The genkit’s screen flickers with a constant blur of text and equations, showing the files he’s calling up with his mind and reading through at a dizzying speed. I prop myself up on my good elbow and watch his glassy eyes skip back and forth as he works.
Of all the apps I wish I had, VR is the most painful to be without, especially since I already have most of the implants required to use it. Like practically everyone with a panel, I have a basic skullnet – a web of microscopic wires fanned out in a lattice across the inside of my skull. The net picks up the electrical activity of my brain, translating my thoughts into commands that my panel’s processors can read and understand.
I also have an optic feed – a coil of wires leading from the graphics chip in my panel into my optic nerve. Together, those implants should have been enough to let me use VR, but the graphics chip in the custom-coded panel my father gave me is ancient and clunky. It can’t keep up with the computations required to run VR – it could barely handle the text in my vision when I sent comms to Agnes. All it could do was run built-in filters and draw text and icons. I spent months researching ways to upgrade it, but every other chip I found needed a different power source, a more sophisticated operating system, and a heat-transfer chip to stop it burning a hole right through my arm. None of the code I found was hypergenesis-friendly, so eventually I gave up, but I never stopped wishing that I could launch myself into an immersive VR world.
Lying here, watching Dax, I want nothing more than to join his session and code with him side by side. There’s no denying that his face holds an austere beauty, but it was never his looks that attracted me to him. It was this – his concentration, the flitting of his eyes as he casts his thoughts effortlessly into blocks of perfect code. When I’m working, I need to type each word letter by letter, but Dax throws down whole blocks of logic in every thought. My code grows like a house, rising slowly from foundations, each brick laid carefully before the design becomes clear. But with Dax, when he codes through his panel, entire rooms and structures fly together in a whirlwind. I can see it on the genkit’s screen – a hundred files open, multiple pages selected and transformed in a heartbeat. With a single thought, he can summon algorithms and rules, rearranging them in a flurry before snapping them into place. It’s magical to watch the way his mind spins pages of code like puzzle pieces, splitting and weaving them together with the merest thought.
His eyes bounce back and forth, his breath quickening. The urge to join his session is so strong I can barely hold it in. I want to entwine my consciousness with his, let our minds meld together, and turn blocks of code into towering masterpieces. Together, we’d be twice as fast. Two minds working in harmony.
Dax and I would be something special if we could work together.
I reach out for him instinctively, tracing my blood-spotted fingers along the side of his face. They leave tracks of scarlet across his pale, freckled skin, but he doesn’t flinch away. He doesn’t even seem to feel it. I draw my hand back again just as he snaps out of his session, yanking the cable from my ruined panel.
‘What the hell?’ he gasps. He reaches for my arm. ‘I need a tissue sample, something live. I need to run a scan.’
‘What’s wrong?’ I hold my arm out, and he slides the needle-tipped cable straight into the freshly stitched wound in my arm. I hiss as the metal pushes into the incision, producing a fresh trickle of blood. The cable twitches, drawing back a sample of my cells for the genkit to run an analysis on. He pulls it back out, his eyes glazing briefly.
‘Dax, what’s happening? Is something wrong?’
‘You have a backup chip.’ He looks stunned. He looks terrified.
‘No, I don’t. That’s why I was so worried when it was damaged.’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, but you have one in your spine. It’s masking its access, but it looks like a standard setup. I don’t understand this.’
I stare at him, my head spinning. If I had a backup chip, I could regrow my old panel instead of getting budded with a new one. All my hypergenesis-friendly apps would be back and functioning in a matter of days instead of the weeks it normally takes to grow a panel from scratch. But I’ve never seen anything about a backup in my panel’s code. If Dax has found one in my spine, that means my father put it there and never told me about it.
A cold feeling settles in my stomach, and then the rest of Dax’s words catch up with me.
‘Wait, did you say a standard setup? Like a normal panel?’
Dax nods, his eyes glazed again. ‘I can’t see what’s in it, but it’s definitely not hypergenesis-friendly. I’m checking the tissue sample.’
‘What do you need the tissue sample for?’
‘I’m checking, but …’ The blood drains from his face. ‘But it’s the same result.’
‘What’s the same result? Dax, what do you see?’
His eyes refocus, and he looks down at the stitches in my arm, swallowing. ‘I don’t know how to say this, but I don’t think you have hypergenesis.’
CHAPTER 23
The air stills. Dax’s words echo through my mind.
I don’t think you have hypergenesis.
‘That’s ridiculous.’ I push myself up with my good arm until I’m sitting cross-legged on the blood-splattered concrete. The movement makes my vision blur. I rub my eyes, shaking my head. ‘I was born with hypergenesis.’
Dax just stares at me. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. These results are all coming up negative. Here, you can see for yourself.’ He turns the genkit’s screen to me. A bright green banner glows at the top, and the words are there, as clear as day.
Hypergenesis not detected.
Every time I’ve plugged my panel in, the same banner has flashed red. I must have seen it a hundred times. This can’t be happening.
‘But my back,’ I say, my voice shaking. ‘Dax, you were there that night. I hacked my panel, and half my back bubbled off.’
‘I know. Trust me, Princess, this is freaking me out as much as it is you.’
I doubt it. My stomach is clenched like a fist, my heart pounding. I punch a command into the genkit, running the scan again. The green flashing banner reappears. I try another scan, running deeper this time, testing the behaviour of every component of my cells.
The result comes back. A jagged line, representing the way the sample Dax took from me responded to an array of test nanites. A hypergenesis-positive reading would look like wild, patternless static, and a negative reading would be almost flat. My line is like a ridge of mountains. Not flat, but not chaos, either. I stare at it, a chill creeping across my skin.
It tells me I don’t have hypergenesis, but it doesn’t say that I’m normal, either.
‘Dax, look at this. I don’t know what it means. I’ve never seen a result like this before.’
He leans in to glance at the screen, then turns to me. ‘Didn’t your mother have hypergenesis?’