“Eddie, why in God’s name did you do this?“, Tammy asked, gently touching his scarred wrist. “You could have been crippled, or worse, and for what? To make some sort of point?” Eddie regarded her thoughtfully for a moment before turning back to the table and sitting. Tammy took a chair and sat next to him, waiting while he gathered his thoughts.
“Tam look”, he sighed, “I’m sorry I’ve been hiding, but I just couldn’t get what she said in the briefing out of my head. I just kept going over it, and over it, and I knew there was something wrong. So I went home and spent all night walking around, thinking about what I’ve been doing with my life the last few years. It took me a while, but in the end I realized it was all about my obsession with problems and puzzles.”
He paused for a moment and regarded her carefully before proceeding.
“You see, I got into all of this after my mom died, because I wanted to help people like her, to see if I couldn’t solve some of the problems that were holding us back. It felt like we had been perched on this edge where technology was supposed to solve so many of the big problems. Nanites were supposed to wipe out cancer, perform impossible surgeries, and keep our bodies clean. Isolated organ cloning was supposed to eliminate transplant rejection, let the blind see, and virtually eliminate aging, and Bionics were going to restore amputees to a normal life.
“But then none of it happened! The Thais got into cloning and made nothing but eight-foot war monsters that celebrated their fifth birthday by falling apart into goo. Then the Italians started fucking around with nanites before they really understood them, and damn near wiped all life off of the planet. After that, the Russians wired up the Spetsnaz with so many bionic parts that they forgot they were people, and decided they didn’t have to take orders from anyone. They leveled a goddamn city and turned people into lobotomized monsters! ”
“And that wasn’t the end of it. Oh no! The list goes on and on and on. We were so stupid! We walked right up to the edge of the most promising time in human history, and instead of pulling together and creating this amazing future for ourselves - we squandered it. We all ran off in separate directions, trying to beat each other to the punch, and created a string of horrifying disasters. It scared people so badly that they outlawed anyone even doing research on these things! For fuck’s sake that’s why we’re all hiding in this bomb shelter when we should be doing this shit at Johns Hopkins, or the Cleveland Clinic, or DARPA!”
Tammy held her tongue as Eddie went on, she could hear the barely checked edge of emotion in his voice, and knew that this change in him must have been a long time coming. She wasn’t even sure this was about Jessica anymore, but it was obvious that the girl had hit a serious nerve in Eddie. This was something he had to process, or he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.
“Tam, do you have any idea what will happen if anyone realizes what we’re really doing here? We’re Campobasso and Phu-Ket and Shichi-san-ichi butai and Volgograd and every other atrocity in history smashed together into one great big ball of super-shit! We’re not just violating all of the research bans; we’re actually using this stuff on real human beings every day. People have been charged with war crimes just for talking about this stuff and I injected it into a little girl!”
He stood and began pacing.
“You know if anyone gets a hold of this they’ll make me out to be like that Nazi Mengele! I’ll look like a blood dripping monster and probably face the firing squad by the time they get done with me. Which is good, because guys that look like me don’t do well in prison. You might get sent to a nice lady jail, and the Director would go to some country club, but nooo... not me - I’ll be getting a bunkmate the size of a rhino with a taste for skinny blonde boys. Barnes is an idiot if he thought I was really going to blab my mouth.”
He sat again, fixing Tammy with his eyes.
“Anyway - the reason I got caught up in all of this is that I lost sight of the problems, and instead I focused on the puzzles inside them. I was so busy figuring out how the Sinai Biotech worked that I lost sight of the problems I could have solved with it. They put me in this wonderland of cool little toys, and asked me to figure them out. Then once I did, I found out that half of it went off to the RAMBUS at Yucca, the one where they do weaponry! Did you know they put Vucovich in charge out there? What are they thinking? Everyone knows that guy’s completely insane! He’ll strap that shit on some Ranger’s armor and get a whole platoon killed. I mean... we were supposed to be figuring out how to stop these things, not become them.”
Tammy had no idea who Vucovich was, but chose not to interrupt. She wasn’t sure it was important and Eddie wasn’t slowing down anyway.
“So then along comes Jessica, all smashed and broken like a little doll, and she’s delivered to us right out of the arms of some sort of quantum physics superman. So what did I do? Oh tallyho! I went right to work sniffing her up one side and down the other. I wanted to see if he left some sort of metaphysical cooties on her. I’m just glad I didn’t find anything. God only knows what Vucovich would do with something like that!”
At this point Eddie stopped for a moment, then he turned his chair so that he could prop his arm on the table. “So I came back to work the next day and I went right down to the red zone and I started going over everything. It was all there! Neurolytic interfacing, safe nanites governed by micronites, discrete tissue cloning and synthetic hybridization, unrejectable bionics… everything! Whoever did this solved every colossal fuckup humanity ever pulled with these technologies in the last twenty years. They may be completely psychotic, but they’re also brilliant on a level I’ve never seen.”
“So I took it all and set up a clean block lab, cancelled everything else and mandated overtime until we got it done. It took a couple weeks, but Liao finally figured out how to hook these things together and let the overall master control system come back online. Then we kept it in a faraday cage so it couldn’t call home and hunted down its communications module. Turns out we couldn’t find the damn thing the first time because it was ORGANIC, or at least synthetic-organic. I’ve been pulling that thing apart for the last six weeks and I still have no fucking clue how it works. But when I hooked power back up to it I was able to pick up the signal it sends with the Apex 2 satellite and that was on the other side of earth at the time! That’s crazy! ”
“So we took it out and hooked up a terminal to the leads and bang! We could see it all! Every time the main system tried to re-establish communications we just gathered up more and more of what it sent out and then brought in some heavy metal to crack the code. It was a total waste of computing power though. I could have cracked the damn thing with my work slate in about ten minutes.”
Stopping, Eddie fixed her with a serious look, then reached over and swiped the table to activate it. Flipping quickly through a series of controls he pulled one up labelled SECURITY in red, typed in a passcode and let it scan his palm. Tammy didn’t see or hear anything happen when he did it, but the control panel turned blue and Eddie visibly relaxed. Then he reached out and took her hand. “OK, I turned off the monitoring in here. Tam, if I tell you this, you have to swear to take it to your grave, OK?”
Tammy regarded Eddie seriously. “Are you sure this is a good idea? I’m just a nurse, I’m not supposed to have access to compartmentalized information and I don’t want to know anything that’s going to get me sent to Guantanamo.”
“You need to know this Tam, and no one’s getting sent off to the big G because they know doing that would blow the lid off this whole operation. You just have to keep it to yourself because it would spread like wildfire if it got out. OK?”
Tammy considered this for a moment. He was probably right about Guantanamo. Plus, now she was curious what could have Eddie so excited, but had to be kept so secret?
“OK Eddie, I’m gonna trust you on this. But if I go to lady prison I’m gonna kill you when I get out.”
Eddie laughed. “Alright, it’s a deal. Hell, after my rhino-roommate got done with me I’d probably beg you to do it.”
Then he sat back and his face turned serious again. “Well, we hadn’t even hooked up the supercomputer for thirty seconds when it dinged like it just microwaved a burrito. Liao pulled up the output stream, and then she sorta freaked out.”
“Tam…. It was in Chinese. The fucking Chinese have been behind all of this shit from the beginning. Think about it. It all makes sense! Who else could pull this off but the one country that still has complete totalitarian control, trillions upon trillions of dollars, and billions of people they can treat like toilet paper?”
Tammy sat, stunned. She had never given much thought to who had been responsible for the monsters and the atrocities they committed. She had been more concerned with figuring out how to stop them, or deal with the carnage they left behind. But this made sense. It made no sense why they did it, but the fact that it was China, well... it fit.
“Jesus Eddie”, Tammy whispered.
“Yeah. That’s fucking messed up, huh?”, he replied.
“OK, so… what did you figure out from it?”, she asked, and now she found herself far more focused.
“It was some sort of reduced set of characters, and used a nomenclature that was new, but basically it was Mandarin. So Michaels wired in a terminal, and after some trial and error Liao started talking to it. About 12 hours after that she found the command and control set. So we put the heavy metal back on it to break in, and that took longer, closer to sixty hours, but knowing it was Mandarin really helped. The weird thing was that the supercomputer couldn’t outrun that biotech controller. I don’t know what’s in that little Chinese chip but I can tell you that it’s seriously fast.”
“Once we had it open we started looking around and the damn code goes on forever. Anyone could see that it was total genius! I don’t know how they did it, but it’s like they took the entire glandular control system from a human being and blended it with something like an amphibian and then turned it into this self-adapting computer code.”
“Wow”, Tammy murmured, “OK, so now what? How do you plan to do this?“, she asked.
“Well, we can’t take her and her family down into the red zone, so we’re planning to use lab seven.”
Tammy blanched. “The big autopsy theater?” She hated that room. It was where they had done the first break-opens of the Corsica assailants and discovered the horrors within. Once they realized the sterile environment and large observation booths weren’t necessary they moved everything to the big open space on the research floor. The same place the briefing had been held.
“Yeah, it’s secure and a controlled environment. It’s also right under trauma, so you guys are a flight of steps away in case anything happens. Plus, her family can come down and see how she is from the observation booths.”
“Why can’t they just go in?”
“Oh no. No one can go in. Once this process gets started you have to keep a clean room policy. No one gets in there unless it’s an emergency and even then it’s in a HAZMAT suit. You can’t risk contaminating the field with foreign tissue samples. The micronites, governors, and even the controller will automatically seek out material to use if it feels it’s necessary. You get too close to that micronite gel and well, it just might blob on and take a bite out of you.”
Tammy laughed. “Oh Eddie, c’mon. I’m not Vallard. You can’t make me believe you’ve cooked up ‘The Blob’. She laughed again, rolled her eyes, and made finger quotes for ‘The Blob’ in the air as she spoke.
Eddie fixed her with the gravely serious look she had seen on him at the briefing. She knew now what it meant. He had seen something that genuinely frightened him. “No Tam, I’m serious. That system is Sinai biotech through and through. You said that the injured would rip parts off of their incapacitated teammates to repair themselves, right?”
Tammy nodded.
“That seems to be a central ethos for whoever made these things. That’s how all of this Sinai stuff thinks. If you’re not the repair target, you’re spare parts, or food. We tried taking it out and just slipping in a request and supply mechanism, but this isn’t one of those things that are just deep in the code. It pretty much IS the code. This thing’s still got a wicked soul, no matter how miraculous its works are.”
“So how do you turn it off?”
“You don’t, and you wouldn’t want to. It turns itself off when it’s done and not a second before.”
Tammy sat for a while, stunned. If she wasn’t looking at the living proof in Eddie right now she’d never have believed him. It was just too much, it went too far, and it expected too many leaps of faith. But she’d been on the receiving end of Eddie’s genius herself, and so she had to acknowledge his ability to do almost unimaginable things. She started to realize how much he must believe in helping people, helping the world get to that better future if he was willing to give up what could easily have been a billion-dollar career to be here. Then on top of that, he literally had his own hand and leg cut off to make sure that what he figured out actually got used for the right reasons.
Taking his hand again she looked him deep in the eyes and said, “Eddie Mathers, you’re a good boy. You have a good soul to have done all of this.”
Eddie sighed again “Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that if Jessica walks I might be able to see some sense in what happened to you, to Jessica, to all of this.”
Meanwhile, a little over twenty-two thousand miles above the Arabian Peninsula, the secondary memory module of the high speed microwave transmitter of the Apex 2 communications satellite activated. Deep within its petabyte segmented memory buffer an assailant encoded transmission string activated itself. Precisely one minute and forty-seven seconds later a monitoring system deep within a classified facility in Colorado began furiously trying to re-establish contact with Apex-2. Multiple unsuccessful attempts later it abandoned normal channels and alerted security administrators.
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