This Mortal Coil

by Emily Suvada

  “I’m glad I met you,” I blurt out. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that.”

  His brow creases. “You’ll be fine.”

  “I know, I just . . .” I trail off. I don’t know how to say good-bye. After all we’ve been through, he deserves much more than this. The drones must sense the emotion in my voice, because they rush to capture the moment, swarming around us, buzzing between our faces like moths around flames.

  Cole steps closer to cut them off. “I’ll be right here, Cat.”

  “I know you will.”

  He takes my hand and squeezes it, then pulls away, and in a moment of desperation, I clutch his shirt and press my lips to his.

  It is a simple kiss. There are no tears, no roaring flames. We are two people coming together, joined for the briefest moment. Even so, it’s enough to slow my heart and bring the warmth of his smile back into me.

  He pulls away, grinning. “Okay, enough of that,” he murmurs. “Get in your glowing tub and save the world.”

  I let his hand drop, my cheeks aflame. “Wish me luck.”

  He winks. “You don’t need it.”

  “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  CHAPTER 35

  A NURSE GUIDES ME TO the immersion chamber and helps me out of the bathrobe. I cross my arms over my chest, self-conscious in the silver pressure suit. I try not to notice the stares from people around the room, but there’s no getting away from the buzzing cloud of drones. My face is still made up, still perfectly smooth and even-toned, but there’s no hiding the pale scars on my leg or the scabbed bruise on my knee. People don’t have skin like this anymore, not with gentech. They don’t have hair on their legs or skin discoloration, not unless they want it.

  Now that I know my hypergenesis was a lie—a cover to hide whatever treatment my father designed—I can’t understand why he didn’t give me an aesthetic suite. He knew how miserable I was with bad skin and rough hair, having to brush my teeth and stockpile old-fashioned deodorant when everyone else had apps. I can almost understand him hiding the hypergenesis treatment from me, but to give me such a rudimentary panel just seems cruel.

  I don’t know what would be more shocking to the people around the world watching the feed of tonight’s events: the heavily hacked enhancements of some of Novak’s scientists, or my complete lack of them.

  The nurse gestures to a metal staircase leading into the vat. I kick off my slippers and climb up it quickly, eager to get into the cover of the blue liquid. It’s thick and warm like honey, but it’s not really wet, and forms a strange, convex meniscus around me wherever I touch it. It’s deep enough for me to stand comfortably with the liquid around my shoulders but dense enough for me to lift my feet and float without sinking to the bottom.

  Dax strides across the room, pushing a rattling steel trolley topped with an array of surgical instruments. He’s in a white lab coat, his hair perfectly styled, his skin made up to be even paler than usual. He looks nervous, and he should be. He’s probably wondering if I’m going to shout at him again and make him carry that for the rest of his life.

  Honestly, it’s tempting.

  Most of the drones have followed Novak and Cole over to the chair with the restraints, but a handful are whining around us, circling the tank. I could make a scene right now, in front of the cameras, and there’s nothing Dax could do to stop me. A few pointed words about how he was the one who set off the kick simulation at Homestake should be enough to shatter his golden reputation.

  But I won’t do that.

  Deep down, I don’t hate Dax, and I don’t want to hurt him. He’s unfeeling and ambitious, but I think part of me always knew that. Maybe that’s even what drew me to him in the first place. I liked him for his mind and his potential, because those are the parts of myself that he brought out too. I know he felt the same way. I always thought we’d get married, he said when he learned what the decryption would do to me. We’d code together. Most people would have mentioned children, or love, or growing old, but Dax knew that any future between us would center around our work.

  Our bond was intellectual, and that was what made it strong.

  But when you love someone for their mind, you can’t expect that their heart will belong to you too.

  He stops beside the tank. “I’ve checked everything about a hundred times, and the procedure is ready to run. I’m sorry about before.”

  I slump into the glowing liquid, blowing out a sigh. “You’re an ass,” I mutter. “And it’s your loss. I hope you know that.”

  He rests his pale, slender fingers on the edge of the vat and flicks a sharp glance back at Cole. “I do, Catarina. More than you know.”

  Something in his tone rings true. His emerald eyes are as unreadable as ever, but I catch a hint of sadness in them. I look away, across the room at Cole. A doctor is working on his arm, and Novak is making one of her speeches to the cloud of cameras.

  “Tell me Novak knows what’s going to happen,” I whisper.

  “Disturbingly, she does. She wanted cameras in here from the start, but when I explained . . .” He drops his voice. “When I explained the procedure’s effects, she ordered a whole swarm. I think she’s making a film. Don’t worry, though. Nothing will be live. The broadcast is delayed, and it’s mostly footage of her and her team. People won’t be watching you when the decryption is happening.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” I kick in the liquid, leaning back against the vat’s curved side. The painkillers and beta-blockers are already working. I’m still terrified about the decryption, but the ache in my knee is gone, and the edges of my terror are bleeding into calm.

  “I have some bad news,” Dax says. “Since you don’t have a panel, we’ll need to do a spinal jack to hook you up to the clonebox.”

  I wince. Spinal jacks are a last-resort procedure using a socket buried in the back of your neck. It grows there in case people lose their arms and need emergency treatment, but it means cutting through muscle and screwing a cable into your spine. I should have realized that we’d need to do one, but I guess I’ve been trying not to think about it. I pull the fishtail braid over my shoulder. “Are you going to do it?”

  He waves his hand across the steel trolley he brought over, where a row of scalpels glitter in the liquid’s blue light. “I think that’s best. Are you ready?”

  I glance around the room, trying to prepare myself for what’s about to happen. Cole’s already jacked in, with his eyes shut, his head tilted back. A thick cable juts from an incision in his forearm, coiling into the clonebox that stands humming in the middle of the room. It’s waist high and cube shaped, built of glass that shows a jungle of internal tubing, where ninety liters of gray liquid is pumping constantly. That’s approximately the same volume of liquid you’d get if Cole were to melt into a puddle on the floor, and that’s precisely the scenario the clonebox is designed to replicate. Every cell in Cole’s body needs to be duplicated, so the soupy liquid inside the clonebox is recoding itself to match Cole’s DNA. If that were to happen inside a living person’s body, their cells would break apart in the same way mine are about to do. But inside the frothing liquid of the box, they’ll be recoded from scratch without affecting Cole at all.

  His panel will see the clonebox as an extension of his body, and it will send his apps, including the vaccine, in to protect it. That’s when we’ll jack me in. Another thick black cable is jutting from the clonebox, curling across the gym’s floor to the side of the vat. Dax will hook it into my spinal socket, and if the procedure’s code works like it should, the gold-flecked cables in my body will pump the vaccine’s code into every limb. Every muscle, every nerve. My own DNA will decrypt it piece by piece, and my body will send the decrypted code back, ready for release.

  I stare at the humming clonebox, at the cable in Cole’s panel, at the whining clouds of drones spiraling through the air. I’m still frightened, but I made up my mind about this the moment I found the procedure’s code in my panel. The o
nly thing I can do now is choose how I want to face it.

  I look up at Dax, steeling myself. “Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s do this.”

  I let Dax pull my head forward so the back of my neck is exposed, my chin resting on the curved rim of the vat. His fingers prod along my spine, and I feel a flash of pain as he slides a syringe of anesthetic into the muscle.

  “Okay, here we go,” he says. A scalpel clinks beside me, followed by a quick slash, a hint of pain, and a sharp tug on my neck. The cable vibrates as it connects with the socket, locking itself into my spine with a wet, metallic crunch.

  My vision flashes. The power running through the cable is bleeding through my wiring, glitching out my ocular tech. “It worked.”

  “Good.” Dax’s fingers slide from my neck. “I’ll kick off a biometric scan.”

  I nod, slowly straightening my head, blinking through the sudden blast of noise in my vision. It’s not just my ocular tech that’s glitching. All my implants are starting up in a rush, flooding my senses, turning the whine of the drones into a roar.

  “This scan looks clear,” Dax mutters, his eyes glazing over. “Your levels are within acceptable limits, and . . . Ah.”

  “What?”

  His forehead creases. “That backup in your spine we found, I can see more information now. It’s not masking its access anymore, and it’s growing a panel in your arm again, like we thought. It has a hard drive, and it looks like there’s data on it. Maybe it was backing up everything from your genkit.”

  “Maybe . . . ,” I say, confused. “Can you see anything else about the hypergenesis treatment?”

  “I’m taking a look now. I can’t see anything obvious except a lingering dose of ERO-86 in your blood. It looks like it was being synthesized by your old healing tech code. I’ll send a command to bring the levels down to trace, then we should be good to go.”

  The cable in the back of my neck vibrates, and a jolt races down my spine.

  “What . . . ,” I breathe, suddenly dizzy. “What’s ERO-86?”

  “It’s a post-traumatic-stress treatment,” Dax says. “It suppresses memories. They use it in black-out training, but it’s probably a false reading. With your panel growing back, there’ll be all sorts of chemicals in your blood. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “M-memory supp-ess-nt?” I slur, my lips going numb. Whatever command Dax used on me, it’s left me barely able to speak. But he has to listen to me. He can’t just ignore a memory suppressant reading, not after everything we’ve found. If the backup node in my spine has a hard drive with data on it, maybe there’s something in there about the decryption. Something important that my father expected me to find.

  What if it’s a way to unlock the vaccine without killing me?

  “Okay,” Novak says. Her stilettos click across the floor, and the drones swarm back around me. She stands beside the vat, resting her mirror-fingernailed hands on the rim. I force my eyes open, struggling to stay upright. My voice is barely a breath when I try to speak, and my arm doesn’t move at all when I try to grab Novak’s sleeve.

  She raises an eyebrow at Dax, oblivious to me. “It’s time to make history, Dr. Crick. The clonebox is running. Is she ready to go?”

  “All clear,” Dax says, his eyes still glazed. “We can start decryption on your command.”

  I shake my head. “St . . . ,” I murmur, my lips shaking. I try to shout, but nothing comes out except a sigh.

  “Cloning now,” Novak says, staring intently at me. The drones whiz around us, a cloud of thousands of eyes trained on me, but not a single one of them can see that I want this to stop. Novak raises a scarlet eyebrow, giving me a sharp-toothed smile. “Hold tight now, Catarina. Transferal on my word.”

  “St . . . ,” I breathe, closing my eyes.

  The cable in my neck vibrates.

  “Installation starting in three . . . two . . . one.”

  CHAPTER 36

  THE LABORATORY DISAPPEARS. THE VAT, the drones, and Novak’s synthetic eye blink out, replaced by an infinite stretch of black. I spin around in the darkness, searching for a light, and find myself standing on a tiled floor beside a floor-to-ceiling window.

  Outside, three mountains rise like sentries, shrouded in fog, their jagged peaks tumbling down into thick, verdant forest. The sky is slate gray, and fingers of frost lace the edges of the window. I feel the cold right down to my bones. I turn, scanning the room, but all I see are bare walls stretching into shadow. The window is unmarked, and a single triangular fluorescent light glows on the ceiling above me.

  “Okay, darling,” my father says. I spin around to find him behind me, dressed in a white lab coat, his dark hair combed and parted on the side. He has a white, gleaming genkit on a trolley beside him, with a cable curling out of it and into my arm.

  “Let’s try this again,” he says.

  I look down. A cobalt bar of light shines from my forearm—a full panel with thousands of apps. It’s blinking a Morse signal, telling me it’s accepting a new app from the genkit’s cable. I look back up at my father, smiling.

  “Remember to focus on your breathing,” he says. “I won’t let you get sick. I’ll be listening closely.”

  “But when it hurts too much, I can’t talk.” My voice is younger, frightened.

  He smiles. “I won’t be listening to your voice, darling. I’ve had your heartbeat patched into my feed since you were a little girl.”

  He points above him. A chart appears, hovering in the air. A jagged green line, matching the beats of my heart. They are strong and steady, quickened by fear.

  “Are you ready?” he asks.

  I nod, my hands in fists. My fingernails are bitten down to stubs. “I’m ready.”

  My father turns a dial on the genkit, and the cable jutting into my panel vibrates. Pain bleeds up my arm to my shoulder and across my back. I swallow down a gulp of air, biting back my fear, trying to focus on my breathing . . .

  But this isn’t right.

  I’m not here. I’m in a laboratory at Sunnyvale with a cable jacked into my spine. Is this the memory my father suppressed with the ERO-86? Dax cleared my system, so maybe it’s coming back. My head snaps up, searching the room for something familiar.

  But I don’t remember this place—I don’t remember any of this. The panel in my arm, the genkit, the code my father was running. I scan the room but see nothing except the jagged, three-peaked mountains looming outside the window.

  “Catarina?”

  Cole’s voice. I spin around, but all I can see is my father, coding with his eyes glazed.

  “Cat, are you okay?”

  “Cole?” The room is growing blurry. The memory is fading, but I still don’t know what it means. I don’t know what my father did to me.

  And if I don’t remember it now, I won’t get another chance.

  “What the hell is going on? Can’t you see that she’s in pain?”

  The scene wavers. Cole’s voice is dragging me back to him. I fight the pull of it, searching for a clue, something to help me remember what happened here.

  “Cat, talk to me!”

  The mountains rumble, and the memory flickers in and out.

  “Cat!”

  I close my eyes and blink into a world of bright, sparkling pain.

  CHAPTER 37

  MY BODY THRASHES IN THE glass vat. Dax is next to me with Novak, each holding one of my arms, keeping my head above the surface. I gasp, kicking out, my feet sliding over the bottom. Jolts of pain race down my spine like sparks along a fuse.

  This is the decryption. I don’t know why I’m still alive, but judging by the pain, I won’t be for very much longer.

  “What about a sedative?” Novak asks.

  “N-no,” I gasp. I don’t want to be sedated. If this is the end, I want to see it.

  Dax’s eyes snap to me. “You’re back.” He sounds surprised. “What do you need, Princess? Painkillers?”

  “I need . . .” I gulp. “I need to stop talking.�
�

  He nods. “Fair enough.”

  Novak turns to shout over her shoulder. “Let’s dim the lights, people! Get some tech syringes out. And stand down, Lieutenant. Nobody’s hurting your girl.”

  My head snaps up. Cole is standing behind Dax, his eyes black, the cable to the clonebox still jutting from his arm.

  “C-Cole,” I whisper. He shouldn’t be up. He should be strapped down in that chair. If he breaks off the decryption, we won’t get another chance.

  Cole’s eyes fade to blue as I speak. He steps closer. “Catarina, are you okay? What’s happening?”

  “I-I’m just . . . uncomfortable.”

  “It’s okay,” Dax says. “I’ll adjust the nanites.” The vat’s liquid glows brighter, and the pain ebbs away.

  “Something’s still wrong,” Cole says. “Her heartbeat is too high. It’s hurting her.”

  “I’m fine,” I manage to choke out, my legs kicking out involuntarily. But I’m not—the pain is back already, and I can barely focus enough to speak. It laps at me like the sloshing liquid in the vat, drenching my senses, taking my breath away.

  I try to crawl inside myself and block it out, but it’s like forcing water back through floodgates, and it just rushes over me.

  “Forty percent decrypted,” a voice says.

  “What?” I gasp. That can’t be right. I should have died by now. Something sparks in my neck, and my head flies back, my body shuddering.

  “Hold her still!” Novak yells.

  Gloved hands grab my head and arms. My chest thumps against the glass. The liquid splashes out in glowing waves that shatter into droplets when they hit the floor.

  “Her blood pressure is rising!” Cole shouts, pushing his way to me. “Dammit, Crick, we have to stop!”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Dax snaps. “It’s working, we’re sixty percent decrypted.”

  “Novak!” Cole roars. “She’s dying, kill the code!”

  I want to reply, but I can’t form the words. My jaw is clenched tight, my ocular implant cycling through random filters.