by Sara Creasy
The BRATs had proceeded along a new path. Checking the log, Edie found no record of external disturbances over those seven years. No one had tampered with the biocyph. There was no aftertaste here of any other cypherteck.
It was Edie’s signature—warped almost beyond recognition, but it was hers.
Her heart pounded as she processed the implications, not wanting to reach the inevitable conclusion.
They’d turned off the temperature regulators on the shields to conserve power, and it was getting cold in the depths of the jungle. Finn had been circling the BRAT to get a better view of their surroundings. He came back around the edge to report.
“Something’s happening.”
She followed his gaze out into the jungle. The vines were turning opaque, and instead of their constant shifting movements, they seemed to be freezing. Finn reached out and touched the tip of a petrified vine. No longer flexible, it was now rigid and brittle. It broke off in his hand, sizzling against his e-shield. The broken end dribbled a milky sap.
The jungle was eerily silent all of a sudden.
“What did you do?” He nodded toward the panel where her fingers were pressed into the dataport, as if she was somehow responsible, but she’d not yet made any programming changes to the BRAT.
“Nothing. Maybe it’s a normal process as the sun goes down.”
Finn looked dubious. He fired into the canopy, not quite directly overhead. The explosive bullet sent a torrent of vine shards raining into the swamp and the area surround ing it. Distant shrieks ripped through the air, and some not so distant.
He fired again, with the same result. Now a blanket of razor-sharp pieces of crystalline vines covered the dead men and the remains of their equipment. Looking up into the cone-shaped tunnel that had been formed, Edie saw patches of gray, late-afternoon sky.
“Maybe Cat will see that when she flies over,” Finn said. “She can winch us out.”
It sounded like a good idea…until Edie realized the sky was disappearing. The tunnel was caving in. She grabbed a lamp and shone it upward. Ribbons of sap spurted from the broken vines. The thick fluid congealed almost instantly to melt the edges of the tunnel back together, once again forming an impenetrable mass. Considering the mobility of the vines in their flexible state, it made sense that the fluid inside had a controllable flow.
Finn raised the rifle to fire again, but Edie pulled his arm down.
“Save the bullets, Finn. There are hundreds of tons of biomass up there. Clearly it doesn’t want to have a hole carved through it.”
He turned a curious look on her. “You talk about it like it has intent.”
“It does what it needs to, like any organism. Its survival must depend on the structural integrity of the megabiosis.”
A keening sound drew her attention back to the melted patch of vines. Shapes crawled through the mangled mesh. Then small creatures dropped out of the canopy—hundreds of them, scattering in all directions. Some dived into the vines and struggled to free themselves, screeching in distress, the broken edges tearing their flesh. It seemed unlikely this was natural behavior. The rifle shots must have disorientated them.
A group of the creatures plummeted straight toward the BRAT in a chaotic cloud. Finn was thrown off balance as they hit him, his shield sparking limply. Edie realized with alarm that its power was almost dead. He hunkered down, shielding her. She felt the thud, thud, thud against his body as the creatures flung themselves at him in a frenzy, trying to get a grip. His shield no longer absorbed the impact of their blows. The creatures fell to the ground and scurried away on tiny legs. They were the same slaterlike creature that had jumped on Finn earlier. She saw now that the carapace lifted up and opened out, like a hard-shelled beetle, to reveal softer wings inside. And everywhere they went, they trailed a silken thread.
The slaters found Zeke’s body. Edie watched in horror as they swarmed over him, cracking the vines that cocooned him, ripping the clothes on his body, and then the flesh, into thin shreds with their tiny busy jaws. The air roared with the sound of clicking wings, shattering vines and the slaters’ screaming.
She leapt back into the biocyph connection. They needed a fast solution. Finn’s shield was about to fail, hers wouldn’t hold out much longer, and the slaters had an appetite for human flesh. She shut out the noise and fear, steadied by the grip of Finn’s hand on her arm where their shields merged. She grabbed the flickering echo of her signature, buried deep within the tangle of new coding that the BRAT had written. The biocyph knew her, but that didn’t mean it wanted to obey her. She captured the signature with a glyph and then laid a passive trail back through the tiers, networking multiple trails from each glyph, then more networks from each of those, so that they fanned outward in a crescendo of increasing complexity. She mentally apologized to Bethany for the brutish assault she was about to launch on the delicate workings of a biocyph seed.
She gathered together the thousands of end glyphs and shot multiple copies of a deceptively inoffensive algorithm down every spoke of the fan simultaneously. They raced toward the central glyph, the core access point, following the trail of her signature, their paths converging again and again so that the algorithm snowballed, gathering momen tum, until it forced apart the tiers like a wedge. It hit the core like a cymbal crash and burst open to reveal its simple command.
Open!
To her right, a seam in the BRAT quivered and cracked. She banged on the casing to attract Finn’s attention. They moved around the edge of the BRAT in a crouch. Edie looked back to see the slaters carrying away the remains of Zeke’s body, coordinating their efforts to drag pieces of his flesh into the jungle. The tatters of tissue that got left behind were quickly swooped upon. She looked away, feeling sick.
The slaters clambered all over the BRAT, some of them finding the crack and skittering around it, feelers probing, legs sliding on the slick surface as they tried to hold on. In a couple of seconds the gap would be wide enough for them to slip inside. Finn reached over Edie to knock them away. They curled up and rolled off as his weakening shield zapped them, and for a split second Edie recognized the spark in his shield’s aura that signaled the shield had almost failed.
She extended her own shield to envelop Finn and most of the door as well. She expanded it gradually. Too fast and it would simply enclose the slaters along with them. As the periphery of the shield widened, it hit the slaters and they bounced away. The split in the seam was now half a meter wide, and protected by the bubble of her shield. Finn’s hands around her waist lifted her up, and she climbed into darkness. He threw their packs in after her, then jumped inside.
Edie took one last look at the chaos outside before jamming the door shut. The seal hissed and locked.
Finn turned on a lamp. They were on a narrow ledge running all the way around the central core of the BRAT—
a three-meter well where the biocyph and seed machinery were housed within a network of scaffolding. The casing arched over their heads. This upper part of the BRAT contained the main interface jacks and the parts of the machinery that were meant to be accessible, although not normally after the BRAT seed had been planted and had germinated. On terraformed, colonized worlds, BRATs were left in the ground indefinitely where they continued their sampling and tinkering, fine-tuning the ecosystem for the human inhabitants, suppressing disease-causing bacterial outbreaks and algal blooms and other conditions adverse to humans and their agriculture and technologies.
Edie cranked down her shield so that it enveloped only herself and Finn. It was going to fail within minutes. Pulling the spare batteries out of her pack—the ones she’d charged with the remaining power in the rest of their team’s shields—she swapped the cell over, and handed one to Finn.
The thumping and scrabbling on the outside of the BRAT returned as the slaters resumed their attack.
“So much for your bunnies,” she said grimly, making her way around the ledge.
“Did the flash bomb damage anything
?”
“Biocyph’s pretty much immune to EM interference, and the seed casing would protect it in any case.” She pointed out the power cell. “Do you have any idea how this works?”
“I thought BRATs were your thing.”
“I know what’s down there.” She nodded into the biocyph well below the ledge. “I don’t know how it’s powered.”
Finn came over to take a look. He flipped open the cell and examined the traces on the circuit module.
“This won’t work. Even if we can jury-rig an interface, it’ll blow out the shields.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“We have to try. What other option do we have?”
He shrugged and she handed him one of the drained e-shields. She watched him open it up and tease out a wire, which he stripped with careful efficiency using his shiv.
“This is all because of me,” she said.
He met her eyes, looking shocked by the despair that choked her voice.
“Finn, I did this. My kill-code. The lock that I put on the biocyph—it’s a loop of code, an irreconcilable paradigm. Makes the programming go around in circles. The biocyph gets confused and eventually it just gives up. But here, it didn’t shut down. After a year, the BRATs found a way around it. They broke the lock and they’ve been fighting the kill-code ever since. Fighting to survive. Fighting me.”
“You think that explains the aggression?”
“Yes. Instead of creating a world for humans, its new target ideal became the creation of an environment to protect itself. The flash bomb was its first big test, made it aware of us as a danger. Then the shooting…” Edie slid down the cold, smooth interior of the BRAT into a tight hunch, hugging her knees. Those things that had torn apart Zeke’s body, and waited outside to tear apart her and Finn—they were her unintended creations. “On any other world this could never have happened, I’m sure of it. This place had different raw materials to work with. Advanced lifeforms, not just algae and bacteria.”
“Helluva breeding ground for anyone interested in bio-weapons,” Finn mused.
He found the power trace on the circuit module and touched the stripped wire of the e-shield to it. The shield popped and crackled. Sparks erupted out of the connection—a short-lived mini-volcano.
He turned the dead shield over in his hands. “Burned out.”
“We can put all our remaining power into two working shields,” Edie suggested. “I think we can get about five hours each.”
“The shields won’t hold charge. Your fifteen hours lasted only two. Mine lasted even less.”
“Is there nothing else you can try?”
“This one is beyond repair. The other was already damaged. These systems are just not compatible.” He leaned back against the casing and rubbed his neck. “What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“What can you try?” He shone the lamp into the well of biocyph.
“There’s nothing that can help us down there.”
“That’s all that can help us.”
“No—”
He grabbed her shoulder—the injured one. “What’s the matter with you? You’re giving up?” His harshness sent a shiver through her. “This machinery can create entire worlds.”
“There’s nothing I can do!” She pleaded with him to understand. “I wish I’d never come here. I should never have interfered.”
“Oh, spare me that crap.” Finn pushed her away. “You did what you did. That’s the past. Maybe you can convince yourself you deserve to die here, but don’t make me the victim of your guilty conscience.” His eyes held more emotion than she’d ever thought him capable of. Fury, even hate, but above all a passion for life.
They faced off for breathless moments.
And then, with the same passion brought firmly under control, he said, “Don’t you let me die.”
CHAPTER 27
Edie climbed down into the heart of the BRAT, leaving Finn on the ledge in the dark. She knew the inside of a biocyph seed intimately, could have found her way around without the lamp, but Finn clipped it to her belt anyway.
Here in its underground belly, the BRAT composed its retroviral music. Using the data collected by the airborne cyphviruses, it analyzed the existing ecosystem, creating endless simulations until it hit upon a combination of changes that needed to be made in order to bring each organism closer to the target ideal. It wrote the code for a tailor-made retrovirus, which it transmitted to the target cyphvirus. The cyphvirus was activated, the host cells infected, the genome transformed. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—the simplest of musical scales. Four notes that combined three-by-three to create the arpeggios of life: amino acids to be endlessly shuffled and assembled into proteins that controlled the physiology of all lifeforms.
Perhaps only a slight modification would be made, unnoticeable to the organism. Perhaps a major change. And every change in an organism required multiple simultaneous changes throughout the ecosystem to support it. The biocyph coordinated this global transformation using a plan that allowed for change over a timescale of decades, until it birthed a world that was safe and nurturing for humans and their kind.
Edie jacked into the biocyph, still with little idea of what she was planning to do. The datastream was a dense, complex cacophony that would take hours to untangle. She searched for something to latch on to. The original specs were still there, along with an accumulation of data gathered over the years by cyphviruses from all the BRATs that had infiltrated every level of the ecosystem, from the mountaintops to the deserts to the depths of the ocean.
And the distorted, mutated instructions were clear now. The biocyph was sending out instructions that changed by the day, feeding back on itself as it sought only to protect the megabiosis from the enemy—the kill-code lock she’d implanted.
She toyed with the idea of dismantling the kill-code, reactivating the initial parameters of Scarabaeus, and reversing the process. It might take a millennium of guided evolution, but the planet could come to resemble the world she remembered from her first visit. The desire to fix the damage she’d caused overrode even her survival instinct.
Hours of work to be done—time she didn’t have. She would’ve done it, let her e-shield dwindle and die while she worked on restoring Scarabaeus…
If not for Finn.
Was everything he’d done for her only to protect his own life? She’d seen enough to believe that wasn’t true. He’d tried as hard as she had to save Kristos. He’d risked his life for the serf in the engine room, too. She’d glimpsed beyond that implacable exterior over the past two weeks. She’d witnessed his anger and frustration, his humor. She’d experienced his tenderness. None of that should surprise her—he was human, regardless of what the Crib or the Hoi’s crew thought of their lag laborer.
He deserved to live. When it came to a choice between Scarabaeus and a man, Edie had to choose the man. She wanted Finn to live. If she could’ve given him more, restored all that he’d lost, she would’ve done that, too. For now, all she could give him was life. And that meant keeping herself alive.
The e-shields were useless. Even without the power bleed caused by the EMP, the physical attacks from the creatures would quickly drain them. They needed to survive without shields, and they needed the aggressive wildlife to ignore them. We made you disappear. Haller’s words. If she could disappear from the entire Crib, surely she could hide for a few hours from a terraforming seed and its hostile lifeforms.
Perhaps there was a way. She tried to get her head around it. Cyphviruses sampled everything they touched, treating the environment like a single complex organism. The biocyph calculated how to integrate all the components harmoniously, regardless of whether individual components could survive the transformation intact. The e-shields had so far protected her and Finn from that sort of transformation, but their presence, like the flash bomb and the weapons fire, jammed the blades of this massive ecological blender. Jump-started by
the bomb, the ecosystem had perceived the physical intrusion and triggered a defensive reaction.
What if they could pass through the blades unscathed?
Edie teased apart a tier within the biocyph’s algorithm-processing center and wrote a new tune. Nothing too obtrusive. Nothing the main program pathways would notice for a while. She drew threads from nearby subroutines—whispers and pulses of melody. She diverted them, pegged out a new route and marked the way with glyphs. She lost herself in the rhythm as she created her new tier, bleeding the edges into the surrounding tiers so that it became fully integrated.
She made it sing.
And Scarabaeus whispered back to her. At first she barely listened, too caught up in her plan as she modified the BRAT’s instructions so they could escape the jungle. But there was something here, something not buried in code or hidden between programming tiers. As she lingered in the datastream, the whisper intensified until she could no longer ignore it. Her wet-teck soaked up the music of Scarabaeus and recognized a pattern.