Qarotti, Eron 14, 5531 – Second Shift

The downhill course of Tendakeo’s solar continued as soon as he stepped through the lab’s door.

Serong Kamelan whirled on him, bright grey eyes sparkling with fury. He leaped up from his station, fists clenched at his side, standing as tall as he could. A poor threat display if it was meant as one. What Kamelan had in height, Tendakeo more than made up for in strength. Kamelan should be thankful that Tendakeo had sworn himself to non-violence. Otherwise the older researcher would be dire straits if he were to try and make good on the promise seething behind his eyes.

“Do you have any idea what I’ve been dealing with since I walked in?” Kamelan spat.

“I imagine—”

“Spare me your imaginings! Thirty people in need of tox-screening and genetics testing. And you, nowhere to be seen! Director Soraheim demands we get them all in today, and has ordered me to remain until we do. And if that moonie fuck is on my ass, I’m on yours.”

Tendakeo felt his vow tested in the moment, the slur hanging in the air between them. Kamelan’s elongated, squarish pupils, and the tufts of gray fur at the end of his pointed ears marked him as one of the lower Martian Clades. In a lot of systems he’d be considered gene-trash as much as any of the Moon-folk, for a ‘crime’ so far back in his family’s past no one even remembered it. The Circle had made that irrelevant in Elysannah. Tendakeo’s knuckles audibly popped as he made a tight fist, then released it.

Kamelan’s gaze dropped to Tendakeo’s side, before bouncing back to his face. His eyebrows rose noticeably. He cleared his throat and unclenched his fists.

“Well, now that you’re aware of the situation, ” Kamelan said, turning away stiffly, “get to work, enough time has been wasted.”

With a grunt, Tendakeo walked the length of the lab and sat down at his workstation opposite Kamelan’s. The room was long, relatively narrow, and set up like a mirror image of itself. Kamelan and Tendakeo’s workstations sat on top of sturdy ultra-plastic desks as white as the walls and tiles. They were both attached to a suite of diagnostic and analysis equipment that fed their data into the workstations so that reports could be more easily assembled and the datasets cross-referenced in real-time.

Because of the room’s arrangement, Kamelan and Tendakeo sat with their backs to each other. When he heard Kamelan sit down at his desk, reached into his work pants pockets and pulled out the sample boxes. He put them in one of the drawers on the underside of the desk, using the sound of his chair rolling across the tiles as cover.

After that, he started the process as normal for the first set of the new patients. Blood analysis, tissue investigation, genetics screening to check for drug compatibility. He added in a focus on agent reconstruction and identification, frowning. What had the Hyenas used this time? He’d heard of attacks using improvised chemical compositions, usually discovered when they threw anomalies in the analysis results—

He froze mid-thought, a blood-collection vial dangling between his left thumb and forefinger. Anomalies! That was it!

Depending on how the victims respond to the presence of a chem, the system might be unable to establish a scan on them because their cells have been so degraded or damaged that they don’t read properly on expected scales. The victims of this attack would certainly contain many anomalous properties that would prevent easy categorization. What if he slipped some of Veshrin’s samples among the Hyena attack victims?

He looked over at Kamelan out of the corner of his eye. The older man watched him with a slight frown. “Did you forget how to do your job, Moyonao?”

“No, I’m just thinking about how hard it is to get accurate results with chem attacks. Since they create their own mixtures, its hard to know what damage to look for. We have to set the system’s sensitivity so high that it usually ends up triggering errors.” He sighed. “Reanalysis eats a lot of time.”

Kamelan laughed callously. “Well that’s what you’re here for. I’ll keep moving forward with the rest while you straighten the data out.”

Tendakeo kept the smile from his face with some effort. Of course Kamelan would unburden himself of a tedious task at the earliest opportunity. Affecting outrage, he responded, “Me? There’s over two dozen cases here!”

Kamelan sneered. “Consequences to your actions, I’m afraid. You’ve got to earn your Honesty back somehow, after all. If I’m trapped here with you, then you’re going to make it up to me.”

Tendakeo marveled at ever having felt guilt for leaving Kamelan to face the job on his own, duty be damned. The work in front of him swelled, but he kept himself focused on the true goal. “Of course, dotakīm.“

---

Over the next twelve hours, Tendakeo’s assumptions about errors among the cases were thoroughly confirmed. Some of the errors were genuine; samples from two separate individuals in the same kit that turned out to be the same chimeric man and his absorbed twin, a woman with undiagnosed bone-cancer that caused her to read slightly radioactive, four people who must have been near the initial blast and had received the highest dosage of all the cases. Three of them, however were his own inventions.

His plan had been fairly simple, all things considered. Cause a minor error through deliberate mis-alignment whose effects he could predict, interpret the data as it would have been without the error, run Veshrin’s samples under the guise of a correction, back up the results onto his comm, and then erase the run from the system memories. Afterwards, he’d input the correct data. Even if someone checked whether the number of errors matched the number of corrected runs, there shouldn’t be a problem. Because some of the errors had been so minor, it would be believable that he could have simply corrected them himself without wasting time and energy running them again. The only one who would know differently would be Kamelan.

He had been successful in running and hiding the tests, but he hadn’t dared to actually view the errors or check the results with Kamelan less than three mitras away. He’d done what he needed to do. Now, for a moment to go over the readings. In the meantime he’d concerned himself with the Hyena’s attack and writing a report on the findings.

He’d just finished the last pass over the most pertinent cases’ data, and sat back to mentally walk through the holo-files floating above his workstation. To his right, a window listed the chemical components of the toxin used in the attack. It had been a nerve agent delivered via an explosive canister launched into the congregation. While it was effective, it seemed to be in spite of the efforts of its makers, not because of them. He touched the charms in his beard. He was grateful that the Hyenas were apparently as incompetent as they were destructive, or else a lot more people would have ended up in the morgue rather than on an operating table.

“Where in Tar’jiin would they get their hands on the chems to make this?”

Kamelan started, the sound of his chair scraping the white ceramic floor tiles cutting through the silence in the room. Tendakeo looked around, blinking. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud.

“Where did who get what?”

“The Hyenas. The weapon they used, it was a truly nasty piece of work. I was wondering where they got it.”

“What does it matter? In any case, does that mean you’re actually finished? Or are you just wasting more of my time?”

Tendakeo sighed. Now that he wasn’t focusing on the case, fatigue started to set in. He nodded. “A few minutes ago.”

“At last. Which means you no longer need equipment access,” Kamelan said, standing as fast as his back would allow. He stretched, rippling pops echoing in the room as his spine adjusted. “And that means I can go home to my wife and child. I’ll probably still be able to catch the hopper, no thanks to you.”

“I’ll shut down the equipment before I leave, if you’re in that big of a hurry,” Tendakeo said off-handedly.

Kamelan started to nod, before he caught himself and frowned. “Absolutely not. Chantford and Soraheim would take turns shredding me till even the polished fucking Father couldn’t put me back together. No thank you.”

Kamelan crossed to the power panel near the lab’s entrance. He pulled out a polished metal ring big enough to slip over his wrist, waved it in front of the power panel’s lid. The blinking red light above the lid turned green with a pleasing chirp. He lifted the metal cover and exposed the room’s power switches. With a single sharp click the diagnostic equipment on both sides of the room went dead, flickering off soundlessly, ultra-plastic and poly-glass surfaces seeming dull beneath the sterile white light leeching the color from everything. He waved the ring again, and the green light buzzed harshly and turned red. Locked.

“Enjoy the rest of your shift. I’m sure Central appreciates your generous gift,” Kamelan said.

Tendakeo waited five minutes after Kamelan disappeared through the lab’s doors before he placed his comm on top of the terminal on the desk. The proximity connection function engaged, and the holo-field projector in the desk woke up, with an extra icon floating among the others, blinking yellow steadily.

It felt like he’d spent solars with the information burning a hole in his comm’s storage. Now it was right in front of him, eagerly waiting for him. He could hardly bring himself to touch it, but he managed to force himself to reach out and open it with a tap. It may have been his imagination, but when his fingertip made contact with the holo-construct there was an electric sensation before the window opened, crowding the other icons and windows from the field.

The data had been automatically compiled to fit in the comm’s storage, but was still in a format that the terminal’s systems could recognize. With a few clicks, the ancient terran scroll icon disappeared, and the holo-field was replaced with a glowing green field of light surrounding a yellow sphere. It represented the analytic suite’s user interface. Clicking on the sphere brought up options for visualizations within the dataset, such as simulation models, structural analysis, and gene-sequencing.

Most of the visualizations had blinking red letters, indicating they contained anomalous data for review. The first was a caution alert in genomics, noting the marked increase of modified human DNA, and the presence of unknown xeno-biological sequences in the DNA it could read. There was a secondary warning that the genetic information was unstable, with various sequences shifting throughout analysis. It did confirm, however, that all of the samples had absolutely come from the same individual.

The vine with its leaves and blossoms, the fungal fur, the root systems, and Veshrin himself, were all the same organism. They weren’t things growing from or in him. They were him. And how much of him was left? The data said that only seventy-three percent of human DNA remained, but that the overall base pairs had doubled.

Tendakeo sat back in his chair. There was no hiding from the results. Veshrin was no longer human. Even when Tendakeo had first taken the samples, he had already been fundamentally altered. Now, hours later? How far had things progressed? There was no way for him to simply cure this. There never had been. He had already come to that conclusion, but he discovered that he had been holding out hope in a corner of his heart secret even from himself, because in that moment it faded to nothingness.

Structural analysis noted the presence of foreign crystalline bodies in Veshrin’s cells, primarily growing on their nuclei. It wasn’t clear what the crystals were composed of. Other, apparently mobile foreign cells present in the tissue samples contained the same formations, but no other nucleus or other genetic information. There were many new organic structures present throughout Veshrin’s samples, though it wasn’t immediately clear what any of them did. There were cells of obvious xeno-biological origins clustered through out the tissues from both Veshrin’s body and the vines. Instead of a Terran nucleus, they contained an enormous approximation with triple helical DNA strands, contained within a crystalline lattice.

Throughout the vine samples, human nerves were present, transmitting signals to the rest of the biomass doing a convincing impression of a leaf. Wrapped around each nerve cell was a third type of cell, one that hosted a crystal so large it immediately reframed the others as fragments in Tendakeo’s mind. At the center of each of these mature crystals there was a constant amount of a substance that defied all efforts of the system to identify or even scan properly. All the computer had been able to determine was that it was in a liquid state.

Tendakeo wiped his brow with the back of his hand. The room had grown stiflingly hot without him realizing it. His mind spun with questions. The crystals, the new biology, Veshrin’s transforming genetics, there seemed to be too much to think about at once, too much to try and wrestle into a single system of understanding, but it was right there in front of him.

How did it work?

The simulations icon drew his eye. He could see the processes the system captured. It would show him what was happening at this very moment inside Veshrin’s body. Many of the organisms humanity had encountered since leaving Sol were odd in light of the Terran biosphere, such as it was. This organism was something far beyond any of them. Not content with fusing kingdoms of life, it had even incorporated the seemingly inorganic.

His mind warred with itself. He was terrified for Veshrin, for what his friend may have been turned into by this organism. He was nearly overwhelmed by the exhilaration of the organism’s reality, its nature, its potential, what could be learned from it. He was maddeningly curious about the origins of the lifeform, and why the Circle had obviously been so keen on keeping it from being studied.

The Circle was a force of Truth, of order. They sought to safeguard humanity from darkness that it could neither see nor defend against. That was what he had always been told. Despite his personal feelings on their methods, he had always believed it. He was proud of his Wāweziani heritage. He lived in the light of the Moons. Yet he had never doubted the divinity of the Circle, even if he did not follow their ways. The Father was real. That felt undeniable, the power of the Circle proved that.

Still, faced with the organism, questions filled his mind. If the Circle served the Father and yet didn’t want this organism discovered, what did that mean? Was it part of the Beast’s darkness they warned of? Was that why it killed everyone who encountered it? Couldn’t they have destroyed it sometime in the last six hundred cycles? Was it beyond the Father’s strength to eliminate entirely?

He reached for the simulations icon, a cube assembled from an array of smaller spheres. Hesitated. Got up, walked over to the door and pressed the deactivation button for the overhead lights. The stark white room disappeared, the sapphire light of the holo-field alone guiding him back to his workstation. He wasn’t sure what had driven the impulse, but now that they were off, he felt instant relief at the light’s absence. He hadn’t realized how tired he was. His head throbbed and his muscles ached. The room was still warm but there was nothing to be done about that, the environmental systems in the lab prioritized sterility and safety over comfort.

He activated the simulations interface, and the holo-field went blank, a flat, bluish-white cloud hanging in the air above the desk’s surface. The analysis suite icons floated just above the cloud, and the simulations icon blinked, indicating it was waiting for commands. He cleared his throat.

“Employee Code 1471-Ela. Sequence start. Extrapolate details for future projection.” The cloud disappeared, replaced with a single uninfected human cell, scaled up to enormous proportions, larger than his head. A dot no bigger than the end joint of his thumb approached it from off-screen, flagella waving around it in an almost lazy manner. Leaning forward, Tendakeo’s eyes widened in anticipation, and something fluttered deep inside him. “Show me where this is headed.”