The Fourth Layer by Boyd Craven Jr & H L Macfarlane

Author:Boyd Craven Jr & H L Macfarlane [Craven, Boyd Jr & Macfarlane, H L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-25T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

South Carolina

Clemson’s Forensic Genetics Lab

It had been two weeks since Hannah jumped on a flight over to MIT and, in the process, changed her life—and herself.

She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Right now she was bordering somewhere between intrigued and terrified. It was an odd, unsettling place to be. Hannah had grown accustomed to the voice in her head that did not belong to her, if only because it refused to disappear. She found that, so long as she talked back to it, the voice remained friendly and unassuming. It was only when she ignored it that it grew more insistent.

It must be Zeus, Hannah concluded on more than one occasion. It must be. It’s learning everything about me. And everything I see, and hear, and touch, and everyone I talk to. Everything.

It learned fast.

Hannah barely understood computer networks on the best of days—it was not a subject that had ever piqued her attention. Now, especially with the rise of synthetic biology, she sincerely wished she had a few years of proper experience working with networks and circuits and interfaces. For if she did then she could understand how Zeus came to be and, in turn, just what the hell was going on with her.

It wasn’t that the MIT team hadn’t tried to explain it to her. Of course they had. But they’d explained it to Hannah in the simplest terms possible and that wasn’t what she needed. Hannah needed to understand exactly how Zeus made every decision for the nanobots in her system. Where it chose to direct them after Hannah and Cas’ team had fed the choker interface the simple orders of search and repair. What was useful? What was dispensable? Clearly the system didn’t know her tattoos were deliberate; it viewed them as damaged skin cells and that was it.

So it can’t be that aware, she thought, although it knows much more about life now than it did two weeks ago. It might now know what tattoos are and wouldn’t ‘fix’ them anymore. But that’s conjecture.

‘Indeed.’

“Be quiet.”

If disembodied voices could laugh then Hannah was sure this one was. She shook her head, for all the good it would do. She was currently doing actual lab work—running repeats of her initial nanobot experiments in mice for the sake of a larger sample size—while waiting for a message from Peter that the next video call had been organized. Hannah had been particularly careful with the way she spoke to the man ever since the voice in her head had begun making comments about him.

‘But you like him. And he likes you? Why not pursue a relationship? I do not understand you.’

And that was the crux of the matter for Hannah; part of her did not want this computer program understanding each and every part of her. If she could prevent its pursuit of knowledge with as simple a move as keeping Peter at bay, then so be it.

Even if she did like him.

Hannah risked a glance towards her supervisor’s office.

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