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Somewhere aboard the Hub, Doctor Eliza Shrank sat on an ancient armchair in the cramped office she shared with her research-assistant. Shelves cluttered with binders, server-racks and white plastic jars with red screw-on caps lined every available inch of wall space, and heavy-duty cable criss-crossed the floor. She was staring at a holographic projection – grainy blue light hovering in the air between her and the unlit ceiling, tracing numbers, names and graphs, the feeble azure glow currently the only source of illumination in the cramped little room. She’d been staring at it for twenty minutes, trying to get it to stop bothering her, but it was not working. It was. Not. Working!
“Ian,” she asked, chewing on her lower lip. “What the hell happened to Test-group H, subject 36?”
Ian looked up from his tablet. He was too skinny for his height, with a face too narrow for its length, and hair too black for his paleness. His labcoat made him look like a stoppered beaker full of whole milk when standing upright, and seated at a desk, as he was now, his knees and elbows got everywhere.
“What?”
Doctor Shrank pointed at the display.
“Just look at this – we put this goop in five hundred people, and what do we have to show for it, mostly?”
Ian shrugged, sucking noisily on his teeth. “I mean…”
What they had to show for it was a bunch of dead guys, mostly. The stuff they were testing had been farmed out to them from somewhere higher up the Kaalakiota food-chain – it was a novel xenomaterial with the ability to rapidly construct highly robust biology-like systems when subjected to the right conditions. So, as was standard practice when results were demanded sooner than later, they had bought out the contracts – and accompanying fine-print consent for any medical procedures the employer deemed necessary – of a few hundred easily-missable planet-sider hospital patients and, test-subjects acquired, had let the mad science roll.
Some had gone violently insane, then spontaneously combusted after a brief burst of unnatural strength and vigor, but most had been overtaken by extremely rapid and invariably lethal physical mutations: cranial bifurcations, bizarre metallic plaques gumming up the organs and joints, patches of golden scale infiltrating the liver and brain, and rapid elongation of the shoulder-blades, cervical vertebrae and tailbone. In at least one case the autopsy had revealed systemic teratomas filled with serrated teeth and dozens of ruby-red eyes.
The really bizarre thing was that across the human and non-human-sophant test-groups, the results were practically identical.
Doctor Shrank pulled at her thick red curls and screwed her eyes shut out of sheer frustration. “Yeah. Exactly. It hasn’t really been subtle, has it? I mean, that one guy, his neck stretched out like a giraffe. I used to *like* giraffes. So why’s there no data on H-36? No autopsy report? All we’ve got for results in her file is ‘Checked Out’. What the hell does ‘Checked out’ mean? I mean, obviously she checked out – everyone in Test Group H checked out. Gruesomely! But that’s not exactly clinical, is it? ‘Deceased’ wouldn’t be much better, but at least it would be professional.”
Ian sidled up to her and peered at the data. He reached up and poked at the hologram, flicking over from the assembled data into peripheral bureaucratic medical records.
“Oh, I get it. See? She checked out of the hospital. Like, she left.”
The doctor, very slowly, sat up, then just as slowly, stood up. She adjusted her green, oversized cashmere sweater where it had bunched up around her narrow shoulders. She stared at the floating medical discharge forms, rendered in flickering blue light.
Out of the one-hundred human-beings in treatment group H, none of the other ninety-nine subjects had lasted more than twenty minutes after receiving the injection. H-36 had been discharged with a clean bill of health after two weeks.
The stuff they were dealing with was unbelievably potent. Normal concerns of toxicity or immunogenicity weren’t even present – whatever the golden goop was (and half of Shrank’s staff was occupied simply trying to answer that question at the most basic level) it seemed capable, once activated and transfected, of hijacking complex biological systems through a means not currently understood by science. If it didn’t seem so deadest on tearing those systems down in order to build…something, if its properties could be modulated and controlled, then it would probably be the greatest boon to medicine since the cortical backup.
There was simply no way there hadn’t been some effect.
“We need to call Corporate immediately.”
“Ian,” she asked, chewing on her lower lip. “What the hell happened to Test-group H, subject 36?”
Ian looked up from his tablet. He was too skinny for his height, with a face too narrow for its length, and hair too black for his paleness. His labcoat made him look like a stoppered beaker full of whole milk when standing upright, and seated at a desk, as he was now, his knees and elbows got everywhere.
“What?”
Doctor Shrank pointed at the display.
“Just look at this – we put this goop in five hundred people, and what do we have to show for it, mostly?”
Ian shrugged, sucking noisily on his teeth. “I mean…”
What they had to show for it was a bunch of dead guys, mostly. The stuff they were testing had been farmed out to them from somewhere higher up the Kaalakiota food-chain – it was a novel xenomaterial with the ability to rapidly construct highly robust biology-like systems when subjected to the right conditions. So, as was standard practice when results were demanded sooner than later, they had bought out the contracts – and accompanying fine-print consent for any medical procedures the employer deemed necessary – of a few hundred easily-missable planet-sider hospital patients and, test-subjects acquired, had let the mad science roll.
Some had gone violently insane, then spontaneously combusted after a brief burst of unnatural strength and vigor, but most had been overtaken by extremely rapid and invariably lethal physical mutations: cranial bifurcations, bizarre metallic plaques gumming up the organs and joints, patches of golden scale infiltrating the liver and brain, and rapid elongation of the shoulder-blades, cervical vertebrae and tailbone. In at least one case the autopsy had revealed systemic teratomas filled with serrated teeth and dozens of ruby-red eyes.
The really bizarre thing was that across the human and non-human-sophant test-groups, the results were practically identical.
Doctor Shrank pulled at her thick red curls and screwed her eyes shut out of sheer frustration. “Yeah. Exactly. It hasn’t really been subtle, has it? I mean, that one guy, his neck stretched out like a giraffe. I used to *like* giraffes. So why’s there no data on H-36? No autopsy report? All we’ve got for results in her file is ‘Checked Out’. What the hell does ‘Checked out’ mean? I mean, obviously she checked out – everyone in Test Group H checked out. Gruesomely! But that’s not exactly clinical, is it? ‘Deceased’ wouldn’t be much better, but at least it would be professional.”
Ian sidled up to her and peered at the data. He reached up and poked at the hologram, flicking over from the assembled data into peripheral bureaucratic medical records.
“Oh, I get it. See? She checked out of the hospital. Like, she left.”
The doctor, very slowly, sat up, then just as slowly, stood up. She adjusted her green, oversized cashmere sweater where it had bunched up around her narrow shoulders. She stared at the floating medical discharge forms, rendered in flickering blue light.
Out of the one-hundred human-beings in treatment group H, none of the other ninety-nine subjects had lasted more than twenty minutes after receiving the injection. H-36 had been discharged with a clean bill of health after two weeks.
The stuff they were dealing with was unbelievably potent. Normal concerns of toxicity or immunogenicity weren’t even present – whatever the golden goop was (and half of Shrank’s staff was occupied simply trying to answer that question at the most basic level) it seemed capable, once activated and transfected, of hijacking complex biological systems through a means not currently understood by science. If it didn’t seem so deadest on tearing those systems down in order to build…something, if its properties could be modulated and controlled, then it would probably be the greatest boon to medicine since the cortical backup.
There was simply no way there hadn’t been some effect.
“We need to call Corporate immediately.”
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