CODE ELDRITCH

Chapter XVII

 The Ghost

I was fuming or close enough when I left The Official's nook in Processing and returned to the living spaces section. After my bar round with Roe the same night, I'd taken to pacing the windowed portion of the floor (that wasn't covered in slowly expanding green overgrowths) to calm down, get a moment's reprieve for my stressed-out psyche, and I was doing the same now.

As far as these things go, I'd say I'm pretty quick on the trigger when it comes to calling someone a shithead. But this guy...

I was mumbling TO's words to myself in the best mockery I could conjure up. Whatever he had really wanted from me, it was clear when I left that neither of us had gotten it. Test results this, test results that. I would have wanted to speak to Dr. Martha, have her walk me through some of the information. Blood type, white blood cell content, iron and zinc levels, those were the basics. But the genetics, the words I didn't half-recognize, all the categories titled CRISPR/CAS9 and nonsensical suffixes? I had a sense they'd meant to tell me that no, I wasn't running any risk of infection, I was 100% me, but it took more than numbers and code on a paper to do that.

My room, 84-04, was situated at an angle from the elevators that demanded I take a detour. A portion of the floor was barricaded off for renovations, so going the long way around was the only way to get from point A (being the space with a view) to point B (the space with no view but also my bed). At this time of the day, or rather night, there weren't really any people out.

I nodded back to one person on a bench in front of one of the corner windows, beginning to give way to creeping green, the only other human being I saw after exiting the elevator.

It was easy to imagine that the CCTEA had some other plot in mind for guaranteeing my cooperation. If that sounds weird, it's because I'm retroactively justifying acting like I did. Rosewall says the victorious theory is that EAs have some intuitive understanding of their role as apex... things. By extension, so do POs. Polar bears have some intuitive understanding (or automatic care for) ecosystems, knowing that if they eat too much now they're not eating at all next year. So do bees, and spiders, and...

Okay, maybe that's a bad analogy. I don't think any of those examples are actually true. That theory I was talking about holds that awakening as a PO kind of instills a certain feeling of import in you, whether you like it or not. That somehow tells you that, even before someone sweeps in to upend your life, there's something more waiting for you. A king won't be surprised when someone bends the knee. A wolf won't be surprised when the rabbit dies of fright. A PO, by that same logic, does not bat an eye at the notion of cosmic significance (or something). It is a natural progression from whatever came before, no matter what that whatever actually was.

Remember, I thought I was a store clerk and university drop-out with a sore relation to my family. Hardly glorious, hardly speaking to a significant future.

But here we are, writing this in a cell after almost changing the world.

What followed was an additional round of examinations and interviews aimed at A: understanding the nature of what we'd been through in the Punta Curiñanco, or what the doctors now sweepingly referred to as the 'Leak site', and B: figuring out Markovitz's role. And of course C, which they made sure not to mention to me, which concerned mapping me, specifically. What had the PO's presence meant for the assignment's results? What was Royal's influence on the region, the Clearing, the Aberration itself? Did I bring in the wave, or did SB-01?

They had me sit in on an interview with some woman whose face I didn't recognize. High cheekbones, bright-blue eyes, neatly tied ponytail straddling the line between brown and black. Very clean. I would call her sterile, actually. The man opposite her, in nondescript CCTEA uniform, looked worse for the wear. By the digital stopwatch ticking along on the table next to the recording equipment, they had been at it for some six hours.