Chrysalis

54

“It just turned eight thirty.”

These were the first words Logan had heard uttered in at least twenty minutes. Coming out of a semi-stupor, he looked up and saw it was Dafna who spoke.

Everyone he had gathered together the evening before — Peyton, Dafna, Mossby, Dr. Purchase, Roz, Snow, Wrigley — were sitting around tables or on the control room floor, in the ghostly quasi-illumination. Beyond, Theater One was dark. Shortly after midnight, in direct consultation with Christie and the rest of the board, Peyton had escalated the entire Complex to Awareness level three: all personnel were to be either on shift, or in their quarters, until further notice. This meant the VR workers Roz sent away had returned to their desks, but she’d made sure to pass the word around that Theater One and the production lab were temporarily off-limits. Not that anyone would have time for wandering around: with Voyager going live in half an hour, every Arc E employee would have their hands full. Logan now looked at Roz, sitting on the carpeting, knees tucked up beneath her chin and arms hugging her shins. Although this was her territory, she ironically had little to do with the current crisis. Logan had chosen this space as a rally point because he knew it had extensive network access and a robust infrastructure… and, since the extortionists had chosen Voyager as a red herring, Omega seemed, perversely, the safest place to assemble.

This little group was the last line of defense. If they didn’t act, Voyager clients would start dying at noon.

The time for the eight o’clock message promised by the extortionists had come and gone. The usual recipient, Asperton, was dead — and Logan sorely missed her calm, guiding presence. Peyton had taken the lawyer’s Sentinel, and adjusted it so he could receive any incoming messages. But there had been none.

Logan cleared his throat. “I think it’s a safe assumption they’re not going to reach out to us anymore. But we have to assume the clock’s still ticking. The default programming for these murders is on, not off. So let’s quickly run through what we know — and then figure out what the hell to do with these last few hours.”

There were sighs; a groan from Mossby. But nevertheless all eyes turned toward him.

“Dafna,” Logan said, “what have you turned up about the conspirators?”

“There were three spies that we know of. Cardiff, the BioCertain programmer; Prawn, the lead on the BioCertain fulfillment line; and Kaupei, the scientist. All are now dead. The killer was not a Chrysalis employee. I would guess he was a sleeper agent — inserted to make sure things went according to plan.”

“Did you kill him?”

“He was wounded, but got away in the confusion. Maybe he hid in a closet somewhere and bled out. But we have to assume he’s alive.”

Logan turned to Purchase. “What, exactly, concerned you so much about that doctored video?”

“In the real video, the line supervisor — Prawn — breached clean room protocol and was injecting a solution into the MMD loads. If you look closely, you’ll see that Prawn wasn’t filling the load chambers. He was filling the reservoirs.”

“What?” several voices echoed at once.

“Cue up that video again and zoom in,” said Purchase. “Slow.”

Mossby took a seat at the console and restarted the undoctored video, this time at half speed, zooming in with remarkable clarity on Prawn. Now, Logan could see that the objects running down the belts contained two chambers: a large, forward chamber and a smaller one at the rear. The robots were systematically filling the forward chambers with medication; Prawn, meanwhile, was filling the rear chambers — with whatever was in his fat hypodermics.

“Okay,” said Peyton after a moment. “So what?”

“We make devices for all kinds of medical administration: insulin, allergies, pain relief, psychotropics, and so on.”

It was the last two Purchase mentioned, Logan thought grimly, that had done in Bridger and Spearman. He’d finally managed to get through to Spearman’s doctor, who confirmed receipt of a new medication load for Spearman directly from Carewell just three weeks before. Bridger, Spearman, Williams… all artfully sacrificed to make it appear their tour of the Voyager rollout was the reason for their deaths.

“Over the last year,” Purchase was explaining, “our designers conceived the idea of an extra medication chamber.”

“Why?” asked Snow, who had finally put away his radio.

“Safety, backup, redundancy. For the same reason you have a reserve switch on a boat or motorcycle. Even though our devices are carefully monitored and the med loads replaced, it seemed wise to design the units with a spare reservoir… just in case.” Everyone was looking at Purchase now, and he began to sound defensive. “With our implants getting smaller by the year, that left room for such a reservoir. In some units, it would be helpful to have a backup dose of the primary med. In others, it could contain epinephrine, or lidocaine, or other drugs vital in critical situations. If and when we brought those online, they could save lives.”

“You said ‘if and when,’ ” Wrigley said. The VR head had been looking increasingly restless — probably because nine o’clock was approaching and he wasn’t supervising the initial rollout, which — without word from the extortionists — they had not dared delay.

“Reservoirs are included in many newer implant models now, but we haven’t yet made them operational. We’re still—”

“In short, the implants out in the world, as well as those being filled in this video, are all supposed to ship with their secondary reservoirs empty,” Logan said. “But while the robots were filling the primary chambers with medications, Prawn was…”

Logan stopped. “Dr. Purchase,” he said, “I think you’d better tell the others what you told me. About the Alaska expedition, and Wing Kaupei’s work with Neanderthal DNA.”

Purchase did just that.

“Jesus,” Peyton said after Purchase fell silent. “So Wing synthesized the poison, got Prawn to fill the emergency reservoirs with it, and Cardiff to loop the security videos and establish the ransom communications. And made it all look like the Voyager rollout was to blame. But Prawn panicked and was killed by that fucking ninja embedded in security.”

“Meanwhile, Cardiff secretly programmed a thousand implants to dump their emergency reservoirs, but he didn’t tell anyone how to undo the programming — for self-preservation, maybe. His big mistake was the bad guys didn’t care.” Wrigley sighed in exasperation and apprehension. “And the whole scheme basically went south on them. They’re all dead—”

“Except for their cleanup man,” Dafna interrupted. “We don’t know if he’s dead or alive.”

“The point is, they wanted a shitload of money by noon,” said Peyton. “But since their agents all failed, it looks like they’ve walked away, the clock still ticking.”

“And by midnight, a thousand Voyager clients will be dead,” said Wrigley. “Even though it’s the implants doing the killing, it’s my product that will forever be tainted.”

A short silence hung in the room.

“Mossby,” Peyton said. “Can you verify what Cardiff told us? About his altering the implant firmware so it releases the poisoned reservoirs, and having the only key? I mean, we saw what Prawn did on video. But we only have Cardiff’s word.”

Logan watched as Mossby worked in silence for a few minutes.

“The system’s acting wonky,” he said. “For some reason, I can only access the console logs. Cardiff’s fingerprints are all over BioCertain, but he only performed firmware downloads three times. Actually, the first two look like trial runs. Judging by its size, the third drop was live. The real deal.”

“And when was that?”

“About a month ago. September fifth, three fourteen p.m.”

“Who did it go out to?”

“Based on what Dr. Purchase said, I’d guess every client whose implants are new enough to have reservoirs.” Mossby pushed himself away from the workstation.

“But Prawn only dosed a thousand devices, max,” said Snow.

Mossby shrugged.

“Why don’t we call?” Dr. Purchase said into the silence.

When everyone looked at him, he continued. “Everyone with an implant. We could get the list of drug-implant clients who are also early adopters of Voyager, and tell them—”

“Tell them what?” Peyton said. “Yank out their implants? Turn them off? Instead of one thousand, you’ll kill—”

“The Helix,” Mossby said.

All eyes swiveled toward him.

“We all know it’s down there. I’ll bet it stores everything.” Mossby’s eyes flashed with sudden excitement. “It’s how you found out it was this Cardiff dude who sent that last message — right? And we know now that Cardiff also pushed out the malware. So, what’s the first thing his malware’s going to look for when it’s activated? Tampering. But we still have two-way communication with all those implants out there. We know when Cardiff sent out his update. So we just use the Helix to locate the code from his firmware lock, null it out, then send out a new update that turns it off. Bingo! A simple story for simple people.”

“Can’t be done,” said Snow.

Mossby frowned. “Why the hell not? You saw how I used those deleted packets to restore the video—”

“That’s the problem: the deleted packets. When we froze the Helix to track the source of Cardiff’s message, the input buffers overloaded and corrupted a chunk of header files. Data was becoming garbled, erased files were appearing in searches. Temporary fixes just started a cascade effect. It’s built on a photonic framework: if we’d let it run wild, the optical cabling would literally melt. So, with no other short-term options, we shut it down.”

“What?” said Mossby and Purchase simultaneously.

“Three hours ago.” Snow unshipped his radio, waved it in emphasis. “We shut down the Helix.”