Chapter 54: Chapter 54: Botany

The last time I had come this way, zombies had been chasing me. This time it looked like they’d left. Back down to the bottom of the maintenance shaft perhaps. Why did they stay down there? Why did zombies nest where they did, and why did they make nests at all?

Was there some primitive psychology that drove them? They moved, hunted, vocalized, and seemed to have some rudimentary form of cooperation. I’d seen a zombie giant throw things before, but they didn’t seem to have the concept of tools as such.

The nanites and the biological infection that created zombies, it did not appear to be random. A confluence of wild mutations seemed extremely unlikely to have created such a perfect machine to destroy terrestrial civilization.

These thoughts went round and round in my head as I picked my way across the shattered bulkheads. The zombies that I’d shot and stabbed were still there, tangled up in the scrap. The tentacled zombie spun slowly, its bulky exoskeleton rig making it distinct from the others.

It also had a familiar handle sticking out of its chest. The vibroknife that I first grabbed out of the contraband crate in Security, back when I was worried about zombies getting too close to shoot at. Lately the only times I went unarmed were uncomfortable. Having both a gun and an knife on my person felt like being properly dressed.

A simple nanite researcher did not feel the need to be armed at all times. That’s all I had been, before the collapse. No distracting social life. No hobbies. No deviation from my research. Now it seemed I was getting constantly distracted.

No zombies appeared to have crept up on me during my distraction. This part of the station seemed to be well and truly dead for now. The door to the cafeteria appeared undisturbed as well. I put the bar back in place.

The cafeteria looked clean. I hadn’t noted it before, but either the little maintenance bots had come at some point or one of the others found a maintenance closet. There was no sign of the blood or bullet shredded bodies that should have been here otherwise. That was a good thing for sanitary purposes.

The first zombie that I killed was gone, too. Little by little this part of the station was beginning to look less like post apocalyptic squalor and more like a proper space station again.

It could just as easily return to a blood and gore splattered mess in an instant. It had before, in Security where the bots had tidied things up time and again only to be explosively redecorated with formerly human fluids and bits of meat.

There would be more of that in the future, if we all survived.

The entrance to Doctor Sorle’s lab showed the evidence of Quenton’s labors. Mud and plant debris littered the soil covered deck as a few of the Doctor’s specialized bots attempted to tidy things up. I could see the gap in the vegetation where the two young men had begun clearing a way to the far bulkhead, but they appeared to have made little progress.

Vines and wood proved to be no obstacle to the vibroknife. In truth I was more worried about accidentally cutting into a bulkhead than getting it stuck in a tree. The loose soil proved to be the most dangerous part as I nearly slipped several times.

Raspberry attempted to catch one of the little flying machines that flitted their way through the tangled vines and woody plants. It easily bobbed out of her way again and again as she leapt at it. Her continued failure did not appear to be a deterrent.

After cutting my way through nearly twice the depth of my lab I finally found the far bulkhead. The vines had grown up it, but some coating on the metal kept them from attaching directly to it. That made it easier to clear them away once cut.

It took me a further ten minutes of cutting and clearing to find the door. Inside was a familiar looking decontamination room. Instead of high pressure soapy water though, a foggy green colored mist poured from vents along the ceiling. The mud and plant debris that I’d picked up seemed to melt away.

Raspberry tried to lick the mist as it settled onto her fur. It didn’t appear to hurt either of us as we breathed it in.

The cleansing cycle ended after a few moments. My damp clothes quickly dried, clean once again. It likely was not what Vera or the others would consider a “proper shower,” but it was useful nonetheless.

The interior door opened into what looked like something between an office, a laboratory, and an apartment. There were several familiar diagnostic stations and specimen analysis trays close to the door. Small seedlings could be seen within stasis fields along with a few odd looking fruits. Or vegetables.

One looked like a fuzzy tomato, only it was the size of a suit helmet. Others were even less recognizable, like the one that looked like worms growing out of a cube of jello. Most were the more familiar looking grains and root vegetables though.

Beyond the lab facility looked to be a glass walled room. Inside was a bed, several grav chairs, a large sofa, a kitchen area, and what was probably a bathroom beyond that. The furniture all looked to be hardwoods and leather, probably extremely expensive. I wasn’t sure of that, though. My experience of what would constitute “luxury” was sharply limited.

On the far wall to my right was a monitoring station similar to the one found in the Security Chief’s office, but this one was continually active. Instead of camera feeds there were a multitude of graphs, reports, and a long unanswered message queue.

None of the screens showed the warning that I’d seen outside the lab, though. Curious, I inspected the alerts and messages that could be seen without touching the station first. Most were status updates on the experiment floor, which I took to be the wild growth outside. All of these had relatively mild warnings about nutrient depletion, plant death, uncollected debris, and unsafe walkways.

One of the most repeated alerts was the maintenance/clearing routine which was listed as several years overdue. That appeared to be an understatement, if anything.

The message queue turned out to be a list of notices of past due reports. They all had predictably corporate language, noting violations of subparagraph C of list F12 over and over again. Attendance and failure to report on time. Official actions needed.

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Was Doctor Sorle the supervisor for the lab section? I hadn’t had much contact with my superiors. Any, really. My paychecks came on time. My reports went out on time. I’d even filed reports while the rest of the station fell into chaos. My last report was a notice for vacation time. I’d accrued several years worth of accumulated leave.

Doctor Sorle was probably dead. Or a zombie. Roaming out there in the halls somewhere, or trapped somewhere in here. I looked around again. No zombies. Still, it would be better to check thoroughly.

The door to the apartment opened at my touch. The inside smelled faintly like citrus.

“Welcome guest. Doctor Sorle is currently busy and has been notified of your arrival. Please make yourself comfortable until he arrives.”

I recognized that voice. It was the same one that gave station announcements and official messages.

“I received warning of a possible containment breach and have come to render aid. Do you have any information on the possible breach?”

The voice only repeated its message. The bathroom turned out to be in character with the apartment, large and clean and full of polished metals. There was an actual shower here. And a tub large enough to fit a good eight people. Likely twelve if they were not particularly shy. But no Doctor Sorle.

The rest of the apartment held no more clues. The closet held suits for a shorter, thicker waisted man. The emergency locker was hidden behind a false but clearly labeled panel. The supplies inside were unused. The desk was empty, and the desk terminal locked.

I went back to the monitoring station. This time I scrolled through the messages and alerts, but there was nothing different. There didn’t appear to be a timed delete on the message buffer, so it could go all the way back to before the collapse.

Along the way, I accidentally clicked on one of the maintenance messages. A popup appeared, asking to reactivate the maintenance/clearing routine. There didn’t appear to be a way to clear the annoying popup without ticking the box, so I did that. What was the worst that would happen? A virtual virus would be something of a novelty at this point.

A moment later there came a loud thump from behind me. A huge metal spider was skittering its way into the decontamination chamber. The door closed. Then another bot dropped from the ceiling, this one a lot chunkier. It looked like a mini tank without the gun. After another moment, it went into the decontamination chamber.

When the door closed this time, the telltale went red. I was locked in. The message bar above the door told me the experiment floor was off limits for the time being, until the maintenance/clearing routine was complete.

A new window opened on the monitoring station. It showed the experiment floor. I could actually see it now that one of the cameras had a clear view. The big spidery looking bot methodically demolished everything in sight. It sliced vines apart with ease, it diced trees into little chunks of wood, and the little tank bot just rolled along behind, scooping everything up. Occasionally it would spit out a dense looking block of vegetable matter. Then it stacked them once the first bulkhead got cleared.

I shook my head. All from one mistaken click. Though it might be handy for fighting zombies if it could be controlled or reprogrammed.

After several more minutes of searching I found the option to exclude the repeated warnings and alerts. Unfortunately, that turned out to be everything that had come up in the last seven years. The rest of the messages looked to be routine business from the experiment lab, new strains of ornamental botanicals and the like. Several dealt with proposed changes to the algae beds in the air scrubbers, all of which were denied by someone else up the corporate chain.

There was nothing on the containment breach. I checked the progress of the spider bot and found that the experiment floor was much larger than I’d expected. Even as quickly as it was going, it looked like I could be stuck in here for another hour or more. The progress bar that popped up when I clicked on the bot on the monitor was steadily progressing, but the size of the bar kept jumping up as the software recalculated.

Nothing in the lab or on the experiment floor appeared to be the source of the warning. None of the plants were even remotely dangerous except as a possible trip hazard if they were to, say, spend seven years without being properly maintained.

There was only one place left to check. Assuming that Doctor Sorle was not too paranoid.

Most terminal security had a bioprint lock. This was a hardware lockout, not a software one. Which meant that my nanites could open it, if it was there.

Doctor Sorle was paranoid. And given the fact that I was there in his office, attempting to get into his terminal without the standard password, somewhat justifiably so. The bioprint lock was disabled and disconnected. But paranoia is not always enough. He hadn’t removed the bioprint reader.

That was enough to give me access. The temporary bridge to complete the connection was not a simple thing to construct, though. It required delicate manipulation to link up all the pathways at once.

Fortunately there was nothing else urgently demanding my attention for once. The terminal powered on and the com tab was open. The message was short and to the point.

“Burn the experiments. Get to the Station Master’s office even if you have to shoot someone. WE ARE LEAVING BY 1345 LATEST. Be there or die here.”

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