Episode 5 - The Tide Recedes, and What it Leaves Behind

  Chapter 42 - Operation: Somber Courage

  “We’re the biggest producers of organic acids in the Cooperative City, although it’s a struggle to get enough carbon as a feedstock,” explains the younger employee giving us a tour of the operations at Bio-Vat Labs.

  “The other challenge is electrons. After that, we’ve got yeast and bacterial strains that can produce almost any organics you want. We prioritize variety rather than scale on any particular commodity chemical, our employees are stacked with symbionts capable of separating matter including complex compounds instead of just raw elements,” adds a second more senior engineer, who has a well-groomed salt-and-pepper beard on his chin.

  “How are your raw materials imported? Do you trust your suppliers?” asks Rhett.

  “Carbon we get an allocation from the city scrubbers, occasionally imports to supplement, but not recently. We use raw symbiont power for most of the rest. Once we chemically synthesize feed compounds, the bacteria take it from there to develop the more complex compounds that we’ve secured manufacturing agreements with other companies at Cooperative for. We’ll produce anything someone is looking for; it’s part of being a member of the Cooperative.”

  “Hmm,” grunts Rhett.

  I half listen as I look down the aisles of bio-reactors - tall silo-like structures with walkways and pipes scaffolded around them like support exoskeletons. A few symbionts perch on the structures, feathers and gleaming pelts shining in bright viridian or muted ochres against the monotone steel structures.

  “We can’t figure it out from our own logs,” muses the older, bearded engineer giving us a tour. “Temperature spikes where there shouldn’t be symbionts or where heaters aren’t meant to be on. They keep on crashing a few of our most valuable reactors, forcing us to reset the populations within.”

  “Can we get a copy of the logs?” asks Rhett mildly, his hands in his pockets as he wanders next to the engineer, high-visibility vest pulled over his black shirt and black suit. It is fitted so precisely to his shoulders and waist that it has to be custom-made.

  I feel frumpy in comparison. I borrowed my suit from Nessa, and she’s almost a full head taller than me, let alone the differences in our figures. So I trail behind, letting Rhett do the talking. He and Shion always just fit in, confident voices never shaking, masks of indifference or professional interest always perfect. In Shion’s case, the masks are even wider in their variety: diligent soldier, surly management, rushed clerk, silent infiltrator. I’ve seen her records now, I’m surprised Regina took her out of the field.

  “We can send you a copy, but I’m not sure what you’ll be able to see that our specialists cannot,” replies the older engineer, a Foreman Hiram.

  “I’m not interested in the details of the logs so much as when things happen,” explains Rhett. “We’ll match it up with anything I can get out of your servers for myself.”

  “We have our own IT professionals,” snipes Foreman Hiram skeptically. “You’re so young, if you don’t mind my asking? I thought Aquila would send us professionals, not greenhorns. We might be small in the scheme of your clients, but we are still a paying client?”

  Rhett clears his throat, squaring his shoulders as he looks up at the taller engineer. “Executive Hawthorne, not greenhorn, thank you. And we are the correct agents for this job. If you disagree, you can take it up with your C-suite.”

  “Ah, yes… well,” stutters Foreman Hiram, eager to turn the conversation around now. “What else ?do you think you will need? I’ve been assigned to help you both for the next few days.”

  Rhett glances down at his tablet. The bandage on his face has been removed to reveal a startling pink scar with the pin-prick remnants of stitches on the side of his cheek.

  “Can you give us a tour of every entrance and exit, even small ones? Waste chutes, automated conveyors or transports between your district and any other district. Doesn’t matter how busy or quiet they are; I want to see them all. And the security measures in place. And I’ll want direct access to any central processing symbionts running the bioreactors or security infrastructure. I want maps too, known vulnerabilities you’ve already checked. I’ll want to see and touch it all,” instructs Rhett, briskly walking ahead between the yellow taped lines that mark the walkways through the bio-reactors.

  That is unusual.

  I don’t need to pause and look where Pooka does, switching my vision to his own eyes as he pads several feet behind us looking around for himself. He is watching the top of one bioreactor, staring at a symbiont that has its head cocked to one side watching us pass below. The body is that of a Lepus with long thin limbs, and distinct, tall pointed ears on a slim, alert face. But it is no ordinary Lepus. Reaching from the back of its head are two branching nine-pointed horns, like a Cervus.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  What is it? I ask.

  It is a sister, like myself.

  I don’t let my head turn as I pass beneath it, letting myself watch through Pooka’s eyes in my place.

  “Do you have a manifest of employees?” I ask aloud.

  Rhett pauses, stopping the engineers. Foreman Hiram hesitates. “Sorry, what?”

  “Do you have a list of employees? And their symbionts?” I repeat. Rhett narrows his eyes thoughtfully.

  “Of course.”

  “Get it for us,” demands Rhett, then he turns and keeps on walking.

  I hold back my gasp of awe as our guides open the doors to the central server room.

  The space is carefully insulated, sterility maintained via positive pressure and the fiddly clean suits we had to change into. Conduits of wire run to the center of the room where several branching columns support two gigantic structures within.

  Two waxen hives, teeming with thousands of swarming Apis.

  They have each built their hives between a network of floor-to-ceiling pillars and crossbeams that act to supplement the structure of the pendulous, layered galleries of the hives, supporting possible millions of tiny, hexagonal cells filled with yet more growing symbiont bodies. Woven into the wax by the symbionts are ribbons of colored plastic and thin flexible tapes of LEDs, likely used to provide visible structure to the mass for human eyes.

  The Apis fan their wings, cooling the interiors, or busy themselves streaming back and forth from the congregation of tiny bodies that are collected around the electronic platforms that provide the physical connection between the server-hives and the rest of Bio-Vats technological infrastructure. At the left hive, the Apis have a distinct green hue to the stripes on their abdomens. In the right hive, the Apis are dark ultramarine and black, with furred heads and thoraxes almost as plush as a mammal’s pelt.

  “These are your only two servers?” asks Rhett confidently, stepping forward and lifting his hand to touch a few unused symbiont platforms emerging from the hives. Pell walks down his arm, over the white sleeves of his clean suit, and touches the device with her front two legs, beginning a steady pulsing teal glow as she does so.

  “Yes, left runs our security, and right the bio-reactors,” says the younger engineer with us, who goes by Jefferson. Foreman Hiram had to leave for a short meeting.

  The door from the anteroom behind us opens, and another worker enters in a clean suit and approaches the hives. They disappear into the back behind the hanging galleries of wax and intricate ribbons.

  I circle around the room to follow, keen to see the hives from the other side. Mixed within the wires appear to be some silicone tubing, clear or tinted blue, with liquids passing down them like the lines used for IVs or medical equipment. Off one wall, a few peristaltic pumps are steadily spinning, dosing liquids deeper into the hives. The new worker stops here and spends several minutes studying the monitors around the pumps. I follow the silicone tubing with my eyes, then almost gasp with horror.

  Within the galleries of wax, a naked man is trapped.

  His arms are sprawled on either side, pinned between the folds of the hive. His hands are curled closed, the wax structure immobilizing them; his feet are suspended above the ground by the structure of the comb. He is unmoving, his mouth strained and gaping open where the combs of the hive intrude into the cavity. His teeth are dry and yellowed.

  On his face, into his nostrils, down his throat, the Apis climb. I watch one step across the milky surface of his sclera, and he does not blink when it does so. Several ?IV lines run to his arms and chest, taped to his brittle, yet still living, skin; feeding him with nutrient broths and liquids to barely sustain life.

  I watch in abject horror, and when one brown eye turns to look at me, I gasp and step backwards from the man’s line of sight, disappearing between the combs and colored ribbons just as he does for me. I follow the IV lines to the second hive, and cover my mouth to stifle my sudden nausea when I see a second naked man between the folds there too, his body curled instead into a fetal position in the center of his symbionts’ constructed cage, which is swirling and chaotic in its design compared to the neat, pendent galleries of the first.

  “This is why I choose to protect Aquila,” says Adrian in my ear. I haven’t said anything, but he must be able to see through the Vespa on my ear. “Death is a better fate than the life of hosts bound to eusocial symbionts, particularly those as productive as server-quality Apis species.”

  Rhett lifts his head as I complete my circle of the room, a grim expression on his face. Even the younger engineer seems a little pale, although he must have known what waited for us here.

  I watch the worker who came to inspect the fluid lines lean between the ribbon-marked galleries to take each host’s pulse, and stop to wipe some gunk from the eyes of the first man. Muscles in his face flinch as he shuts his eyes and lets the worker clean his face. He does not open his eyes again, the tips of his fingers twitching as a remnant sign of life.