Fratricide

8: Cascade

When Daniel caught his breath he picked up his assault rifle and climbed the stairwell inside the apartment building to the rooftop. There he took in the breadth of the city and the spiraling smoke columns gently rising from the skeletons of fallen rigs. He made a call to Control.

"D-C9330, receiving."

"I have an intel packet awaiting transfer; possible evidence of gene hacking."

A pause. "Packet received. Await further instruction."

Daniel sighed, he could count on that taking a few minutes. All soldiers were required to immediately call in evidence of hackers, he just never thought he would be one who had to. Who knows how deep into military protocol he was going to get on this one. If he was right, and he wasn't sure how he could possibly be wrong, then the strategic approach to quelling the rebellion was going to change dramatically.

He still couldn't believe it. Biohacks had been outlawed by Congress decades earlier and cases since then had been extremely rare and minor. The cautionary tale of Prometheus, back when Congress had been composed of twenty-eight worlds, was a staple of elementary education on all colony worlds.

Daniel remembered those classes vividly; the holographic images of people bent and contorted at disturbing angles, a natural result of the reprogramming of DNA that caused significant redistribution of bodily structures. Bones dissolved and reformed to thicken other skeletal regions. There was an inevitable loss of humanity that followed the treatments. When they started to look less and less human their behavior eventually followed suit. The images horrified him at the time. He was a child learning that monsters were actually real.

He remembered seeing a man being lifted out of a cage, his hair a long and knotted mass. When they put him down he was nearly prostrate on the floor, no longer a biped but close to the ground, walking with eight appendages bent like the limbs of a spider. His face had bony protrusions piercing the skin and lesions covering his entire body as a result of insufficient nutrition to keep up with the radical transformation.

The memory gave Daniel chills. To see a person lose their humanity for the sake of an ill-conceived notion; the human form could be improved upon! It was a travesty. The man was in terrible pain, he could not speak, he could not stand, it was an unspeakably miserable way to live; to die. Savages, Daniel thought. The testing had been so widespread and so well-received by the Promethean communities that virtually every citizen had indulged in the practice to some degree. Faced with the prospect of having altered genetics enter the main gene pool on other worlds via travel and immigration, the planet was quarantined.

That was, until a few years later. When ships were discovered to have been sent out to gather resources from neighboring moons and systems outside the designated quarantine zone to fuel their perverted lifestyle. "Perfect functionality" they called it. That's when the CCC was sent in. A few atmospheric destabilizers later, the radiation exposure became so profound the surface was virtually sterilized of all life. The planet was burned over, a poignant end for the people of Prometheus. A harsh but necessary measure if it meant preserving the human genome.

Daniel's intercom clicked. It blared static for a few seconds until a voice broke through. It was directed to all battalions on all channels.

"Be advised, strong evidence of biohacking reported in combat zones. Accept surrender and take prisoners wherever possible to assist the ongoing investigation. Current objectives remain operational until further notice. Over and out."

Daniel released a breath he hadn't noticed he'd been holding. His hands were shaking. Prometheus was a historical anomaly, the true extent of the mutative technology was still unknown. Why they opted for a suicidal breach of their quarantine for the sake of further savagery was still a mystery. They spat in the face of Congressional mercy for nothing. How their influence had traveled to Aurora was anyone's guess.