Cyberdrome (24 page)

One simulation
was enough to deal with, she thought as she activated an input terminal. After
ten minutes, she gave up. All sensor logs were empty—apparently erased—even
though the main computer appeared to be undamaged.

She started to
walk away, but then remembered that her boss, Mathew Grey, stored all of his
research inside Cyberdrome, presumably on one of the Survey Vessels computers.
Like many people in the company, he believed that virtual computers were far
more secure than physical ones, and since all of the Survey Vessels were interlinked,
there were always 99 backup copies of your work in case something happened to
the originals. The only drawback was that if you had to shut down Cyberdrome in
an emergency, you lost everything.

She thought
about what would happen to Mathew’s work if they ever did manage to make it out
of Cyberdrome, and realized that his research could still be useful in fighting
the plague in Utah. The thought gave her clarity and a renewed sense of hope.

She considered
getting Alek to help her search, but decided to try it herself first. She
ordered a system-wide query for any documents containing keywords such as
nanotech, plague, or Grey. The results came back faster than expected.

Twenty-seven
Terabytes of data were stored under a directory called, “Mathew Grey’s Private
Research,” right inside the main computer. No access restrictions were evident
and the data wasn’t even encrypted. Obviously, Mathew hadn’t expected anyone
from the outside world to access his data in this manner.

Then she decided
that she was being paranoid. Mathew was a scientist, not a spy. He obviously
left his data accessible, just in case something happened to him. That thought
brought up the memory of Mathew lying dead inside his interface chamber. There
was nothing peaceful about his face, or the nature of his death. Nothing to
make her believe he was in a “better place,” as her mother used to say.

She put those
memories aside and called up a mining program to scan the database. Two minutes
later, it displayed a summary of Mathew’s efforts to combat the Utah nanobugs.
As she read through it, she started to hope that it was, in fact, a fake.
According to Mathew’s own notes, he believed that there was no way to stop the
spread of the Plague. His projections showed that once the nanobugs escaped the
quarantine, they could potentially kill every human being on the Earth within
three years. Then she saw a note near the bottom of the summary; a cryptic message
saying that if the plague was going to kill all humans, then humans would have
to evolve.

What did he mean
by that?
What was he planning?
She performed another search of the data, this
time indexing by date. She had the mining program gather up all files recorded
in the final days before his death. The results shocked her even more.

Mathew
apparently had a plan to protect humans from the unstoppable nanobug plague
after all. He called it “Project Chimera” and it involved combining human DNA
with that of other mammals in an attempt to evolve humans into something not
quite human, thereby making them resistant to the human-based plague.

The term was
Transgenics
,
and as a biologist, she knew the idea was madness. Back at the turn of the
century—in the early days of genetic research—scientists combined a rabbit’s
DNA with that of a phosphorescent jellyfish, creating the first in a horrible
line of glow-in-the-dark pets. Ever since the Human Genome Project database
became public, legitimate researchers had to fight the public image of being
mad scientists.

She suddenly saw
her former boss in a different light. He was success-oriented, of course, which
was why she came to work for him. Like most Type-A personalities he also had
difficulty accepting failure, but this Chimera work showed that he flat-out
refused to accept it, even at the expense of common sense.

I’m just like
him
,
she realized with a start,
and heading down the very same road.
Could
denying your own failures blind a person so completely from the truth?

Failure is a
part of life
,
a voice in her head told her.
Knowing it and embracing it is how we learn
.
It’s how we evolve into something better
. The voice was her mother’s, or
maybe her own. Either way, she knew it to be the truth—one that both she and
Mathew Grey had refused to accept.

A small flashing
message on the display screen caught her attention. It read, “Unauthorized access
in progress— Wildfire initiated.”

Before she could
wonder what ‘Wildfire’ meant, she heard a strange gurgling sound coming from
the Fluidal computer. She looked toward it and saw that the once-green liquid
inside the tube had darkened and turned a dull gray. It now looked like a solid
metal tower.

This isn’t right
, she thought
just as the metal tower began to sag. Streams of thick gray liquid began
flowing down the sides of the tower and across the floor. What’s going on? As
she backed away from the material, she noticed that the liquid wasn’t expanding
uniformly. It was reaching out tendrils and pulling itself along the floor. It
looked alive.

“Gray goo,” she
said aloud. Carbon-eating nanobugs. She looked toward the exit and saw that it
was too late—the goo had already cut off her only escape route. The river of
microscopic machines had sealed her in and now moved directly toward her.

She ran inside
the Cartography room and sealed the door. Carbon-based nanobugs consumed
carbon, Alek had told her. Just like most of the ship, her body was made out of
carbon, even if it was just an Avatar and the carbon was digital. If the bugs
touched her, they would consume her, and quite possibly, she would die in the
process.

She looked
around the room for another way out, even though she knew there was none. The
Cartography room had only one exit, and that was back in the now-flooded main
room. She heard a hissing sound and turned to see the door beginning to melt
near the bottom. She knew she probably had only a few minutes left of her life,
but her thoughts jumped to Alek. Was he all right?

The door finally
gave way at the bottom and the nanobug mass flowed into the room. Maya jumped
up onto one of the holographic display tables just before the substance touched
her feet. It rapidly covered the floor and began to climb the walls. They had
surrounded her and she had nowhere else to run.

She looked above
her. A light fixture hung over a meter above her head. There was no way for her
to reach it. She looked back down just as the gray goo crawled over the edges
of the table.

She screamed and
jumped straight up with all of her strength. Her fingers touched the wire mesh
of the overhead light and she grabbed on tight. The mesh was hot and her fingers
felt like they were being seared by the light, but she hung on.

Below her, the
table was already covered and being pulled down into the goo. She looked all
around her. The walls were covered and the goo was now creeping along the
ceiling toward her. She thought about just letting go. How much would it hurt?
How long would the pain last?

A tendril of goo
on one of the walls reached out for her. She instinctively kicked it and was surprised
when it broke off and fell to the floor. She looked down at her foot. The
nanobugs in the goo should’ve attached themselves to her foot and begun eating.
Maybe she was lucky, she thought. Maybe it had happened too fast for the
nanobugs to grab hold.

Another tendril
reached out for her. She kicked it with her other foot, this time more gently.
It pulled back into the approaching mass. The nanobugs should’ve grabbed her
that time, she realized.
What’s going on?

“Silicon,” she
said aloud. “You bastards eat carbon and my Omnisuit’s made of silicon.” More
than that, she realized, it’s made of silicon nanobots.

She looked at
the floor beneath her. It seemed to be alive. Alive and hungry. In its current
configuration, her suit didn’t cover her face or hands, so she would have to be
careful not to fall.

She released her
grip on the light and dropped to the floor. She landed on her feet, but then
fell to her knees. She almost reached her hands out to balance herself, but
stopped just in time. She was correct—the carbon-nanobugs surrounding her feet
were unable to get past the silicon in her Omnisuit. How long her suit would
protect her was anyone’s guess, but she certainly wasn’t going to wait around
to find out.

She began moving
cautiously toward the door, which the goo had now completely dissolved. It felt
like she was wading through a thick carpet of moving snakes. The inside of the
computer center was now a solid gray mass, and she could see holes opening in
the walls as the nanobug machines pulled the carbon atoms out of the steel,
feeding its unstoppable need to grow and reproduce.

She found a
large opening in the wall near the sealed door and climbed through it, being
careful not to touch anything with her exposed hands. The gray mass had already
made it halfway down the hall in both directions. She headed in the direction
of the hangar, pulling her legs along as if she was walking in deep mud.

At last, she saw
the edge of the expanding mass just ahead of her, moving steadily down the
hall. When she finally stepped out of the goo and onto solid floor, she began
to run as fast as she could. If Alek’s story about gray-goo was correct, then
these carbon-eating nanobugs would be reproducing exponentially. That meant
that they would soon devour the entire ship, and eventually the entire world.

This is Mathew’s
doing,
she thought as she ran,
some sort of failsafe device to keep his work secret
.
Under normal conditions, deleting a simulated world would have less than dire
consequences. However, since both she and Alek were unable to leave this world,
the situation was exceptionally dire.

She realized the
fastest way out of the ship was one floor up on the Hangar deck. She sprinted
up a flight of spiral stairs and bolted through one of the open airlock doors.
She stopped in her tracks when she saw a woman sitting on top of a wrecked Dragon
on the far side of the room. She appeared to be naked and covered head to foot
in some sort of green paint. Her hair was the color of pure copper.

One of the
locals, she guessed. Must have wandered into the hangar after the crash, took
off her clothing, and then painted herself green. Real people did strange
things when stressed beyond their breaking point, so why not simulated people.
Human-modeled programming was probably too good at times, she realized. Digital
people should not have to suffer like this.

The woman slid
down from her perch and approached Maya, staring at her with a puzzled look on
her face. She was beautiful, Maya thought, but the color of her skin wasn’t
right. The green was not paint, she now realized. Her skin was almost
translucent and there were patterns woven deep into her flesh, almost like
fabric. Almost like Javid’s, she realized. Could this be another Sentinel?

The woman looked
down at Maya’s body and then reached out and touched her lower abdomen. Maya
stood there for a moment, shocked at the woman’s actions. She was about to push
her hand away when she felt a warm tickle of energy surge from the woman’s hand
and into her body. It felt wonderful.

Time seemed to
stop and all thoughts of the carbon-eating nanobugs lifted from her mind and
floated away. She was keenly aware of the woman’s nudity, and it too, felt
incredible. She felt herself leaning toward the woman, her lips opening
slightly.

“No,” she said,
stepping back from the stranger. As soon as the woman’s hand left her stomach,
the feeling that had almost overwhelmed her was gone.

“You carry the
Gift,” the woman said. Her voice sounded unreal, almost as if flutes were playing
in the background.

“Gift?” Maya
asked as she looked down at her stomach and then back up at the woman. “I don’t
understand.”

“You carry the
Gift,” the woman repeated. “I have to protect the Gift, because it will save us
all.” She swept her hands around the room.

Maya glanced
over the woman’s shoulder, and for a moment, she thought she saw people behind
her. Hundreds of them, crowded all around her. She could see right through
them. Ghosts, she thought. She blinked once and they were gone.

The woman
reached for her abdomen again, and this time, Maya didn’t try to stop her. As
she made contact, Maya heard flutes playing and her body vibrated to the
strange music. She looked down and saw the woman’s green hand buried up to the
wrist inside her body. How was that possible? A vision appeared in front of
her, blocking out everything in the room. It was her own body.

The view before
her began slicing through layers of skin and muscle. It was like one of the
surgical simulations she worked with back in college. The only difference was
that this body was hers.

The view stopped
in an area she recognized immediately. It was her uterus. She recognized the
scar tissue on the right fallopian tube from the surgery she had years before.

The image then
sliced through the uterine wall and then increased magnification. She could see
a small sphere, half buried and growing on the inner surface. Inside the
sphere, she saw cells dividing and multiplying. The sphere was alive.