All Fall Down (39 page)

In the cell the Jonah pulled on a coat made of letters and written reports. A mask of thoughts fit over its head. Clothes of diary pages and perfumes of medical exams completed the make-over. It looked in a mirror in its environment cell and saw Doctor Huriko Maki. The mirror Jonah spoke, “I am she.”

           
The mirror frame bulged, distended as Huriko stepped through, now the sole occupant of the cell. Warm light curved the room, her quarters replicated. Pre-Fall decorations gave it life. She looked at an Old Earth fossil, a rock split, a spiral defying hundreds of millions of years of death. An owl carved in yew wood stared with speckled eyes. There were three bonsai algal trees from Cerberus Prime. A shark's tooth necklace hung from one. She ran her fingers down the thread, clasped the tooth between the thumb and forefinger, ran her thumb over its serrated edge. The tooth curved.

           
Way up above, Djembe called up a semantic analysis, so that he could have an idea of what the avatar Huriko might be thinking, feeling.

           
In Huriko's quarters, electronic music softened the air. The room was scanning her eyes, retinal feedback and optic nerve impulses, tasting the shape of the Compound X deposits and adapting the music to suit. The scene was amniotic. Happily adrift, contained, at peace in the
hezelig
space. She sat on a couch and looked around, “My quarters. My space.” She smoothed a hand over the couch, soft. Huriko breathed, defocused her eyes. Existed. Neither aware nor unaware, neither thinking nor not thinking. She tranced, in
 
neutral, the lighting ambient, the music burbling along with her brain waves, the furnishings familiar and comfortable.

           
Time passed.

           
Her eyes remained open, not blinking, not staring. Just open.

           
Nothing changed in the room. Nothing changed in her heartbeat. No muscles twitched, no dust caught in her eyes, no itches tickled her skin. No aches twinged her back. No sensation brought her to life.

           
Huriko was.

           
And after some time, her head twitched. She blinked quickly, in bursts. Her eyes sought a fixed point, resolving too near, too far. Finding their distance. A breath passed over the roof of her mouth. A shoulder jumped: a small
 
jump, backwards, like a flinch. Her mouth closed, she breathed through her nose. A thigh tensed, relaxed. The music altered, a subtle tone shift in a far away place. Her trance state shook itself away.

           
Huriko became.

           
Now it was later, in the kitchen, and water was boiling. Chopped vegetables fell from her hands into the bursting fluid. Gelid blocks of algal protein glistened in the white light. She had arranged them into a biological shape, a remnant of her shift in the lab that day. She was puzzling, still trying to solve a protein structure. Eventually the cubes, too, fell into the spitting water. She spooned a dark yeast extract after them. Added noodles. Removed the pan from the heat.

           
“I'm back!” Huriko's husband.

           
“In the kitchen.”

           
He walked in, still in his uniform, kissed her, put a hand on her abdomen, “Hungry? Smells good.” She consciously moved forward, into the touch. He didn't know. She hadn't told him. Their child was in there, tiny, maggot sized. A thing, growing inside her, living off her body. A parasite.

           
“Can you shower? Then we'll eat.”

           
She smiled at him. Her husband, “Sure.” She watched his back, heard the bedroom door.

           
Beside her, the soup steamed.

Djembe frowned at the re-creation of Doctor Maki's life. The holo security recordings and personal logs and other evidence was being used in a very strange way by the Jonah matrix. Surreal. He lowered his datapad and allowed himself to be distracted. He wondered if the AI algorithms had uncovered something which needed to be presented with subtle contextualisation.

In the holo it was days later and Huriko filed a request for surface work. Her exposure experiment was due an inspection. Bio-plates needed changing, bringing back to the lab, analysing. New plates, new formulations, new protein chains had to be installed, exposed to the suns, the killing light.

           
In her display, holicons tumbled, flickered, fought. They flashed through shapes, contorted, tried to embrace each other. Her equations of molecular potential and protein folding wrestled with the data from the surface and her theory; her ideal, calculated forms. Huriko drank jasmine tea. Around her, colleagues pulled apart holographic RNA, smoothed, shaped, modelled cellular machinery, their eyes wide, shining, bright with Compound X. A meeting request blinked in her display. A review meeting with Doctor Currie.

           
It was several hours later. She thought of him as Masjid, but always called him Doctor Currie. He had never asked her to change, even though everyone else used his first name. While he talked, she thought to herself that he looked familiar. She had known him for seven years. Been on Fall seven years. And still she couldn't escape the feeling that she knew Doctor Currie. From before. Before she came to planet Fall.

           
Huriko missed part of what he said, asked him to repeat. A paternal concern came over Masjid's face. Was she alright? His first concern was her. Her work was exceptional, brilliant. Ahead of schedule. If she needed a break, that was fine. Good work came from good health. But Huriko was shaking her head. She was fine, distracted, that was all. She knew she could re-design a protein to fold into a protective shell under certain radiation exposure. She could feel it in her mind, knew she was on the verge of a breakthrough. That was all.

           
Masjid approved her surface work request. She wondered if she should ask the question that had plagued her for the past seven years, “Do I know you?”

           
In the lab she dropped the Compound X nasal delivery sticks into the disposal system. Holo equipment floated across the room with her, a corner of the lab coloured itself a wall, a private working space, as she neared. When she was inside, private, unseen, she stood mute, her eyes remming. A full body hologram appeared. It was her. Her body. Naked, showing the biological changes taking place. The embryo was visible, as if her pubis had been split open. Glands throbbed, exaggerated in their action, as hormones danced through her veins. She watched fat deposit on her breasts, hips. She watched the hologram of herself and her pregnancy.

           
Huriko reached out a hand to the embryo. She crouched, face to cervix, fingers curled, cupped around the womb. Medical annotations flickered around her body. Salt levels, blood sugars, hydration, hormone concentrations, protein analyses, heartbeat, skin conductivity, sweat rates. Gene expression. Everything was normal, everything was within usual parameters. Healthy.

           
“I know something is wrong,” she stroked the embryo, unrecognisable as human. A blastocyst rapidly mutating, acquiring form.

           
Huriko's hologram squatted, held her upper arms, and talked back, “I understand. I know how you feel.”

           
Huriko looked into her holo's eyes, “Hold me.” They lay on the floor, Huriko spooned by her naked hologram. Tears ran down her face.

Djembe swallowed. The rules and procedure of the mission drifted from his mind as he watched Doctor Maki lost in her existential pain. He shifted in his seat, watched the evidence unfold.

The quarters were silent. There was no light, except for a night sky projection on the walls and ceiling. Huriko lay on the floor. The computer had suggested a random night sky program, different views from different planets from different epochs. The stars shone and burned and occasionally burst. A starry, starry night. The patterns changed. Constellations re-arranged, and she knew each one, somewhere, on some planet, would have inspired a thousand myths. As the stars mutated she could almost feel the stories being told in her memory, around a thousand camp fires, by a thousand tribes and parents, across a thousand planets. They told tales of beasts and heroes. Tales of artists and lovers. Tales of adventure and challenge. Tales of humanity becoming more than it ever was. A thousand myths, a thousand tales. A thousand stories to make a change. The secret code of narrative. A magic that wove its spell unseen, unfelt. Transformation.

           
Huriko crossed her hands over her stomach. With eyes closed, the stars remained. The induction to Fall removed many things, but never the fairy tales of youth. Never the tales of woe, of sacrifice. Never her childhood or imagination.

           
She cried again, silver on her cheeks. “This is not my child.” Her body vomited tears. The stars were swallowed by the approaching dawn.

Now it was a week later and Huriko's husband had his hand on her shoulder. Concern frowned his face. His voice threw its arms wide, to hold only empty space.

           
She looked at his reflection in her datapad's screen, “I'm just tired. I'm on the verge of something. Something's breaking through.” She turned, “At work, I mean.” Slim eyes rounded, “I just need some time.”

           
“You need a break.”

           
“I know. Soon. I promise.”

Then Djembe saw it. The final clue, he thought. His blood ran cold.

Sophie was in the MedLab. Her platinum hair shone above the holo shading. Eyes remming wildly. Huriko didn't know why Sophie was there. Here. In the lab. Didn't she have her own rooms? A private holo suite with Daoud or Jonah?

           
Huriko left the main holo lab for the bio-lab.

           
The protein plates would be ready for the surface work. They grew in the lab, excreted by artificial life forms. By algae cells, re-designed in the AI environment, the DNA twisted, spliced in the lab, ready to produce their creator's wishes. NeoXenes. Aliens, really. That's what they were. DNA changed so much from its Old Earth bio-source it could be called a new alien life form; a neoxene. And this lab had created millions of them.

           
The surface test would be a failure. She knew already. Something was missing. They, the cells, the adapted algae, they were lacking. No matter how many times she constructed the material, something always went wrong. Glistening, the bio-plates dutifully grew their wares. But for what? What was it all for? Pure science, pure research. Masjid's quest to know all there was about the human body, about cells, about potential applications. To push the envelope, the capabilities of every protein, hormone, fatty acid. To build, write, compose the greatest thesaurus of biology and how it could be translated into other biological environments. To re-discover what the Edict had destroyed centuries ago. A symphony of knowledge, re-scored for altruistic purposes.

           
To what purpose, really? For this she had destroyed her born-life. Left them all behind: her brother, sister. Her father. Her mother's grave. An easy life, a carefree world. Her existence erased for a passion. A vision at university, before that at school. Years of study. Breakthroughs. Brilliance. Fêted scholarships. And then the goal: the myth, the rumour.

           
Fall.

           
And the years of research here, the home she'd found, the man who was all her family. All for what? She was distracted by her thoughts.

           
Blood splashed on the bio-plate.

           
She sucked her thumb.

           
A laser cutter clattered to the floor.