This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  My father said there were a lot of rumors like that in the early days of gentech—that innocuous-looking apps were based on the genes of animals that many religions believed to be unclean. Pigs, dogs, insects. Genes that people didn’t want swimming around inside their cells. The concern was well-founded, since many early apps were derived from the previous decades scientists had spent studying rats. It was estimated that almost 60 percent of early gentech code contained at least one rodent gene. That changed as time went on, and people like my father invented new and superior genes that were entirely synthetic. When he wrote the code for Influenza X, there was no need to lift genes from nature’s encyclopedia—he could write better code himself.

  The rumors about the Influenza X vaccine were false, but that didn’t stop them spreading, and Cartaxus refused to release the code and put them to rest. Hundreds of thousands of religious objectors refused to download the vaccine, and thousands of them died.

  “If Cartaxus had learned from Influenza, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” I say. “The whole idea of encrypting gentech code is unconscionable. People need to know what their code is doing to them, which means they need to read it. But Cartaxus doesn’t care about people. They just care about copyright.”

  Cole snorts. “Encrypting the Influenza vaccine had nothing to do with copyright. You can’t pander to extremists about code they don’t understand while a virus is killing millions of people.”

  “It’s not pandering! It’s open, honest debate. People have a right to choose what goes into their bodies.”

  “What about their children’s bodies? Who chooses for them when the alternative is death?”

  I throw my fork down. “I don’t know, but it sure as hell shouldn’t be Cartaxus. All they care about is power. My father knew that, and that’s why he quit.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “He wasn’t lying.”

  Cole picks up my plate. “Then he shouldn’t have based the Influenza vaccine on canine DNA.”

  I push back from the table, biting back the urge to yell at him. He just told me my father is dead, and now he’s trashing him in front of me. I’m so worked up I can barely keep my voice level, but I’m not going to let him disrespect my father like that. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, soldier,” I say. “My father wouldn’t do that. He would have found an alternative, or even if he couldn’t, he would never have lied about it. He wasn’t ashamed of his work.”

  Cole’s eyes meet mine, flintlike and cold. “Believe what you want to believe, Catarina. Let me know when you’re ready for the truth.”

  He stands and walks into the kitchen, leaving me in a storm of grief, with a trickle of blood weaving from the palm of my left hand.

  CHAPTER 9

  BY THE TIME COLE IS done with the dishes, I’ve tugged a comb through my hair, cleaned my nails, and am pacing back and forth across the living room. Cole’s words are spinning through my mind—but it’s not what he said that’s worrying me. It’s the cold, angry tone in his voice when he talked about my father.

  He sounded like a perfect Cartaxus soldier. A true believer, loyal to the conglomerate that has taken over the planet. He didn’t sound like a renegade gone AWOL on the back of a single note from a man whose word he’s ready to risk his life on.

  If anything, it sounds like Cole didn’t like my father at all.

  So why the hell is he here?

  Doubt has taken hold inside me, a fire that first sparked when Cole told me that the Skies hacked Cartaxus and destroyed the vaccine’s code. That’s ridiculous. I’m probably the best coder the Skies have, and I’m nowhere near good enough to pull off a hack like that. But if not the Skies, then who? Part of me feels like Cartaxus is playing some larger game that I can’t yet grasp. All I know is that my father is dead, and he left a message for Cole.

  I saw the proof of that, at least. I held it in my hands.

  What I have to decide now is what to do with Cole. My eyes glide across the gleaming handcuffs on the living room table. For all I know, he’s waiting for me to unlock the vaccine so he can drag me back to Cartaxus, and they can control the code again. I’ve spent the last two years hiding from people like him. How could my father possibly expect me to work with him now?

  “Are you ready?”

  I jump as Cole walks back from the kitchen with my little battered genkit in his hands. “Where did you get that?”

  “It was on the floor.” He hands it to me. “I moved it out of the way when I brought my gear in. I’m guessing you’ll need it to get into my arm.”

  I take the genkit carefully, a wild idea sparking in my mind. This machine holds backups of every piece of code I’ve ever written. Every algorithm, every firewall-busting script I’ve developed with the Skies. But that’s not all it holds. There are viruses in here, malware that can be triggered remotely, with a vocal command. If I can dump one of those viruses into Cole’s panel, it’ll give me a chance at getting away from him if he turns on me.

  Maybe that’s what my father wanted—not for me to work with Cole, but to fight him. To control him. To hold my own against this living, breathing weapon.

  “Are you ready to do this?” Cole asks.

  I nod swiftly, turning away. “Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go down to the lab.”

  A set of dank concrete steps at the back of the house leads down to the laboratory my father built in the basement. The motion sensors at the door trip as I step through, and the ancient fluorescent bars on the ceiling blink to life.

  It’s a mess down here. Sheaths of musty paper lie spilled across the floor, a testament to my father’s love of old-fashioned notes. The black lab counter runs the length of the room, cluttered with dirty beakers and metal canisters of proteins ready to be laser-coded. A pile of broken petri dishes and test tubes fills one corner, and the frayed wiring of a disemboweled genkit takes up most of the floor.

  It’s a minefield of broken glass and toxic chemicals, just the way it’s always been. It’s my favorite place in the cabin.

  “This place is a death trap,” Cole says, scanning the room.

  I nod to the broom hanging on the far wall. “I’m going to need a few minutes to get ready. Feel free to clean up.”

  He raises an eyebrow at me and leans against the door frame. “Not a chance, Catarina.”

  I smile, walking to the counter, and set my genkit down. Its screen is dim, cracked in one corner and mended badly with duct tape. It’s just a basic laptop model: the kind of thing someone would buy if they were getting into coding but didn’t want to spend too much money. The higher-end genkits can take up an entire room, designed to run calculations on every possible permutation of the human genome. My genkit has a screen and keyboard, which most people use when they’re learning before upgrading to the smoother, faster VR interface. I tried hooking up my panel’s low-tech graphics card to the genkit’s VR stream a dozen times, but all it did was crash my tech. One day I’ll find a way to upgrade my panel’s processors, but until then I’m stuck using a basic, clunky, entry-level genkit.

  A slow, broken, taped-up genkit that I love with all my heart.

  The screen glows blue as it boots up. I glance over my shoulder at Cole and run a quick scan through my files for a virus I can hide in his arm. Most of them are for attacking computer systems, but a handful are straight-up malicious gentech code. Biocryptic warfare. I wrote them after the outbreak, while the world was going to hell and I was alone and terrified. The only weapon I had was my father’s rifle, and I barely knew how to use it.

  But I knew how to code.

  A forty-kilobyte Trojan catches my eye—a command that should short-circuit Cole’s wiring and knock him out if I say a trigger word: recumbentibus. It’s perfect. Small enough to slip past his security scanner, and it’ll give me time to run the hell away from him if it comes to that.

  I pull out the genkit’s I/O wire, a three-foot-long cable coiled into the back of the device, and wave it at Cole. A
chrome-plated, inch-long needle gleams on the end. “Okay, soldier. Let’s get you jacked in.”

  His shoulders tighten. “With a needle?”

  “Don’t be a baby. Give me your arm.”

  He eyes the gleaming needle, shifting uncomfortably. He’s not alone in his discomfort—most people hate the wire. Panels can usually be updated or checked through their wireless connection, but there are some apps that need to be physically budded through a brand-new stream of nanites, and that’s where the wire comes in. Its needle tip is hollow, ready to send in a microscopic drop of saline teeming with nanites. Whenever I’m coding, I always use the wire. Hardwired connections are faster, and you don’t have to worry so much about electromagnetic interference.

  Cole steps closer reluctantly, his gaze hovering on the duct tape holding the genkit’s screen in. “Are you sure this thing is safe?”

  “The machine is fine. It’s just old, and a little slow.”

  He doesn’t look convinced. “And you’re sure you know what you’re doing?”

  I stare at him. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was afraid, which is ridiculous coming from a man who could kill me in seconds with his bare hands.

  At least, it would be ridiculous if I wasn’t planning on dumping a Trojan into his arm as soon as I get in.

  “Of course I know what I’m doing,” I say. “How many times do I have to—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says, cutting me off. “You’re a smart-ass Agatta, I get it. I still don’t think you’ll be able to get past the firewalls.”

  “We’ll see.” I flick the machine into reading mode and pull Cole’s arm toward me, turning it so his panel faces up. It glows beneath his skin, an oblong of soft blue light stretching from his wrist almost all the way to the crease in his elbow. There’s a thick, soft layer of silicone in there, just above the muscles, grown from the bud Cole would have been injected with a few days after birth. The function cores inside the silicone each act as tiny factories, producing nanites that build and destroy ribbons of synthetic DNA. They can also build structures out of metal or plastic to create implants inside your body. Titanium wrapped around your bones to make them unbreakable. Fiber-optic wires to pass commands to your fingers at the speed of light.

  With the knowledge I have of coding and hacking, using the genkit humming beside me, there’s almost nothing I couldn’t do to Cole’s body if I wanted to. Stop his heart. Cut his oxygen supply. Shut down everything in his panel.

  It’s really no surprise that he looks so uncomfortable right now.

  I hold the needle end of the wire against Cole’s panel. It flashes for a second, and the probe jerks free of my grasp, burying itself in his arm. He flinches as it dives beneath his skin, and the genkit’s screen flashes white.

  ALERT. Unauthorized use of this software is prohibited. Password required.

  “See?” Cole says, reaching for the wire. “I don’t know the password. You’re not going to be able to get through.”

  “Hush now,” I say, slapping his hand away. “I need to concentrate. No more talking.”

  My fingers dance across the keyboard as I start to work, loading up libraries, feeling out the basic structure of Cole’s security. I’m not going to dump the Trojan in just yet. My first priority is blasting open his firewalls and getting access to his memory. Once I’m in and we’re scanning his panel for files left by my father, it should be easy to dump the Trojan and hide the keystrokes in a harmless-looking command. The hard part is getting in—figuring out which scripts to run, trying to remember the best methods of attack.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve done this. The last panel I hacked was my own, and that was almost three years ago. Dax had been at the cabin for a month, I’d fallen head-over-heels for him, and although we’d flirted constantly, we’d never actually kissed. In retrospect, it was because I was fifteen and he was afraid of my father, but at the time I thought it was because I wasn’t pretty enough.

  The other girls I’d known at boarding school had satin, colortrue skin. They had fingernails that grew in pink, and quad-follicle eyelashes that grew until they cut them. Next to them, I felt like a common gray pigeon—dull and obsolete—so I modified a cosmetic app to be hypergenesis-friendly. My father refused to test it. Too dangerous, he said. When I pushed him, he’d always tell me how my mother died. How the well-meaning doctor gave her a syringe of healing tech, and she took just fourteen seconds to die. How her cells fragmented, splitting apart like a billion screaming mouths, until she choked to death on the bloody pulp of her own lungs.

  My father wouldn’t help me, but I thought that I knew better. I sat down one night, hacked my panel, and uploaded the app myself.

  It took thirty-seven seconds until the burning started.

  The rest of the night is a blur. My father hauled me downstairs and jacked me into his industrial-grade genkit, jumping my panel to keep me alive. He stopped and restarted my heart, flushing my system, wiping any trace of the rogue nanites as he knelt on the floor beside me. With Dax’s help, I survived, lying in the basement while the skin on my back bubbled up, sloughing off in chunks.

  That was the last time I disobeyed my father, and the last time I hacked my panel. I learned the hard way that there are some things in life you’re not supposed to change. I was left with an ugly track of scar tissue along my spine, but Dax didn’t seem to care. He told me that night was when he realized he was in love with me.

  The memory makes the scar tissue on my back prickle as I weave past Cole’s security, feeling out his hardware. Hacking my panel’s firewalls took days of preparation and testing, and the actual attack took over an hour. But if I’m lucky, hacking Cole’s panel should only take a few minutes. When I broke through the firewalls in my arm, I discovered a weakness in the way the panel’s power is distributed. Exploiting that weakness will mean running a serious electric current into Cole’s arm, but it should also give me a shortcut to get in.

  First up: distract his security scanner. Cole has a miniature AI in his arm that’s always watching for attacks, learning how to protect his code. I throw a virus at his wireless chip and watch as the AI responds, its primary defenses surging around it.

  Now I’m free to attack his battery.

  Every panel has a power system somewhere in the body—sometimes deeper in the forearm, sometimes inside the chest. They charge up using a mixture of your body’s kinetic energy and your metabolism, gaining energy as you digest food. That means guilt-free hamburgers when you’re running power-intensive VR sessions, but it also wastes a lot of food when all you have is nutriBars. With the AI scanner distracted, I prepare the genkit’s cable to send a series of electric pulses into Cole’s arm.

  “Uh, hold on for a second,” I say. “This might hurt. . . .”

  “What?” Cole asks, his eyes flaring. “Is this safe? I’m not sure you should—”

  His arm goes tense as he cuts off, his whole body jerking against the counter, his eyes flashing to black for a split second.

  “What the . . . ,” he breathes, a vein on his forehead popping up. He reaches for the genkit’s cable, but I smack his hand away again.

  “It worked,” I say. “Hold on, I need to do it one more time.”

  “No—” he starts, but it’s too late. I’ve already run the command. His eyes fly wide as it surges through him, his mouth opening silently.

  He doubles over, his muscles twitching furiously. It’s probably not good for his heart to take this kind of stress, and I’m sure he’s got a dozen implants that are close to shorting out, but the last shock brought down one of his firewalls, and the final barrier is toppling before my eyes. . . .

  And it’s down. One second. That’s all I get, but it’s all the time I need to drop a single command and run. The AI surges back from the wireless chip, furious, and I flick the genkit off before it races inside to corrupt it.

  Cole’s forehead glistens with sweat. “What the hell are you doing, Catarina?”

&
nbsp; “Just wait,” I say. “It takes a while for your security to reset.”

  “You couldn’t do it.” He reaches for the wire in his arm. “I’m not letting you shock me again.”

  I grab his wrist, meeting his gaze with all the steel I can muster. I can’t let him pull the wire out. Not until I’ve logged in and checked his files for the vaccine. Not until I’ve bought myself an edge by dumping the Trojan into his arm.

  “I said wait, soldier.” I reach out with my free hand to flick the genkit on.

  ALERT. Unauthorized use of this software is prohibited. Password required.

  “See?” he says. “You couldn’t do it. I told you.”

  I ignore him, typing with my free hand, letting my hand slide from his wrist. “I just typed in your new password, which I reset for you. It’s my name—Catarina.”

  He stares at me for a second, then drops his eyes to the screen. “Holy shit,” he breathes. “You did it.”

  The genkit beeps, and his panel’s menu unfolds. A list of Cartaxus apps scrolls across the screen, almost too fast to read. Most are standard upgrades I recognize, but some are apps I’ve never heard of. Toxic aorta shielding. Neocell mesh. One is labeled Hydra Vaccine, and the sight of it makes my heart skip, but it’s encrypted. I can’t click on it. I can’t even see its size, or how it’s running.

  Cracking that file would take more than a few electric shocks.

  “What about hidden files?” Cole’s skin is flushed, beaded with sweat after what I just put him through.

  “Just a second,” I say, my fingers flying across the keyboard. I throw together a command to dump the Trojan into his arm, wrap it up in the best camouflage I can think of, and send it to his panel. His security is down, but it starts spooling up as I type, and my stomach tightens, waiting for the code to transfer.