Inside the terrariums were different clots of decaying flesh.
Sandro waved some buzzing flies—real ones, not botflies—away from the glass boxes of rot. As Hwa looked closer, she saw that two of them appeared to still be alive. They pulsed. Their terrariums fogged. Hwa tried to breathe through her mouth. Not that doing it that way was much better. The scent stuck to her tongue like rancid fat.
“The fuck is that shit?”
“It’s tissue,” Sandro said. “Programmable tissue.”
Hwa thought of Síofra’s broken nose, and how quickly it had healed. “What, like a regimen?”
“Like fucking cancer, more like. Fucking uncontrollable. I keep hiving it off and trying to kill it.”
“Aye? Any luck?”
He shrugged his massive, oozing shoulders. “It’s cancer. It hates radiation.”
“What, you’ve got like random isotopes just lying about?”
“Nah. I had a friend take a sample under her shirt, during treatment in St. John’s.” He drew a line across his throat with one finger. “Killed it right dead.”
Hwa pulled up a stool and watched the samples. They seemed to breathe. Each of them were hooked up to various bags of fluid. One of them looked like beer. How had Calliope gotten something like this in her system? All the USWC members were extremely cautious about health. Testing for all types of cancer was regular. Having unprotected sex was verboten. Unless you went off-book. And Calliope had.
“Could you give this to someone else?”
“Who else you want to be looking at this shit?”
“No, I mean, could one person pass it to another? Sly like?”
Sandro frowned at the samples. He squeezed a pustule on his arm. “Maybe. I heard the CIA tried giving Putin cancer, way back when, with the early programmables. You could program these tissues to make a tumour, I guess.”
“So you could get someone sick, and then hold their health for ransom?”
Sandro’s eyes widened. He crouched on his knees. “Gonna pretend you didn’t just say that. I don’t even want that thought in my head.”
The timer dinged. They went back into Sandro’s “office,” and he slid the glass wall back into place. Then he threw images up on it. Hwa recognized the dates. He was comparing the two samples, Calliope’s and Layne’s.
They were identical.
“You know a lot of sick people,” he said.
“I know a lot of dead people.”
Sandro reached over to a shelf above the scanner, dug in behind some beakers and flasks, and pulled out a necklace. A rabbit’s foot dangled at the end of it. He slung it over his head. “You’re an ill wind, you.”
“You should meet me mum.”
“Think I have, once or twice,” Sandro said, and winked.
Hwa snorted. “Is there enough here to do a search?”
“Now there is. Now we got more of the original.”
He expanded the image, capped it, and threw it onto another screen. Rapidly, similar images overlaid it, like cards being shuffled together. Finally, another image popped up.
It was the Lynch logo. A press release. About the experimental reactor they were building deep in the Flemish Pass Basin, right under New Arcadia.
“Project Krebs will allow Lynch to build Canada’s energy future from the ground up, with less risk and fewer errors. We are confident in the capability of the Krebs self-assembling devices to assist in construction of the reactor…”
And there, at the bottom of the release, was a render of the self-assembler machines. It wasn’t a perfect match—the matching function straight-up said it wasn’t—but it was close. Damn close. Almost like looking at the difference between a prototype and the finished product. Only one was made of protein, and the other wasn’t.
“Why would industrial construction devices be in your friend’s blood?”
“I don’t know,” Hwa said. “She had a lab on a chip to keep an eye on her hormones, but I don’t think she was on any other regimen. Especially not anything this shiny and new. The union couldn’t afford it. But keep digging. I’ll be out of town for a bit.”
“Lucky you.”
“Not really.” Hwa winced. “I can’t stand the woods.”
13
Terra Nova
“I won’t be coming with you to Terra Nova,” Síofra told her, as she zipped up her pack the morning of the trip. “Sorry. I’ve been asked to refocus myself here in town.”
“Refocus yourself?”
“There’s some concern…” He cleared his throat. “Katherine and Zachariah wonder if perhaps my attention is a bit divided, lately.”
Hwa scowled. “Divided how? What do they mean? You’re great at your job. You—”
“It’s all right, Hwa.” He chuckled softly. “Don’t worry about me. It was always a little strange for me to be going on the trip. The panels and talks are only at the very fringes of my subject area. I put in for it because I wanted to go, not because I needed to go.”