This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “If my father encrypted it,” I say, “it’s because Cartaxus forced him to.”

  “I don’t care who encrypted it,” Cole snaps. “The problem is that it’s locked.”

  I flinch at the sudden edge in his voice, reminded of the way he moved when he grabbed the fountain pen from my hands. He’s a Cartaxus weapon, tightly strung. It might not be the best idea to get into an argument with him.

  “If you don’t trust me, that’s fine,” he says, scowling. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re a damn Agatta, after all. But I’m not here to fight.” He wipes his hand on his shirt and slides a slip of plastic from his pocket. “I’m here because before he died, your father left me this.”

  He hands me the slip. It’s white and scratched, with a burn mark along one side and a faint image of a scythe etched on the front. A ghost memo. An encrypted chip that displays messages when the person who left them behind has died. People use them to confess their sins and store their secrets. Sentimental stuff. The kind of thing my father would never do.

  I press the button on the side. Glowing letters appear on the plastic, flickering faintly, lit by a dying battery.

  Cole—If required, my daughter Catarina can unlock the vaccine. You must find her, and protect her with your life. She may be our only chance to save humanity.

  A gust of wind sweeps through the hole in the bedroom wall. I shiver in my foam-streaked clothes, staring at the words. The note means nothing to me, but that doesn’t stop a chill from settling in my stomach. It’s probably a fake. Something put together by Cartaxus. I press the button again, but the message doesn’t change.

  “So will you help?” Cole asks.

  I glance up at him, then back down to the memo, turning it over. No ports, no access. It must connect wirelessly. “Help with what?”

  “With decrypting the vaccine.”

  I press the memo to my forearm on the off chance my panel will register it, but nothing appears in my vision. “I don’t know anything about that. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  It’s true. I don’t know the first thing about decryption; my job is purely hacking. If Cole’s telling the truth about the vaccine, and Cartaxus’s scientists can’t crack the code, I don’t see how I can help.

  “But Lachlan said you could.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you.” I run my fingernail along a crease in the edge of the memo, splitting the plastic apart. It falls open neatly in my hands. Inside is a tiny screen—LCD, old-school, with two stubby buttons wired up to it. I look up, scanning the room, searching for the fountain pen, and settle for a splinter of wood on the floor beside me.

  “What are you doing?” Cole leans in to watch me jab at the buttons with the splinter. The tiny screen flickers with green text as I make my way into the ghost memo’s operating system. “You’ve broken it.”

  “I haven’t broken it. I’m trying to see who it’s registered to.”

  To figure out if it’s really linked to my father’s panel, or just part of some elaborate Cartaxus lie.

  Cole watches me use the memo’s buttons to navigate through its file system. “How do you know how to do that?”

  “You said it yourself. I’m an Agatta. I know how to do a lot of things.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Honestly, I’ve never used a ghost memo before, but it’s only taken me a few moments to figure it out. That’s how I’ve always been with software. Learning new programming languages has always felt like relearning words and concepts that I already knew. Like I was born with the knowledge inside me and just had to remember it. That’s how my father always described the way he felt about DNA.

  The memo’s display blinks, showing me the registration details, the log of people who’ve had access to the chip. I navigate into the memory. The message Cole showed me was recorded in the last two weeks and activated just three days ago. It was set off by a death notice from the panel it’s paired to. I jab the button one last time, my chest tightening.

  The ID flashes on the screen. A hundred hexadecimal digits I know by heart, that I’ve searched for every time I’ve hacked Cartaxus’s servers. A void inside me opens up. A yawning, empty chasm.

  It’s there on the screen. Cole wasn’t lying.

  My father is dead.

  The pieces of the memo tumble through my fingers. My father is dead. The words circle inside me, over and over, the dimensions of my universe shifting to accommodate this truth.

  “Catarina?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Yes.”

  “The vaccine, the encryption . . .”

  He just nods. I double over, clutching my chest. My ribs feel like iron bars, unyielding. I can’t breathe. My heart can barely beat.

  My father’s lab was attacked. His work was destroyed, his staff were killed . . .

  “Wait, what about Dax?” My head snaps up. “Dax Crick? He worked with my father. Is he alive?”

  Cole nods, and the breath rushes from my lungs. I reach for the wall, fighting a wave of dizziness.

  “Crick is fine,” Cole says. “He was one of the few who made it out of the lab before the genkits self-destructed. Your father left instructions for both of us. We’re working on this together, and he’s going to try to join us out here.”

  “He’s coming here?”

  Cole nods. I shut my eyes, the thought of Dax breaking through something inside me, a door that I’m now struggling to close. The plague has taught me to handle grief, and my father’s death is an ember in my fist—I know to crush it, let it burn into my palm, shrinking it down until it morphs into something hard and cold. A diamond. But this is more than grief. This is too much to take in—the vaccine, the attack on my father’s lab, the thought of seeing Dax again. It’s a rush of oxygen, making the ember of my father’s death burst into flames that threaten to engulf me.

  “There must be some instructions we’re missing,” Cole says, but I barely hear him over the thudding of my pulse in my ears.

  Joy and grief are battling inside me. The last two years of pent-up emotion are rushing for the open door in my heart, fighting to make their way out.

  But I can’t let them. I can’t break. My father left a mission for me. I look down for the plastic pieces of the ghost memo, but I can’t see through the tears in my eyes.

  “Catarina?”

  I rub my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “I . . . I can’t handle this.”

  I turn away, pushing through the bedroom door. My shoulder hits the frame as I stumble blindly into the hall. I can’t think about vaccines or viruses. I can’t think about my father. I need air, and light, and space. I need to get out of here.

  My feet find the stairs, and one foam-streaked hand grips the banister as I run down to the living room and race to the front door. Military bags and weapons blur past in my peripheral vision, stacked in piles against the walls. I see disassembled rifles, the tube of a rocket launcher, a pair of silver handcuffs on the living room table.

  Somewhere behind me, Cole shouts my name. I burst through the front door and run outside, expecting him to chase me down.

  But he lets me go.

  CHAPTER 7

  TWO HOURS, FOUR HOURS PASS; I don’t know. It’s dark and the moon has risen by the time I make it back to the lake. My throat is sore, my eyes are swollen, and I’m still coated in filth from the blast of the infected flesh, so the icy waters are a revelation against my skin. I wade in until they lap at my throat, and arch my back to soak my hair, unbraiding it underwater.

  Overhead, a thick band of stars glitters in a cloud-streaked sky. A flock of pigeons call to one another as they flap across the lake. They skim the water, dropping their beaks to drink.

  How can the world keep spinning when its brightest star is dead?

  The cabin door swings open, throwing a slice of yellow light across the grass. Cole emerges carrying a towel and a fresh pile of clothes. He’s shirtless, with a bandage wrapped around his shoulders�
��a blue transparent film that looks vaguely like plastic wrap.

  “Thank you for coming back,” he says. The gravel on the path crunches under his boots. “I should have waited to tell you everything. It was too much to take in at once.”

  “I’m fine.” I swipe a handful of water up to splash my eyes. And I am fine. I’m strong, the way my father taught me to be. Take the pain under your control, wrestle it into a spike. There are bloody half-moons etched into my palms, but the doors in my heart are locked. “I’m ready to talk.”

  “Okay,” Cole says, sitting down on the lake’s rocky shore, putting the clothes and towel down behind him. He must have bathed while I was gone. The light from the cabin falls across his back, catching the curves of his shoulders, leaving his face in shadow.

  I sink into the water, watching him. I still don’t know what to think about Cole. He’s been honest enough so far, but he’s a Cartaxus soldier. My father made it clear that nobody wearing the antlers could be trusted, but I don’t know how to reconcile that with the message he left Cole.

  Now, more than ever, I’m desperate for Agnes’s advice. She met Cole, she must have spent time with him, but now she’s disappeared. When I ran into the woods, I commed her over and over, but the same message kept flashing up. Out of range. Out of range. My mind spun to the worst-case scenario—that Cole had killed her—but when I slumped on the ground at the foot of a tree, I felt the weight of something in my pocket. A licorice drop.

  One of Agnes’s horrible homemade candies that I’ve turned down so many times before. I’d spend a night at her house every week or two, eating lentils, playing cards, until I found myself itching to get back to the lab. She always slid a licorice drop into my pocket as a farewell gesture, even though she knew I hated them. The fact that she put one in my pocket when Cole brought me to the cabin means that she must have been alive and trusted him to take care of me. But it makes no sense. He’s a Cartaxus soldier, armed and dangerous. We’ve spent the last two years hiding from people just like him.

  “Why did Agnes trust you?” I ask.

  “She didn’t at first.” Cole’s shadow ripples across the rocks on the lake’s shore, dipping into the water. “After you passed out, she realized I was trying to help you, and you were hurt so badly that we didn’t have time to talk. She told me how to get to her house, and kept a gun trained on me while I drove, while I put you in the ice bath, and for a few hours after that. I think the frostbite changed her mind.”

  I blink. “Frostbite?”

  Cole stretches out one hand, the movement crinkling the bandage around his shoulders. “We ran out of ice from her freezer, and the bath you were in kept heating up. I had some freezepaks in the jeep. I used them to make more ice, but after a few uses they started to split.”

  I close my eyes, empathic pain shooting through my fingers. I’ve split a freezepak before, and it wasn’t fun. The chemicals in the freezepak’s lining undergo an intensely endothermic reaction when they’re agitated. It’s strong enough to freeze whatever’s inside, and if the lining splits and the chemicals land on you, it’s enough to freeze your skin as well.

  Cole bunches his outstretched hand into a fist, as though testing it. He unfurls his fingers slowly and drops it to his side. “She started to trust me after the first one split. After the tenth, she knew I hadn’t come here to hurt you.”

  I swallow hard, trying to imagine the state his hands must have been in. Even with healing tech and anesthetic, it must have been excruciating. No wonder Agnes warmed to him. Made him soup, let him stay. It still doesn’t explain why she left, but it’s enough to quiet my unease.

  “You didn’t call for help,” I say. “Cartaxus could have sent a Comox. There’s a bunker just a few miles from here.”

  “I know.”

  I scrub my hands across my neck, wiping away the streaks of dried foam. “You said my father left a message for Dax, too. He told him to keep this a secret, didn’t he? Cartaxus doesn’t know you’re here.”

  Cole leans back, watching me. The light from the cabin catches on a pattern of ridges on his chest. It looks like some kind of upgrade, but I can’t make out the details. “You figured that out fast.”

  “I’m an Agatta. I thought we went over that.”

  “Of course,” Cole mutters dryly. “How could I forget?”

  “I think I’m starting to understand what my father wanted me to do.” I push back in the water, scrubbing my hands over my arms, trying to wipe away every last trace of blood and foam. “My father was a genius, but he wasn’t psychic. He couldn’t have predicted that his lab would be hacked, or that the vaccine’s source code would be destroyed. So why would he give you that note?”

  Cole pauses. “I . . . I haven’t really thought about that.”

  “Well, I have. He gave you that note because he’d just finished the vaccine, and he knew that Cartaxus wasn’t going to release it to the survivors on the surface. They were going to restrict it like they do with everything else. My father would have tried to release it freely, but in case he died, he left a backup plan for us to do it instead.”

  Cole sits forward. “That’s crazy. Cartaxus would never hold back the vaccine.”

  “Oh yeah?” I run my hands through my hair, flicking away splinters tangled up in the long dark strands. “They hold back everything else—antibiotics, medical code. People out here are living with illnesses that were solved twenty years ago. If you want to use Cartaxus code, you have to join one of the bunkers.”

  Cole snorts. “That’s because the bunkers are safe. They want people to join so they’re protected from the virus. But once the vaccine is released, we won’t need the bunkers anymore.”

  I turn my arm in the water, rubbing tracks of foam off the lights of my panel. “So Cartaxus will give the vaccine to everyone, free of charge, no requirements? They’ll let anyone use it, even people with nonstandard tech?”

  For the first time, Cole sounds hesitant. “I’m sure they would.”

  “Yeah,” I say, splashing my face. “That’s what I thought.”

  When Cartaxus opened their bunkers, most survivors of the initial outbreak flocked to them, with only a few choosing to remain on the surface. Almost everyone who stayed behind did so because they couldn’t bear to lose control over their panels. Human gene editing has been around for over fifty years, but it was Cartaxus who invented the first implantable panels. They perfected the technology, copyrighted it, and released budding kits freely around the world.

  Panel buds only cost a few cents to make. They start the size of a grain of rice, injected into your arm to grow inside you like a tree growing from a seed. The cables, the metal sockets, the processors all grow in place, one molecule at a time, branching out from that first bud. Even the poorest countries distributed them, and within a few years the uptake rate was almost 100 percent, thanks to the first detox app. Over the last century mountains of nanowaste used in everything from plastics to fertilizer had leached into the soil and water, until the planet was swimming with toxins. No matter how careful a mother was, her baby would still be born with hundreds of artificial chemicals floating in its blood.

  Panels changed all that. Mortality rates plummeted. The number of lights on a person’s arm told you how healthy they were. Cartaxus opened up their software market to approved providers, and soon there were apps for asthma and weight loss, then hair growth, self-tanners. People could download the solutions to their weaknesses. The industry exploded overnight.

  Then the genehackers arrived, and they wanted to be more than pretty. They wanted to be ten feet tall, with prehensile tails and retractable claws. They wanted to grow a winter coat and shed it in the spring. To feel the earth’s magnetic field the way migratory birds do.

  The genehackers had glimpsed the future, and they saw a day when people would be defined by the limitations of their imagination, not their DNA. My father loved them. They represented pure creation.

  Cartaxus tried to sue them all
for copyright infringement.

  Even before the outbreak, the war over the definition of “human” was raging between Cartaxus and the genehackers. When the virus hit, and Cartaxus opened their bunkers, I wasn’t surprised that the only condition of entry was letting them control your panel.

  No hacks, no nonstandard apps, no open-source code. People entering the bunker agreed to let Cartaxus wipe it all. The problem was that for a lot of people, that code is what defined them, and for some people it was also keeping them alive. Every app in my measly panel is technically nonstandard, since it was written by my father and never approved by Cartaxus. If I went into a bunker, they’d make me wipe the whole thing. My sensory and healing tech, all nonstandard. All gone.

  Cartaxus says these rules are to keep people safe, but my father would have seen the truth, and that’s why he left this plan. He knew they’d withhold the vaccine and use it as blackmail to crush the genehackers once and for all.

  “Look,” Cole says, rubbing his face. “Cartaxus’s line on nonstandard tech is firm, but—”

  “Firm?” I ask. “They tried to make it a crime to own a genkit. They’ve cut access to their code for anyone living on the surface, and they’ll do the same thing with the vaccine.”

  “That’s ridiculous. They want to vaccinate as many people as possible—that’s the only way to kill the virus. They won’t risk losing another vaccine.”

  The water around me seems to freeze. The sounds of the forest die away. All I can hear is that little word, echoing. Thundering.

  “What do you mean, another vaccine?”

  But he doesn’t need to say it. My mind is already clicking into gear, running through my father’s lessons on viruses. In our first summer at the cabin, he showed me the code that made him famous—the gentech vaccine for Influenza X.

  It was robust, he said. Previously, flu vaccines would work for a year before Influenza evolved, mutating like the poem in the pigeons. The code would lose its effectiveness, and the vaccine would become obsolete. That’s called fragile code. It uses strategies that nature will shrug off in a few years, flicking them aside in its endless march of evolution. But my father’s code was different. It acted like a knife, unstoppable and true, aimed at the virus’s heart. It would work forever, and once enough people downloaded it, Influenza X simply ceased to exist.