Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘It’s a point,’ Louise agreed.

  ‘Or maybe she fancies you.’

  Louise coughed. ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘Maybe she fancies you. You’re beautiful and a bit crazy. So’s she. Some people really like someone who’s willing to stand up to them. They don’t get it a lot and it adds spice.’

  ‘Right…’ Louise frowned at her reflection in the bra she was wearing. An idea began to percolate. ‘Somehow, I don’t think that’s it. She did say she’d reconsider her policy on the avenue, so I guess we’ll see what happens.’

  Sarah grinned. ‘I guess we will. My money’s on you, just for the record.’

  ‘Your confidence and loyalty are both noted and appreciated. I need to work on some code.’

  ‘Code?’

  ‘Mm, just an idea I had. We’ll see how that goes too.’

  26/4/2117.

  Louise opened her eyes, checked the time and her morning diagnostic read-out, and grinned. Slipping out of bed, she headed for the bathroom. She always timed her waking to give her shower time before she woke Sarah, which she inevitably had to do, but this morning she wanted the bathroom to herself for another reason. There were experimental results to examine and experiments were among Louise’s favourite things.

  Starting the shower, she turned to the mirror and examined herself. She nodded. Nothing too excessive, very much not implants: improvement, yes, but without surrendering herself to Sandy’s suggested course of action. ‘I have feminist principles to think of,’ Louise told her reflection. Her reflection would, she thought, have raised an eyebrow if physics allowed it. ‘You can shut up,’ Louise told it, and turned to the shower.

  ~~~

  ‘Not in your corset?’ Sarah asked as she blinked sleepily through the kitchen hatch at Louise.

  ‘Uh, no,’ Louise replied. ‘I’m going straight to the workshop, so I didn’t bother getting dressed up.’ There was, actually, a far more embarrassing reason for Louise to be in a cropped T-shirt and jeans, but she was not going to tell Sarah what it was.

  ‘Okay. You going to be late or should I expect you and Mickey outside the gate?’

  Louise did a few calculations in her head. ‘I’ll probably meet you there.’

  ‘Cool. I think it’s a good thing you’re taking me this morning. I am having so much trouble waking up.’

  ‘I told you that wine was a bad idea.’

  ‘But it was on offer! And it was pretty good, right?’

  ‘Uh-huh. But I don’t get hangovers now.’

  As Sarah began to deny her hungover state, Louise smiled. Maybe it was the drowsiness, but so far Sarah had not noticed a thing. Louise was wondering when her friend would spot the change. She figured, Sarah being that kind of girl, it would not take too long.

  ~~~

  Mickey had noticed. Well, he had not exactly noticed what had changed, but he knew that there was a change and part of it was that Louise was pleased with herself.

  Louise had installed a full-length mirror in the workshop because she did manufacture clothes there, or planned to, and wanted to be able to check the fit without having to go home. Right now, as the big chest thing that hummed a lot was busy humming over something Louise had programmed into it as soon as she had got in, Louise was standing in front of the mirror, topless, examining the results of her overnight experiment more thoroughly.

  ‘I just changed the shape,’ Louise said. Mickey settled his chin more comfortably on his paws and looked at her. ‘They aren’t actually any bigger, they’re just… more upright.’ She flicked a glance at Mickey. ‘It’s not cheating, and I’ll thank you to keep your accusations to yourself.’ Mickey made not a single sound. ‘It’s just rigging. It’s exactly like wearing a push-up bra, just I don’t have to wear a bra. It’s not breast implants, I’m not caving to pressure, and you are not getting another steak.’

  Mickey relaxed his awesome, doggy telepathic powers. Some you won, some you lost.

  ~~~

  Sarah frowned as she walked down the steps to where Louise and Mickey were waiting for her. ‘Is that a new corset?’

  ‘Uh, it’s the same design, but it is new, yes,’ Louise replied. ‘I decided I needed a bit more protection. This one has armour over, well, most of my vital organs.’

  Sarah pursed her lips. ‘Same design, just armoured?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘No, there’s definitely something…’ Sarah’s eyes widened. ‘What did you do to your boobs? Even if you changed the corset, they shouldn’t be that… up-thrust.’

  Louise turned on her heel and started for home, mostly to hide her smirk. ‘I had my nanomachines put in some rigging. It’s like having an internal push-up bra. They’re not bigger, they’re just firmer and more–’

  ‘Up-thrust. Can you do that to me?’

  Louise giggled. ‘Not really. You don’t have the cybernetic additions. Well, I suppose I could work something out, but you don’t need anything like this.’

  ‘Neither did you.’

  ‘Apparently, that was debatable. But you think it looks good?’

  ‘Could I kind of jam my face in your cleavage and lick them all over?’

  Louise giggled again. ‘No.’

  ‘In that case, I think they look absolutely terrible. And the next time I see you without a bra on, I’m going to make catty comments about your cellulite.’

  Louise frowned and, without really thinking about it, looked down at her thighs. ‘I don’t have–’

  ‘Ha! Made you look.’

  Sky City District, 28/4/2117.

  The problem that had spurred Louise to make the new corset was the same one she had with a lot of her clothes. The T-shirt had been okay since it was designed to just hang over her chest, but most of her dresses, and her combat suit, were going to need refitting. On the plus side, Louise could do that herself as she was quite good at sewing. On the minus side, it was going to take time to go through everything and make the adjustments.

  The black tank dress she had bought for her Perfect Partners interview was something of a case in point. She had been directed to a studio in Sky City to get some stills taken for her portfolio, so she had pulled the dress out again, put it on, and it was the corset all over again. When she had tried her corset on that first morning after her ‘experiment,’ it had fitted, but if she jumped or moved too fast, there had been about a fifty-fifty chance of severe wardrobe malfunction. The dress fitted, but now the edges of her areolae tended to show over the low neckline. It was going to need adjusting, but she had no time for that and it did not look too bad…

  And it also seemed that it did not matter. Sandy had said that there would be a couple of head and shoulder shots, maybe a profile, and a couple of full-body pictures. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes and Louise would be out and on her way. Well, the photographer seemed to have other ideas, not to mention a strong desire to get Louise out of her dress for as many poses as he could manage. The more she posed, the more he snapped.

  ‘Thart’s it, dahling. Flick the haar. Yas, perfect. Just poosh those out in front, darling. Yas, perfect. Point the toes, dahling. Yaaas!’ Oh, and he also had the most outlandish accent Louise had ever heard. She was sure he was putting it on, but… whatever.

  After two hours, he had taken enough pictures to fill a major gallery, but had finally declared that he had enough and ‘Yas’ it was perfect. Feeling vaguely shell-shocked, Louise got dressed and wandered out into the midday sun of Sky City vowing never to go near a photographic studio ever again.

  Queens District.

  ‘Did you know,’ Louise said, ‘that there used to be tribes around who refused to have their pictures taken because they believed the process would suck out their soul and trap it in the picture?’

  Sarah looked up from her algebra homework. Any distraction was worth it when you were doing algebra homework. ‘I did not know that, no.’

  ‘I always thought it was superstitious garbage, but I’m wondering whether they might
have something. I’m sure that guy today was at least trying to suck my soul out of my body.’

  There was a giggle, followed by, ‘I thought he was just trying to suck your clothes off.’

  ‘Huh. Well, he managed that. I’m not sure Sandy wanted “tasteful nude” shots, but that’s what she’s getting.’

  ‘Maybe we could get a few of them printed,’ Sarah suggested, looking back down at her problem. ‘You know, blown up and framed for the wall…’

  ‘You are not getting framed nudes of me on the wall, young lady.’

  ‘Spoilsport.’

  Louise looked around and smiled. Then her eyes lifted to the wall which was kind of empty… She shook her head and went back to cooking. No, that was just a little too egocentric.

  29/4/2117.

  The only reason that Louise spotted the note hidden among various diagnostic messages in her morning read-out was that, given the relatively recent installation of her new immune system, she was paying attention and looking for anomalies. Even now, not that long after she had deployed Project Omega, she was getting complacent about it, but the notice of detection and elimination of a nanoviral threat caught her attention.

  With the information she had gathered on the virus Jenny had been infected with, Louise had programmed her system with data allowing it to counteract that nanobug if it ever encountered it, but everything else was supposed to be learned as Louise met new problems. This one was not new, but it was not the ‘vampire’ virus either. She dug into the details.

  Another virus recognition template had been created while the system was being initialised, one she had not programmed in and had not noticed, though when she checked the, very long, report on the process, sure enough it had been noted. The template had been inferred from her body’s own natural defence mechanisms and simply noted as ‘Immune Response Action 47A.’ Helpful. But it had been for a nanovirus, not a natural virus, and there was only one nanovirus Louise knew of that she was supposed to be immune to…

  Worried now, she checked the time her system had responded to the infection. There had been various instances of viral material entering her body via the lungs and nasal tissues, all of them after Sarah had got home from school.

  ‘Shit,’ Louise said, and Mickey’s ears pricked up. ‘Double shit with shit sprinkled on top.’

  Mickey got to his feet. Louise was busy swinging her legs out of bed in a manner that suggested some form of action was needed, and she rarely used the kinds of words she was using right now unless there was really something wrong… If only he knew what so that he could fix it.

  Louise was busy putting a call through to the local hospital. She had the direct number of a certain epidemiologist who was likely to be the best person to deal with the situation, and the emergency number was just going to cause more trouble.

  The call connected. ‘Doctor Mitre? It’s Louise Barrington. You remember we met when– Yes, exactly. I think I’ve got a bigger problem for you. I’m not absolutely sure, and I’d really like you to tell me I’m wrong, but I think my housemate has contracted the Damnation Plague.’

  ~~~

  Sarah looked scared and confused which, Louise thought, she had a right to. She was locked away in an isolation room and the only people she was being allowed to see were dressed in biohazard suits, and none of them were telling her what was going on.

  Louise turned from the observation window as Doctor Mitre entered in scrubs. ‘Doctor?’ Louise asked. The rest of the question was unsaid, but obvious.

  ‘You were right,’ Mitre said. Louise had known it just from the telltale signs she was seeing: anxiety suppressed with all his might in the interests of his patient’s friend. ‘I’ve detected viral material in her blood. It’s the Damnation Plague. She’s not showing symptoms yet so the infection must have occurred recently. A day or two ago.’

  Louise turned her attention back to the window. ‘The only likely source is the school.’

  ‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’

  ‘You ran my blood at the same time?’

  Mitre raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes. There are plenty of things in there which, frankly, none of us have the slightest idea about, but you’re clear of the plague. As you said you would be. That is fascinating technology you have there, Miss Barrington.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ Louise said, frowning. ‘Her chances are beyond slim, aren’t they? And she won’t be the only one?’

  ‘Once symptoms begin to show… She’ll have days. I’d imagine that others will exhibit the effects and go before her. She can’t be the first person infected; she won’t be the first to die.’

  ‘What is the enclave doing about it?’

  ‘They’ve started. Queens is being put on curfew. Essential movement only. I suggested they implement that over the whole enclave, but they’ve ignored me so far. They believe it’s a small outbreak and can be contained.’

  Louise sniffed. ‘I doubt it. I’m going to need access to your data on the nanovirus, Doctor. Everything you have. And I’m going to need you to get me on that list of essential personnel. I need to get to my workshop.’

  ‘You don’t think–’

  ‘I think that if I start work now, base the tech off the machines in my own system, and have enough data, then I might be able to come up with something which will save her life. Probably a few others too, but you’ll forgive me for thinking of my friend first. The problem is going to be volume. If the disease is allowed to spread too far… I have limited production capacity and I won’t be able to keep up with demand if too many people are infected.’

  Mitre nodded, but there was a hint of hope in his anxiety now. ‘You really think you can cure it?’

  ‘Cure, yes. I think I can make a hunter-killer nanomachine with the plague virus as a specific target. What I can’t do so easily is make something to inoculate people against it. That’s a whole different kettle of fish which… It’s possible, but we need it now, not in a couple of months. In Utopia City, everyone’s inoculated against it at birth. If I hadn’t just trashed my immune system, I might have been able to reverse engineer something, but…’

  ‘We’re stuck with fire-fighting instead of prevention. It’s better than watching everyone die, Miss Barrington. I’ll get the paperwork started to have you listed as essential medical personnel.’

  Louise nodded, her eyes on Sarah. ‘Thank you, Doctor. I’ll get started as soon as possible.’

  ~~~

  The streets of Queens were unnaturally quiet. Industrial Avenue was empty of girls and even the Cyber-Kings seemed to have decided that the threat of biological hazard was something they should consider before breaking the curfew.

  There were LIPD officers wearing filter masks at the gate into the industrial zone. They checked Louise’s ID before allowing her through, without actually making contact and with their hands near their weapons. It was not, entirely, paranoid; the infection process for the Damnation Plague was relatively well known and Louise had been a little surprised to discover that the documentation on the virus which she had available to her here was better than what she knew from Utopia City.

  She had spent her time walking from the hospital to her workshop familiarising herself with the information Doctor Mitre had given her, and it was impressive. Infection could be achieved in almost any way imaginable. The virus could enter the body on prepared foods through the digestive tract. It could enter via mucous membranes, which meant it was transmissible through unprotected sex, on the skin into eyes or mouth, or directly into the bloodstream through a wound. Infected individuals breathed out viral particles even before symptoms developed, and those could be breathed in to cause infection. If you could avoid exposure, and most of the usual antiviral barrier techniques worked for that, you were fairly safe. If you were exposed, however, there was little chance that the infection would fail to take.

  Once infected, symptoms could take anything from four to fourteen days to show up, but you were already living o
n borrowed time. The first symptom to show up, almost immediately once the disease began to bite, was joint pain. That was followed quickly by photosensitivity and an intolerance to pain, which made the joint aches worse, then nausea, muscle pain, blindness, haemophilia, yet more pain… Soon, the victims were left in total agony and needed artificial respirators to keep breathing, and if they survived that, they faced seizures which tended to toss blood and other bodily fluids around. It was a horrible way to die and some said that surviving it, which was rare, could be worse than succumbing.

  What Mitre and his people had, largely obtained in the latter years of the first outbreaks, was more detailed structural data than Louise had ever seen in Utopia City. She recognised the virus as an organic nanomachine and so found some of its capabilities to be less surprising than the people who had gathered the information, but it was still a marvel of engineering. What had been thought to be a rapid mutation of the protein shell structure by the biologists, Louise saw as a rather clever camouflage trick. The plague virus was able to alter its outer structure to make it look different in almost every victim. Certainly, she doubted you would see a repeated pattern in most city-sized populations. Creating any normal vaccine for such a beast would be extremely difficult.

  It was possible to see where Mitre had thought the vampire virus appeared to be similar, however. Louise began running a full analysis of the basic protein structures even before she got to her workshop, but there were clear similarities. And she was sure that that was the way to attack the virus. She was not aiming to make something which would protect its host the way her own nanomachines did; what Louise was aiming at was a specific nanophage machine designed to infect the host, locate the plague virus, and destroy it.

  Down in her workshop, Louise took off her arming pod and placed it on the floor beside Mickey’s basket while her dog, which she had decided to pick up on the way there, settled onto his bed with a worried look in his eyes.

  ‘Okay, Mickey,’ Louise said, ‘for once, I won’t be shooting my way out of the situation. This is going to be one time when it’s all down to brain power. Sarah’s going to be dead if I can’t do this, so–’