Randall Meridian wakes to the sound of his datapod chirping. He looks at the status panel next to the door to his cabin, and below the Futuretech logo he reads:
CCSV Sterling Silver
Status:
Normal
1:15 AM
He curses quietly, and grabs the datapod off of his nightstand. The screen shows the smiling face of Saranna Beltrivus. He accepts the comm.
“What?” he says grumpily, his voice sounding thick.
“Come to my lab!” Saranna says, “I did it, and I need to show you.”
“Did what? You haven't even told me what you're working on anymore.”
“That's because it’s a secret,” Saranna says, exaggerating the words as if she was explaining something a child, “but it’s working now, so I want to show you.”
“It's one in the morning!”
“That's just ship time; it's lunchtime on Banks Station.”
“We left Banks two weeks ago.”
“Time is a state of mind, Randy!”
“So is annoyance. I'll come over in the morning... ship time!”
“You're going to come over now, or I'm going to come get you. You've got fifteen minutes.”
The datapod's screen changes to show that the comm has ended.
Cursing some more, Randall climbs out of bed. He knows Saranna will follow through with her threat if he does not go up to her lab.
He turns on the light, illuminating his practically closet-sized cabin. There's just room enough for his bed, night table, clothes cupboard, and a sink. Randall is too low in both rank and seniority to score a cabin with a private shower, toilet, and room to stretch his arms, but he is grateful to at least have private quarters.
Randall splashes water on his face, puts on the coveralls he wore the previous day, and heads for Saranna's laboratory.
Saranna and Randall are unlikely friends. With him in engineering and her in the science labs, they would rarely see each other in the normal course of events. If it weren't for Saranna's going to the wrong orientation when she started working for Futuretech Industries they might not have even ever met. She did though, and they became friends instantly.
The door to Saranna's lab slides open as Randall approaches, and Saranna strides out, white coat trailing behind her. She walks straight into Randall's chest, staggers back a step, and looks up at him, smiling.
“Ah, good,” she exclaims, “I was afraid you were going to make me come get you.”
Randall looks down at Saranna's face. The pale skin contrasting against her messy black hair makes her green eyes sparkle. While her hair is usually a mess, the dark circles under her eyes, and the redness surrounding the green in them tell him that she has not been sleeping.
“How long have you been up?” Randall asks, concerned.
“What time is it now?”
Randall pulls out his datapod, “one thirty-two.”
“Three days.”
“Sara, you can't keep doing that!”
“The stims say I can. Come in!”
Saranna grabs his hand in hers, and leads him into her lab. On most ships, someone like Randall would not be allowed into a science lab, but the captain of the Sterling Silver likes to keep her brainboxes happy, and gives them a lot of slack when they are out in the black.
The inside of the lab is an almost blinding white when compared to the dull gray colour scheme of the rest of the ship, and Randall has to blink a couple of times before his eyes adjust. The room is full of things he barely recognizes as props from science fiction trids, even after being Saranna’s friend for the last couple of years. Plastiglassware of various liquids, cases containing Genny Piggs (a porcine/rodent crossbreed created specifically for scientific research), datascreens, and keyboards. He’s afraid to touch any of it.
Saranna moves to one of the datascreens, and takes a thin cable off of the counter with her right hand. With her left hand she pulls her dark hair aside so that she can plug the cable into the techport behind her right ear, “So you know how your emotions are controlled primarily by one part of your brain, right?”
“Sure,” Randall lies.
“No you don’t, hold on.”
A three dimensional image of a horse baring its teeth suddenly appears on the countertop from the trideo projector built into its surface. Randall jumps back in shock.
“What the feec is that?”
“Sorry, wrong file, hold on.”
The horse vanishes, and is replaced by a brain, “Okay, so this is where emotions are processed,” the brain splits in half, and a section of the brain lights up red, ”With the right stimulus, you can manipulate the brain to make a person behave in a violent fashion. Some drugs do this.”
“Illegal drugs,” Randall adds.
“Of course, but they are used all the same by mercenaries, pirates, and others for whom violence without the limitations of rational thought can be a benefit,” the brain goes dark, shrinks, and moves to the side of the projection space. A man wearing a plain grey jumpsuit appears; he is holding a hockeyball bat and has a blank expression on his face. The brain lights up again, and the man’s face becomes a mask of rage. He raises the bat, and starts swinging at some unseen target.
“Okay,” Randall says.
“But what about stimulating other emotions?” Seranna asks, and the man’s expression calms again. He lowers the bat to his side.
“Are you making a sex drug?”
Seranna giggles, “That’s been done, Randy, no. I’m making something even more important. I have come up with a way to manipulate the brain to create feelings of despair; artificial depression,” the brain lights up blue now.
The projected man’s face drops; he lowers the bat, and tears start to run from his eyes. His shoulders slump and his head droops to look at the counter he is being projected on. He starts to rock back and forth, and then suddenly he swings the hockeyball bat up, and strikes himself in the face with it.
“Why did he do that?” Randall asks.
“Instead of making him angry at something external, it made him angry with himself; hate himself. It made him not only lose his will to live, but actually want to kill himself.”
“That’s what you’re trying to make?”
“No,” Saranna says, grinning, “That’s what I’ve made.”
The brain and the man disappear. Saranna pulls the datacable out of her port, and places it back on the counter top. She walks over to a large plastiglass box built onto one of the countertops. There are a series of manipulators on segmented arms inside of it.
Taking the datacable that is hanging from the side of the box and plugging it in behind her ear causes the arms twitch as they activate, but not move into action. A panel in the back of the cabinet opens, and a Genny Pigg crawls into the box. It snuffles around with its flat, pink nose as it explores the box.
“Sara, do I want to see this?” Randall asks.
“No, probably not,” Saranna replies, “Now I just add some Tuosku Itsemurhan to the environment inside the box.”
The Pigg continues to shuffle around the box, exploring the wall with its nose for a few more moments, and then stops. The Pigg stands still for a few seconds, and then backs away from the wall. A moment later it throws itself face first into the wall as hard as it can. It does this again and again until its blood starts to smear the plastiglas surface.
Randall cringes in horror, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Sara, make it stop!”
“It will take a bit longer to work in humans, larger body mass, larger brains, and so on; plus it would depend on how much of the bacteria was inhaled to begin with; it can take time for enough of it to multiply in the body before the infected begins to exhibit self-destructive behavior. I gave our little Piggy there a pretty dense dose. Impressive, huh?”
“No, it's horrifying. Can't you stop it?”
The Pigg continues to hurl itself against the wall of the box, but not as hard anymore. It’s weakening, but still it persists.
“The real wizz thing about this is that it multiplies pretty quickly in the body. Right now that little Piggy is exhaling more Tuosku Itsemerhan into the space. There is now a higher concentration of the bacteria in there than there was when I added it to begin with. If this was a person, and someone ran in to try and
restrain them, they would be infected too.”
“Saranna, please!”
“Oh fine. You're such a girl.”
The box fills with white smoke as Saranna runs the sterilization procedure, superheating the contents before they are sucked into the biohazard disposal system. When it’s through, the box is in pristine condition, as if countless Genny Piggs had not met their demise in it already.
“Why did you do that,” Randall asks.
“Kill the Pigg? It's what they're made for. You know they don't feel pain like other animals,” Saranna replies as she pulls the datacable out from behind her ear.
“No, why did you make that tusko itemerhand stuff?”
“Tuosku Itsemurhan, and I made it because it's my job to make things like that.”
“Isn't that illegal though? Like ragestims?”
“Not technically. I mean, it works similar to a ragestim, but it's not the same thing. Besides, think of all the lives that could be saved if you just sprayed some of this,” Saranna pulls a small, hand-labeled, plastiglas bottle out of the pocket of her lab coat, and shakes it in front of her, sloshing the clear liquid inside around, “over your enemy in a ground battle? Or got it into the environmental system of a pirate ship? The enemy would simply take care of themselves for you. There’s enough here, under the right circumstances, to take out an entire space station.”
Randall struggles for words, “Sara, I.... That’s… that’s a very noble idea of how that can be used.”
“Yeah, well that’s the tact I’m going to take when I present it to the board next week. I expect to get quarters with an actual viewport for this,” she says, still sloshing the bottle around in front of her face.
“Wait, is that the stuff your suicide bacteria?”
“Yuppers. It’s much more effective when aerosolized, but if you splash it around, it will still work.”
“And you are just carrying it around in your pocket? You were going to come up to my quarters with that in your pocket?”
“As long as it stays closed it’s perfectly safe.”
“You could infect the ship!”
“I could, but I won’t. Since you’re so worried about it, come over here.”
Saranna drops the bottle back into her pocket, and leads Randall across the lab to a wall composed mostly of cabinet doors. She taps a code into the keypad on one of the doors, and the little red light above the pad changes to green. She opens the door, and grabs a hypoinjector from a small box of them.
Before Randal can pull away, Saranna grabs his right arm, and stabs it with the injector.
“What was that?”
Saranna grins, “That was the vaccine. You didn’t think I would make something like this without a way of making sure that friendlies couldn’t be infected did you?” she leans in close to whisper in his ear, “Don’t tell anyone though; I’m not going to ‘discover’ the vaccine until I get my pay raise.”
Saranna turns and drops the used hypoinjector into a biodisposal chute, “You know, I kind of expected you to be happier for me than this.”
“I’m happy for you as a friend who succeeded at something she was trying to do, but I have to tell you that what you were trying to do is monstrous.”
“Randy, I know it is, and I know that it won’t go much farther than this. If Futuretech announces that they have something like this, it will be banned immediately. It’s never even going to be used on a single human. I have spent a million creds to create something completely unusable, and I’m going to get a raise for it. All the perks of mad science with none of the torch-wielding villagers! Isn’t the system wonderful?”
“What?”
“Results are all that matter, and I got results. I think after I create a vaccine for it I’ll start working on bacteria that do the opposite. Think about it, a cure for depression and self-destructive tendencies that requires neither drugs nor tech. It could help millions, maybe billions, of people. How does that sound?”
“It sounds better than suicide bacteria.”
“So I guess I’m not such a Nazi after all,” Saranna says smugly.
“Why not make that first though?”
“What, and get to miss out on making this?” she pulls out the bottle and shakes it again.
“You’re delirious.”
“Maybe; I think it’s time for another stim.”
“I think it’s time for bed. Come on, I’ll walk you to your quarters.”
“Yeah, alright, but they won’t be my quarters for long. I’m gonna get a space along the hull for this, you wait and see,” Saranna starts towards the door, “Oh, wait!”
Saranna places the bottle on the counter, and crosses the room to close the open cabinet, “Wouldn’t want to leave that open,” she says, “I wouldn’t want some snoopy-drawers coming in and getting into my vaccine before I invent it, would I?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Okay, we can go now, but we’d better hurry. If I don’t at least get a cup of brewkaf in me soon, you’re going to be carrying me.”
“That would hardly be a first,” Randall says as he follows his friend out of the room, “How did you come up with that name anyways?”
“Oh, it’s Finnish or something,” Saranna explains, “I stuck ‘scent of suicide’ into a translator and just picked the best sounding result. It sounds cool, and it’s less threatening than ‘Death Perfume’”
“Wow, your attention to detail on some things is simply stunning.”
* * *
Nermal Wraithwhite is not what you would call an overly-smart person, nor a lucky one. He was born in one of the worst domes on Luna, socioeconomically speaking. He underperformed in school, was laughed out of the Interplanetary Security academy, and it was almost certainly a mistake somewhere that he ended up with a job at Futuretech Industries at all.
His career in the janitorial division has been less than stellar. He was put off of an executive transport yacht, two space stations, and a cargo ship. The CCSV Sterling Silver is almost certainly his last stop before unemployment.
Nermal is not a bad person; not lazy, not stupid despite his poor school record, not even necessarily incompetent, but he is horribly unlucky. He is the sort of person who, were he to find a gold bar, would almost immediately drop it on his foot.
Combine bad luck with is a sense of curiosity and wonder generally reserved for explorers, scientists, and young children and you get someone who could accurately be called an excrement magnet. It is this curiosity that got him put off the CCPTV Rising Fortunes after following the sounds of a person moaning to its source, which happened to be a vice president and someone who was not his spouse in a compromising position. It is also this same curiosity that led Nermal to accidentally flush twenty thousand credits worth of datacables and a few thousand credits more of assorted tools and equipment into space while trying to figure out the landing bay control board on Autumn Station.
He is well aware of his shortcomings, but luck is not something anyone can really influence, and he has never been able to control his curiosity. He knows his days with the company are numbered, but he plans to see them through to the end all the same. Nermal Wraithwhite has never quit anything in his life, no matter how depressed his continual failures make him; he usually gets kicked out before it gets to that.
Less than an hour after Randall and Saranna vacate the lab, Nermal comes in on his normal rounds. He rarely has anything he has to clean in any of the labs, as most of the scientists are fairly tidy, but unless a lab is locked down for a running experiment, it is still his duty to check.
Doctor Beltrivus’ lab is as spotless as ever, and Nermal turns to leave when he suddenly decides he can wait for a minute and watch the Genny Piggs wandering around their enclosures. He wonders what it must be like to run tests on the little gengineered creatures in order to discover new medicines or even just new forms of makeup.
After a couple of minutes he decides to get moving, but then he spies a small bottle on one of the counters. It’s unlike Doctor Beltrivus to leave anything out when she leaves the lab, and he wonders what it is.
Nermal picks up the bottle, and reads the label aloud to himself, “Tuosku Itsemurhan.”
It takes some effort, but Nermal is able to unscrew the bottle’s cap. He holds it up to his nose, and sniffs. The smell is sweet and strong, like candy fleece. He realizes that it must just be a bottle of the doctor’s perfume, although he cannot imagine why someone like Doctor Beltrivus would want to smell like that, and quickly screws the cap back on, and places it back like he found it.
He decides to leave the lab, and finish his rounds as quick as possible. He’s starting to feel a little down about himself. He knows he can be kind of useless when he’s in one of his funks, and this feels like it is going to be a bad one.