‘What colour are your eyes, Catarina?’
I frown. Of all the things I expected to hear, that’s not one of them. ‘They’re grey, like my father’s. A polymorphism on OCA2, you know that.’
‘Yes, I do.’ He sits down on the cot beside me, staring with an intensity that makes me want to shrink away. ‘What did you do during the decryption?’
‘I don’t know how I survived. There’s a lot going on that I don’t understand, like –’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about,’ he says, cutting me off. ‘What did you do to the vaccine?’
I blink. ‘The vaccine? What are you talking about?’
He stands and paces across the room. ‘You’re a genius, Catarina. Don’t play the fool, it doesn’t suit you.’
My breathing quickens. ‘Dax, I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is this something to do with the ERO-86?’
Dax pauses mid-step. ‘The memory suppressant. Of course.’ He turns, his face softening as he looks me up and down. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’
‘Know what?’ I stand and stride across the room to him, clutching the bathrobe around me. ‘Dax, I’m losing my mind here. Tell me what’s going on.’
He swallows. ‘I analysed the readings from the clonebox, and I found what was generating the ERO-86. You have a neurochemical-producing implant buried in the base of your skull. It used to be controlled by a subfunction in your healing tech code, but it went offline when your panel was damaged.’
The air grows still. I search Dax’s face for a hint that he’s joking, but all I see is fear. I reach one shaking hand up to touch the back of my head. The base of my skull. That’s where my migraines come from.
‘Did you say my healing tech?’
Dax nods, and I draw in a breath. That’s the function core that Marcus cut out of me because he said it had neural code. I didn’t believe him, but in a way he was right. It wasn’t neural code, but it was producing neurochemicals. Memory suppressants. Maybe that was why Amy seemed lucid afterwards.
But why the hell did my father give it to me?
‘OK,’ I say, my voice wavering. ‘What does that have to do with the procedure?’
Dax presses his lips together. ‘The implant switched on again during the decryption, but it wasn’t generating ERO-86 any more. I didn’t realize what it was doing until I saw the feedback from the clonebox.’
‘What was it doing?’
Dax laces his pale, slender fingers together. ‘It added four million lines of code to the vaccine.’
I step back. ‘No. I thought you checked the code. I thought it was working.’
‘It is, but the vaccine was supposed to have roughly five million lines, and the version that came out of you had nine. I have no idea what the new code is doing, but it looks like it’s acting as a daemon – running independently, without instructions. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’
I stare at him wordlessly, the roar of celebrations outside drifting into a wash of static. There are four million lines of untested, unchecked code in the arm of every single person.
And I’m the one who put it there.
‘How did this happen?’ I breathe. ‘Why wasn’t it picked up?’
‘Novak pushed the testing. She wanted the vaccine to be broadcast as quickly as possible, and Cartaxus signed off on it. The vaccine is still working against the virus, but this code is running too, and I don’t understand it. I can barely even read it.’
I close my eyes, my heart pounding. Four million lines of rogue code, sent by my own trapdoor into every family, every child. The thought makes me want to be sick. It could be lethal; it could be toxic. I can’t believe Cartaxus didn’t check the code before they let Novak send it out.
‘Maybe it’s just administrative junk from the decryption,’ I say. Meaningless filler code that shouldn’t interact with a person’s DNA. ‘You can clean it up in a patch, right?’
‘Possibly.’ Dax’s voice is solemn. ‘All I know is that this code has gone out to everyone with my name on it, and I have no idea what it does.’
I push my fingers through my hair, bunching it in my fists, trying to get my head around everything that’s happened. I survived the procedure. I had a memory suppressant in my system, generated by an implant which added a four-million-line daemon to the vaccine.
‘That’s not all,’ Dax says. ‘I asked about your eyes because according to the clonebox, they’re supposed to be green.’ He pulls a pen-size swabber from his pocket, chrome finished with a needle point on one end, and a pad for swabbing on the other. ‘Do you mind?’
I hold out my arm. ‘They’re grey – you can see for yourself. Maybe there was something wrong with the readings from the clonebox. Maybe everything is fine.’
‘Maybe,’ he murmurs, running the swab across the crease in my elbow. He flips it deftly to press the needle point to my wrist. I barely feel it pierce. Dax’s eyes glaze over, and he points the pen at the wall, shooting out a flickering projected display. A report appears. The first sample is the one from my elbow – dead skin cells, grown days ago, shed before the procedure. The second sample is platelets from my blood – fresh and constantly renewed. Biological summaries of both samples glow on the cinderblock wall. They detail every gene, from the mutation that lets me digest dairy to the family of genes that control the size and shape of my teeth.
Dax blinks, and the summaries disappear, leaving a single result remaining. My eye colour.
Sample 1: Female. 16–18. Eyes: grey.
Sample 2: Female. 16–18. Eyes: green.
I feel myself begin to sway. This scan isn’t checking for apps; it’s measuring the immutable, unchanging DNA inside my cells. Gentech can’t change that. It’s supposed to wrap around the genes like paper around a present, leaving my natural DNA untouched.
But if this report is right, my underlying DNA has been changed. It’s like wrapping paper around a present and somehow changing what’s inside the box.
‘This is impossible,’ I breathe, but the proof is glowing right in front of me. According to this scan, I stepped into the vat with grey eyes and stepped out with green. It’s a violation of everything I’ve learned about coding. It’s a breach of the fundamental laws of gentech. It should be impossible. But then again, I should be dead.
I have no idea what to believe any more.
‘What the hell did my father do to me?’ I spin to Dax. ‘This has to be linked to the hypergenesis code we found. The implant, the vaccine, the way I survived the procedure. He did something to me, and he made me forget it.’
I close my eyes and see a flash of the mountains I remembered during the decryption, but the image blurs as soon as I try to focus on it. It was a place I knew. I was there. A drum starts up at the back of my mind, but I still can’t hear it clearly enough to drag the memory out.