The Mother Code by Carole Stivers

Author:Carole Stivers [Stivers, Carole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

IN THE CLUTTERED cave that was Mac’s Los Alamos office, James’s gaze traced the arc of Sara’s neck, the graceful curve of her jaw. In front of them, Kendra rifled through a series of menus on Mac’s computer screen, selecting the BotView data feed.

As part of a government effort to cut long-term energy costs, the XO-Bot building had been capable of sustaining life “off the grid,” collecting and storing its own power, since its initial construction two decades earlier. And though precious power and water still had to be monitored and conserved, the building now served their little group well. It was no mistake that New Dawn had been housed here, in a structure outfitted with massive solar panels and power storage walls, ventilated via a self-contained air filtration system, with water pumped from artesian wells in the nearby Valles Caldera via its own small water purification facility.

James focused on Mac’s screen, a series of empty fields waiting to be filled. Rick Blevins and his team of Hopi scouts in the Utah desert maintained contact with Los Alamos via a secure NSA satellite hookup. Hours ago, the general had called in with news of a crashed bot at the bottom of a narrow canyon, east of a place called Escalante. The climb down to the site was treacherous; according to Blevins, it might take a while.

James reached out to grasp Sara’s hand. In the past nine months, she’d endured enough pain for a lifetime. Unlike Rudy, Kendra, and Mac, unlike Blevins or even James himself, she’d had no time to come to grips with the reality of losing everything and everyone. She herself had almost been lost.

And she’d lost her baby—their son. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise; their child was of the old world, not immune to the plague that gripped the earth—and Sara herself was far too weak to bear a pregnancy. But it was a sorrow that neither of them had come prepared for. They’d buried the baby in a small plot visible from the window of their quarters at Los Alamos. “We’ll have the Gen5s soon,” he’d promised Sara. “Perfect, immune babies.” But since then, the sight of Sara staring out that window each morning, her hands clasped in her lap and her lower lip quivering, had become almost more than he could bear.

Still, they’d survived. Rudy had set up a C-343 synthesis operation at Los Alamos, a scaled-down version of the one destroyed at Fort Detrick. With it, he could produce enough of the antidote to replenish the existing inhaler units. Once a day, the Los Alamos survivors dutifully dosed themselves. And there was hope. The new sequence used for the antidote was the same as that engineered into the Gen5 embryos. If it afforded the survivors immunity to IC-NAN with no ill effects, perhaps the Gen5s could count on it too. James looked around the room. It might be safe, living out in the world. But except for the general, none of them had yet been ready to try that experiment.

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