Ganymede (Book Start)

Chapter 1 : World Zero, 2088

Standing in the kitchen, her preparations complete, Mary knew she should take a moment to enjoy the calm before the storm. Elizabeth was in her bedroom playing with her toys, the presents were wrapped, and the cake was cooling on the counter. Mary was pointedly ignoring the fact that there was a swarm of news-drones at the end of the block. She would take this moment for herself. She would try to relax.

She knew she was too old to be the mother of a seven-year-old, but that was the whole point wasn’t it? It was because she couldn’t conceive that she’d chosen to take this route. The protests, the blaring headlines, the violence in the streets, none of that mattered, not when compared with the miracle of her daughter – her perfect seven-year-old girl. And how could she not be perfect? She was a marvel of science, the shining outcome of the largest research project conducted in the history of mankind.

Mary placed her palms flat on the countertop, looked out the window over her garden, and smiled. She was content. More than content. She was for all intents and purposes immortal. If that wasn’t satisfying, she didn’t know what was. When she’d been chosen as a participant in the human trials, she had felt unbelievably lucky. She could finally have the child she so desperately wanted. It seemed impossible that seven years had already flown by. All she knew was she loved her daughter with all her heart.

She had almost given her daughter the same name as herself, but it had seemed like a step too far, an expression of arrogance that might tempt fate and tip them both into disaster. She’d decided that clones shouldn’t be named after their parents, so Elizabeth had been given her own name. Mary was determined that Elizabeth would be her own, unique person.

As she was thinking these thoughts, the view out the window flickered, a panorama of dense, grey buildings bleeding through the fruit trees and garden in her backyard. Mary was surprised by the sudden failure. She hadn’t ever been shown the unfiltered view without having chosen it. She triggered her interface, reinstating her preferred filter. The buildings blurred and fuzzed, then blinked out of existence, her backyard returning to greenery.

She watched for a moment longer to see if it would happen again. When the filter seemed stable, she turned away from the window. “Elizabeth! Come down! Are you ready for the party?”

When Elizabeth didn’t respond, Mary’s face creased into an unaccustomed frown. She walked through the dining room to the long, white-carpeted stairs, and called up toward her daughter’s room. “Elizabeth, can you hear me?”

Still no response.

This silence was unlike her. Elizabeth was usually so responsive. Maybe it had to do with turning seven? Mary thought back to her own seventh birthday. Had she been worried about turning seven? She honestly couldn’t remember. Raising a clone was so confusing at times. It was hard to stay inside her own head.

Mary checked her watch. There was still thirty minutes until the first guests would arrive. She walked up the stairs to the second floor, trailing her fingers along the hand-rail. She stopped at Elizabeth’s room, placing one hand gently on the door. “Elizabeth, can I come in?”

The room was silent.

A sharp pang of anxiety spiked through her. The feeling was there and gone in an instant, a liquid flutter in her stomach. Surely she was overreacting, but there was something about the dense silence emanating from her daughter’s room that seemed particularly ominous.

“Elizabeth?” she called through the door. Even as she said it, she realized that her voice had come out louder and more frantic than she’d meant for it to.

She waited a moment longer, and when there was still no response, she made up her mind. Mary pushed the door open and entered the room to find her daughter sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, a doll in each hand, head down, her hair falling in a loose cascade over her face.

Mary took a deep breath, one hand on her chest to cover the frightened beating of her heart.

“Honey, is everything ok?”

Elizabeth was oddly still, nothing like her usual boisterous self. Mary tried to tell herself that it was a normal seven-year-old thing. It couldn’t be anything too serious. She forced herself to calm down as she crouched in front of Elizabeth. When there was still no response, she pushed her daughter’s thick brown hair back over her forehead, revealing her eyes, surreptitiously checking for a fever with the palm of her hand.

“Are you nervous about your birthday party?”

Elizabeth didn’t respond. For a long, pregnant moment the room was utterly silent, a frozen tableau of worry and doubt. Then Elizabeth lifted her head in one smooth movement and looked Mary in the eye. “Who are you?” Elizabeth asked, her face twisted with some intense emotion.

It was an expression Mary had never seen on her daughter’s face before. The anxiety returned, sharp and cruel, twisting within her. Something was wrong. She knew it. Elizabeth wasn’t well.

“Honey, listen to me, do you feel sick?” Mary asked, tripping over her words in her concern.

Elizabeth’s eyes darted around the room, as if she was trying to figure out where she was, before landing back on Mary. “Why are you doing this to me?” she asked.

“It’s time to get ready for your friends. Everyone is coming for your party,” Mary said, trying to return a sense of normalcy back to the conversation.

“Party? Where the hell am I?” Elizabeth asked, her voice rising.

Mary pressed her hand to Elizabeth’s forehead. It was still cool to the touch, but it wasn’t enough to steady her nerves. Taking a deep breath, she picked Elizabeth up. It was time to talk to the doctors at the lab. They had told her that if anything unusual happened she needed to bring Elizabeth in to them immediately. This definitely qualified as unusual.

As soon as Mary picked her up, Elizabeth started to struggle, kicking and twisting to get free. Mary rushed toward the stairs, one hand gripping Elizabeth around the middle, the other grasping the hand-rail as she fought for control. Partway down the stairs, Elizabeth suddenly went limp. It was such a surprising change that Mary stopped in her tracks, fearing the worst, the animal part of her brain crying out in shock and alarm. But she found that Elizabeth was looking at her calmly now, her eyes flat as she spoke.

“Mother?” she asked.

“What is it darling?” Mary responded, trying desperately to keep the rising panic out of her voice.

“Put me down,” Elizabeth demanded.

“We need to see the doctor, honey. It’s important.”

“Put me down,” Elizabeth repeated, her voice taking a deeper tone. Commanding.

At that moment, Mary’s mother, Elizabeth’s grandmother, opened the front door and bustled in. “Hello, sweetheart! Happy Birthday!” she called out. She was carrying a bag of presents, beaming up at them where they were standing on the stairs, unaware that anything unusual was going on.

“Mother! Thank God you’re here,” Mary began, but she didn’t get a chance to finish, because at that moment Elizabeth grabbed the metal chopstick from her mother’s stylish bun and stabbed it into the exposed flesh between Mary’s neck and shoulder.

For one long moment, Mary gawked at the end of the chopstick sticking out just above her dress line, blood welling up and starting to run down her chest. And then her legs gave out and she toppled forward, falling down the stairs toward Grandma who stood at the bottom, eyes shocked, mouth open, a scream stuck in her throat.

Chapter 2 : World Zero, 2080

The lab was quiet, all of the typical noise and movement and energy having faded with the end of the day. Nearly everyone had gone home to their families, to their dinners and their feeds, each scientist reverting back to ordinary life once the lab coat came off and the pressures of work faded. Those who stayed behind were the most dedicated, or the ones without family, or the ones who stayed at work to avoid facing something even more painful waiting for them back home.

Jill rubbed her eyes and looked at the analysis one more time. She knew she could find a pattern in it if she looked long enough. With enough time, she’d start to see the connections that had been eluding her. Then she could figure out the right questions to ask of the data-set; the correct paths to follow through the massive maze of information that her team had been collecting.

`The tip of her tongue pushed up against the back of her teeth and there was a deep crease between her brows as she leaned in toward the data-model projected in the space over her desk – as if getting closer to the data would make any difference. A few strands of her brown hair had sprung out of her ponytail and were hanging over her eyes. She pushed them back behind an ear, her mind totally focused on what she was doing.

With a sharp, percussive exhale of pent in breath, she leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, her dark eyes focused out to infinity. What was she missing? She felt so close. Something was prickling in the back of her mind, and she knew from experience that if she could let it germinate, some beautiful new idea would flower forth. And this one felt like a doozy. Like the breakthrough she’d been waiting for.

“Burning the midnight oil again, Jill?” a man’s voice asked from just behind her.

Jill let out an undignified squeak and shot straight up out of her chair, her fight or flight instincts on full display, balanced precariously between sprinting toward the exit and striking out at the source of the voice. But it was just Matt, sneaking up on her. Again. She forced her arms down to her sides, hoping Matt hadn’t noticed both her hands balled up into fists.

He stood with his feet planted confidently shoulder-width apart, hands crossed over an excessively fit chest, his green eyes appraising her with smug satisfaction. She noticed that his hair was starting to grey again. A sign, she thought, that he couldn’t afford to keep up with his treatments. Nobody went grey on purpose these days.

Matt was the closest thing she had to an enemy at the lab. She didn’t have enemies. Not normally. But she had a sneaking suspicion that he was trying to steal her research and claim it as his own. He was on the cleared team, working in the cleared facility. Something for the Department of Defense, or maybe it was Homeland Security. She didn’t care. They were all the same to her. A bunch of ethically suspect sell-outs conducting research that would be turned against humanity, either as weapons or as a better way to spy, subvert, or manipulate other human beings. She hated it. Matt wasn’t a scientist. He was a hack. And he had a bad habit of looking over her shoulder and showing up when she least expected him. He was a creep.

“Hi, Matt. Yeah, I’m working late tonight. I, uh, have something I need to finish up,” she said.

“What are you working on? Maybe I can help,” he responded with obvious enthusiasm.

“No, that’s ok, I was just getting ready to leave. Thanks anyway.”

“Maybe next time,” he said, disappointment coloring his reply. “We really should work together more, you know.”

“No Matt, I don’t think so. Not in this lifetime.”

He looked genuinely chagrined, and for a moment she almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Then she remembered the time she’d found him looking through her data-node. Or the time he’d come instead of IT when she’d needed someone to deal with an upgrade procedure, and she’d caught him inside her research folders. No, she didn’t feel sorry for him at all. Creep.

She turned her back on him, shut down her lab-station and started stuffing her things into her bag. She could hear him breathing behind her. Breathing, and shuffling his feet. She turned slowly, her hands full, and gave him as much of a glare as she thought she could get away with. “Do you need something Matt? I would think you’d want to get back to work, or you know, go home.”

“Well yeah, it’s just…” he trailed off.

She didn’t need this. She really didn’t want to be dealing with Matt right now. Whatever was germinating in her mind required time and space, and what she didn’t need was to be stuck here dealing with this crap.

“Whatever it is, it can wait, right? I need to leave.”

“Yeah, ok, it can wait. But tomorrow, first thing, come to my office, will you? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

When she looked hesitant, he leaned forward, crowding into her personal space. “Promise me, ok? You’ll come to my office? It can wait till tomorrow, but it’s important. It’s something you need to know.”

“Whatever, Matt,” she said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “Yes, I’ll come by in the morning. But right now… I just need to get home.”

Matt stepped aside. He still looked hesitant, but he seemed willing to let the conversation end. Jill took one last look at him and walked away from her desk, down the hall, and toward the elevators. There were a few lights on in other parts of the lab, and she could hear other people working, but it wasn’t enough to make her feel completely comfortable. She could feel the pressure of his eyes on the back of her head all the way out. Even after she’d turned the corner and knew she was out of sight, she still had an uncomfortable feeling in her gut, telling her that something wasn’t right.

Back in the lab, Matt stared at the last spot Jill had occupied before she’d turned the corner and disappeared. The look on his face was intense, his hands were clenched, and he was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. He took a moment to moderate his breathing and settled back down onto his heels. He ground his teeth, jaw muscles standing out in ropy cords. A flash of what might have been anger, but just as easily could have been fear, crossed his face. Then he settled his expression into the bland placidity of a professional poker player. His bluffing face. His lying face. Commander Tros was waiting for him to report back and he would have to play it carefully. Very carefully.

When Matt left the room it was quiet except for a slight clicking emanating from the lab equipment as it sorted, classified, and labeled genetic material. In the next room machines were using advanced gene editing techniques to enumerate small changes to the DNA, one allele at a time. They incubated the combinations, documented the results, and then destroyed each sample of generated tissue in turn.

Every combination tried, each classification made, every single data point gathered, took the project one step closer to its ultimate goal of creating a fully reprogrammable human. A human who could be modified to be anything wanted of it. Stronger, smarter, healthier. A human that would not be held back by doubts or worries. A human that would do what it was told without question or complaint.

First, the scientists needed to figure out how to create a viable human clone. Once that breakthrough was complete, the rest would come in due time. Matt knew that this was true; like knowing that the sun would rise in the east tomorrow morning. His whole team knew it was true. It’s what they were all waiting for.

Chapter 3

Jill allowed her thoughts to wander during the ride home. As the car carried her through the wet streets of Seattle, the steady beat of rain on the roof and windshield soothed her. Once she was on the small roads near her apartment, she let the car turn its headlights off. It didn’t need them to drive safely and she preferred the feeling of being in a warm, dark cocoon as she was carried toward the comfort of her home. She could see a faint reflection in the window, the outside lights glowing through her as if she was a ghost.

She had been working on the problems surrounding human genetic engineering for so long now. The lack of progress was frustrating. It had been nearly one-hundred years since the first mammal had been cloned. Contrary to every expectation, human cloning hadn’t followed. The automated, AI-driven techniques that she used to perform genetics research were far more advanced than her ancestors had ever dreamed of, but they still hadn’t led to a breakthrough.

Every time her team got close, they would hit a new roadblock. Sometimes it felt as if there was a malicious ‘something’ that was actively blocking progress. She wasn’t normally superstitious, but on a cold dark night like this it was easy to let her imagination get away from her. She let her eyes lose their focus, looking past the raindrops streaming by, past the subtly glowing guide-lights flashing by, out toward a dark horizon, struggling to see what it was she’d missed. Something they’d all missed.

She had gotten her start in computer science, and because of that she had a certain way of thinking. Sometimes it helped her, sometimes it hurt. She tended to think algorithmically, as if everything was at its root just information. As if the very passage of time was in essence a vast computation. She viewed the universe as a massive computer working toward an unknowable final solution, the algorithms playing out in breathtaking beauty and complexity.

She had received a Masters Degree in Molecular Biology and a Ph.D. in Genetics, but she didn’t conceptualize DNA the way she’d been taught at university. She had been trained to think of biology in terms of proteins unfolding and chemical equations to be solved, but when she looked at DNA she saw code. It was like looking at the world’s messiest, most poorly written program, created by a madman and lacking any comments whatsoever to explain itself.

Evolution had taken what had started as a simple, elegant biological system and had layered on so much crap that the result was an incredible mess that was nearly impossible to make any sense of. Early genetics research had operated on the assumption that every human trait was controlled by one or two genes. If a dominant gene overruled a recessive gene, the trait would manifest. Early in the 21st century it was discovered that this was not the case. To their horror, researchers found that most traits were expressed across the entire genetic structure. Height, for instance, was expressed across ninety percent of the active DNA sequence. There was no tall gene. No short gene. It didn’t work that way. If you wanted to change someone’s height, you would need to make an exacting set of changes across tens of thousands of alleles.

Then there was RNA. If DNA was the code, then RNA was the runtime interpreter. It was the mechanism by which DNA was interpreted into physical structures and traits. The exact same DNA sequence could result in a bewildering variety of outcomes depending upon the RNA it was processed by. If that wasn’t enough, the RNA could change continuously as a result of environmental and behavioral factors. It had taken one of the most powerful AI constructs in the world two full years to create a working model of a single DNA/RNA combination that accounted for any sort of environmental variability.

She knew the answer had to be out there somewhere, and she wanted to be the one to find it. Somewhere in that mess of DNA and RNA was the key that would unlock unlimited genetic engineering.

The ability to genetically modify humans had grown in leaps and bounds over the past century. Most of the symptoms of aging had been pushed back to the very end of life. Teeth didn’t decay, wrinkles didn’t form, and muscles didn’t weaken; humanity was experiencing a golden age of health and vitality. Genetic engineering was what primed the brain stem for the neural implant that everyone was now given at birth. Without the progress that had been made in the past decades, implant tech wouldn’t have been possible. It was hard to imagine what life had been like before everyone had access to an interface.

A wide variety of genetic engineering modifications were possible on human subjects, but if a threshold was passed the result was inevitably catastrophic failure. Genetic researchers were like a group of hackers nibbling at the edges of a system they didn’t fully understand. Some unknown factor was preventing them from making progress beyond a certain point. Jill dreamed of a future in which unlimited genetic engineering truly unlocked human potential. The possibilities were so much greater than what had been achieved so far.

There were some who opted out of the entire idea, who lived ‘close to the genome’ as they called it. They believed in staying true to what they saw as the original human form, living close to nature, choosing to suffer and die like their ancestors. They tended to be cult-like in their belief in the purity of the human genome. The percentage of people who took it that far was minuscule, but there were many who sympathized.

She had to admit that there had been some negative side-effects to genetic engineering. People lived longer, healthier lives, but overpopulation on this depleted planet had become an issue again. It was hard to get used to. Not since the Great Unrest had anyone had to worry about there being too many people. The die-off during that time had been so large that the human race had experienced a measurable reduction in genetic diversity. It was one of the reasons Jill had decided to enter the field. She not only wanted to improve individual lives, she wanted to ensure the species as a whole survived and thrived.

Unfortunately, the ability to engineer the genome had resulted in less diversity, not more. Giving parents the ability to engineer their children had resulted in a convergence toward what society determined was the ideal child. One of the unexpected results was that there weren’t enough men left in the world. Not only were a huge number of men killed during the Great Unrest, once the world regained stability it had become a cultural assumption that boys were less desirable than girls. After all, men had led the human race to the very precipice of extinction. No one had the desire to repeat that particular experiment in self-destruction.

There had even been talk of legislating a solution – requiring each state to meet a male quota for instance – but so far there hadn’t been any significant progress. The upshot was that for every male there were now three females. The world had long given up on an even ratio between the sexes. The battle now was merely to preserve what was left.

Jill shifted her body so her back was up against the side of the car and she was looking out the opposite side window. Her head was cocked to the side, her index finger tapping her lips. Maybe she hadn’t taken the computer science analogy far enough. There was something about thinking like a hacker that was making the itch in her mind grow stronger. She could feel it intensifying, like a solution on the verge of revealing itself to her.

So far she’d been conducting her research as if the system she was studying was acting in good faith. She had assumed that the obfuscation in the genome was caused by the chaos inherent in natural selection. She had always believed that her failures were because she hadn’t understood the interactions between the genes well enough, and so her strategy had been focused on cataloging the result of every individual genetic change. At the lab they applied a brute force approach to testing each combination in turn, moving toward a critical mass of knowledge, hoping for an ‘Aha!’ moment that would open the floodgates of understanding. Meanwhile, the horizon moved steadily further away.

Every other animal in the world could be engineered in extraordinary ways. Entirely new species of animals had been created in the lab and optimized for human consumption. There was clearly something special about human genetic code that was blocking their progress.

She closed her eyes and triggered her interface, focusing it on her biological parameters. The interface sprung to life in front of her, displaying a glowing representation of her body. She focused on her limbic system and the interface zoomed in, the limbus of her brain highlighted. She paused for a moment, thinking it through. Then she nudged her entorhinal cortex, modifying her associative memory system’s response to cortisol and epinephrine. The color of her brain changed, shading closer toward blue. Her attachment to past ideas fell away. Her willingness to accept novel solutions increased. She found herself in the center of a radius of calm, the world around her muted and subdued.

And then it unfurled like an exquisite flower, the realization blooming in her mind. She knew what she’d been missing. She finally understood what they’d all been missing.

Chapter 4

“Joining me in the studio today are two of the leading voices of our time. On my left is Megan Duncan, a bio-ethicist from the Berkeley school of Reason. On my right is Lisa Albright, a Senior Mentor at the Sunrise Congregation in Livingston, Virginia. Lisa is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Pure Genome Project and a repeat guest on this show. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to you both and thank you for joining me tonight.”

Holly turned toward Megan with a well-practiced, serious expression. “Today we are talking about the ongoing efforts to clone a human. Let’s dig into the reasons why the attempts have been unsuccessful so far. Do you, like many, believe that this is a technology we are not meant to have?”

Megan raised one eyebrow and smiled into the camera, “No Holly, I don’t believe that. When I look at the history of our species, I see an unbroken track record of exploration and discovery, starting with the invention of language and fire, culminating in the highly advanced society that we enjoy today. Without technology, this planet’s limited carrying capacity wouldn’t be capable of sustaining our current quality of life. We should never forget the dark years during the Great Unrest. We owe a huge thanks to our ancestors for getting us back on our feet and to where we are today. We have an obligation to future generations to push the frontiers of science ever forward.”

Holly smiled prettily and turned to Lisa. “What would you say to that Lisa? Should we hurtle ourselves forward into a golden technological future, or are there boundaries we should fear to cross?”

Lisa’s face crinkled into a smile, charisma oozing from every pore. “Megan raises a good point. I would like to start by saying I truly respect and honor all the achievements of the scientific community, but we should understand that technology is nothing more than a tool. It is a means of achieving that which will bring further glory to God. Technology should never become an end in and of itself. It only takes a brief review of humanity’s sorry history of war and conflict to see the twisted ways in which scientific achievement has been used to destroy and condemn our fellow man.”

Megan leaned forward, a glossy braid falling over her shoulder. “Lisa, you are ignoring a critical fact. All of that historic bloodshed was caused by men in the pursuit of power and conquest. There are so few men left and we’ve moved beyond that stage in our history. Our species has matured. We’ve grown up. We can be trusted now to advance our technology, without the need for prior restraints. We no longer need to set the kind of limits on progress that may have made sense in the past. Can you imagine a woman leading the Khmer Rouge to commit genocide? A woman in charge of the Nazi holocaust? A woman starting a nuclear war over religious misunderstandings? I know I can’t imagine it.”

Lisa crossed her arms, looking thoughtful, before she replied, “I’ve heard this argument before and I find it unconvincing. Aren’t we all human? Maybe we can’t imagine a woman committing these types of atrocities because we simply haven’t witnessed it yet?”

“That’s a circular argument, Lisa. It’s a fact that women are less aggressive than men and we know they are more willing to resolve conflicts verbally rather than physically. This is exactly why we’ve enjoyed such unprecedented peace over the past few decades,” Megan responded.

Holly cut in, “We are wandering away from the subject of tonight’s program. Let’s get back to that specific example of human cloning that we started with. Why hasn’t human cloning been successful? Should we even attempt to create a human clone?”

“The lack of success is a fascinating question,” noted Megan, “one that is being investigated in many labs around the world. We’ve all seen how powerful genetic engineering can be. Our entire post-capitalist system is tied to our ability to modify the human genome. What we don’t yet understand is why we’ve run into hard limits in our quest for generalized genetic modifications, including human cloning.”

Lisa broke in, “But what about the ethical question? Cloning leads us to question the very idea of a soul. Is it right for us to make copies of something as precious and singular as a human being? By doing so, do we devalue the result? Do we devalue the rest of humanity? Will cloning result in humans becoming disposable?”

“You are breaking in on my territory,” Megan said with a laugh. “These are all excellent questions, and they are exactly the right questions to be asking in my opinion. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t move forward in our research, but we should do so very carefully while considering these important issues from every possible angle.”

Lisa broke in, looking solemn. “Consider from every angle? Forgive me for saying so, but that is an extremely patronizing attitude toward those of us who have grave concerns about this entire endeavor. What about the roadblocks that scientists have encountered? Many in my congregation believe that God is actively blocking our progress. Maybe we aren’t meant to advance our knowledge past a certain point. The Tower of Babel is an ancient lesson that holds important lessons for us even today. At what price will we realize the cost of human arrogance and the dire consequences of reaching too far.”

Holly swiveled her head back and forth as the guests spoke, her interest piqued beyond what could be expected from gracious professionalism. “I’d be very interested in hearing your response to that question Megan, but first let’s take a break and hear from our sponsors.”

Jill twitched her finger in the air to trigger the controls for the virtual screen and turned off the live-cast. It was all crap. The talking heads could blather on for a hundred years and still no progress would be made. The debates made for good entertainment, but they didn’t bring anybody closer to the answers. In the end, it didn’t matter. She was doing what she was doing for the good of mankind. She imagined a future free of disease. A future in which people could choose who they wanted to be, in a multitude of physical forms. A future free of pain and suffering. That’s why she had devoted her life to this problem. She had always dreamed of setting humanity free.

This line of thinking brought up painful memories for Jill. It always did. She hadn’t lived through the Great Unrest, but she lived with its consequences. She had never gotten to meet her grandfather. He had died in the firestorm that had swept San Diego. All that was left of him were the stories that Grandma Annie had shared with her before she too had died. Jill had sat beside her bed as she had coughed out her last breaths, the cancers having spread through every part of her body. Another legacy of the Great Unrest, a sickness so pervasive that nothing could be done to stop it.

If Jill had her way, it would all be a thing of the past. Not only the cancers and diseases of the body that had afflicted her grandmother, but the tendencies toward war and violence that had afflicted her grandfather and so many other millions like him. That was the oath she had sworn on her grandmother’s deathbed, and she had dedicated the rest of her life to fulfilling it.

She stood up and padded from her bedroom into the communal kitchen. Pepe followed her, purring and brushing up against the doorframe with his fluffy grey back, his tail waving back and forth in excitement.

“Hey Pepe, are you hungry too?” Jill spoke quietly so she wouldn’t wake anyone up.

Pepe looked up at her and meowed, his tiny teeth sharp and translucent.

“Hold on, I’ll get some milk for you. Warm I suppose?”

Once they were in the kitchen, Jill bent down and triggered her interface to place a bowl of warm milk on the floor in front of Pepe. He meowed once more and then plunged his head into the bowl, lapping up the creamy milk with gusto.

Jill sighed. She wasn’t actually in the mood for this right now. Her ideas from earlier in the night still hung in her mind. The more she toyed with them, the more they unraveled around the edges. She was trying to hold it all together, but she just wasn’t sure. She had felt so excited, but was this line of research going to get her any closer to a solution? She’d start her investigation first thing in the morning, but right now, she just needed to relax. She needed to let her mind settle. She triggered her interface again and both Pepe and the bowl of milk disappeared. She walked to the food synthesizer and requested a cup of chamomile tea.

She was sitting at the table nursing her cup when Jacob walked in. “Hey Jill, need some company?”

When she didn’t respond, he sat down next to her and put a foot up on the chair next to him. “Tough day at work?”

“I don’t feel like talking about it,” she said, her hand wrapped around the comforting warmth of the mug. She stared through the steam curling off the top of the hot liquid, her eyes losing their focus.

“Sorry Jill, I didn’t mean to intrude.” He shut himself down, the space where he was sitting flickering back into emptiness.

What she wouldn’t give for a real person to talk to right now.

Chapter 5

Jill lifted her head, peeling her face off the slick surface of the table. She must have fallen asleep, her cup of tea now cold beside her. “Huh, that was weird,” she said to the empty room. She checked her internal self-diagnostics and saw that she’d gotten a full four hours of sleep. Falling asleep at the kitchen table? She hadn’t done that for years. The stress at work must be getting to her.

The light was shimmering behind the auto-blinds, so she gave them the command for transparency and took a moment to look outside. It was windy this morning, the tree limbs shaking, billows of yellow leaves blowing past in cascades of color. Occasionally, a small stick would bounce silently off the window, the sound of it failing to penetrate through the thick pane.

She asked the synthesizer to get started on her breakfast while she kept her eyes on the scene outside. No animals of course, but she could see to the horizon where land met sea, small clouds scudding prettily across the sky. She adjusted the filter and buildings filled the view. They were huddled close together, dark and forbidding, the closest just ten feet across the lane from her. As always, they were grim and grey, massive, dirty, and depressing to look at. They were not maintained for aesthetics. All that mattered was that they kept the elements out and the humans in.

She made it a habit of looking at the real world once in a while. It was easier to keep the filters on, and it was certainly more pleasant, but there was no substitute for reality. She raised her hands up over her head, stretching once to the left, once to the right, feeling the pull all the way into her legs. A ball of conglomerated rubbish bounced down the lane and stuck itself to a wall. Jill ignored it. A cleaning drone would get to it eventually, and in the meantime no one else would even notice it was there. Most people kept their filters up all the time.

The synthesizer informed her that her meal was ready. She took a few minutes to finish a set of deep knee bends and then she re-activated the filters. A scene of pastoral beauty replaced the buildings. What she was looking at was real in a sense. It was what the area had looked like 150 years ago, before it had been developed and incorporated into the city. In the scene outside, the wind continued to blow and yellow leaves continued to fly past. She turned on the animal filter and a couple of deer appeared, grazing in the distance. A squirrel chattered in a tree branch, holding on for dear life as the branch swayed violently in the wind. Below the squirrel a dog wandered past, his nose down, following a scent that only he could smell.

Jill smiled and turned back to the table. Her plate was piled high and a cup of coffee awaited her, doctored with precisely the right amount of cream and sugar.

Jill was lost in thought, the drive downtown to the lab passing easily. She had her head pressed back into the seat cushions, an astronomical chart projected in front of her. She was watching the progression of the stars as seen from Earth, accelerated one hundred thousand times faster than normal. It was a habit she’d formed as a child, memorizing the changes to the constellations over time. It had started when she’d watched a bad horror feed involving a time machine, and she’d decided that if she were ever involuntarily transported in time she would want to know, at the very least, what century she was in. So she’d started studying the stars from millennia in the past and far into the future, memorizing their patterns. She was old enough now to see it as a funny side-effect of a child’s over-active imagination, but she kept at it. It was comforting, and it brought her back to her roots.

The car jolted to a stop and she was shaken out of her reverie. In front of the car someone had projected a wide band of yellow tape, and beyond that there were armed military personnel swarming her lab building.

“This is a restricted area, you may not travel beyond this point,” an automated voice informed her.

She stepped out of the car and walked down the block, parallel to the tape, trying to get a better look. At the end of the block, she saw a group of scientists standing in a clump looking worried. As she approached, Joanne, from the classification department noticed her and waved her over.

“What’s going on? Why did they close the lab?” Jill asked.

Joanne looked upset, one of her hands tapping her leg, the other fidgeting with a virtual cigarette. “They locked it down earlier this morning. No one’s talking, but I’ve heard some ugly rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?”

“They’re saying that Matt’s dead.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” Joanne leaned in close, “suicide.”

“What?” Jill repeated, dumbfounded. “How could that be? I just saw him last night. He looked fine.”

“You know what they say about looking for the signs, right? It’s all bullshit. I had a friend who committed suicide, and I had no clue. He told me he was going to meet me for lunch and then his wife found him dead. He left a note and everything. Ranting and raving about the state of the world and how hopeless he felt. Fucking men, right?”

“Wait, how do they know it was suicide? With Matt I mean.”

“I shouldn’t be telling you this. I mean the body isn’t even cold yet, if you know what I mean. But what the hell.” Joanne took a drag on her fake cigarette, drawing out the drama. “They found him in his office. Neural overload. They also found stim packs and simulators. The whole nine yards. Nasty, right?”

Jill forced down a wave of nausea and looked back toward the lab building while she collected her emotions. “What’s going on over there? Why did they lock it down?”

“Oh, that? They’ve nationalized the lab.”

“They what?” Jill gasped. That was impossible. That meant the entire building would be converted into a cleared facility. She would never be able to set foot in there again. Her professional-node would be locked down. All her research. Her notes. Her… everything. Shit!

Before she knew what she was doing, she found herself running toward the lab, hoping she could somehow make it through the door.

“This is a terrible idea,” the rational part of her brain told her, “this will end badly.”

She made it to the edge of the tape before they shut her down. Her nervous system spiked, sending a massive jolt through her body, and then she collapsed, arms and legs jelly, her head thumping against the street.

Her last thought, before she completely lost consciousness, was that she didn’t believe a single word that Joanne had told her. Matt could not have committed suicide. And the lockdown could not be a coincidence. She was going to find out what the hell was going on.