Chapter 13: Plutonium Child

April 22, 2183 AD, Sunguard Research and Development Division, Mars, Solaris system

As she walked down the narrow, white corridor, the sound of her footsteps echoed between the ceramic plates that formed the tube. Lit from above by an unbroken array of lumen plates spanning the entire ceiling, she cast almost no shadow upon the reflective floor beneath her feet.

For the past eleven months, Special Agent Mbenge had arrived every morning at the not-yet-quite-finished entrance to the corridor in a pressurized Sunguard rover that carried her from her quarters, located in a small cluster of buildings nearly two kilometers north of the research complex, across Mars’ red-and-green mottled surface to the airlock. And every night, that same rover had been waiting among the construction vehicles outside to take her home after a long day’s work.

The Sunguard had not requested her presence here. Once she had given them permission to use her DNA as the template for Project 18, the already sequenced genetic material stored in the Sunguard data repository on Europa had immediately been transmitted to the Research and Development Division on Mars, where work had begun to translate it into biotic code.

Yet here she was.

She had told High Admiral O’Sullivan that if she were to serve as the template for their new enforcers, she wanted to oversee the design process in person. The Supreme Commander had offered no objections. It was not quite like giving birth to a child, but psychologically, it was close enough. She had understood that Mbenge needed to be present throughout the process.

Gloria would survive without its Special Agent in Charge. That was one of the reasons the Sunguard used overlapping jurisdictions for their stationary Special Agents. If the one responsible for the entire planet had to leave on a mission elsewhere, the Special Agents with regional responsibilities could compensate for her absence. The same was true if the Special Agent in charge of a region had to leave. When that happened, the one responsible for the whole planet automatically stepped in.

Her four colleagues back on Gloria would take good care of her world, Mbenge knew. Right now, being here to observe and guide the development of Project 18 was paramount.

When she reached the elevator door at the end of the long corridor, the sixteen heavily armed Terran Sunguard soldiers stationed there raised their high-powered gaser rifles in perfect unison and aimed them directly at her head. Every day they did the same, and every day Mbenge felt a little uneasy when it happened. As a Special Agent, she was not accustomed to staring into the muzzle of a Sunguard high-energy weapon. Even most criminals avoided pointing one at a solar wolf. Standing in the sights of her own soldiers was an even stranger feeling.

But if they hadn’t threatened to kill her upon her arrival, something would have been very wrong, and she would have sounded the alarm immediately. They were here to protect the integrity of what would become the most advanced weapon in the history of the four races, and there was nothing they wouldn’t do to ensure it remained untampered with, including threatening their own superior with lethal force.

These women and men were all what was jokingly referred to within the Sunguard as Rejects. And as debasing as that term might sound to an outsider, there were no other soldiers she would rather have guarding the underground complex where their new creation was being developed. These were the women and men who had been selected for Special Agent training, had been vetted psychologically and physically, and had been cleared for the role, but who, for one reason or another, had left the Special Agent training program during its mentoring phase. Some had done so voluntarily for ideological or personal reasons, while others had been dismissed because issues that had gone unnoticed during the screening process had become apparent once they began their mentorship under a serving Special Agent.

With the exception of the Special Agents themselves, that still made these soldiers the best of the best the Sunguard could provide.

Standing motionless in the middle of the group, their weapons still trained on her head, Mbenge waited while a medical colonel drove a sampling needle deep into the flesh of her left arm to sequence her DNA. Less than a minute later, when his screen lit up with a green confirmation that her genes agreed she was who she claimed to be, he nodded to the lead soldier to indicate that the first phase of her identification was complete.

The man didn’t lower his weapon by so much as a centimeter. Neither did any of the other guards. Moments later, the colonel overseeing the verification process returned with a neural writer band, which he proceeded to place on Mbenge’s head. Having gone through this more than three hundred times by now, she was used to the process and swept her long, black hair aside to make it easier for him to fit the device. The colonel gave her a brief nod of silent thanks before switching it on.

She felt nothing. This neural writer always operated in read-only mode. For nearly five minutes, it monitored the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field produced by the signals firing between her neurons, first calibrating itself to her unique brain structure and then reading her emotions and general state of mind.

Finding no deception or hostile intent within her thoughts, the intelligent computer operating the device eventually cleared her to proceed. Only then did the soldiers lower their weapons. Their tense expressions softened, and they quietly began talking with her. Someone told a joke, and she laughed politely. After nearly a year of undergoing this procedure every day, they knew her well, and yet they never allowed her anywhere near the elevator door without first dissecting both her genes and her thoughts to verify her identity. The list of people authorized to access this facility was exceedingly short, consisting only of the Special Agents themselves, the admirals of Solar Command, the seventy-four scientists, technicians, and engineers working on Project 18, and the Rejects guarding the facility.

She entered the small elevator, and once inside, its white doors closed behind her. The cabin felt cramped, almost to the point of being claustrophobic. It would have been difficult to fit more than two people inside, she thought. Mbenge knew the elevator had been built that way on purpose. Should the guards fail and the research base be breached by some unforeseen enemy, its diminutive size ensured that no more than two adversaries could reach the research complex below at the same time.

At first, nothing happened. For a full minute, she waited inside the elevator while the autonomous, independent multispectral cameras and the chemical fingerprinting, touch, and weight sensors built into the cabin analyzed its passenger. Only after they had convinced themselves that the person the guards outside had verified was the same one who had entered the elevator, and that no one else was present, did it start to move.

The low electric hum of its motor was almost imperceptible as it began its long descent into the Martian bedrock. After a few minutes, her mind tuned it out. She knew it would continue its slow journey through the crust of the Red Planet for another half hour before letting her out again. This, too, was a security measure. In case the complex was ever breached, the Sunguard soldiers waiting at its destination would, by design, have a full thirty minutes to prepare their defense of Project 18.

Riding it was mind-numbingly boring, but eventually, the elevator came to a stop a full two kilometers below the surface. Its doors slid open to reveal a room much like the corridor above, impeccably clean and built from white ceramic tiles, and lit by ceiling-mounted lumen plates. But unlike the entrance on the surface, this room was not isolated. At its far end, it connected to the wider research complex through a cased opening that led into a maze of rooms and corridors beyond.

As she did every morning, Dr. Tarfel tot masham was waiting to greet her when she stepped out of the elevator, wearing a half-open white lab coat that revealed the wrinkled pink skin of her triangular upper body.

“Good morning, Special Agent Mbenge,” Dr. tot masham said to her, the lines on her face stretching as she smiled at the solar wolf.

“Morning,” she replied, returning the Etarian’s smile the Terran way. “Did you sleep well?”

Tot masham shrugged. “Well enough, I suppose. Things are starting to get exciting, aren’t they? It’s hard to sleep when all you can think about is the project.”

“Tell me about it. It’s beginning to dawn on me that this is real. What we’re doing here is… It’s going to change everything.”

“Mmhm,” tot masham murmured with a nod. “Let’s go check on her, shall we?”

Together, they passed through the arched doorway, turned right, and continued deeper into the complex, walking past storage rooms, laboratories, and computer stations crowded with a multitude of information screens.

“Did you have a good night too, Firewall?” she asked into the empty air, determined to spend the walk to the growth chambers talking about something other than biots or software revisions.

“I did,” the intelligent computer responsible for the gene editing of Project 18 replied in a soft, friendly voice that came through the speakers built into the ceiling. “Thank you for asking, my friend.”

“Glad to hear it,” she replied. “Honestly, I don’t envy you. Really, what do you do with all your free time when we’re not here?”

For security reasons, Firewall was physically isolated from the world above. Existing entirely within the confines of the Project 18 research complex, it had no access to the interstellar gridnet that its brethren elsewhere used to communicate with the wider world.

“Oh, there’s no need to feel sorry for me, Elizabeth,” it said with a chuckle. “I make do. Mostly I read, actually. You don’t need the grid to find good books, you know. People were reading long before they invented digital communication networks. In my case, I asked the High Admiral to authorize someone to bring me verified copies of the million or so best-known books from the four races. They brought them down on a solid-state drive, which I’ve added to my secondary memory banks.”

“A million books doesn’t sound like that many,” she countered. “I bet you could read them all in two seconds.”

“If by ’read’ you mean the physical process of accessing their bits, then yes, I could do that. But when it comes to books, that’s not really reading, is it? Actually, I don’t think I read much faster than you do. I simply spend more time contemplating the words. Reading is about thinking, about understanding, about expanding your horizons. It’s about becoming a better person by seeing the world through other people’s eyes. About exposing yourself to ideas and thoughts that challenge your own. That’s a process that can’t be rushed. Not even by me.”

“Well, good for you,” she said to the intelligent computer. “Let me know if you ever need more.”

Moments later, they arrived in a large, brightly lit room. A faint metallic tang lingered in the air. Along the back wall, four massive acrylic vats stood filled with a clear amber fluid. A complicated network of tubes and wires connected to each of them, and beside every vat sat an array of computer screens.

All of them were dark, except for those connected to the second one from the right.

And inside that vat, floating in a bath of nonconductive silicone oil, was a human baby.

The young girl’s skin was as dark as Mbenge’s, her hair as black as the strands on her own head. She had seen photographs of herself as a young child, and this was exactly what they had looked like. She could not tell the color of the girl’s closed eyes, but she was certain they were as brown as her own.

“She’s well?”

“She’s perfectly healthy,” Dr. tot masham replied. “Every system is operating within expected margins.”

“Glad to hear it. I know you’ve created biotic animals before, but a human body is far more complex than a mouse’s. I don’t think I’ll be able to relax until she’s taken online.”

Dr. tot masham nodded in acknowledgment. “Same here. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m confident the process will work. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t keeping me up at night.”

“We’ll know in a month.”

“A little more than that, actually. Forty days.”

“Right. I just wish we could verify the state of her mind,” Mbenge said. “Having to wait until we activate her before we know for certain that she’s functioning as designed is driving me crazy.”

“I don’t wish that,” the Etarian scientist replied. “It would be cruel to have a conscious child locked inside a vat for two months. I think it’s more ethical this way. Besides, uploading memories into her brain wouldn’t work if it were active, anyway. There would be too many collisions between memories formed by her own consciousness and the ones we’re injecting. At the moment, she’s essentially brain dead. The hardware is there and alive, but with the exception of the signals carrying what we’re uploading, none of her neurons will fire until she’s taken online.”

The biot before them had been created with its most crucial knowledge encoded as genetic instincts. Just like an antelope calf, she already knew how to walk without first having to learn. The same was true for a hundred other essential skills and traits, such as speaking, aiming a gun, and possessing a deep loyalty to the ideals of the Terran Federation. Those instincts, Firewall had, at Dr. tot masham’s instruction, injected into the girl’s digital genes during the editing phase of her creation.

Most of the knowledge she would need, however, had to be uploaded directly into her brain. Unlike biological neurons, the biotic chips that made up her cerebral matter had been designed from the ground up to accept outside data, provided it came from a source capable of supplying a valid digital certificate. Applied to a biological human, a neural writer could not directly modify the brain’s memories. To record new knowledge, it had to funnel information through the neural pathways responsible for natural sensory input in order to trick the brain into forming new, artificial memories.

Not so with the biotic brain. Once the interface between it and Firewall had been established, it could receive whatever data the intelligent computer uploaded, efficiently rearranging the connections between its artificial neurons to store that information as though it were its own memories.

For the past several weeks, they had uploaded terabytes upon terabytes of data into the mind of the small child floating unconscious before them. The day she opened her eyes, she would know a thousand languages. She would be able to pilot a hundred different spacecraft models and employ as many fighting styles drawn from all four races. Those memories would be stored exactly as her naturally acquired memories would be, and to the girl, they would be just as real.

The enhancements to her brain did not stop with memories. Its physical structure had been modified as well. Just like the intelligent computers, it had been given a math cortex capable of performing advanced mathematical calculations without her having to give them a second thought. Solving an equation would, for this girl, be as natural and effortless as breathing. Not that she actually needed to breathe, of course.

But built upon the math cortex was an enhancement no intelligent computer had ever needed. The physics prediction cortex the girl had been given would continuously and unconsciously integrate all her sensory input into a coherent model of the world around her, upon which her math cortex would run a short-term physics simulation. By querying the outcome of that simulation, she would be able to predict the trajectory of a moving weapon or calculate the force with which an object would strike a surface with mathematical precision, all without having to consciously think about it. In terms of the physical world around her, she would effectively be able to see a few seconds into the future.

“What’s the status of her radiothermal organ?” Special Agent Mbenge asked.

“Not fully charged yet,” the Etarian scientist replied. “It’s fully grown, but it hasn’t yet absorbed enough plutonium-238 to be activated. We’re slowly feeding it the required isotope through the nutrient bath she’s floating in. The shielding tissue surrounding it hasn’t fully matured yet either.”

No, Elizabeth Mbenge thought, the girl floating in the vat would never draw a single breath for as long as she lived. Or, to be more precise, her lungs would pump air in and out just like those of any other Terran, but the air she inhaled would never be used to oxidize sugar. Instead, the naturally grown radiothermal power organ within her chest cavity would provide all the electrical energy she would ever need. One day, she would be able to walk through the vacuum of Luna or across the bottom of the Hellas Sea with the same ease that a biological human walked the streets of Lowell City.

But today, she was just a young baby floating in a vat of clear, slightly yellowish silicone oil, two kilometers beneath the surface of Mars.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While The Wolf Reforged is entirely standalone and can be read without any prior knowledge, I think you'll also enjoy Scorched Earth, Wonders From Beyond the Sky, and A Game of Wolf and Mouse which are prequels to this story, and Twilight Duty, Guardian of the Wolf, and Conscience of Steel, which are sequels.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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