This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  “Oh, one more thing before you leave,” Regina says. “You said Lachlan’s Origin code was designed to alter our instincts. Was there anything else it was supposed to do?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  I shrug. “He just said he wanted to use it to remove the Wrath from humanity, but I think it could probably be used to alter any instinct. He wanted to make us better.”

  “Ah.” She tips her head back. “Yes, the Wrath. He’s always had a problem with it. He can’t see that it’s useless to cut us off from one of the most important instincts we have. We’d never survive without it.”

  “Is that really what you believe?” I ask. “That violence is part of our design?”

  She smiles. “Design is a strong word to use in a place like Entropia, especially when it comes to our DNA. There are those who cannot look at this universe, with all its living creatures and humanity itself, without believing that it has been intelligently designed. As a scientist, I can’t rule out the chance that they’re right—in fact, that question is what drives me. I have looked closer into our foundations than anyone alive. I have gazed into each cell, into the very patterns of life that bind them, and all I can tell you is this: if there is a design that underpins us, Catarina, then it is cold, it is violent, and it is cruel.”

  She gives me one last smile, her black eyes gleaming, then turns and strides back into the lab.

  I wrap my arms around my chest as I leave, walking back down the concrete stairwell and into the park. The party seems to be starting—the trees are glowing, the air humming with the low, pounding bass of electronic music that sounds like a thunderstorm with a melody. The towering empty space of the atrium is filled with floating cobalt lights shaped like jellyfish that my cuff picks up as a swarm of decorated microcopters. There are crowds of people filling the atrium, lined up behind the elevator banks to get up to the surface to watch the flocks come in.

  Cole pushes through the crowd, making his way to me. He pulls me into a hug, but steps away when he feels the tension in my body. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, looking around. “Where’s Mato?”

  “He went to talk to someone. Come on—the others are back inside.” He lifts his arm as though he might slide it around my shoulders to walk back to the room, but he decides against it and falls into step alongside me instead. We weave through the park and back down the concrete hallways, echoing now with a pulsing bass I can feel vibrating in my chest. The steel door to the apartment is open. Anna is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a towel spread out before her, oiling the pieces of her disassembled rifle. Leoben is lying back on one of the bunks with his eyes glazed, his fingers interlaced behind his head, but there’s no sign of Mato.

  “What did Regina say?” Anna asks, looking up.

  I cross the room to one of the bunks, dropping into it with a sigh. “She’s organizing a team to help look for Lachlan tonight, during the party, and she said that we can all stay as long as we like.”

  “What the hell did you give her for that?” Anna asks, setting a gleaming piece of her rifle down.

  “Nothing.”

  Cole sits down beside me. “What’s going on? Did she hurt you?”

  “No, she didn’t even run any tests on me. She just checked the implant to see if it could help lead us to Lachlan, but I don’t think it can.” I scrape my hand back through my hair. “She’s my mother.”

  Leoben sits up, snapping out of his session.

  “What?” Anna asks. “Like, genetically?”

  I nod. “She had a daughter that Cartaxus killed. They made a clone of her to try to keep Regina working for them. That . . . that was Jun Bei.”

  “Holy shit,” Leoben says.

  Cole stands from the bed, walking across the room, his face unreadable.

  “She said she tried to get us away from the lab,” I say. “A couple of times. She said Lachlan tried to get us out too.”

  “Bullshit,” Anna says. “That was Lachlan’s lab. Cartaxus barely had any control over him while he was there. He could have let us out any time he wanted. Sounds to me like she’s working with him.”

  “What do you think, squid?” Leoben asks.

  “I don’t think she is,” I say. “She really doesn’t seem to agree with what he’s doing. She’s worried about him finding me—she said to stay in the bunker.”

  “It’s getting hectic out there,” Leoben says. “There’s a shit-ton of people coming to see these birds.”

  “That’ll make it easier to blend in,” Anna says, clicking the pieces of her rifle together. “We can cover a lot of the city if we have a team helping. Are you sure we can trust this Regina chick?”

  “I think so,” I say. “She seemed like she was being honest. She wants to get to know me again. She’s interested in the Origin code, but I don’t think she wants to force it on anyone like Lachlan does. It’s intellectual for her.”

  “Sounds like Jun Bei’s mother,” Anna says, clicking the last piece of the rifle on. “She couldn’t get you anything else to help us find him, though? We gotta search this whole place?”

  “Yeah,” I say, shuffling back on the bed, leaning against the wall. “We tried running another scan on the tracker to see if it could get us a connection to him, but it doesn’t look like it can.”

  I pull up my cuff’s menu and bring up the report from the implant again. The pieces of paper appear in my lap, sliding through the air as I swipe my finger across them. The only thing the tracker has been sending to Lachlan is my vital signs and my location. If it was sending anything more—like packets of data—then we might be able to slide a virus into them and send it into his panel.

  But there’s nothing we can exploit. The only other communication the implant is making is with a cloud server for what looks like regular software updates, which is strange. I’ve never set up my tech for software updates. In fact, my old panel was strictly prohibited from updates in case any hypergenesis-unfriendly code made it into my arm. I would have noticed update settings like this in my panel.

  But this report isn’t from my panel. It’s from the implant.

  I straighten on the bed, logging in to the server the implant has been connecting to, pulling up a log of software updates that stretches back for three years. These aren’t just updates for the implant, though—they’re pieces of code. They’re gentech apps.

  The implant has been giving Lachlan backdoor access to my panel.

  “Holy shit,” I say, staring at the log. The implant has been slipping these apps silently into my panel’s background memory. I might have noticed if Lachlan hadn’t made me promise not to touch my tech—if he hadn’t burned the skin off my back the one time I managed to hack it. He did that to stop me discovering the truth about my DNA.

  But it also stopped me discovering this.

  “What is it?” Cole asks.

  “It’s . . . it’s the implant,” I say, reeling. It’s been giving Lachlan complete control over my tech for the last three years. He still has access now. He could install and remove apps whenever he wanted. He could tap into my ocular tech.

  He could be watching everything I do right now.

  “Shit,” I say again, standing, my heart kicking.

  “What?” Cole asks. “What’s wrong?”

  “I . . . ,” I trail off, not knowing what to say. Lachlan could be listening. He could be watching us all right now, spying through my own sensory tech. “Nothing,” I force myself to say.

  Cole’s brow furrows. He knows I’m lying, but I don’t want to. I just need to find out what the hell Lachlan has been doing to my tech.

  I pace to the edge of the room, sliding back into my cuff’s interface, bringing up the log of software updates. They’re all pieces of custom code written by Lachlan. The earliest ones look like healing tech boosts, metabolism smoothers, and a couple of antivirals. They’re dated from the first few months of the outbreak, before Agnes arrived at th
e cabin. I was barely eating back then, barely managing to stay alive. A few months later he sent me a bone-knitting app when I broke my finger. There are a handful of nutritional apps, and one to help me sleep.

  I frown, staring at the log. It doesn’t look like Lachlan has been spying on me.

  He’s been trying to keep me healthy.

  A strange feeling tugs at me as I scroll through the list, remembering every injury I had over the last two years. Each one is reflected in minor updates to my tech to help heal me without ever alerting me to the fact that Lachlan was doing it. He must have been monitoring my vital signs constantly. A dozen files were added to my panel the day the dose blew in my stomach. There are updates for sunburn, for cramps, for the lice that bit me when I was in the caves. Everything he sent to me was medical code. Every single file . . .

  Except the one that was added to my panel yesterday.

  The room seems to pulse as I draw the file into my vision. It’s a giant piece of gentech code, unreadable and vast. Over nine million lines. It’s bigger than the vaccine, but only slightly, and it was installed in my arm just a day ago. That was when I heard the blowers in the distance—when the new strain hit the mountains.

  I look up at the others, shaking. “I think I have the patched vaccine.”

  CHAPTER 22

  LEOBEN STANDS FROM THE BED so fast, he’s almost a blur. “Give me the code.”

  “Here,” I say, dragging the file from my panel, sending it to him in a comm. “I don’t even know if it’s really—”

  “Dax can check,” he says. “He’s second stage already. I’ll send it to him.” He turns and strides from the room and into the hallway.

  “Why do you think you have the patched code?” Cole asks.

  “Because—” I start, then pause, pulling up the log of software updates again. I still don’t know if it’s safe to talk. I scan the list, checking for anything he could be using to listen in on what I say or see, but all he’s ever sent me is medical code.

  “Lachlan has access to my tech,” I say. Anna scrambles from the floor, her eyes wide, but I hold a hand up. “It’s okay. I checked for spyware. That’s not what he’s using it for. He’s just been sending me medical code. I think he was trying to keep me alive through the outbreak. He sent me an updated copy of the vaccine just yesterday. I need to check it against one of yours, to see if it went to you, too.”

  Cole offers me his panel. I summon my cuff’s interface, ejecting the needle-tipped reader wire from its side. Cole tenses at the sight of it. My mind rolls back to the night I jacked him into my little laptop genkit in the cabin. He was frightened by the wire. It makes sense now, knowing his past and what he’s been through, and it also makes sense that he doesn’t like the cuff on my arm. It’s a genkit—the same machine that was at the other end of every moment of torture throughout his childhood. And now I’m wearing one wired right into my body. I’ve only had it for a day, but it already feels like it’s part of me.

  I don’t know what to make of the fact that this cuff is my new favorite thing, and that it’s something Cole’s afraid of.

  I place the wire near Cole’s panel, and it wriggles out of my grasp, diving into his skin, clicking when it meets his tech. A Cartaxus login screen appears, but I know the password. It’s my name—Catarina.

  His eyes glaze as I navigate through his tech, searching for the vaccine. He has two—one from after the decryption, and the earlier encrypted copy that Lachlan gave him before he came to find me.

  But neither match the version in my arm.

  I look up at him. “He sent me the patched vaccine, but he didn’t give it to you.”

  “How could he?” Anna asks. “He doesn’t have a way to broadcast it, right? Only Cartaxus can do that.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “but why would he give it to me and not send it to Cartaxus? Dax said he’s been trying to get Lachlan to send him a copy of this for days.”

  “Lachlan doesn’t care about Dax getting infected,” Cole says, his face darkening. “He doesn’t care about anyone else.”

  He doesn’t say the words, but I still feel them hang in the air. Lachlan doesn’t care about anyone else except for me.

  I shake the thought away. “I’m gonna give you the new version, okay?” I upload the patched file into his arm and kick off the installation, then start to log back out, but pause. There are a handful of texts floating unread in his inbox. They’re from Anna, sent in the last few minutes, after I got back into the room. The urge to open one is overwhelming, but he’d know that I read it, and I don’t want to violate his privacy. A chat history is collapsed behind the new messages—I can’t read any of them, but there are hundreds of texts from just the last few hours.

  Another one blips into his inbox while I’m watching, and I force myself to log back out and retract the wire. I knew they were texting earlier while we were driving here. It looks like they’ve been communicating nonstop since Anna showed up in the jeep. I know they’re brother and sister, and I know they’ve been apart, but it’s not like the two of them couldn’t have just talked in front of us.

  Maybe not in front of Mato, but surely Leoben, and surely me.

  “You want the code?” I ask Anna.

  “Panel’s locked up,” she says, waving her arm. “Black-out soldier, remember?”

  “I can hack it. I did that for Cole.”

  “I’m good,” she says, scrunching up the towel she’s been cleaning her rifle on. “If it’s the real deal, then Cartaxus will send it out soon anyway.”

  I wind the wire back into my cuff. Anna clearly doesn’t like the idea of me getting into her arm, but that doesn’t surprise me. She doesn’t seem to trust me much at all. I pace back to the bed to sit down, and Leoben pushes through the door, his face clouded. He heads for his backpack.

  “What did Dax say?” I ask. “Is everything okay?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I sent the code to him, and he was installing it while we talked. He said it seemed like it was working, and then the call dropped out.”

  “Mato said the comm reception was bad here,” I say.

  “That’s just it. I found a spot where it’s not so bad. I think it dropped out from his end.”

  “Maybe his panel needed to reboot to get the code running,” I say.

  “Maybe,” Leoben mutters. “What’s the plan? Are we gonna kill Lachlan now that we have the code?”

  “What?” I ask. “That’s not the mission. We don’t even know if that code is safe. We can’t kill him. We need to get him back to Cartaxus and under control.”

  Anna snorts, rolling her eyes. “Of course you don’t want to kill him. He was your dad until last week. He’s been sending you medical code, taking care of you, making sure you don’t get the big bad strain.”

  “Anna, stop it,” Cole says.

  “What?” she says. “It’s not like this is anything new. She was always his favorite. They were practically friends back at the lab.”

  I stand from the bed. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah? Well, why does he want you to get your memories back, huh?”

  I look at Cole. “You told her?”

  “He tells me everything,” she says. “And thankfully he does, because I seem to be the only one here who realizes you’re a threat. Lachlan wants to work with you—he’s literally said it. He wants his coding partner back. His little apprentice.”

  “How dare you?” I say. “He killed me. He changed my brain. I have more reason to want him dead than any of you.”

  Leoben steps to move between us, bracing his hand on my shoulder. I realize with a shock that both my hands are in fists, my feet sliding instinctively into the fighting stance that Leoben’s been teaching me all week.

  “Then where were you for those six months?” Anna asks.

  “Drop it, Anna,” Leoben says.

  “No,” she says, striding closer. “I want to hear the truth. You were here, weren’t you
?”

  I glance at Cole. His face is tight, and it makes my heart twist.

  “Regina said Jun Bei spent six months living in the desert,” I admit.

  Anna throws her hands up. “I knew it. You ran away, and he let you. He could have tracked you down, especially if you were here.”

  “He did track me down,” I say, “and then he wiped my brain. I wasn’t the only one who got out, anyway. Ziana escaped, and he never found her.”

  “Ziana doesn’t even have a goddamn panel,” Anna says. “Finding her is impossible. You really don’t know anything, do you?”

  The breath rushes from my lungs. I had no idea that Ziana was unpaneled. I barely have any memories of her at all.

  Anna rolls her eyes. “I don’t even know why I’m bothering with you. I’m gonna go and find this team of Regina’s that’s supposed to be helping. We need to build a search grid. You guys come and meet me when you’ve got your shit together.”

  “I’m coming with you,” I say.

  “Are you kidding me?” Anna says, whirling on me. “You’re compromised. You just told us Lachlan can get into your arm.”

  “I told you, there’s no spyware—”

  “And are you going to check that every few seconds? What if he installs something when we’re out in the streets? You can’t come with us. You’d be giving away our location as well as yours. You can’t even be part of our planning, okay? You’re off this mission, and I don’t care what Mato has to say about it.”

  She snatches up her rifle and storms out of the room. I shove my hand back through my hair, pacing to the wall.

  “That went well,” Leoben says.

  I throw back my head. “Not now, Lee.”

  “I’m serious,” he says. “That was always coming, and there was a lot less blood than I expected.” He looks between me and Cole, then grabs his rifle and heads for the door, pausing to press a kiss to my temple. “We’re going to find him, okay? You stay safe, squid.”