Chapter 55: Chapter 55: Not Botany

It should not have been a surprise. The experiments that were to be burned still concerned me. But the fact that the man running the lab next door to mine was colluding somehow with the Station Master was not something I expected to see.

In retrospect, it was obvious. We were all isolated, true. But there were hints. The multiple layers of security. The unexpectedly big lab, especially large for a space station. The publicity cases, often children, that I was directed to attend to.

Nanite research was expensive. The imaging technology in my lab was particularly rare if not completely unique after all the modifications I made. The combat suit research had to be similar, as the suits themselves could easily cost as much as a shuttle craft.

But botany research? I had not so much as questioned it before. The gene wars left us a legacy of biotech that brought custom body modification within reach of the common man. Custom modified ornamental plants were sold by boutique shops here on the station.

It did not make sense. This lab was held in the deepest layer of security along with my own. The study of plants did not rate on the same scale, not when one considered the potential power and wealth that could come with newer nanite technologies.

It occurred to me that Doctor Sorle could be still alive out there somewhere. The Station Master too. The very thought of the man made my fists clench reflexively, my heart rate accelerating. Images of little space suits with shattered visors were newer memories that flitted across my consciousness like ghosts.

They joined the faces of the young men and women that I’d failed to save over the years. The ones that had died in the pods as the power failed were a faceless crowd, unknown but not forgotten.

Never forgotten.

Doctor Sorle and the Station Master fled and left everyone else to die. That could not be neglected either.

The terminal offered up more than that one, damning message. Far more. Doctor Sorle’s records held summaries of the research that the other scientists were studying before the collapse.

Weapon systems. These were the purview of the balding little man who had bragged about his work on the combat suit grips. Some of his weapons were even now installed on the combat suit that Sam piloted. Those could be useful.

More for the engineers in our group, though. I could glimpse a few hints of possibility from the blueprints and summaries. They could understand far more, particularly Sam. His easy understanding of everything from the power system infrastructure to the combat suit marked him as far more than the simple, boyish character he often portrayed.

The next tab showed a dark haired woman with a narrow face and piercing red eyes. She worked in the second section of the lab researching more covert technologies. Spy tools. Simple nanite boosted constructs to defeat scans, and even visual observation. Temporary surface DNA spoofing. Microhacker hardware. Sabotage. With the collapse, this did not seem like something we needed.

There was even one lab with two researchers devoted entirely to gossip. Well, not precisely gossip. Industrial secrets, blackmail, spying and sabotage. No actual research was being done, but they were a sort of hub that collected and collated intelligence on everyone from governmental entities to tech corporations.

There was even a section devoted to creating and spreading rumor that would benefit Walker or harm others. The only distinction made between allies and enemies was that the former did not seem to have as much active sabotage enacted against them- the company was spying on everyone it could.

Then there were the personnel files. Most of the scientists and researchers were older, cultivated from within the company that ran Walker and other stations. Each one had a section that lined out how they were to be “handled.”

The woman developing spy tools had a child. The child’s minder while the woman was at work in the lab was a plant, listed as a loyal employee who would not flinch at using the child as a tool to control the woman if necessary. The man working on combat suits had a predilection for harming his sexual partners. Reading between the lines, the company had been supplying him with the occasional person that “would not be missed.”

My own profile showed up at the end of the list.

“No family. Early life unclear. Shows up in the system at age 10 where he tested in the top 10% of all students in his age block. No significant social contacts. Psych profile does not indicate complete psychopathy, but some elements are present. Emotional response to social cues is blunted, and nearly nonexistent when immersed in a fugue.

“No response to sexual advances of either gender, no positive response to the pain of others. No exploitable habits.

“Recommend to keep this one dark. His pride should prove enough of a handle to control him, and we can’t afford to let this one go to anyone else. His initial thesis and research put him in the top thirty nanite researchers already. If we can find a way to replicate his control method the profits could be significant.

“Demonstrated narcissism and obsessive tendencies present no difficulty to the degree he has expressed them. The main danger to us is the man’s unceasing and insatiable curiosity. Fortunately, his focus appears to be on his research for now. Keep feeding him intractable problems and demand miracles. Use for PR regularly as this will help keep him distracted. Do nothing to arouse his curiosity towards the other projects. This should be simple enough considering his anti-social tendencies.”

There was more, indicating possible control methods should I show evidence of becoming a threat. Those boiled down to simple chemical influence introduced into my meals, a simple matter considering my eating habits.

There were other tabs with more detailed analysis. There were brain scans that I hadn’t authorized. Several overtures were made to ascertain just how loyal I was to the company, and whether or not I could be swayed by bribes, gifts, or sexual favors, most of which I could not recall even with the evidence right in front of me.

Then I found my research tab. I could feel my heart rate increase as my jaw clenched.

“Fundamental control method still non-reproducible. Experiment with wild nanites successful. Reproduction of nanites completed in over 90% of cases after harvesting. Translation protocols ineffective. Implantation successful in 13 cases, partial successes in 137, failures in 4,331.”

Implantation.

They took the wild nanites that I had carefully harvested from my patients. The ones I’d preserved for study purposes to see if there was a way for me to prevent anyone else from being harmed by them. Then they had to carefully feed them so that they would replicate in a controlled setting without devouring themselves.

And then they had infected other people with them.

The same horrors that came to my doorstep in the shattered and broken bodies of my patients, they had gone on to experiment with reintroducing them into healthy people.

Not just once or twice.

Thousands of times.

Against the backdrop of the current situation it should not have mattered. Billions of people were dead or infected, now hunting the lives of their former friends, family, and random researchers on abandoned space stations.

These were just a few thousand souls. Far less than the population of Walker station. Less even than some of the larger space going vessels, back when such things were common, before the collapse.

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But they were mine.

I was isolated the wild nanites.

I extracted them.

I studied them.

In some cases, I was able to remove or suppress them or teach the patient to adapt to them if suppression was not possible. Those were my successes. Those patients lived. Some were even to return to a semblance of normal life, without the need for regular management of their nanite issues.

Just a moment ago just seeing the message from the Station Master angered me. That feeling was still there. Now it had company.

If Doctor Sorle or anyone else that had a hand in the torture and murder of all those people who had suffered and died during those experiments based on my research...

A quick death might be too kind for them.

I closed the terminal. Several long minutes of breathing exercises helped to bring not peace, but focus back to me.

The psychological evaluation and invasive scans they had of me missed that part. Wrath came easily to me. Too easily. The monks had taught me methods to channel and control my anger into productive means. Anger had its say. It did not have to control me. I breathed and repeated that mantra. My heart rate finally slowed, my fingers unclenched.

I reopened the terminal. Then I copied everything in it to several places. I put the invasive personal files aside in a secure drive. Then, as I was about to close the research screen, something caught my eye.

Doctor Sorle did not have a file in the research screen.

That seemed like a rather obvious omission. There wasn’t even a file for the fake research on plants or the request he had to modify the algae matrices. He kept tabs on all the other labs and researchers, but didn’t keep notes on his own research? Unlikely.

Where would he keep his own research if not on his own protected terminal?

He could have hidden the files in the terminal somehow. But I was no hacker. No more than I was a doctor, or an engineer. I was a researcher with a talent for nanite control.

That would have to do.

Doctor Sorle’s personal space was not cramped in the least. One wall was transparent, though there was a panel that could cause the surface to go opaque at a touch. There was enough floor space to park a small station runner if one could be disassembled and rebuilt inside, even with the existing furniture.

Two walls faced into the lab. Starting with the closest control panel I sent threads of nanites to explore the system network. Information, control, and power pathways spread out in a web that my nanites could only see small parts of, at least until they grew and spread enough.

It was well hidden. At least, from most normal eyes it would be. The surface of the wall was completely unblemished. The control was similarly hidden. Unpowered, it would not even register under most scans due to the dense material and lack of seams.

Powering the switch caused the door seam to break. It swung open an inch, just to the right of the bed. Doors were meant to be opened. Too bad for Doctor Sorle’s privacy, he had not made the adjustments necessary to keep me out once I was inside this room, as he had the main lab doors.

Raspberry woke up as I moved to enter the secret room. This time I was able to distract her with a new bottle before she could bonk me with the empty. She did so anyway, then accepted the new bottle as her due.

The inside was set up like an airlock. There were not space suits inside, though. These were similar. Full coverage, independent air supply, heavy duty protection otherwise. They were to prevent even the smallest iota of poisonous or infectious agents to enter, and the gear was made for the extremely paranoid.

I could take a hint.

The suit was not comfortable at all. It pinched tight basically everywhere, ensuring positive contact in places I was not used to having gripped so firmly. Raspberry would not fit inside the new suit and so had to wait in the apartment, much to her vocal displeasure.

The other door of the airlock led into a familiar looking but much smaller decontamination chamber, this one made for only a single person. Only this time when I hit the control to start the cycle the entire chamber began flooding.

Seemingly endless gallons of greenish fluid dumped into the chamber, rapidly coming up to my knees. The control panel indicated that the process would take only a few minutes. Full immersion decon was what it was called.

These were popular in holodramas that I’d seen in passing. In the stories, they’d been used as torture devices or to dispose of inconvenient corpses. The fluid was often said to be some kind of super solvent, capable of rendering all live into formless goo that drained into an incinerator, never to be seen again. It was supposed to be a perfect way to dispose of a body without anyone being able to find it.

In my studies, I learned that such things had been more commonly used in the past to fight some of the worst and nastiest viruses and bacteria developed during the gene wars.

The fluid nearly filled the chamber. Then it began to agitate, spinning and causing me to tumble with the force of it. Then it filled completely. The timer on the panel ticked down slowly. After a full minute, the fluid began to rapidly drain.

If so much as a speck of biological material had been on the suit, the fluid would have covered it. Maybe it really was a kind of super solvent or disinfectant. If the diseases that nearly brought down civilization once were in that room before the zombie virus actually did it, the precaution might make a sort of sense.

The fluid finally drained away. With the cycle complete, the door opened at my touch. The room it revealed stretched long to either side, but was only about twenty feet deep. The bulkheads on both sides were full of cells. Transparent walls separated the contents of the cells from the long hallway.

Each one was full of monsters.

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