I nod, dropping my hand from my mouth. I’ve chewed my thumbnail down to the quick, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I force myself to keep my hands at my sides, following the guard down a stairwell at the rear of the house.
We reach the basement, and pass through a hissing airlock into a room with soundproofing spikes lining its walls. Novak is waiting inside with two people – a man with bright yellow hair, and a woman with slick, transparent skin that looks like it’s been hacked with frog DNA. I’ve never seen anything like it. The glassy layers of skin show patches of muscle and dark streaks of veins.
The glass-skinned woman stares blankly as I enter, one side of her mouth twitching up. The yellow-haired man is drooling, his head tilted to one side. I look between them warily, raising an eyebrow at Novak.
‘These are two of the world’s leading experts on the Hydra virus,’ she says. ‘Or at least, the best we could do at short notice.’
The man gives me a slow, deliberate nod, and his whole face twitches.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘You’re using puppets?’
The puppet connection is one of gentech’s most dangerous apps, one of the few that the UN agreed to make explicitly illegal. It uses a map of thousands of tiny wires grown throughout its user’s nervous system to allow a puppeteer, a person in a distant location, to remotely take over the puppet’s body. Anyone can be a puppeteer; they don’t need any special tech. Their brain activity is captured like it always is, by their skullnet. That activity includes the mental commands that control their voice and movements, and that’s what gets transmitted directly into the puppet’s muscles.
Usually, it works quite well. Most people’s brains and bodies are similar enough that a puppeteer’s mental command to nod their head should work on the puppet’s muscles too. It’s not perfect, though. Puppets tend to twitch, and sometimes their speech is garbled, but it’s still the most secure connection possible. Anyone hacking your transmission will just see a stream of unintelligible muscle impulses. Translating them into words would require a machine almost as complex as the human body.
But it’s dangerous. Puppets have been known to go into cardiac arrest when their hearts were hijacked by leaked signals from the puppeteer. Sometimes the wires don’t grow properly and paralyse the puppets. Sometimes they’re forced to do things they don’t want to do. The puppets are supposed to be conscious, and able to cut off the session at will, but I’ve heard of hacked versions of the code locking people inside their minds. Keeping them trapped inside a body that moves with another’s will, unable to escape. I can’t imagine anything more terrifying.
I never thought I’d see the app in action, and looking into the strange, blank eyes of the two puppets, I hope I never do again.
‘This is the safest way for us to talk,’ Novak says.
‘Who are we talking to that requires this level of secrecy?’
Novak raises a scarlet eyebrow. ‘Cartaxus, obviously.’
I blink, looking between the scientists and back to Novak. ‘Cartaxus? Are you crazy?’
‘You have to understand,’ Novak says. ‘Even though our methods might be different, both the Skies and Cartaxus are trying to defeat the virus and save as many lives as possible. We’ve fought each other in the past, there’ve even been casualties, but we know when to put aside our differences and work together.’
‘You’re working together?’
‘Of course we are. Without the vaccine, humanity is doomed. Your father was the only person capable of writing code like that. Maybe some of our younger generation would eventually grow talented enough, but by then the virus could have wiped out everyone on the surface.’
The yellow-haired man coughs. ‘And now that the virus is growing stronger, the bunkers aren’t safe either. No airlock is foolproof, and our buffer zones are all but useless now, as you saw when you left Homestake.’
I shift uneasily. ‘So if you’re working together on this, why did my father think you were going to hold back the vaccine?’
The glass-skinned woman smiles. ‘Because we were.’
Novak flicks a strand of hair from her eyes. ‘Honestly, Catarina, I thought you would have figured this out by now.’
I look between them, lost. The female Cartaxus scientist smiles. ‘You may have noticed, Miss Agatta, that we haven’t been securing our servers as well as we could. Your attacks were quite marvellous, but very few of your friends in the Skies shared your talents, and they were still able to steal our medical code. That’s because we let them. When we designed the bunker system, we knew that the population would inevitably split into two factions – those in the bunkers, and those on the surface – and that if we broadcast medical code on our satellites, very few people on the surface would trust it.’
It starts to make sense. ‘But if it was stolen …’
Novak smiles. ‘Exactly. If Cartaxus gave away code, people wouldn’t trust it, but if it was stolen and decrypted by us, they would. The same goes for the vaccine. If Cartaxus were to broadcast it freely, it would make people suspicious, and they might not download it. Nobody wants a repeat of the Influenza tragedy. However, if you stole it and released it to the Skies, they’d snatch it up in a heartbeat.’
My head spins. ‘So this whole time we’ve been running from you …’
‘When all we want to do is help you unlock the code,’ the yellow-haired man says.
My suspicion flickers. ‘Then why won’t you let us follow my father’s instructions? We’re supposed to go to a lab –’
‘Yes, and run a procedure. We know,’ Novak says. ‘But what then? How are you going to release the code? How are you going to convince billions of people to download it? There are no clinical trials, no long-term studies. Your father was the only person who could even explain how the vaccine worked, but now he’s gone. You’re asking billions of people to download a mystery. How are you going to do it?’
I shift my weight from my aching knee. I’d barely even thought about releasing the vaccine. All my focus had been on how to unlock it. ‘I … I don’t know,’ I say. ‘My father didn’t mention that in his notes. I thought people would just want it.’
‘You’d think so,’ the man says, ‘but Cartaxus watched millions of people die of Influenza X after your father’s vaccine was freely released. The Hydra code is brand new, it’s been rushed through testing, and some people are going to want to wait and see how it works. If that happens, we’re doomed. The virus is evolving dangerously fast. You saw the blowers detonating at the same time outside Homestake – that’s a three-gene mutation. This code could be obsolete within weeks if we can’t get everyone on the surface vaccinated.’
‘Well, we’ll never get everyone,’ Novak mutters. ‘Not everyone out there is still rational. There are people who roam around in packs, eating each other.’
I swallow. The Lurkers. She’s right – they’re insane. I doubt they’re even lucid enough to control their download settings.
‘So what do you want me to do?’ I ask.