Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,53
a small, distinctly female shudder. It looked so strange on the bio-male coil that it made me blink a few times in momentary confusion. “Or any information on what might have inured the body to the effects of vacuum and the near-zero temperatures of the shuttle. Maybe it was a mutation, or a glitch, or yet another side effect. Some unexpected reaction between the Bliss nanites and the nanites all coils have in their systems. Or maybe it was another unintended side effect of Bliss itself. A self-preservation instinct that allowed the nanites to mitigate the effects, at least to some degree. Genetechnic is so far out on the bleeding edge with this stuff, there’s no predicting what might happen.”
Her face twisted into a look like she was going to be physically ill. “The data was ambiguous. As if Genetechnic didn’t want a record, even on their protected servers. My best guess is that the shuttle… it was the… rejects, I suppose. Coils that had unexpected reactions to the nanites, or maybe ones that just didn’t accept the AI programming. For whatever reason…” She paused. “I’m not sure if the word should be ‘died’ or ‘ceased to function’ or maybe even just ‘shut down.’ I can’t really figure out if something happened to those coils or something was done to them. But whatever the reason, Genetechnic decided to send them on a one-way ticket to Sol.”
“Then why leave their coils in place? And what was Copeland doing on that shuttle?”
“As to the first,” Chan said, “Genetechnic was worried about allowing any potential infection vectors. From what I can tell, they didn’t know what would happen if they started cutting into the coils. The nanites have to be introduced to the system, but they are part of an intelligence, Carter. Bliss may well be able to climb right out of one person and infect another. They thought it better to load their failures into a shuttle and launch it into the sun with minimal human interaction.” She paused and scrubbed at her face for a moment, trying to physically remove the strain of the work she’d been doing.
“As for Copeland, he was gathering evidence. There are some notes on the Genetechnic security in here. There’s no way he would have been able to get any real proof out of the corporate offices. Data like this,” she waved a hand at the cube reader, “can be fabricated. Without physical evidence, who would take him seriously? I guess he thought he’d be able to get something more from the shuttle, tissue samples or maybe even some of the nanites. Maybe the cores. But something went wrong.”
I thought of the decompressed corpse locked in the airlock. Wrong was a bit of an understatement. “And he woke up here, re-coiled and… and what? Ready to try again? If he had all this information on him, he must have either backed up shortly beforehand or… I don’t know. Maybe left himself a message like my branch did for me.”
Chan was nodding. “He must have hidden what he was doing from Genetechnic. At least for a time.”
“And then we started moving around, running searches, trying to track him down,” I added.
“Genetechnic got wind of it. Realized he was a loose end. Which is why they came to kill him. To put him in the archives for a bit, until they had everything all nice and covered up and didn’t have us poking around, looking for answers.”
“It also explains why they want us dead. They’ve gone to a lot of work to hide what they’ve discovered here.” I sighed. “I don’t suppose the message from my branch is any more likely to be taken seriously by any authorities than the data on that cube?” Chan shook her head in mute negation. “No, I didn’t think so.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, each of us looking into eyes that had grown familiar, and yet, still seemed wrong. Chan broke that moment first, dropping her gaze, her eyes full of a sadness that twisted a knife somewhere deep inside me. “I don’t suppose we could just tell Genetechnic we’ll drop the whole thing?” she asked. Her voice was light, mocking, but I could sense the true hope behind the words. Just let it all go. Drop it and walk away, with some assurances that we could live our lives in peace so long as we never mentioned Genetechnic again.
It was tempting. No, it was more than tempting—it