Cole pauses. ‘I … I haven’t really thought about that.’
‘Well, I have. He gave you that note because he’d just finished the vaccine, and he knew that Cartaxus wasn’t going to release it to the survivors on the surface. They were going to restrict it like they do with everything else. My father would have tried to release it freely, but in case he died, he left a backup plan for us to do it instead.’
Cole sits forward. ‘That’s crazy. Cartaxus would never hold back the vaccine.’
‘Oh yeah?’ I run my hands through my hair, flicking away splinters tangled up in the long dark strands. ‘They hold back everything else – antibiotics, medical code. People out here are living with illnesses that were solved twenty years ago. If you want to use Cartaxus code, you have to join one of the bunkers.’
Cole snorts. ‘That’s because the bunkers are safe. They want people to join so they’re protected from the virus. But once the vaccine is released, we won’t need the bunkers any more.’
I turn my arm in the water, rubbing tracks of foam off the lights of my panel. ‘So Cartaxus will give the vaccine to everyone, free of charge, no requirements? They’ll let anyone use it, even people with non-standard tech?’
For the first time, Cole sounds hesitant. ‘I’m sure they would.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, splashing my face. ‘That’s what I thought.’
When Cartaxus opened their bunkers, most survivors of the initial outbreak flocked to them, with only a few choosing to remain on the surface. Almost everyone who stayed behind did so because they couldn’t bear to lose control over their panels. Human gene editing has been around for over fifty years, but it was Cartaxus who invented the first implantable panels. They perfected the technology, copyrighted it and released budding kits freely around the world.
Panel buds only cost a few cents to make. They start the size of a grain of rice, injected into your arm to grow inside you like a tree growing from a seed. The cables, the metal sockets, the processors all grow in place, one molecule at a time, branching out from that first bud. Even the poorest countries distributed them, and within a few years the uptake rate was almost a hundred per cent, thanks to the first detox app. Over the last century mountains of nanowaste used in everything from plastics to fertilizer had leached into the soil and water, until the planet was swimming with toxins. No matter how careful a mother was, her baby would still be born with hundreds of artificial chemicals floating in its blood.
Panels changed all that. Mortality rates plummeted. The number of lights on a person’s arm told you how healthy they were. Cartaxus opened up their software market to approved providers, and soon there were apps for asthma and weight loss, then hair growth, self-tanners. People could download the solutions to their weaknesses. The industry exploded overnight.
Then the genehackers arrived, and they wanted to be more than pretty. They wanted to be ten feet tall, with prehensile tails and retractable claws. They wanted to grow a winter coat and shed it in the spring. To feel the earth’s magnetic field the way migratory birds do.
The genehackers had glimpsed the future, and they saw a day when people would be defined by the limitations of their imagination, not their DNA. My father loved them. They represented pure creation.
Cartaxus tried to sue them all for copyright infringement.
Even before the outbreak, the war over the definition of ‘human’ was raging between Cartaxus and the genehackers. When the virus hit, and Cartaxus opened their bunkers, I wasn’t surprised that the only condition of entry was letting them control your panel.
No hacks, no non-standard apps, no open-source code. People entering the bunker agreed to let Cartaxus wipe it all. The problem was that for a lot of people, that code is what defined them, and for some people it was also keeping them alive. Every app in my measly panel is technically non-standard, since it was written by my father and never approved by Cartaxus. If I went into a bunker, they’d make me wipe the whole thing. My sensory and healing tech, all non-standard. All gone.
Cartaxus says these rules are to keep people safe, but my father would have seen the truth, and that’s why he left this plan. He knew they’d withhold the vaccine and use it as blackmail to crush the genehackers once and for all.
‘Look,’ Cole says, rubbing his face. ‘Cartaxus’s line on non-standard tech is firm, but –’
‘Firm?’ I ask. ‘They tried to make it a crime to own a genkit. They’ve cut access to their code for anyone living on the surface, and they’ll do the same thing with the vaccine.’
‘That’s ridiculous. They want to vaccinate as many people as possible – that’s the only way to kill the virus. They won’t risk losing another vaccine.’
The water around me seems to freeze. The sounds of the forest die away. All I can hear is that little word, echoing. Thundering.
‘What do you mean, another vaccine?’
But he doesn’t need to say it. My mind is already clicking into gear, running through my father’s lessons on viruses. In our first summer at the cabin, he showed me the code that made him famous – the gentech vaccine for Influenza X.
It was robust, he said. Previously, flu vaccines would work for a year before Influenza evolved, mutating like the poem in the pigeons. The code would lose its effectiveness, and the vaccine would become obsolete. That’s called fragile code. It uses strategies that nature will shrug off in a few years, flicking them aside in its endless march of evolution. But my father’s code was different. It acted like a knife, unstoppable and true, aimed at the virus’s heart. It would work forever, and once enough people downloaded it, Influenza X simply ceased to exist.
‘You had one, didn’t you?’ My voice wavers. ‘There was a vaccine, but it was fragile.’
He nods. ‘Your father developed one in the first months of the outbreak, but the virus evolved too quickly. The code was useless within weeks.’
The thought makes me sway. Fragile code. We had it, but nature swept right past it.
Nature laughed at us.
‘That’s why Cartaxus won’t hold back the vaccine,’ Cole says. ‘They’ll give it to as many people as they can. They’ll broadcast it day and night to make sure we crush the virus. They don’t care about non-standard tech, not any more. They only care about the fact that if we take too long to decrypt it, we could lose the vaccine. We couldn’t have written it without your father, and now …’
‘Now he’s gone.’
The full weight of it hits me. The last vaccine was useless within weeks, and Cole said this one might take six months to decrypt. If we wait that long, the virus will evolve, until there’s a chance the code won’t even work any more. The vaccine could be useless, and without my father, it could take years to write another one.