Skin Deep

by Brandon Sanderson

  “When you ‘comment out’ something in computer code,” Ivy explained, “you write lines, but tell the program to ignore them. That way, you can leave messages to other programmers about the code.”

  “Yup,” J.C. said. “Gibberish. Ask him about the zombies.”

  “Steve,” Ivy said to me, pointedly ignoring J.C., “these people are serious and excited. Their eyes light up when they talk, but there are reservations. They are being honest with you, but they are afraid.”

  “You say this is perfectly safe?” I asked the three.

  “Sure,” Garvas said. “People have been doing this with bacteria for years.”

  “The trouble is not the storage,” Loralee said. “It’s access. Sure, we can store all of this in our cells—but writing and reading it is very difficult. We have to inject data to get it in, and have to remove cells to retrieve it.”

  “One of our teammates, Panos Maheras, was working on a prototype delivery mechanism involving a virus,” Garvas said. “The virus infiltrates the cells carrying a payload of genetic data, which it then splices into the DNA.”

  “Oh, lovely,” Ivy said.

  I grimaced.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Garvas said, a little nervous. “Panos’s virus had failsafes to prevent it from over-reproducing. We have done only limited trials, and have been very careful. And note, the virus route was only one method we were researching.”

  “The world will soon change,” Laramie said, excited. “Eventually, we will be able to write to the genetic hard disk of every human body, using its own hormones to—”

  I held up a hand. “What can the virus you made do right now?”

  “Worst case?” Loralee asked.

  “I’m not here to talk about ponies and flowers.”

  “Worst case,” Loralee said, looking to the others, “the virus that Panos developed could be used to deliver huge chunks of useless data to people’s DNA—or it could cut out chunks of their DNA.”

  “So . . . zombies?” J.C. said.

  Ivy grimaced. “Normally, I’d call him an idiot. But . . . yeah, this kind of sounds like zombies.”

  Not again, I thought. “I hate zombies.”

  The engineers all gave me baffled looks.

  “. . . Zombies?” Loralee asked.

  “That’s where this is going, isn’t it?” I asked. “You turning people into zombies by accident?”

  “Wow,” Garvas said. “That’s way more awesome than what we actually did.”

  The other two looked at him, and he shrugged.

  “Mister Leeds,” Laramie said, looking back to me. “This is not science fiction. Removing chunks of someone’s DNA doesn’t immediately produce some kind of zombie. It just creates an abnormal cell. One that, in our experiments, has a habit of proliferating uncontrollably.”

  “Not zombies,” I said, feeling cold. “Cancer. You created a virus that gives people cancer.”

  Garvas winced. “Kind of?”

  “It was an unintended result that is perfectly manageable,” Laramie said, “and only dangerous if used malignly. And why would anyone want to do that?”

  We all stared at him for a moment.

  “Let’s shoot him,” J.C. said.

  “Thank heavens,” Tobias replied. “You hadn’t suggested we shoot someone in over an hour, J.C. I was beginning to think something was wrong.”

  “No, listen,” J.C. said. “We can shoot Pinhead McWedgy over there, and it will teach everyone in this room an important life lesson. One about not being a stupid mad scientist.”

  I sighed, ignoring the aspects. “You said the virus was developed by a man named Panos? I’ll want to talk to him.”

  “You can’t,” Garvas said. “He’s . . . kind of dead.”

  “How surprising,” Tobias said as Ivy sighed and massaged her forehead.

  “What?” I asked, turning to Ivy.

  “Yol said a body was involved,” Ivy said. “And their company is about storing data in human cells, so . . .”

  I looked to Garvas. “He had it in him, didn’t he? The way to create this virus? He stored the data for your product inside his own cells.”

  “Yes,” Garvas said. “And somebody stole the corpse.”

  6

  “Security Nightmare,” J.C. said as we made our way to the office of Panos, the deceased gene-splicer.

  “So far as we can tell,” Loralee said, “Panos’s death was perfectly natural. We were all devastated when he had his fall, as he was a friend. But nobody thought it was anything more than a random accident on the ski slopes.”

  “Yeah,” J.C. said, walking with my other two aspects just behind him, “because scientists working on doomsday viruses dying in freak accidents isn’t at all suspicious.”

  “Occasionally, J.C.,” Tobias said, “accidents do happen. If someone wanted his secrets, I suspect killing him and stealing his body would be low on the list of methods.”

  “Are you sure he’s dead?” I asked Garvas, who walked on my other side. “It could be some kind of hoax, part of an espionage ploy of some sort.”

  “We’re very sure,” Garvas replied. “I saw the corpse. The neck doesn’t . . . uh . . . turn that way on someone alive.”

  “We’ll want to corroborate that,” J.C. said. “Get coroner reports, photos if possible.”

  I nodded absently.

  “If we follow the simplest line of events,” Ivy said, “this is quite logical. He dies. Someone discovers that his cells hide information. They snatch the body. I’m not saying it couldn’t be something else, but I find what they’re saying to be plausible.”

  “When did the body disappear?” I asked.

  “Yesterday,” Loralee said. “Which was two days after the accident. The funeral was to be today.”

  We stopped in the hallway beside a wall painted with cheerful groups of bubbles, and Garvas used his key card to open the next door.

  “Do you have any leads?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he replied. “Or, well, too many. Our area of research is a hot one, and lots of biotech companies are involved in the race. Any one of our less scrupulous rivals could be behind the theft.” He pulled open the door for me.

  I took the door from Garvas and held it, much to the man’s confusion. If I didn’t, though, he was likely to walk through while my aspects were trying to enter. The engineers entered. Once they’d gone in, my aspects went through, and I followed. Where had Yol run off to?

  “Finding out who did this should be easy,” J.C. said to me. “We just have to figure out who hired that assassin to watch us. What I don’t get is why everyone is so worried. So the nerds accidentally invented a cancer machine. Big deal. I’ve got one of those already.” J.C. held up a cellphone and wiggled it.

  “You have a mobile phone?” Ivy asked, exasperated.

  “Sure,” J.C. said. “Everyone does.”

  “And who are you going to call? Santa?”

  J.C. stuffed the phone away, drawing his lips to a line. Ivy danced around the fact that none of them were real, but she always seemed—deep down—to be okay with it, unlike J.C. As we walked along this new hallway, Ivy fell in beside him and began saying some calming things, as if embarrassed for calling out his hallucinatory nature.

  This newer area of the building was less like a kindergarten, more like a dentist’s office, with individual rooms along a hallway decorated in tans with fake plants beside doorways. Garvas fished out another key card as we reached Panos’s office.

  “Garvas,” I asked, “why didn’t you go to the government with your virus?”

  “They’d have just wanted to use it as a weapon.”

  “No,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “I doubt it. A weapon like this wouldn’t serve a tactical purpose in war. Give the enemy troops cancer? It would take months or years to take effect, and even then would be of marginal value. A weapon like this would only be useful as a threat against a civilian population.”

  “It’s
not supposed to be a weapon at all.”

  “And gunpowder was first just used to make fireworks,” I said.

  “I mentioned that we were looking for other methods to read and write into our cells, right?” Garvas said. “Ones that didn’t use the virus?”

  I nodded.

  “Let’s just say that we started those projects because some of us were concerned about the virus approach. Research on Panos’s project was halted as we tried to find a way to do all of this with amino acids.”

  “You still should have gone to the government.”

  “And what do you think they’d have done?” Garvas asked, looking me right in the eye. “Pat us on the heads? Thank us? Do you know what happens to laboratories that invent things like this? They vanish. Either they get consumed by the government or they get dismantled. Our research here is important . . . and, well, lucrative. We don’t want to get shut down; we don’t want to be the subject of a huge investigation. We just want this whole problem to go away.”

  He pulled open the door and revealed a small, neat office. The walls were decorated with an array of uniformly framed, autographed pictures of science fiction actors.

  “Go,” I said to my aspects, holding Garvas back.

  The three entered the office, poking and prodding at objects on the desk and walls.

  “He was of Greek descent,” Ivy said, inspecting some books on the wall and a set of photos. “Second-generation, I’d say, but still spoke the language.”

  “What?” J.C. said. “Panos isn’t a w—”

  “Watch it,” Ivy said.

  “—Mexican name?”

  “No,” Tobias said. He leaned down beside the desk. “Stephen, some aid, please?”

  I walked over and moved the papers on the desk so Tobias could get a good look at each of them. “Dues to a local fablab . . .” Tobias said. “Brochure for a Linux convention . . . D.I.Y. magazine . . . Our friend here was a maker.”

  “Speak dumb person, please,” J.C. said.

  “It’s a subculture of technophiles and creative types, J.C.,” Tobias said. “A parallel, or perhaps an outgrowth, of the open source software movement. They value hands-on craftsmanship and collaboration, particularly in the creative application of technology.”

  “He kept each name badge from conventions he attended,” Ivy said, pointing toward a stack of them. “And each is signed not by celebrities, but by—I’d guess—people whose talks he attended. I recognize a few of the names.”

  “See that rubber wedge on the floor?” J.C. said with a grunt. “There’s a scuff on the carpet. He often stuffed the wedge under his door to prop it open, circumventing the auto-lock. He liked to leave his office open for people to stop by and chat.”

  I poked at a few stickers stuck to the top of his desk. Support Open Source, Information for Every Body, Words Should Be Free.

  Tobias had me sit at the computer. It wasn’t password protected. J.C. raised an eyebrow.

  Panos’s latest website visits were forums, where he posted energetically, but politely, about information and technology issues. “He was enthusiastic,” I said, scanning some of his emails, “and talkative. People genuinely liked him. He often attended nerdy conventions, and though he would be reticent to talk about them at first, if you could pry a little bit out of him, the rest would come out like a flood. He was always tinkering with things. The Legos were his idea, weren’t they?”

  Garvas stepped up beside me. “How . . .”

  “He believed in your work,” I continued, narrowing my eyes at one of Panos’s posts on a Linux forum. “But he didn’t like your corporate structure, did he?”

  “Like a lot of us, he felt that investors were an annoying but necessary part of doing what we loved.” Garvas hesitated. “He didn’t sell us out, Leeds, if that’s what you’re wondering. He wouldn’t have sold us out.”

  “I agree,” I said, turning around in the chair. “If this man were going to betray his company, he’d just have posted everything on the internet. I find it highly unlikely that he’d sell your files to some other evil corporation rather than just giving them away.”

  Garvas relaxed.

  “I’ll need that list of your rival companies,” I said. “And coroner’s reports, with photos of the body. Specifics on how the corpse vanished. I’ll also want details about where Panos lived, his family, and any non-work friends you know about.”

  “So . . . you’re agreeing to help us?”

  “I’ll find the body, Garvas,” I said, standing. “But first I’m going to go strangle your employer.”

  7

  I found Yol sitting alone in a cafeteria, surrounded by clean white tables, chairs of green, red, yellow. Each table sported a jar filled with lemons.

  Empty, yet decorated with perky colors, the room felt . . . as if it were holding its breath. Waiting for something. I waved for my aspects to wait outside, then walked in to confront Yol alone. He’d removed his garish sunglasses; without them, he looked almost like an ordinary businessman. Did he wear the glasses to pretend he was a star, or did he wear them to keep people from seeing those keen eyes of his, so certain and so wily?

  “You set me up,” I said, taking a seat beside him. “Ruthlessly, like a pro.”

  Yol said nothing.

  “If this story breaks,” I said, “and everything about I3 goes to hell, I’ll be implicated as part owner in the company.”

  I waited for Ivy to chastise me for the curse, bland though it was. But she was outside.

  “You could tell the truth,” Yol said. “Shouldn’t be too hard to prove that you only got your shares today.”

  “No good. I’m a story, Yol. An eccentric. I don’t get the benefit of the doubt with the press. If I’m connected in any way, no protests will keep me out of the tabloids, and you know it. You gave me shares specifically so I’d be in the pot with you, you bastard.”

  Yol sighed. He looked far older when you could see his eyes. “Maybe,” he said, “I just wanted you to feel like I do. I knew nothing of the whole cancer fiasco when I bought this place. They dropped the worst of it on me two weeks ago.”

  “Yol,” I said, “you need to talk to the authorities. This is bigger than me or you.”

  “I know. And I am. The feds are sending CDC officials tonight. The engineers are going to be quarantined; I probably will be too. I haven’t told anyone else yet. But Stephen, the government is wrong; they’re looking at this wrong. This isn’t about a disease, but about information.”

  “The corpse,” I said, nodding. “How could I3 let this happen? Didn’t they consider that he was literally a walking hard drive?”

  “The body was to be cremated,” Yol said. “Part of an in-house agreement. It wasn’t supposed to be an issue. And even still, the information might not be easy to get. Everyone here is supposed to encrypt the data they store inside their cells. You’ve heard of a one-time pad?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Random encryption that requires a unique key to decode. Supposed to be unbreakable.”

  “Mathematically, it’s the only unbreakable form of encryption,” Yol said. “The process isn’t very practical for everyday use, but what people were doing here wasn’t about practicality, not yet. Company policy insisted on such encryption—before they put data in their bodies, they encrypt it with a unique key. To read that data, then, you’d need that exact key. We don’t have the one Panos used, unfortunately.”

  “Assuming he actually followed policy and encrypted his data.”

  Yol grimaced. “You noticed?”

  “Not the most interested in security, our deceased friend.”

  “Well, we have to hope he used a key—because if he did, the people who have his body won’t be able to read what he stored. And we might be safe.”

  “Unless they find the key.”

  Yol pushed a thick folder toward me. “Exactly. Before we arrived, I had them print this out for you.”

  “And it is?”

  “Panos’
s net interactions. Everything he’s done over the last few months—every email sent, every forum post. We haven’t been able to find anything in it, but I thought you should have it just in case.”

  “You’re assuming I’m going to help you.”

  “You told Garvas—”

  “I told him I’d find the corpse. I’m not sure I’ll return it to you when I do.”

  “That’s fine,” Yol said, standing up, taking his sunglasses out of his pocket. “We have our data, Stephen. We just don’t want it falling into the wrong hands. Tell me you disagree.”

  “I’m pretty sure that your hands are the wrong hands.” I paused. “Did you kill him, Yol?”

  “Panos? No. As far as I can tell, it really was an accident.”

  I studied him, and he met my eyes before slipping on the ridiculous sunglasses. Trustworthy? I’d always thought so in the past. He tapped the packet of information. “I’ll see that Garvas and his team get you everything else you asked for.”

  “If it were only your company,” I said, “I’d probably just let you burn.”

  “I know that. But people are in danger.”

  Damn him. He was right. I stood up.

  “You have my number,” Yol said. “I’ll likely be on lockdown here, but I should still be able to talk. You, however, need to make a quick exit before the feds arrive.”

  “Fine.” I brushed past him, heading toward the door.

  “Finding the decryption key isn’t enough,” Yol said after me. “We don’t know how many copies of it there are—and that’s assuming Panos even followed encryption protocol in the first place. Find that body, Stephen, and burn it. That’s what I wish I’d done to this whole building weeks ago.”

  I opened the door, stepping out and waving to Ivy, Tobias, and J.C. They fell in with me as we walked.

  “J.C.,” I said, “use that phone of yours. Call the other aspects. Send them to the White Room. We’ve got work to do.”

  Part Two

  8

  I’ve got a lot of aspects. Forty-seven, to be exact, with Arnaud being the latest to join us. I don’t usually need all of them—in fact, imagining more than four or five at a time is taxing, something I can’t do for long. That limitation is yet another thing that makes my psychologists salivate. A psychotic who finds it more tiring to create his fantasy world than live in the real one?