Redemption by Steve Stanton

Author:Steve Stanton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Colin7’s wristband blinked a continual beacon of warning as he accompanied Niko home to her apartment and tried to settle her as best he could under strenuous circumstance. He made a quick and grateful escape and rushed down two floors to the neuroscience lab where the borrowed body of Phillip Davis lay surrounded by a circus of bioengineering equipment. A bank of red lights glared up from the monitors, dangerous data on the boards, unexplained anomalies in Phillip’s bioscans, raised lymphocyte count, fever, exotoxins, peptide levels cascading with dysfunction. It looked like some sort of virulent trauma, a sudden plague of immunodeficiency. What new madness was this?

Colin7 slouched into his work station, weary of the perpetual turmoil on this planet and the volatile emotions of the inhabitants. He felt like he was fighting a deliberate conspiracy against diabolic foes, grappling against chaos. And to what authority could he prepare his complaint? The collective unconscious mind of the Earthlings? The mysterious Source of the Eternals? His father and DNA progenitor, Colin Macpherson? No, he was on his own, the master of his fate on the treacherous extremities of science. He could expect no god before him and no angel guarding his rosy backside. This was just plain bad luck.

“There’s been a new development,” his father said as he sat up from the lab couch. “I’m going to need an upload out of this failing interface. You’ll have to go home to make the arrangements.”

Colin7 shuddered with foreboding. Home? Back through the Macpherson Doorway to Cromeus Signa? Phillip looked shrunken and sickly in green lab scrubs, his face dire. Matted wiry grey hair poked up below his throat, and a thin red plasma tube connected the stub of his left arm to the haematology equipment, an extension of his body into the machine. Colin7 tapped a keyboard to scroll through viewscreens filled with hazard. “Have you run diagnostics on this data?”

“I’m dying,” his father said.

A cold shock vibrated in his spine at the impossibility. The death of the eternal architect? The end of the Original upload? “There must be a mistake,” Colin7 said as he cycled through charts and microscope slides. There was something wrong with Phillip’s blood, no doubt about it. He magnified the image. Blood cells appeared to be exploding in showers of necrotic debris. Some invisible parasite was consuming them like birds feasting on the flesh of kings at the supper of Armageddon. Impossible!

“You must have heard that Helena Sharp passed away recently,” Phillip said.

“Yes, I saw the obituary on the V-net,” Colin7 said as he turned to face him. “Terrible tragedy for an Eternal.”

“She carried a synthetic virus that we developed offplanet.”

Another wave of panic coursed through Colin7. “What?”

“She was our first test subject. There was no indication of any problem.”

“A fake Eternal virus?”

Phillip scowled at his protestation. “It was an authentic carrier, as near as we could measure. We perfected it over several years of due diligence.”

“Did Helena know?”

Phillip shook scraggly grey curls. “No, that would have introduced an experimental bias.

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