused to look at Dr. Hel.

  “Dinah, what are you doing?” Dr. Hel asked.

  “You’re not putting that in my arm. I’m not your experiment anymore. I refuse.”

  Dr. Hel waved the attendant away. The man backed off. The needle got put down on a tray.

  “Dinah, it’s just medicine to keep you from getting sick. There isn’t always time to fully review everything that we do for your health.”

  “I’ve heard this from you already. There’s never time, is there? Why not make time to tell me and the other kids what you’re putting in our food and in the punch and the needles. Until you convince me it’s something I need, I’m saying no.”

  “Dinah, I appreciate your frustration. You have to know that living within these walls is the only way humanity can survive. But there are health issues that must be addressed. Information about some of these problems must be limited to administration. Surely you can appreciate the need to avoid causing a panic.”

  “People are too sick to cause problems. I saw my brother and everyone that was in the hospital. And what about all of the sick kids?”

  “Some weaker constitutions require longer recovery time after a treatment. And rumors among you children don’t help. It only spreads fear. Our fragile system requires full cooperation.”

  Dinah thought the doctor’s slight nod was to her, as if to say, “Don’t you agree?” But the attendant had taken the moment to step around the table, and he grabbed her. Dinah screamed and tried to bite his arm, but this wasn’t his first go-round with a difficult patient. He wrangled her easily enough up against the exam table, using his weight to his advantage. Dr. Hel picked up the needle.

  “Dinah, please! This won’t hurt, and it will be over in a moment. You’ve fallen behind in your treatment. It’s time to get you back on track.”

  Dinah kicked her. The needle fell to the floor. Dr. Hel was furious.

  “Strap her to the table. We’ll let her calm down, and then we’ll try again. You and Ruben are both more trouble than you’re worth.”

  Dinah got strapped down. The orderly turned off the lights when they left.

  At least I didn’t get the shot.

  ***

  As she lay there in the White Room with the lights out, waiting for Dr. Hel to return with a surgical team to perform medical experiments—no doubt without anesthesia—all she felt was relief. Whatever numb place she would eventually be sent to could be no worse than life within Nineveh. Perhaps Ruben was already there and happy. Addis might be there too. And whoever her mother and father were, if she saw them there, Dinah would resist the urge to slap them and instead give them a hug and never let go.

  She thought she was delirious when the man she would come to call Uncle Karl came in with two of the hunters to take her away. There were sounds, shouting, fighting, but when the big man carried her, he held her close as if nothing would ever hurt her again.

  35. Good Medicine

  Her brother’s hospital room hadn’t changed much since she last saw it over six years before. It smelled less intensely of urine compared to the hallway, but perhaps her nostrils were accustomed to the odor. The place might smell like a rose garden for all she knew. He lay in bed tucked under his sheets, his mouth agape, his eyes fluttering.

  Next to the bed were his wheelchair and exoskeleton. In an armoire with missing doors hung his hunter outfit and the loose jumpsuit he wore when in the chair. Which one was really him?

  She examined the machines in his room. He wasn’t connected to any of them. Whatever illness that had plagued him years prior was either suppressed or gone. His bed had an array of rails and a trapeze so he could sit up and get to the chair, but even on his best days doing this without assistance would be unlikely.

  She got her first close look at his exoskeleton. The metal body brace looked horribly uncomfortable, with little in the way of padding. It was replete with servos and micromotors and had a wireless neural link to control it all located at the top of the artificial spine. She wrapped a knuckle on the metal. Tough stuff.

  Rosalyn shushed her.

  “We made enough noise with Dr. Hel,” Dinah said. “He’ll wake up soon enough once we get him out of bed.”

  “Can’t we sedate him?”

  “Then he’ll be out when we need him later.”

  Rosalyn wasn’t following, but she went to the head of the bed. She uncovered Ruben and they dragged him and slid him to his chair.

  “Where are we going?” he asked. His eyes were having trouble focusing. He appeared confused, looking around at Rosalyn, then Dinah, then the ceiling. Once they got him seated upright he bent forward and wasn’t able to straighten himself. Dinah attached the chair’s chest strap and tightened it so he wouldn’t fall.

  Dinah kissed his cheek. “We’re going to work.”

  Before they left the hospital, Dinah liberated Dr. Hel’s key card from her belt. She was already wriggling free. Dinah retightened her cords, but it would only be a matter of time before she escaped. Rosalyn made a sideways head gesture, indicating Dr. Hel.

  Dinah knew what she meant, but asked anyway. “What?”

  “Her.” Again with the sideways nod. Only Rosalyn could hint at homicide with a toss of her head.

  “No.”

  The wheelchair made its own rubber-on-tile noise as Dinah pushed Ruben through the hallways. There was no masking the sound. But they didn’t encounter anyone as they made it back to the research wing. Even the elevator was free, the spot Dinah most expected to be crawling with hunters eager to recapture her and throw her back in her cell.

  Karl had a worried look on his face when they got back to the White Room.

  “What took you so long?” he said. “I think we might be in trouble.”

  “What happened?” Dinah asked.

  “Channel one. Gregory. Fifteen minutes ago, he asked ‘Initiate which lockdown protocol?’”

  “What did you answer?”

  “I just gave a one-click acknowledgment. Saying nothing would have alerted him. Hopefully he takes the response as ‘Question received—I’ll get back to you.’ Since then it’s been all quiet. But we need to assume he knows something is wrong.”

  “Keep listening. Give a shout if you hear anything. We’ll be right here in the lab.”

  Before he could ask any questions, she left him.

  With Dr. Hel’s key card in hand, she tried all the doors within the lab she couldn’t access before, including the room with green lights. The card worked. The nodes lay in their restful slumber, no staff members or hunters anywhere to be seen. She next op
ened the door to the lab room with the Wally. Last time, the creature had thrown a tantrum, but now the room was silent as she turned on the lights. The cage was empty and clean. Rosalyn pushed Ruben up behind her. His eyes were bleary, but he was awake.

  “It’s gone,” Dinah said.

  “It had become…unmanageable,” her brother said. “So here we are. Besides disrupting another dreadful night’s sleep, what are we doing here?”

  Rosalyn gave her a look. She too waited for an answer.

  Dinah collected herself. “I’ve had a lot of time to read through program files while connected. I noticed the actual gene-editing program hasn’t been used since before our arrival. Seems the practical side of the lab was busy once. Not anymore. Also, since we came here you’ve been less able to function. I’d imagine you’d be using your exoskeleton as much as possible rather than rely on a nurse to push you about. Sure, it must be a pain to get into your brace, but walking is better than getting pushed. Using the bathroom on your own is better than pissing through a catheter and into a bag. Your brace doesn’t have an attached bag because when your treatments are current, you regain a fair to good measure of control over your tics and weak muscles.”

  His forward head motion proved to be a nod. He was actually listening. Good.

  “But things regress between treatments. Your own immune system fights the genetic changes applied to your cells. It must be a careful balance, right? Subvert your immune system, and you die. For the changes to take, we need designer antibodies to help cultivate the changed cells and not take them out. To be able to apply some of the sexier changes I tried in the virtual sim, the process would have to be applied over as short a time as possible. But that becomes a race against the body trying to maintain the status quo, or tipping the scale so far that the body begins to genetically adapt and make its own changes. But you know all of this already.”

  No response.

  “And you’ve had some limited success in turning children into the network nodes. Where this is your doing or that of other, earlier redoubt scientists isn’t clear to me. But you upped the subjects’ brainpower, conditioned their metabolism so they could live a life in bed as part of your supercomputer. They couldn’t handle the strain without such treatment, and they got started at an early age. Putting a fresh brain like Redmon’s into the network was just leverage.”

  She put both hands on the armrests of his chair and leaned in.

  “You would have done it to me back then if you’d been in control. The only reason you kept me from being turned into a node was so I could return and work under your terms. It had nothing to do with saving me; it was all about saving you, fixing you.”

  His eyes kept contact with Dinah’s. She even had Rosalyn’s undivided attention.

  “Remember that last night I visited you before I left? I went into a few of the hospital rooms. They were full of grown-ups, all sick. Genetic changes to adults prove more difficult. Thus all of the cancer or whatever other sicknesses got triggered.”

  My brother snorted. “There were other causes. The redoubt made people sick before I was even born. It’s not all me.”

  “Maybe. But instead of stopping the madness, you refined it. Everyone here was a test subject, not just the children. But who benefits? How many people are even left? This place is a tomb with a supercomputer. Is it all to help make more hunters?”

  “There are others we can help,” Ruben said. “We just have to know our role. Some pieces go in front to save those in the back. Some drink the punch and become nodes.”

  “I never drank the punch. I wasn’t that stupid.”

  Ruben said something in a low mumble. When she waited, he repeated himself more clearly.

  “Sometimes punch is just punch.” His grin spread across his face.

  She stood erect over him and made fists and dug her nails into her palms. She was trembling. It took everything she had not to strike him. Everything Nineveh had done to its own citizens and to those above was all a joke to him.

  “How many dead?” she asked. “How many hurt or crippled? Brain-locked? Uma, Redmon, Addis, even Karl. Everyone I’ve ever been close to, you took away. Even the kids I didn’t like, they don’t deserve this. How many didn’t survive to be included into your network? How many?”

  “About fifty percent. But it was all for you.”

  “Liar.”

  “Too true. But the researchers before me would have heaped you in with the other kids, and your beautiful mind would have been rendered down to mush like the rest. I couldn’t allow that. That’s why I had you removed.”

  “Why couldn’t you have just let me be? I was happy up there. Happy enough.”

  “Because you don’t get to have it your way. I need you. You have a purpose and work to do. But you could have waited for a more decent hour.”

  “That doesn’t make sense! Why not just tell me? Ask me? You know I’d have said yes. I would have done anything for you. But you were never there. They kept taking you away. You kept your plan to yourself. Then when I was taken, I didn’t know how to get back here. But you could have sent someone, sent a message. And now you’ve become…what?”

  “A mass murderer,” he said. “The man in charge of Nineveh. But this place has a certain momentum to it, even if the cycle we’re going through is decades in the making. The new generation of hunters could be led only so far until they realized it’s easier to take what they need from those who can’t defend themselves. Our future for survival is aboveground. They need me and Nineveh to keep their machines running. But in their fervor, they’ve decided that the old must be purged.”

  “They’re all changed, aren’t they? The hunters? Are they even human?”

  “Of course they are. Bred to their task decades ago, even before the collapse, if I were to guess. I didn’t start the process. Nineveh’s quest for the perfect genetic specimen to survive was racing toward a dead end. They would have all been sick and dying if I hadn’t made numerous laborious corrections over the years. But our computing power was never good enough to make true improvements and to properly fix the flaws of prior generations. Our parents’ generation knew that, thus the project. Thus you and Rosalyn and me as the hub.”

  “I’m flattered,” Rosalyn said dryly.

  “But the hunters,” Dinah said. “I only saw them a couple of times as a kid. And none of them looked like Gregory.”

  “A separate class on another level, raised both inside the redoubt and outside. Trained by the older generation of hunters. Nineveh’s scientists would never risk further testing on their providers even as they watched them sicken. But I would, and I let them know that I would help them. It would just take time. And once Gregory and the others of the new generation understood what I was offering, they backed me and let me perform all the tests needed to make them stronger despite the risk. They yearned for it, their disdain for technology of the old world notwithstanding. For the hunters’ full cooperation, I had to allow them their extracurricular activities.”

  “Makes sense,” Rosalyn said.

  Dinah glared at her, wishing she would shut up.

  “I could go on,” he said. “It’s quite the complex labyrinth of beliefs the hunters have about the world above and how it needs to be wiped clean. It apparently reflects those of quite a few surface dwellers, doesn’t it? Technology blamed for the collapse. Doubt they’d find common ground on which to not kill each other, but it would be interesting to see. Where would you place the hunters on your board, Dinah?”

  “It’s not a game. And whatever weirdness the hunters believe in just sounds like your usual twisted stories.”

  “They pleased you so, once. So can we please all go back to bed and resume this conversation at a more reasonable hour?”

  Dinah thought she heard something from the hallway. She went to check. No one was there, but as she listened she made out the distant sound of the closest elevator whirring to a stop.

  “They’re coming,” Rosalyn said.<
br />
  “I know.” She was distracted, still chewing on everything her brother had told her.

  “Dinah.” Rosalyn grabbed her arm and squeezed. “What’s the plan?”

  “We can’t leave,” Dinah said in a low tone. “And I’m sorry, but I can’t kill him. It won’t end anything. So I’m going to see if I can change who calls the shots. Watch the hallway. Close and block the door if you see anyone.”

  She pushed her brother to the side of the lab with the most machinery. It looked like there was enough equipment here that they could do surgery. But Dinah understood that larger changes were possible without ever drawing a scalpel, and from her time in the network she knew one of the machines by the software that drove it. All the functions were part of the simulation. Each design she had executed would have been saved. Her only hurdle was to familiarize herself with the external controls.

  Some of the network cables ran though the various instruments, monitors, and a large ceiling-high microscope clamped to the desk. These were all connected, like some ad hoc row of train cars. The caboose to the whole works was a medicine printer that would produce whatever the network told it to. The printer was an unassuming matte-gray plastic box with a mouthlike dispenser. Bottles and containers of every sort were in a cabinet nearby where the end product could be gathered in liquid or solid form.

  Although Ruben’s computer was still pass-protected, the printer wasn’t. She brought it out of sleep mode. A few lights blinked. It took her longer than she liked to familiarize herself with the small touchscreen. Although this particular printer hadn’t been recently used, it was part of the network. Her network. And there in its memory queue was a job she had sent to print when last in the network. No one had deleted it.

  spacepope-1D, the item read.

  When she selected that item, the printer’s monitor began to read out a long ingredient list that kept scrolling once it reached the limits of the tiny screen. She tapped the screen until it read “Print Now” and followed the instructions. This meant gathering raw ingredients, tiny wrapped and labeled cubes she found in a small refrigerator, and feeding them into a hatch on top of the printer. She put three empty syringe vials in the printer’s dispenser and hit Start.