Dilemma

I hurried out of the neighborhood with almost nothing for my time. Everyone being completely closed to help didn’t give me anything useful. But that itself felt like a red flag. There was far too much unity in the way they rejected me for it just to be natural. And that was information, just not a good sign.

At a street side bench, I sat down looking into the center of the town. There wasn’t too much foot traffic for the moment. So I had some peace to just reflect on what happened. “Still think nothing’s going on?”

B crawled out on my lap to stay mostly out of sight. “You want something to be happening.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“It’s suspicious.”

“Very.”

“Arguably, but let’s entertain the notion. What has caused everyone to reject your questions?”

“Someone is pressuring them.”

“Or you’re not an approachable person.”

“Be constructive.”

“You’re jumping to extremes.”

“Did you even see their faces? That wasn’t the look of people that are just quiet or don’t like strangers. They were scared. You don’t talk to more than twenty people and all give shut down at the same point.”

“Other than the restaurant.”

“Which still happened the moment it became about questions. You can’t say the way she acted isn’t something to question.”

B crossed his arms and held his reply for a moment. “She was definitely the one I would say is your best evidence to something going on.”

“Right? So maybe stop trying to think I’m looking to make the Basilica out to be bad and accept that maybe they’re into something.”

“But what does it gain them to be this heavy handed? Eventually someone’s going to notice.”

“It’s the Basilica, who’s going to question them? Only the Corpus really and they need the Basilica still. As long as they aren’t doing something criminal, I doubt they even care. Everyone else is so fixated on being a good Scien that they’ll just let the Basilica do whatever.”

“Possibly. But this investigation does have more merit now.”

“Finally seeing it my way!”

“But it doesn’t change the problem you have. You’re no closer to helping Louise. And this doesn’t give you reason to go charging into the Basilica. You have no evidence.”

I leaned back on the bench now that we were back on the same page. A sigh came from me. He was right. Not that I even wanted to go back. I’d rather just let the Corpus do that, but nothing was going to happen as it stood. “I know. We’re at a deadend if they’ve silenced anyone that might have given me something about Therese.”

“It was a long shot you were going to learn anything useful.”

“Perhaps, but we’re working with scraps right now. I need a trail to follow.”

“A detective now?”

“Just a nosy busybody with too much time on her hands.”

“On that we can agree.” Behind me, I heard a deep cough that rattled up through the body. It sounded all too familiar. I tilted around a little to see if I could find who it was. There weren't many people, but it took enough time for me to spot them. A young man with a Coulen uniform, probably out for lunch. “How many people are affected by this?”

B hopped up on my shoulder looking about. “I’m detecting two others further away. It’s either contagious or people have been infected.”

“Disease-like symptoms that only affect bio-circuitry. Can a natural disease infect augments?”

“It’s never happened before.”

“But not impossible.”

“Conventional wisdom would say it is, but this isn’t conventional. If it is possible for bio-circuitry to become infected by diseases then we have a massive threat on our hands.”

The weight of that thought pressed me down into the bench. If B was correct about that potential, this was far worse than I could imagine. A majority of diseases that affected humans went extinct thanks to the universal adoption of augments and bio-circuitry.

From my understanding, any human today by adulthood was only about five to ten percent still natural. Nearly every part of their body was replaced. It gave too many benefits to ignore. A longer life span, more resilience and strength, compatibility with the network and immunity to nearly any disease. With so little of the original human biology still whole, diseases just didn’t have the same chemistry to work with. And what little they could attack, the healthcare system attacked so aggressively that the body just never got sick.

Only certain types of cancers and genetic diseases still lingered. And science continued to work to eliminate even those. At least it did until the Collapse. If there was a medical town, they might still have focused on fighting those types of diseases, but general survival became more of a priority for everyone. Thus the hyper specialized Corpus became the foundation to the continuation of humanity.

But if some form of disease could attack augments and be transmitted, it’d be a disaster. None of the towns were prepared for that sort of attack. If this was ground zero, it’d have to be quarantined until a cure was found or worse.

I halted my dark thoughts there.

Paused, I stared out at the town and Coulen tower in the distance. My hands rubbed together trying to cool off from the sweat and heat. I couldn’t let such things consume me. “Like you say, speculation is bad.”

“Accurate. So what’s the plan?”

The plan didn’t exist. That was the reality. I was winging all of this hoping that I could help Louise. But with another dead end and an unhelpful Basilica, there wasn’t going to be a lot of options. I could wander the town for days or weeks without getting anywhere.

I never expected talking to people would give me what I needed to cure her. There was just the hope that I’d get some clue that could put me onto a path I could follow. Running aimlessly around the city would get me nowhere and that was about all I had done in the end.

“Return to the House. But apart from that, I don’t know. We need evidence of wrongdoing by the Basilica or a look at whatever is affecting people.”

“But only the Basilica has the equipment to even look into it.”

“The House might, but it wouldn’t be as thorough.”

“Which is why I didn’t mention it. If this is a disease or a network virus, we need the right equipment to do anything about it.”

I couldn’t disagree with him. It was something that had been in the back of my mind, but also ignored. I figured it was a bridge to cross at a later point. If I did nothing because I couldn’t use the equipment, then I was just admitting defeat. And I couldn’t do that.

The way things looked, we started to have just enough data to give us a direction. We could rule things out with the right equipment from our speculation. But that was a different dead end. It came back to the Basilica. “How to convince the Basilica to help us. They ran off the other guy, so we can’t use that approach.”

“And breaking and entering to use their tech isn’t an option either.”

“I know! I’m not that reckless. They’d be on to us before we even got a minute into a scan.”

“But it was on your mind.”

“As an option, yeah, but not a worthwhile one.”

“And we don’t know anyone in the Clergy that could help us.”

Crossing my arms, I stared up at a brick and concrete high-rise. It wasn’t really of much interest to me, just a place to put my focus while I thought. The Clergy couldn’t, wouldn’t help us and we’re outsiders. The best I had was the Corpus connections I have, but the relationship between the Corpus and Basilica was contentious.

Each town was different, so I didn’t know how it worked here. But the Corpus ran the governmental responsibilities and the Basilica the daily necessities. Each served an important and necessary function to maintain society. However, there was a large amount of gray area that needed to be handled by someone that didn’t fall into either of those two groups. And they fought endlessly over who’s responsible.

My understanding was that it was a fast way to tell which held more power in a town by how much responsibility that they held. If Coulen allowed the Clergy without question to handle some security matters that was a pretty big sign of which held power.

So the Corpus was probably not an option right now. If the Basilica was doing something wrong, then I could call on them, but that was a huge if. I needed someone else with ties to the Basilica.

And then I felt dumb for not coming to it sooner. “The Chapterhouse and the Lalondes. They may be separated now, but given that they do similar things, they have to have some connections that we could use. Maybe even know someone in the Clergy that’s good to speak with.”

“But you need to get the Lalondes to agree to help you.”

“Their daughter is suffering, they should be open to ideas. Let’s go see them!” It might have been moving a step ahead, but it was the only plan I had right now.