Valhalla's Temple

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Valhalla's Temple

By Sara King

Covered in mud, piss, and calf guts, Valhalla Highland Genetaker slumped into a bench beside his friend, Eric, and tried not to think about what he was going to have to tell the farm lab manager the moment she came back from her weekend.  Eric, too, seemed traumatized by the affair--where he was usually so talkative he made the cows nervous, now he only muttered to himself.

“Tell me this morning never happened,” Eric said, a pitiful sound somewhere between a moan and a whimper.  He, like Val, was covered in viscera, a good deal of it his own.  Usually very handsome in an effortless, charismatic way, now Eric was pale and shaking.  One of the hyper-intelligent wild dogs had sunk their teeth into his left arm and had held on stubbornly as the rest of the Lab beat it away with shovels and pitchforks.  Even with the wound wrapped tight in strips of shirt, Eric was bleeding on the bench beneath them, activating cleaning bots as it dribbled to the floor.

“You should get that checked,” Valhalla said, nervously watching the bots lap at the scarlet pool forming on the worn metal sheeting of the hallway.

“Don’t deserve it,” Eric groaned, slumping until the side of his head hit the steel wall with a ringing sound.  “Builders have mercy.  Dr. Cin’s gonna kill us.”  He gave a short, miserable laugh and leaned over to look at him.  “Besides, you think I’m gonna let Anne catch me in bed when she finds out?”

Val grimaced.  “Yeah,” he agreed.  “Bad idea.”  Valhalla all-too-well understood the desire not to be caught bedridden when Dr. Anne Newyork Cincinnati found out what had happened.  It would be akin to being chained to a tree facing a raging grizzly bear.  A raging, utterly brilliant, grizzly bear.  If an unlucky sot happened to piss in the tea of the four-foot-nine fireball, he would usually find himself in a situation where one would much rather be dead than lashed to pieces by her utterly calm, utterly calculating tongue. 

She can cut you to pieces with a smile on her face, Val thought, swallowing down the dread. 

But this wasn’t pissing in her tea.  This was taking her life’s work and smearing it in bloody bits across six hundred-and-ninety-five acres of prime Ship laboratory.

Valhalla looked down at the blood staining his shirt and tried to remember where it had come from.  One of the cows, he thought.  Maybe one of the dogs.  Maybe even the scratches on his arms and stomach.  He’d grabbed a dog off of a labmate and held it down while Eric killed it, so he was pretty sure he’d been bitten a time or two, but his adrenaline was still too strong to feel it.   

Valhalla dropped his head back against the wall, miserable.  She was going to choose me as her successor, Valhalla thought.  Now he’d be lucky if Dr. Cin didn’t turn him over to Crewhost for an Expulsion.

And he could see her doing it, too.  After destroying her life’s work, ruining years of research and work in a single careless action, he could see her signing his Expulsion warrant herself.  Valhalla closed his eyes and shuddered.

Anne Newyork Cincinnati was a no-nonsense woman who had single-handedly brought the animals of Lab 16 out of their genetic oversaturation spiral.  She had taken the scraggly, malformed beasts of her predecessors and, with shrewd inter-lab trading and judicious accessing of the gene bank, bred them back into the healthy, food-producing specimens they were now. 

...And the moment she’d left the fourteen thousand animals, forty-two workers, and six hundred and ninety-five acres of Ship in the hands of Val and Eric for the first time, someone had forgotten to lock the door on the lab that shipnight and a pack of wild nonessent dogs had gotten into the lab, probably from one of the many slums in Section Sixteen.  Every calf was dead.  The goats, polled at birth and unused to predators, had been killed to a head.  Most of the adult pigs had survived, though many dead piglets now littered the six hundred and ninety-five acres of Lab 16.  The chickens and geese were dead.  Several ducks had made it out into the pond and the turkeys had flown to the ten-foot-high nighttime roosts and survived, but all of the chicks had either gotten torn apart or trampled in the mayhem. 

The thirty-two dogs, once they’d eaten their fill, had then killed for fun.  And, after enduring the nightmarish slums of Section 16, a couple dozen men with pitchforks and shovels hadn’t even slowed them down.  With the dogs outnumbering people two to one, Val and the other lab technicians had gone from hunter to hunted, circled by a pack of blood-soaked, snarling, feral beasts.  Once they’d turned on the humans, it had been luck and Van’s quick thinking to lure them into the composter that had kept them from falling to the pack like the rest of the livestock.

Over half of the technicians who had shown up to work that shipmorning had already been carted off to Medical 16 for bleeding or broken bones.  And, through it all, Van had made repeated distress calls, which Crewhost Security had politely ignored.

Valhalla could hear the dogs locked in the composter even now, deep inside the lab, howling and whining and tearing at each other in the darkness.  Valhalla hadn’t composted them yet because a terrified part of him wanted proof when Dr. Cin arrived that it had been dogs to destroy her stock, not their own stomachs.

“I wish I’d never gotten outta bed,” Val agreed, leaning back against the bench and staring at the harsh orange ceiling light.  The thought of the vast piles of meat in the rooms behind him made his stomach rumble.  This morning, like most mornings, he hadn’t been able to afford the meal chit, and they’d been cleaning up after the dogs late into the afternoon. 

“You think she’ll Expel us?” Eric asked, still staring at the far wall. 

Val felt the little hairs along the back of his neck stand on end at Eric’s words.  “No,” he said, with more confidence than he felt.  “Dr. Cin is gonna be pissed, but the lab can recover.  We’ve got plenty of stored genes, and we can trade the other Sections for more breedstock.”

“And how’s Section 16 gonna eat while we’re regenerating our stock numbers?” Eric demanded.  “Are the Builders simply going to drop fresh chevon and poultry into our bowls?  We’re already functioning at a twenty-two percent overpopulation, and that’s one of the lowest Section percentages on Ship.  You think other Sections are just going to hand over a few thousand animals to help us get back on our feet?”

Val grimaced.  “You don’t look on the bright side of things, do you?”

His friend stared at him.  “There’s a bright side to this?” 

“Uh,” Val said, “Dr. Cin doesn’t know yet?”

Eric looked at him as if he had grown corkscrew horns out of his temples.

Val sighed and slumped further into the seat.  “You’re right.  There’s no bright side.  We’re both dead.”

Eric paled even further.

“Not dead, dead,” Val said quickly, seeing his friend’s panic.  “It was an accident, and it clearly says in Ship Code that even negligent accidents cannot result in an Expulsion.  It’s gonna be the end of our careers.  We’re probably gonna be back down to cleaning stalls the rest of our lives, if she lets us stay with the Lab.”

Eric groaned and fell into a fetal position on the bench.

Valhalla felt like joining him.  Dr. Cin’s Livestock Lab was one of the only intelligent workplaces on Ship.  At least Dr. Cin still incorporated the use of genetics charts and breeding regimens and diet chemistry.  At least here, he had access to the Ship database and every report of every lab technician that had come before him. 

Everywhere else--if he could even find a job after this debacle--the Ship was seemingly proud of its own ignorance.  Science was a notion to be scoffed at.  Nonessents everywhere believed that the random flu viruses that spread through Ship, killing hundreds of people a day, were caused by black magic, not pathogens.  They burned sage bundles and wore silver triangles around their necks instead of going in for the flu vaccinations that were freely offered at Medical 16.  They attributed the geometric designs set into the walls of the ceiling and archways to representations of Builder power, warding symbols against evil, and had instigated bans on the non-devotional drawing of circles, ovoids, or triangles out of respect for the Builders.

They had even bought Crewhost’s line about being descended from the Builders, as if that somehow put Crewhost on a higher status level than every other soul on Ship.  As far as Valhalla could figure out, every person on the ship was descended from the Builders, and Crewhost had simply bastardized the rules and history of the original crew in order to make good its claim over power.

But to whisper these accusations were enough to get the perpetrator whipped or even composted, should it be heard by the wrong person.

Which, Valhalla thought, glancing at his fetal friend, was just about everybody.  He didn’t even dare speak to Eric about his theories, because he was pretty sure Eric would turn him in for the reward money.  He had tried to discuss them with Dr. Cin, though she had quickly shushed him the moment she realized what he was explaining to her.  Whether she thought along the same lines or not, she had never said, but she had given him an extra chicken that night, to share with his little brother, at no cost to his food chit.

“What do we do with the dogs?” Eric said, staring at the far wall like a zombie.

Security wouldn’t help them.  Wild dogs were the responsibility of the respective Section’s Domestics Division, which normally specialized in roach and ferret extermination.  Unfortunately, when the dogs gathered into packs this size, the Domestics Division could do little to stop them because, like all nonessent divisions, they weren’t allowed the use of firearms.

Valhalla could think of at least twelve different ways to trap or kill wild dogs given fair warning, but one of the requirements to be on the Domestics Division was that the applicant be at least six feet tall, because obviously ferrets and roaches needed to be wrestled into submission before being placed in extermination bins.

It was yet another of the problems Valhalla faced if Dr. Cin turned him out on his ear--Val was short.  At 5’6”, he was a good four inches beneath most height standards on nonessent job applications.  The ones that didn’t require heavy lifting--those jobs based on intellect, not strength--either belonged to Crewhost or worked so closely with the Labs that his application would be incinerated before it even hit the personnel officer’s desk.

“What do we do?” Eric whispered.  He was still staring at the same spot across the hallway, and Valhalla was beginning to wonder if he was suffering from blood loss.

“We get you to medical, for one,” Valhalla muttered, shoving himself to his feet.

Eric gave him a panicked look.  “What about Dr. Cin?”

Seeing Eric’s terror, Valhalla realized he needed to present a stronger sense of purpose than he felt, otherwise Eric would probably run and hide in his hut until he bled out.  He grabbed Eric’s good arm and straightened, forcing him to stand.  “Dr. Cin is going to see the dogs, see the dead stock, and she’s either going to do one of two things.  She’s either going to fire us both on the spot, leave us without a meal chit until we can find someone else to take us on...”

Eric, who was also under the average height requirement, moaned with self-pity.

“...or,” Val said, beginning the long walk to Medical 16 with Eric over his shoulder, “She’s going to understand it was an accident and get us to help her put everything back together.”

Eric whimpered and stared at the bots trailing behind them on the floor, licking up his blood.

“Look at it this way,” Val said.  “We’re her two best hirelings.  Her protégés.  We--”

“You,” Eric interrupted.  “You’re her best, Val.  I don’t come up with ideas like you do.  I just do what she tells me.”

Val couldn’t argue with him on that.  He quickly changed tactics.  “But she trusts you, Eric.  That’s what I’m talking about.  You’re smart enough to understand genetics.  You think she’d give that trust to anyone else in the lab, let alone the Ship?”

Eric laughed wretchedly.  “Trusted, Val.  She trusted us.  Not anymore.”  He gestured hopelessly at the doors to Lab 16.  “You think she’s ever going to trust us again, with what we did to her project?”

Val narrowed his eyes, the feeling of unfairness that had been raking at his gut all morning finally unfurling.  “And why not?  It wasn’t one of us who left the door open.  Hell, it could’ve been another Lab, jealous because our stock was twice as healthy, twice as big as anything they were producing.  We’ve both heard folks talking about Lab 16 like it uses black magic.  Hell, even some of the technicians don’t even understand what we’re doing here.  They see the bigger, fatter pigs and they think the Doc’s feeding them special potions, making sacrifices behind closed doors.”

Eric laughed.  “And what do you think’s gonna happen when the rest of Section 16 hears their trade supply was destroyed by wild dogs?  They’re gonna ask the Builders why it happened, and when the Builders don’t respond, they’re gonna assume it was black magic, backfiring on the owners.  They all know she’s brilliant.  They’re gonna come after her.” 

Val froze, his mind rushing through a scenario he as of yet hadn’t explored.  As he stood there, calculating, Eric nodded triumphantly and continued, “It happened on our watch, Val.  She’s smart enough to know Governor 16 will want her head.  She’s going to hang us out to dry.  Tell them we were working in black magic and we destroyed our food supply.  They’ll turn us over to Crewhost if we’re lucky.  If we’re not, they’ll lynch us both.  She’ll have every technician in the Lab behind her, because they’re terrified of her.”

“It happened when she wasn’t here,” Val murmured.

“Yeah!” Eric snapped.  “And she’s gonna blame us.”

“No,” Val said hurriedly.  “Listen to me.  It happened when she wasn’t here.  When does black magic backfire?”

Eric stared at him as if he’d grown a third eye.

Val rolled his eyes and shook his head.  “No, I haven’t suddenly developed a stalwart belief in magic.  I’m saying think.  When, according to the Priests of the Triangle, does black magic usually backfire?”

A small light of understanding filled Eric’s eyes.  “When they’re not expecting it.”

“She doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” Val agreed.  “If she tries to point fingers at us, call it black magic, all we’ll have to do is mention the one time she wasn’t here to brew her potions and make her sacrifices, the wild dogs come in.  Coincidence?”

Eric’s eyes widened, though it was at something down the hall.

A dry, utterly calm voice said, “I was under the impression that you didn’t believe in magic, Val.”

Valhalla flinched and looked down the hall at Dr. Cin.  She was watching him with a cold expression.  Out of the massive wall of shame that hit Valhalla like a bull’s kick, all that he could think to say was, “Who called you?”

Dr. Cincinnati’s freckled face was flat.  “The doctor at Med 16, when one of my technicians passed away this morning due to multiple animal-based injuries.”

Val swallowed as Dr. Cin approached, her face unreadable.  Her gaze flickered behind them at the closed door to Lab 16, then returned to Val.  He had to resist the urge to cringe under her stare.  “How bad is it?”

For a moment, Val thought she was just as calm and collected as she’d always been--a cold stone amidst turbulence--yet movement caught his eye.  When he looked down, he saw that her hand was shaking. 

“How bad is it, Val?” she asked again.  Valhalla didn’t like the desperation he saw in her eyes. 

“Bad,” Val whispered.

Dr. Cin took a deep breath and let it out slowly.  It ended in an odd sound, something that almost sounded like the beginnings of a sob.  She looked up at him, her gaze open and anxious.  “How much did we lose?”

“About seventy percent.”  Val hated the vulnerability he saw in the doctor’s eyes.  She had always run Lab 16 with an iron fist, terrorizing intern and lifetime worker alike, and to see her with the beginnings of tears in her eyes was too much.  He had to look away.  “Maybe as much as eighty.”

Dr. Cin lifted an arm and wiped at her face.  She nodded at Eric.  “Get him to a doctor.  Someone in Medical 17--something weird’s going on at Med 16.  Meet me back here when you’re done.”

Shame still pounding against his heart, Val nodded and moved past her with Eric still slumped against his shoulder.  Behind him, he heard Dr. Cin make the last few steps to the lab door.  A heavy clunk reverberated down the metal hallway as she twisted the handle, throwing the deadbolts out of the way.

Val hurried his step.

At the hallway joining Section 16 and Section 17, Val considered going to Med 16 anyway.  First, it was closer, and second, Dr. Cin had a reputation of being an overly bossy control freak when she was stressed.  Besides, what could be weird enough that he couldn’t find someone to make a few stitches and find Eric some antibiotics?

Besides, Med 16 was about thirty minutes’ closer.

By the time he got Eric to Medical 16, Eric was clinging to his arm, only half-aware.  Valhalla dropped his friend into a seat by the front desk.  He stayed just long enough to jog Eric awake, then went to the desk.  A brute of a man sat in a chair behind it, fiddling with tongue depressors, attempting to stack them into a cabin.  He only seemed minimally interested in Val’s arrival.

Val slapped the table to get the man’s attention.  Jerking his thumb at the benches behind him, Val said, “He’s gonna need stitches, some antibiotics, and maybe a blood transfusion.”

The man froze, tongue-depressor in hand, his gaze blank.  “A what?”

Val winced, realizing he had quoted a vague reference he had found in one researcher’s journal, when breeding a type of pig genetically altered to produce blood suitable for use in the human body.  “He’s gonna need blood,” Val said.  “Do you have blood on hand?”

The man stiffened, his thick, heavy-boned face not belonging to a man who favored intellectual pursuits.  “Blood on hand for what?”  He was peering at Val as if he expected him to pull out a chicken and sacrifice it right there on his desk.

Val shook his head.  “Nevermind.  I need a doctor.  He’s going to need stitches.”

The man frowned at him.  “I’m the doctor.”

Val froze, then peered down the empty hallways behind the reception booth.  There was no bustle of white and blue uniforms, no hum of conversation.  Now that he looked, the place seemed more or less abandoned.  “Where are the others?”

“Other who?” the man asked.  He was stepping from behind his desk, pulling skin-tight, bloody leather work gloves over his hands. 

Val stared at the gloves.  “The rest of Medical 16.  What are you doing?”

“Checking my patient,” the man said.

“What about antibiotics?  Sanitation?”

The man gave him another bovine look.  “I’m wearing gloves.”  He then proceeded to squat down beside Eric and pry an eyeball open.  “He’s still alive.”

“That’s why I brought him here, instead of the morgue.” 

The man let the eyelid snap shut and turned his attention to the shirt.  “Lots of blood.  I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

“That’s not his blood,” Valhalla growled.  “The stuff on his chest’s dog blood.  His arm got mauled.  Where is everyone?”

“Some tiny Labs bitch gathered ‘em all up and took ‘em somewhere.”

Val frowned, immediately recognizing Dr. Cin’s M.O.  “You know where?”

The man snorted.  “I called Crewhost on her.  Taking my patients from me.  That’s Code violation.”

Still frowning, Val glanced around him at the seemingly dead Medical division.  “Where are your colleagues?”

“I got a couple nurses in the back,” the man said.  “They’re keeping my other patients company.  Tellin’ em stories of the Builders to keep the black humours away.  My janitor’s probably sleeping.”

“The other doctors,” Valhalla snapped.  “This medical installation serves over six hundred thousand people.  Where is everybody?”

The man shrugged.  “Maybe off taking that Crewhost test.”

Val frowned at the clumsy way the man started unwrapping bandages.  “The what?”

“The Crewhost test,” the man repeated.  “The one they make all the smart people take.”  The man shrugged and yanked the remaining bandage from the wound, opening it anew.  He frowned at what he saw.  “That’s bleeding pretty bad.”

“It’d be bleeding a lot less if you hadn’t tore it open!” Val snapped, slapping the bandages back in place and applying pressure.  “Where’s your first-aid kit?”

The man’s heavy brow was furrowed, now.  “It’s full of black humors,” the man said, glaring at him.  “It needs to be washed.”  He pointed at a bloody bucket in the corner, the water obviously having been used for a similar purpose several times already that day.

“To hell with that,” Val growled.  “Go get someone who knows what they’re doing!”

The man’s eyes narrowed and stood up.  He was easily a foot taller than Val, and he wasn’t lacking in the muscle genetic.  He grabbed Val by the collar and lifted him away from Eric.  “I’m the doctor now,” the man growled.  “I took the medlab fair and square after they left, so you’ll obey my rules or I crush your face.  Go sit down until I’m done washing him up.  Then you can take your friend home.”

“He needs stitches and antibiotics,” Val growled.  “He was mauled by a dog, not stung by a goddamn bee.  You use that water on him and it’ll introduce bacteria, which will fester and create infection.”

The man snorted.  “I’ve been a doctor longer than you.”  He then threw him across the room and went back to prying the bandage away from Eric’s wound.

He’s going to kill him, Val realized.  Dread slowly began to heat his arms and legs in painful arcs of adrenaline.

Val crawled back to his feet, his back and legs throbbing from where he’d slammed into the benches lining the far wall of the reception room.  Seeing the man daub a finger into Eric’s blood, then bring it to his tongue, cold tingles of fear started crawling along the back of his spine.

“What do you mean, you ‘took’ the medlab?” Val said, inching his way towards the reception desk.

The man, not looking back at him, grunted and spat scarlet onto the floor by his foot.  “Yep, definitely bad humours in there.  I need my bucket.”  He stood up and retrieved the bucket, slopping crimson water on the floor as he carelessly slapped it down beside Eric’s bench.  He looked over his shoulder at Val, who pressed his back into the reception desk and waited.

“Don’t use that water,” Val said.  “You need sanitized water or alcohol.”

“They shut the water off, and I don’t feel like getting alcohol,” the man said, shrugging.

“Get it!” Val snapped, feeling his face heat.

The man laughed at his fury.  “Hey, I gotta learn somehow, right?  Your friend is gonna be furthering science, here.  You should love that, Lab-boy.  I learn on him just like you Lab-rats learn on your goats.”  He then turned his attention to a pink rag floating in the putrid bucket.

As soon as the man was looking elsewhere, Val started to move again.  “How did you say you became a doctor?” he asked.

The man wrung out the rag into the bucket.  Conversationally, he said, “There weren’t nobody here, and the food bots deliver food once a day, whether there’s people here or not, so I walked in and claimed it.  Figure I gotta do my job if I’m getting paid foodmoney for it, right?”

Eyes on the squatting brute, Val slowly began feeling his way along the edge of the reception counter.  Hunched over on the bench, his wounds exposed, Eric was bleeding badly, wetting the floor beneath him crimson. 

“Everyone’s gotta eat,” Val agreed, still moving along the counter.  “Ain’t no way around that.”

“Yeah,” the man said, “Figure I might as well do a public service, you know?  Don’t have to, since the bots deliver the food anyways, but I got bored after the first week.  Decided I might as well do something interesting, and I don’t mind blood.”

Val’s fingers found a stainless steel drinking mug and clamped around it.  As quietly as possible, he lifted the mug off the reception counter.  “Stop, now, or I’ll make you stop.”

The man snorted.  “You don’t got what it takes, Lab-boy.”

“I just spent the day killing wild dogs,” Val snapped.  “Get the hell away from my friend!”

The man ignored him.  “That Lab-bitch bullied my nurses into letting her take my first set of patients ‘cause I was busy taking a dump, but I’ve been sitting here all day without anything to do, so you’re gonna let me work on your friend, here, or I’ll pound your head in so flat you’ll think it was a pancake.”

Val’s hand tightened on the mug, his eyes fixed to the dripping rag.  “I could teach you what you want to know.  A lot of it, anyway.  We had to patch up a lot of animals in the Lab.”

The man hesitated, seemed to consider, a look of honest contemplation on his face.  Then he shook his head.  “Nah.  My pops told me the best way to learn is to figure it out myself.”  He lifted the rag from the bucket and grabbed Eric’s hand.

“Get away from him!” Val snapped.  He threw the mug and it slammed connected solidly with the back of the man’s skull.  The brute grunted and dropped the rag in Eric’s lap.  Slowly, he stood, his bulk winding up and turning around like an angry mountain.

Val danced sideways, into the hallway leading deeper into Med 16.

“You lab-fat coward!” the man snarled.  “Get back here.”

“Come get me,” Val said, backing further into the hallway. 

The man squinted at him, then looked over his shoulder at Eric.  “Screw you.  There’s just nurses and beds back there.  My patient needs his wounds washed.  He’s gotta get rid of those humours or he’s dying.”  He turned and squatted beside Eric.

Val grabbed a bottle of tongue-depressors on a counter beside him and lobbed it at the man’s head.  His aim, which had always been good, hit true, and the self-proclaimed doctor came up in a roar.

“I’m doctor now,” Val snapped, still walking backwards down the hall.  “Get the hell out.  I could do a better job than you.”

The man’s stupid eyes opened slightly, as if he were stunned Val could even think such a thing.  Then he ducked his head and charged, obviously intent on ramming the top of his head through Val’s chest.

Val stopped at a door marked Medical Personnel Only and yanked it open to meet the man’s charge.  The man slammed into it, leaving a dent the size of a basketball in the steel.  As the brute stumbled backwards, blinking, Val quickly scanned the room for something to defend himself with.

To his dismay, it was a medication room.

Across the hall from him, the so-called doctor was regaining his senses, rage painting his face a deep crimson.

I am so dead, Val thought.

Seeing the bottles on the racks, Val blindly yanked it off the shelf.  Behind him, rag-clad nurses were coming out of the sickrooms to see what all the shouting was about.

Swiveling, Val twisted the lid off the bottle and stepped back into the hallway brandishing his prize label-first at his assailant.  “Stay the hell back or I’ll use this!” he shouted, keeping the bottle between them.  “Read the label!  You know what this’ll do to you!”

The man stumbled to a halt, staring at the bottle with oblivious bovine stupidity.

“You know all those people getting sick?” Val demanded.  He sloshed the liquid inside the bottle.  “This is why.”

The man flinched and took a step backwards.  “Med-lab people stop the sickness.”

Val laughed.  “And then they go label their bottles, ‘Death Potion?’  Really?  Does that sound like something someone with your best interests at heart would be doing?  What about Rash Brew?  Cancer Potion?  Fever Powder?  Plague Carrier?”  He swept his hand backwards to include the racks of bottles in the tiny room behind him.  “Just look at them!  Don’t believe me?  Go in there and see!”

“I can read,” the man said, swallowing.  “But Docs help people.  Everybody knows this.”

“Oh yeah?” Val demanded.  “What better way to ensure your own job security than to give yourself extra work?”

The man was taking on a hunted look, licking his lips, his eyes fixed on the bottle.  “You’re lying.”

“Really?” Val demanded.  Then he frowned, peering at him as he took an extra step towards him.  “You really didn’t know that, did you?”  He threw back his head and laughed.  “How else you think they fix it, if they don’t have a way to make it?  Doctors are the founders of black magic.  They cause the Plague because it gets them more business.”

The skinny, grime-covered nurses, upon hearing talk of the Plague, quickly stepped back inside their rooms and slammed the doors shut.  The self-proclaimed doctor took another step backwards, toward the reception center.  He was licking his lips nervously, eying the doors his assistants had disappeared behind, obviously wanting to join them.  Instead, he straightened, giving Val a smug look.  “I don’t believe you.  Know why, Lab-boy?  ‘Cause you ain’t stupid.  You won’t be holdin’ no sickness in yer hands.  You know better than that.”

“Oh yeah?” Val demanded.  “Who better to know how to counter the black magics a med-lab uses than a Lab-boy?  How else you think you started eating meat more than once a month?  You think the Builders just dropped it on your plate for you?”  He snorted.  “You’re right--we ain’t stupid, and we finally figured out science ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.  You know that beef you’ve been eating?  It sure as hell hasn’t come from better gene-selection.  You think it was something as simple as increasing the genetic diversity of our native sample?”  He cackled, putting the full strength of his lungs into it.  “You really think, after all these years, we worked to get where we are?”  He kept walking forward, holding the bottle between them.  “Why should we, when it’s so much easier to use the Black Book?”

The man kept stumbling backwards, his eyes widening.  “I knew it.  They’ve been saying it for years.  You lab-rats ‘been sacrificing chickens to the Dark One, ain’t ya?”

“No,” Valhalla said.

The man stopped, frowning.  “No?”

“No,” Valhalla repeated.  “We don’t sacrifice chickens.”

He could see the man’s confusion climbing through the crevices of his brain like a weed seeking the sun.  “But I thought--”

“A chicken?” Valhalla snarled.  “Do you really think the Dark One would waste his fucking time with a chicken?”  Valhalla strode up to him and slammed a finger into the man’s chest.  “Would you insult your pathetic gods with something as worthless as a goddamn chicken?”  Spittle flying, he snarled, “We sacrifice goats to please our Master.  Male goats.  Ones with big balls.  Our Master likes vigor in his meals.  Sometimes we’ll bleed Him a bull, if He’s craving dark meat.  And then, on particular occasions, we’ll give Him something even more special.  Something a bit more...” he paused and looked the enormous man up and down thoughtfully, stopping on his groin, “...interesting.”  Then he lifted his gaze and held the man’s stare pointedly, waiting. 

Faced with the man’s bovine stare, Valhalla started counting off seconds in his head.

He had reached thirteen before the self-proclaimed doctor’s entire body twitched as if he’d been swatted in the side of the head with a two-by-four.  The man’s eyes widened until they were showing whites all around, then, with a rabbit-like squeal, he turned and bolted down the hall so fast he fell and had to scramble around the corner.  Valhalla heard the squeaks of the rubber soles of his shoes all the way out the front of the reception booth and into the hallway beyond.

Val dropped the bottle of isopropyl alcohol onto the floor and went back to Eric.  He re-bound his wound, checked his pulse, grimaced that it was so weak, and slung him over his shoulder.  Eric barely even struggled.

His friend in tow, he began the trek to Medical 17.

When he got there, to huge double-doors to Med 17 hung open.  Inside, he saw no lights and no one manning the desk, but he heard the clatter of plastic and glass breaking.  Frowning, Val stopped outside the entry and lowered Eric to the ground.  Eric’s head lolled and he was completely unresponsive when Eric tried to shake him.  What little pulse Valhalla could feel, it wasn’t enough. 

He needs help, Val thought, peering into the empty reception room.

Heart pounding, Val slowly got to his feet and approached the entrance.  The clattering continued inside, along with the sounds of a gurney being tossed, its frame rattling as it hit the floor.  Swallowing, Val wished he had some sort of weapon, but Crewhost had long ago confiscated anything sharper than a butter-knife.

He walked to the front desk and switched on the lamp.  Instantly, the crashing within the med unit stopped.

“Hello?” Val called into the darkened hallway.  “Hello?  I’m looking for a doctor...”

No answer.  He heard a tinkle of glass, something crunching underfoot.

Val swallowed and started to approach the dark corridor.  “Excuse me, but do you have any idea what happened to every--”

A dark shape lunged from the blackness at a dead sprint and barreled into him.  Val tried to get out of the way and grunted as he was bodily thrown aside.  He gasped as a sharp pain sliced through his chest as his back slammed into the wall, hard.  Something clattered to the floor and he dropped to his knees, the breath knocked out of him.  Behind him, he heard feet running past the reception desk, toward the exit.

“Wait!” Val called behind him.

No answer.  The sound of running footsteps turned and disappeared around the bend in the hall.

Groaning, Val reached up and touched his chest, expecting to find a broken rib.

His hand came back bloody.  At first, Val didn’t understand.  He squatted there in the half-darkness of the abandoned Med lab, staring at the wet crimson of blood.  Had a rib broken through the skin?

Then his eyes came to rest on a penlike object on the gray tile floor between him and the exit.  He froze when he recognized the scalpel.

Builders, Val thought, immediately slapping a hand over the wound.  He stabbed me.  He swallowed once, twice, then slumped against the wall, his adrenaline screaming through his veins.  Thoughts began to hammer through his brain, in desperate rapid-fire.  How bad was it?  Had it punctured a lung?  Had it cut any major arteries?  What if it had reached the heart?  Where were the doctors?  Could he find someone to help him in time?

After several minutes of panic, Val finally realized he would have to lift his hand from the wound in order to judge its severity.  Bracing himself, he lifted first a finger, then his palm.

Blood oozed from under his fingers, further staining his shirt.  Gingerly, Val took a finger and prodded at the wound.  More blood oozed past his touch, slicking his chest scarlet.

The scalpel cut was approximately five inches long and, from what Val could tell, no more than half an inch deep.  Still, it was bleeding badly, and he knew it was going to need medical attention.

With as little movement as possible, Valhalla pulled the shirt over his head and wadded it against his chest, then held it there, hard.

Grunting, one hand pressing the wadded-up shirt to his chest, Val got to his feet and listened to the darkness beyond.  “Hello?” he called.  He slowly reached down and grabbed the scalpel.  “I’m coming back there.  I need to get a med kit.”

He heard nothing.

Scalpel in hand, he started into the dark hallway.  He stopped a few feet inside and, using the hand holding the scalpel, flipped on the switch.

What he saw left him in dismay.  The entire medical facility had been ransacked, with bottles and instruments shattered and strewn across floors and counters, graffiti scrawled across the main hallway.  The further in he went, the worse it got, until he found the operating room and preservation freezers.

The operating room had been destroyed, every robotic arm, every lamp, every priceless piece of equipment shattered into a hundred pieces, never to be used again.  Etched upon the brushed steel walls with the tips of scalpels, torn into the leather of the beds, scraped into the glass of the observation booth, were circles, triangles, and ovoids. 

Feeling as if he’d been punched, Valhalla backed out of the operating room, into the storage area beside the morgue.  Valhalla gagged upon seeing thawing human organs ripped from their containers and strewn over the floor, the stainless steel freezer doors bent and twisted, with operating instruments buried in the walls, the organs, the floors.  Valhalla quickly returned to the main hallway, holding the back of his hand to his mouth. 

From his vantage, he could see straight down the hallway to the morgue.  It was a mistake.  Through the open door, he saw bodies pulled from their preservation chambers, cold, dead, white corpses flayed like they’d been torn apart by wild dogs, but with more precision, more finesse.  Dogs didn’t carve circles into dead men’s foreheads. 

Valhalla looked down at the scalpel in his hand.  It was covered in crusted bits of flesh, blood, and hair.  He immediately dropped it, gagging.  Then, stumbling, he hurried back down the hallway, toward the hall outside and the spot where he’d left Eric.

His pace slowed as he considered his alternatives.  Eric was in trouble.  He needed help, and soon, and if the first two Med sectors were any indication, he wasn’t going to find his friend help in the normal places.  He stopped in the entrance to the reception room and looked at the ravaged area behind him.  Somewhere in there, strewn amongst the broken instruments, the dead bodies, and the stink of medicine, there had to be thread, bandages, alcohol, and antibiotics.

Remembering the corpses, Valhalla felt his legs begin to shake. 

That was the morgue, he told himself.  They weren’t cryo-preserved.  They’ve been dead a long time.

Or had they?  He hadn’t gotten a good look at the label on the door when he’d been staring at the mutilated bodies.  What if it had been the cryo room?

Val shook his head.

Not even nonessents were that stupid.  Ship needed sleepers to rejuvenate the human gene pool every three hundred years, adding ancient, abandoned bloodlines to help prevent bottlenecking.  Everyone knew that.  Even the nonessents understood that people were getting uglier, that only Crewhost seemed to avoid increasing instances of genetic deformities or disabilities.  Over half of the nonessent population was either deaf, blind, or mute, and most were born with missing or extra fingers, mismatched eyes, or odd growths.  Even they understood that the offspring of sleepers resulted in smarter, healthier babies.  Val’s father had been a sleeper, as had Dr. Cin’s.

Hell, even if all they understood was that the Builders wanted sleepers to be awoken every 300 years, they still respected their ancestors’ wishes to the letter.  It was one of the only things that Valhalla’s brethren still did by the book.

...or had done by the book, before the medical personnel disappeared.

And who better to revive sleepers than the missing med specialists?

Valhalla closed his eyes, a sickness working its way into the back of his throat.

They weren’t Cryo, he told himself.  Nobody’s that stupid.    They would’ve been somewhere else if they were Cryo.

...Or would they?  What if the perpetrator had half-thawed sleepers and killed them?

The idea was so gut-wrenching to Valhalla that he found he couldn’t move.  An image of the dark figure springing from the darkness to cut him with a scalpel once again flashed through Val’s mind.  It could have been shadows... or he could have been dressed from head to toe in black. 

For a second, Val couldn’t breathe.

Then he was moving, hurrying back down the maze of corridors, seeking out the deepest hallway, the hall of sleep and death.

He came to a stumbling halt when he once again reached the final junction and found himself looking back into the open door.  Beside it and to the right, a clearly-marked double-entry door stood unmolested, with the small black letters of MORGUE etched across its surface in bold.  Even at this angle, he could see the first three letters of the word CRYO marking the open door.

The dead men on the floor had not been long dead.  They had been murdered.

Val slid to the floor, stunned.

One man.  One misguided soul had destroyed the genetic future of an entire Section of Ship.  But why?  And who?  Any followers of the Builders would consider it blasphemy to destroy a sleeper.  Sleepers were the sacred Chosen of the Builders, gifts from the gods to give their daughters healthy children.  Yet the symbols of the Builders had been carved into the dead men’s heads in the same manner as a priestess would daub paint into a young girl’s forehead to signify her passage into womanhood, or a priest would mark a corpse before burial.  Val’s brain chewed on that as he stared at the corpses, trying to make sense of it. 

Regardless of his fellow nonessents’ stupidity, he couldn’t imagine them doing anything so vile.

The image of the man emerging from the shadows hit him again.  Black.  Only one faction on Ship was allowed to dress in black.

Val squinted at the bodies.  Crewhost? 

The more he considered it, the more it made sense.  Not even the self-proclaimed doctor, confident in his abilities to patch up his ‘patients,’ had had the self-confidence to try and wake a sleeper.

But why would Crewhost do something so destructive?  What did they have to gain?

It certainly seemed to fit with their general apathy towards Ship non-essentials, but why should they care?  They had sleepers of their own.

Then it hit him.

Crewhost had its own sleepers.  Its genetic pool was secured, whereas the rest of the human race was experiencing increasing amounts of inbreeding.  Val and Dr. Cin were the only two he knew of whose direct ancestry didn’t include sister-brother or father-daughter crosses--crosses that were given with the Sons of the Builders’ full blessing, as they had taken the concept of genetics and bastardized it to the point that, should a sister and brother both experience no defects, they were encouraged to produce children together.

They’re breeding us out, Val realized suddenly, shocked.  They’re narrowing the bottleneck.

But why?  Ship was going to need every ounce of genetic diversity it had when Crewhost finally found them a planet capable of supporting human life.  Why compromise their ability to re-settle? 

The answer was so simple it left him speechless. 

“No,” he whispered, his world crumbling.  His arm went limp, his hand falling away from the rag on his chest.

Piece by piece, it all fell into place.  The missing Med personnel.  The door that was pathologically closed and locked at night, suddenly finding itself open, the priceless animals inside destroyed by wild beasts.

Valhalla stared at the wall, every tidbit he’d picked up from passing Crewhost conversations, every clandestine whisper that Crewhost had made another landing and left again, every discrepancy in the ancient Lab reports, every odd rash of ‘black magic’ disappearances, every random Crewhost intelligence test, all of it finally adding up.

Crewhost didn’t plan on landing.  Ever.

Instead, they were taking the nonessents’ best genetics and killing them.  Finally, the ancient reports citing average human IQs of 120 didn’t seem so implausible.  All the stupidity, all the rampant superstition and ignorance suddenly made sense.

Crewhost was breeding them.  Like Dr. Cin’s goats, the nonessents were being selectively cultivated for desired traits.  Stupidity.  Gullibility.  Placidity.  Trapped on the nonessent side of Ship, prohibited from entering Crewhost territory, forbidden to wear the Crewhost black, they were the livestock, and Val and Dr. Cin were to Crewhost what a sickly, malformed animal was to Lab 16. 

They were the failed experiments.

Suddenly, the paranoia of his father, the man’s constant orders to act dumb, to hide his intelligence, to avoid Crewhost’s tests, all of it made sense.  His father’s disappearance when he was thirteen suddenly became something more, something terrifying.  Viewed through this new lens, it was no longer an apathetic parent abandoning his children for greener pastures.  It suddenly became ominous, chilling.

Feeling detached, drifting, Val got to his feet and went back to the medicine room. 

Most of the bottles inside were shattered, and an acrid, sickly-sweet smell permeated the room.  Valhalla winced and held his breath as he squatted and began rooting through the shattered bits of glass and fluid with a tongue depressor.  After some searching, he found four unbroken bottles that he recognized as different types of antibiotics, then, tucking them into his pocket, went to get Eric.

Eric was much as he’d left him, though his heartbeat was barely noticeable and his hands and feet were rapidly turning to ice.  Val checked the compress, grimaced at the sloppy crimson bandages, and tightened it down further.

“You selfish bastard, Eric,” he growled, hefting him over his shoulder, “You’re gonna cost us a pig, you know that?  Dr. Cin’s gonna be pissed.  Your worthless hide ain’t worth a pig.  You hear me?  She’s gonna skin you alive for wasting her pigs.”

Then he was moving fast, the weight of his friend ripping open the wound on his chest anew, despite the rag he held against it.  By the time he wove his way back through the corridors of Section 17 to the abandoned Section Interchange and struggled his way down the side hallway to Lab 16, Valhalla was getting dizzy. 

The door to the lab was hanging open when he got there.

Valhalla frowned and pushed it open the rest of the way.  “Dr. Cin?” he called into the hallway beyond.  “Eric’s here.  I need help.”

He got no response.

Deeper inside the lab, he heard snarling and yipping.  He froze.  The sounds didn’t have the unmistakeable muffled ring made from the inside of a compactor.

The dogs got out? he thought, horrified.  How did they get out?

Carefully, Valhalla set Eric down beside the door.  He could no longer feel his friend’s heartbeat, and his face was much too pale.  He needed blood.  He could only hope that one of the pigs from the original transfusion research had survived the wild dogs, and further could only pray that the sounds he was hearing was a result of the onset of delirium.  Alone, unarmed, he wouldn’t stand a chance against the hyper-intelligent dogs. 

Listening to the sounds of dogs fighting, Val stepped into the hallway, his heart pounding.  “Dr. Cin?” he called, barely more than a whisper.

No answer.

He kept moving, peering into the office rooms as he moved toward the lab main.  Even from the shadows of the hall, he could see that they had been ravaged, their contents tossed to the floor, their instruments mangled.  All the doors were open except for the last on the right, the large one belonging to the lab manager.  “Dr. Cin?” he called again, pausing outside her closed office door.  The light inside was on, shining through the window.  Beyond, in the office main, the dogs were snarling again.

Val reached out and put his hand on the time-worn steel knob.  He twisted slowly, eliciting a click as the latch sprang free.  Val hesitated, listening.  The dogs were still squabbling amongst themselves.  He held his breath and pushed the door open.

The room, like the others, was completely trashed.  This one, however, had fine traces of blood smeared upon small sections of the books and walls, and dents had been kicked in the steel desk.  Dr. Cin’s favorite chair had been snapped in half, the pieces a twisted mess in the corner.  It only took a look to realize that Dr. Cin wasn’t in the room.

Instead, the room was filled with haphazardly-painted circles, triangles, and oviods.  On the wall directly behind her desk, a vandal had scrawled an enormous circle with a square inside it and a triangle inside the square, symbol of Ship.  It was also the most common mark found after the disappearance of a particularly loud, anti-Builder activist, and until this day, Val had taken it to be a symbol of Ship’s most vociferous extremists.  Now he suspected it was something more.

They fed her to the dogs, Val thought, his heart suddenly becoming a thundering tempo in his chest.  They came in here, kidnapped her, and fed her to the dogs.

He backed from the room faster than he intended, pulling the door shut with a snap.

In the open area beyond the hall, the dogs went silent.

Val froze and turned toward the end of the hallway, listening.  The room that had been alive with snarls, snaps, yips, and growls was absolutely still, listening back.

Val took a step backwards, toward the open door to the Section 16 hallway.

Out in the lab main, something growled.

Val spun and bolted, hurling down the hallway with as much speed as his feet could carry him.  Behind him, he heard the dogs give chase, heard the click-click-scratch of their toenails scrabbling on metal grating, heard them approach much too quickly.

Go, Valhalla thought, seeing the exit door as if it were a thousand miles away in his mind.  Run, run, run...

He heard the dogs round the corner behind him, heard their snarls echo in the corridor with him, reverberating in his lungs.

Go! Valhalla’s mind screamed, throwing every ounce of strength into his legs, thrusting him the last two meters through the exit door.  Without pause, he slammed the door shut behind him and twisted the latch into place.

On the other side, the dogs lunged into the steel, raking their claws down the heavy metal door, snarling, tearing at the walls, the door, the floor, and each other in their eagerness to get at him.  Valhalla held the latch in place, feeling the claws hit the door and pull.

Too smart, he thought, his terror reaching a new high.  Our dogs are too smart.

It only took a moment for his blood-addled brain to make the connection.

Crewhost was breeding the dogs, just like it was breeding the rest of them.  It was creating the one thing Ship never had...  Predators.  Population control.

The howling on the other side of the door came to a sudden halt and he heard several sets of footsteps pad away back down the hall.  Valhalla waited, hands still clamped to the door handle, his hyper-sensitive awareness listening for any scrape, any shuffle on the other side of the door.

He heard nothing.

He was just about to straighten when something hit the latch again, almost ripping it out of his hand.  Valhalla cried out and held on, putting every ounce of his weight into keeping it in place.  He heard the thumps of feet as the animal on the other side dropped from the door to the floor of the hallway, only a couple inches of steel between them.  It started to growl, a low, eerie sound that carried through the metal as if it weren’t even there.

Every instinct told Valhalla to run.  Every muscle in his body wanted to drop the door handle and sprint down the hall just as fast as he could go.  It was a carnal feeling, something Valhalla had never experienced before, and it was the most difficult thing he’d ever done to simply keep his hands in place.

The thing kept growling.

Valhalla squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to feel every vibration of the dog’s snarl against the hairs of his neck and spine.

It growled, then went silent.  Just when he thought it would stop, it started growling again.  It knew he was there.

It’s waiting for me to let go, Valhalla realized, a new sort of terror pouring through him.

The dog kept growling, punctuated by slow, nerve-rattling scratches against the metal floor.

Too smart, Valhalla thought.  I should’ve realized they were too damn smart for wild dogs.

The dog continued to rake its claws along the floor, growling, waiting.

Valhalla finally couldn’t take it anymore.  “Shut up!” he screamed at the door.  “Just shut the hell--”  He froze when he realized that, in his terror, he hadn’t even checked his pocket to see if he still had the key.

Numbly, he unwrapped one hand from the door handle and started patting his pockets, trying to remember.  Who’d taken the key that afternoon?  Had he left it on Dr. Cin’s desk?  Had Eric picked it up?  He didn’t have it.  Had one of the assistants dropped it back in the mail slot?  The day had been such a blur he couldn’t remember.

“Eric,” Valhalla whispered, over his shoulder.  “Eric!”

The growling stopped.  Valhalla got the eerie feeling the dog was listening, and understood.

It’s just a dog, Valhalla thought, fighting the stab of panic that followed.  “Eric!  I need the key!”

His friend did not respond.  Val looked over his shoulder, then immediately felt his heart clench at his friend’s too-white face.  Swallowing, he turned back to the door, looking up at the biometrically-sealed mail slot.  With one hand still firmly holding the latch shut, he slid the other up the wall, until it touched the scan-pad.

“Sample accepted, Doctor Genetaker,” the keypad said.  “Full access.  Please take your mail from the dispenser.”

Full access? Valhalla thought, confused.  Then he flinched.  Doctor Genetaker?  When had that happened?

The slot into the mail box slid open, revealing a pile of papers and reports, some still bloody from that afternoon.  Valhalla grabbed the whole mess and pulled it out, and breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the plastic tinkle of the keycard hitting the metal floor.  He squatted and reached down to start digging.

His eyes, however, caught on the haphazardly-folded, hand-printed piece of scrap paper on top of the pile.  Dr. Cin didn’t allow anything other than official, properly typed, file-ready reports in her message bin.  Everything else got discarded, unread, so no one in the Lab was stupid enough to drop something like this in the box.

The latch on the steel door suddenly jerked in his hand, and the metal became alive with the sound of talons-on-steel, scratching and clawing at the lock.

Still clinging to the latch, Valhalla dug his hand into the pile and started feeling for the key.  Come on, he thought, his fingers scrabbling through the papers, seeking the lump of a keycard.  The wild dog continued its assault, lunging and clawing at the door, its snarling reverberating through the steel, lancing his spine.

Valhalla’s fingers found the lump under the reports and he dug underneath.  He grabbed the keycard and, in one quick motion, slid the card through the locking mechanism.  He thanked every god he knew as he heard the heavy thud of animal-proof deadbolts thumping into place, but he continued to hold the handle for long minutes, waiting.

Eventually, the beast’s assault subsided, and it dropped back to the floor.  Long minutes passed, when all Val could hear was the sound of his own heartbeat as his fingers turned to ice on the handle.  Then he heard the dog turn and pad back down the hallway, toward the lab main, yet still Valhalla held onto the latch.

When he could finally bring himself to release the latch, Valhalla stood slowly, still panting, eyes fixed to the door.

“Eric,” he whispered, listening to the dog’s footbeats retreat, “We’re in a lot of trouble.”  He looked at his friend and froze.

Eric’s mouth and eyes were open, his jaw hanging against his chest. 

For a moment, Val’s heart gave an extra thud when he thought his friend was looking at him.  “Eric?”

Yet Eric’s gaze never wavered.  There was no movement in his ribcage, and his face held no blood.  Val had seen something similar, in pigs.  Their faces and jowls went white, their skin a sickly shade of ivory.  If Eric wasn’t already dead, he would be within moments.

Val squatted down and felt his friend’s forehead.  It, like his hands, was icy cold.  When he grabbed his wrist and dug his fingers into the vein, he felt no pulse.

Closing his eyes, Val dropped his forehead to Eric’s.  The two closest Med labs were both empty husks.  Anyone who had known anything about blood transfusions would have been in those labs when they were ransacked.  Any pigs that had survived the dogs’ initial assault were either dead or in hiding.  Val himself was starting to fail, the scalpel cut sapping his energy, leaving him dizzy.  His forehead still pressed to Eric’s, Val took a deep breath, squeezing his eyes shut.  Then, letting his breath out slowly, he began to intone the only burial prayer he knew.

“You lived well upon the Builders’ offered bosom, Eric Blackhand Goodsight.  You cared for their creation as if it were your own.  You were true to their memory, following their wishes with your every breath and motion.  Now, in death, you go to meet them.  May the Builders see form and beauty in your soul.”

When he pulled away, Eric remained in the exact same position as before: unbreathing, unmoving, dead.  Val slumped down beside him, staring at the opposite wall.

Someone had intentionally destroyed Lab 16.  Dr. Cin had joined the long list of the missing dead, carted off and made to disappear by the same Crewhost criminals that had ransacked the Med Labs.  Eric had died in his arms.

Which meant Val, as the last one in the Lab who understood what was happening with the stock’s genetics, was the one who had to get it running again.

Which would get him killed.

A trickle of blood down his chest caught Valhalla’s attention once more.  Somewhere in the race to the door, he had dropped the rag he had been using to keep the wound shut.  It was now bleeding mercilessly, oozing out over the lip of flesh to stain his chest crimson, reminding him too much of Eric’s wound three hours before.

After a cursory search didn’t produce his rag, Valhalla ripped one of his pantlegs free at the knee and pressed it to the wound.  He then slumped back against the wall to consider his options.

If someone didn’t get Lab 16 back into working order, the people in Section 16 would starve.  Governor 16’s exchange board would no longer be able to trade meat, hides, wool, and dairy for grain, paper, fruits, and vegetables.  All of Section 16’s trade potential depended upon its livestock lab.  Without the animals, Section 16 would have nothing but manpower to trade for its basic commodities, and with a surplus of manpower throughout Ship, what little manpower the other Sections were willing to trade the Governor would be paid a pittance.  Without food, the slums would become a wasteland, and aggression and murder rates would skyrocket.  Riots would break out.  Crewhost would be forced to step in and--

Val frowned.  Could Crewhost be intentionally destroying Section 16’s ability to be self-sufficient?  It went against all the credos and manuscripts the Builders had left them.  While trade was important, every section of Ship--every section--should be able to seal its blast doors and be able to continue the human race on its own, should something befall the rest of the ship.

They’re destroying the plan, Val thought, fury beginning to build in a hard ball in his gut.  They don’t care about saving the human race.  They never intend to land.

In that moment, Valhalla knew he had to do something.  Of anyone in Section 16, he had the knowledge to revive its stock.  While Valhalla didn’t have the experience behind him that Dr. Cin did, Val was still reasonably sure he could retrieve DNA from the slaughtered animals and begin reconstructing Dr. Cin’s herds using cloning techniques and mechanical surrogates.  If nothing else, he could pull bloodlines from the freezer and start over.  If, that was, Crewhost hadn’t destroyed the necessary equipment.

Yet, if he did anything to follow in Dr. Cin’s footsteps, it would make him a target.  He was reasonably sure that Crewhost was already watching him.  Further, he couldn’t seek the aid of Governor 16, because the man had made it clear that, while Dr. Cin’s methods had been producing more valuable trade goods, he found genetic selection to be a clear violation of the Builders’ Codes, and a blatant attempt to usurp the Builders’ established genius with heretical claims of errors in their Plan.

Besides, by kidnapping Dr. Cin, Crewhost had made it clear to every able-bodied technician that working Lab 16 was a good way to disappear.  He would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to brave the Builders’ wrath to repair the damage, much less anyone with enough brains to help him.

Damn them, Val thought, fighting down the horrible surge of hopelessness.  He checked the rag, was somewhat relieved to find that the blood flow had slowed, and leaned his head back against the wall to think.  As he did, it brought the odd scrap of paper atop the mail pile back into focus.  Frowning, he leaned forward and plucked it from the top.

He froze when he realized that, scrawled in Dr. Cin’s handwriting on the outside fold, was the word, “Val.”

From behind, a loud voice said, “Something we can help you with, sir?”

Val flinched and looked over his shoulder.  Two men in Crewhost black were headed toward him down the hallway, guns and knives belted to their hips.  Every hair standing on end, Val tucked the message into his pocket and straightened.  “I’m a lab tech here for Dr. Cin.”

“Dr. Cin resigned two hours ago,” the closest man replied.  “TUCK accepted her withdrawal by warrant of incompetence.”  He was taller than Val by a foot, and carried the lithe, handsome physique of a model Crewhost.  It was the one standing beside him, however, who held Val’s attention.  Though Val guessed he was in his mid thirties, the second man was quieter, with a shock of silver at his auburn temples.  Lithe, but not displaying the steroid-enhanced body currently in vogue with Crewhost, he had a handsome, rugged jawline that called attention to his full beard.  Both his beard and his hair were a shade of brown that Val hadn’t seen before, almost a red.  He stood at around six feet, and had an intelligence about him that made Val nervous.  Further, the six ropes--three silver, three gold--of Senior Security adorned his shoulder, giving him the power of Expulsion over nonessents.  His eyes were on Val’s pocket.

Knowing his next words would decide his fate, Val tore his gaze back to the first man and did his best to look shocked.  “She retired?” Val demanded.  “Why?  Lab 16 needs her.”

The talkative one shrugged.  “Guess she got tired of scooping cow shit.”  He glanced at the floor beside the door.  “Who’s that?”

“I found him in the labs,” Val said.  “He died before I could find a doctor.”

“That’s a shame.”  Was it his imagination, or was the man being smug?  Val couldn’t tell as the man pulled a radio from his belt and called in for a composting crew.  He sniffed and peered at the door.  “We heard there was a wild dog problem?”

Rage began to bubble up through Val’s gut before he squashed it.  As civilly as he could, he said, “We could’ve used you twelve hours ago.”

“We had other things we were doing,” the man replied. 

I bet you did, Val thought, seething. 

The man made a show of removing the gun from his belt and checking the chamber.  Smiling, he gestured at the door and said, “But we’re free now.  If you would care to let us in?”  Val could all but feel the smugness rolling off of the man as he said the words.

“Sure,” Val said, biting down a curse.  He reached out, slid the card through the lock, and gave his ID to the computer.

“Voiceprint identified.  Thank you, Dr. Genetaker.” 

Since when am I Dr. Genetaker? Val thought, confused.  But the door slid open, and Val tensed, waiting for the Crewhost to shoot him in the back.

Instead, the man with the gun out laughed and said, “Unless you want to lead the way, nonessent, I suggest you get out of the way.”

To avoid saying something rash, Val moved to the side and bent to gather up the reports on the ground.  The first man stepped past him, marching down the hall at a rapid pace.

Valhalla hadn’t realized that the second man hadn’t followed until he spoke behind him.

“Today’s mail?”

It was all Val could do not to jump out of his skin.  “Reports,” Val said.  “Inter-office memos.”

The senior Security officer came abreast of him, watching.  He stood so close that Val could feel the heat coming off his body.

“Mind if I have a look?”  His words were friendly, but his intent look--combined with the fact he was Crewhost--allowed no refusal. 

Val, who had been planning to find a safe place to store the fountain of genetic information he held in his hands until he could figure out what to do next, reluctantly handed over the pile of mail, fully expecting the man to destroy it.

To his surprise, the security chief actually began to read them.  He grunted as he sorted through the pile, then looked up at Val with a frown darkening his hazel eyes.  “You made your first call at zero-seven-thirty?”

“Yes,” Val muttered.  But of course you know that, you bastard.  You intentionally did nothing.

“This morning?” the man insisted, looking full of disbelief, eying him much too closely for comfort.

What does he want me to say? Val wondered.  Were they trying to get him to disavow the fact that the lab had made numerous calls for help?  Were they trying to get him to lie on record, so there was no evidence of Crewhost wrongdoing?

“We called for help a total of twenty-seven times,” Val said finally.  “One of my assistants got mauled while she was on the phone.”

The man’s gaze sharpened.  “One of your assistants.”

Damn! Val thought.  Seeing no other alternative, he straightened.  “Before Eric died, the two of us acted as assistant managers for Dr. Cin.”

The security chief looked at him from under a raised brow.  “Can you make sense of these reports, then?”

He’s trying to figure out how much of a danger I am.  Val’s lip twitched in a snarl, refusing to play the fool.  “I can do everything Dr. Cin taught me.”

“Good.”  The man handed back the reports, his big hands surprisingly gentle.  “After a disaster like this, Section 16 will need every bit of help it can get.”  The man nodded politely and stepped past him, leaving Valhalla staring in his wake.  Unlike his partner, Val couldn’t even hear his footsteps as he padded down the hallway.  Deeper within, from somewhere in the lab main, Val could already hear the whomping puff of sonic rounds going off, followed by the barks and whines of dogs in pain.  He waited until he heard a second set of rounds join the first, then hurried inside the labs.

He went directly to the veterinary section, found the kits the doctor had used to stitch up leg gashes or torn ears, and pulled out a needle and thread.  He swabbed the area with alcohol, wiped down the needle with more alcohol, and poured hydrogen peroxide into his wound.  He then attempted to push the needle through his chest to make the first stitch, but only managed to get the tip halfway through before he stopped, panting, the thread hanging from the needle buried in his chest.

Need to dull the pain, he thought, looking at his shaking fingers.  He’d seen Dr. Cin use something on the cattle, when the stitches were in a sensitive area, like the leg.  According to Dr. Cin, there was nothing more unpleasant than being kicked by a cow while trying to save its life.

The blood was running freely from his chest again, and Val’s dizziness was getting worse.  He blinked at the closet, trying to remember what the drug was called.

Finally, unable to remember the drug name, he started pulling bottles from the closet and daubing them on his skin until the wound eventually went numb.

I’m probably gonna end up growing a leg out of my ass for this, Val thought, hating the odd pulling sensation as he pushed the needle the rest of the way through his flesh.  He made a total of eighteen stitches, as tight and close as possible, then threw a bandage over it and fixed it in place using the heavy-duty tape Dr. Cin used on the livestock.  Then, panting, Val sat down to rest.  He could hear the two Crewhost talking to each other in the lab main, but his thoughts were consumed with what had happened to Dr. Cin, and what they planned to do with him.

Whatever it was, he doubted he was going to be able to change his fate.  While they each carried impact weapons and looked as if they got three solid meals every day, he was weak, underfed, and not a very good runner to boot.

Swallowing, Val dug into his pocket and opened the scrap of paper Dr. Cin had left him.

Inside, Dr. Cin’s distinctive, elegant hand had scribbled MC12B16W, the shorthand version of her prize bull’s ID tag.  Underneath, she had added the words, “Please check her ear tag.  I’m afraid it’s infected, and I don’t want her to experience any unnecessary stressors during calving.”

Val frowned and reread it.  Using the doctor’s own system, an obsessive method of tracking every genetic for ten generations, male IDs began with M, while female IDs began with F.  Further, the prize bull in question was dead, and he lived on only by virtue of stored semen.

Val read it again. 

Why refer to her bull as a she, and a pregnant one at that?  Val knew it had to mean something.  Dr. Cin was too compulsively exact on everything else she did for it to simply be a mistake.

Then Val frowned.  The bull had died of an ear infection they had noticed too late, caught in the bustle of calving time.

As far as he knew, the bull’s ear was all that remained of the animal affectionately called Big Ben, carefully stored in the freezer with its accompanying tag, as well as the sixteen doses of semen Dr. Cin had made them collect for her before he died.  He knew it was sixteen because one of her pathologically neurotic behaviors as lab manager had been to make him count them every morning, to make sure none had disappeared overnight.

Was she trying to, even in death, get him to count the remaining canisters of bull semen?  It was so completely unbelievable that Val almost threw the scrap aside in disbelief.

Then he frowned.  Even if she were about to perish, he couldn’t see Dr. Cin issuing a lab order on a ragged scrap of paper.  She would type up a memo, even if it meant she had to boot up her lapboard as Crewhost was breaking down her door.  The only reason he could see her scrawling such an unprofessional message was if it was of the utmost importance and she had no time to do anything else.

Curious, now, he stepped back into the hall.  He paused, listening to the sounds of weapons discharge from the lab main, then glanced again at the doctor’s note.  The freezers were directly inside the lab door on the left, the first set of double-doors before the office suites.  It was a climate-controlled, senior-personnel-only section of the lab, and its doors were hanging open and the freezers’ contents strewn across the floor in heart-wrenching destruction.

Instinctively, Val stuffed the note back into his pocket and bent to the task of replacing the countless bottles, canisters, samples, and embryos to their respective freezers.  He even found the sixteen canisters of MC12B16W samples, and put them carefully back into their rack.  He found her prize goat strains relatively intact, as were most of her poultry and pig specimens.  While what glass that could be broken was scattered across the room, whoever had ransacked the freezers hadn’t understood the basic failsafes built into most of the sample cartridges.  Ninety percent of the material, as far as he could tell, was still useable.

Val’s mind was starting to numb with the monotony of placing sample cartridges in their proper freezers when he picked up another large canister and stopped.  The number on the label belonged to Big Ben.  He stared at it, frowning, then glanced back at the freezer behind him, where sixteen other MC12B16W samples sat in their proper holding cells. 

Confused, Val popped the lid on the canister and looked inside.  A sample tube of semen, kept cold by the canister’s automatic cooling system, remained cushioned in a pillow of foam. 

He was frowning down at it when the first Crewhost officer stopped in the awkward opening created by the door’s broken hinges and watched him.  Quickly putting the cap back on the canister, Val put the cartridge into the freezer with the others and did his best to ignore the man.

“Almost hard to believe it was dogs, eh?” the officer said, after watching him for a time.  When Val stopped and looked, the man’s satisfied sneer was unmistakable.  He smiled, displaying perfect, Crewhost-white teeth that put Val’s unattended nonessent molars to shame, then turned and was gone.  In his helpless rage, it was all Val could do not to throw a box of samples at the man’s head.

The senior Security officer stopped in the door as the first one left, watching his companion from the hallway with a frown.  Then turned to look at Val, the frown fading as his eyes stopped on Val’s chest.  “I was gonna offer, but I see you stitched yourself up?”

Valhalla nodded, feeling a sudden flush of heat under the man’s gaze.  He quickly looked back down at the samples.

Following his lead, the man’s hazel eyes dropped to the remnants of the samples.  “They do much damage?” the Crewhost officer asked.  If Val hadn’t known better, the man had almost sounded concerned.

“I think most of it’s ruined,” Val lied.  “A lot of it thawed.  I’ll be hard-pressed to get any good specimens out of this.”

The man in the doorway grimaced.  “You have trade connections with the other livestock labs?”

“Not many,” Val said.  “Most labs refuse to trade stock.”

The man grimaced.  “You should probably try anyway.  I can get you the passes that you need.”

Val stopped in the middle of collecting canisters and looked up at him, caught off guard.  The young Security chief surveyed the room, seemingly oblivious to his stare.  Unlike his companion, his face was as pale as a nonessent’s, either because he didn’t have the money to tan properly, or because he hadn’t wanted to waste the energy on his vanity.  Val doubted it could be the latter--Crewhost was notorious for its vanity.  And, as a member of Crewhost, he had the chits to do whatever he wanted.  As Val examined him, he began to wonder if the man’s freckled skin was pale for another reason, a long-disappeared genetic that his father had talked about whenever he discussed the ‘Old Country.’  The genetic for which Val was given his middle name.

Eventually, the man’s speckled hazel eyes came back to rest on Val.  “So what did you stuff in your pocket, earlier?”

Val froze.  “A note.”

“What kind of note?”  The man looked curious.

“One from my supervisor,” Val said.  “Before she left for the weekend.”

“Can I see it, please?”

Val stiffened.  “Why?”

The man cocked his head at him.  “Why not?”

“I...”  Val realized, caught under the man’s sharp stare, that he didn’t have a good reason to keep it from him.  He reluctantly reached into his pocket and retrieved the note, then handed it to the Security chief.  The man took it, opened it, and frowned at the contents.  Finally, he said, “What is MC12B16W?”

“An ID code for a head of cattle,” Val said, trying not to let his anxiety show.

“I see.”  Eventually, the man grunted and pulled something from his vest pocket.  As Val watched, frowning, the man scribbled something on the paper and handed it back to him, neatly folded.  Nodding politely, the man said, “My name is officer Shire.  We killed the dogs in the lab and composted the ones someone had trapped in the bins.  I don’t know where the wires got crossed earlier this morning, but if you have any more problems, call me at my private extension.  I’ll see to it you get a squad sent down immediately.”  The man’s eyes drifted to the freezers behind Val and he shook his head.  With apparent empathy, the man shook his head.  “Good luck.”  He settled his big hand on Val’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.  “I hope it’s not as bad as it looks.”  Then he turned and was gone, following his companion out of the labs.

When Val could get over his shock enough to look down, he realized that, on the front of the note, in bold letters, the Crewhost officer had written, Officer Shire.  Security 16.  16.335.9090-772.

Tucking the note in his fist, Val got to his feet and went to the door to look down the hall.  The Crewhost officers were gone.  He went to the front door and locked it, only afterward wondering if the Crewhost officer had been telling the truth.  He tentatively followed the hallway to the lab main and stuck his head around the corner.

Dead dogs littered the acreage before him, dogs that had not been there that morning.

They ate her, he thought immediately.  Seeing the many unidentifiable piles of meat scattered throughout the lab main, Val’s gut heaved and he had to look away.  To steady himself, he hurried back to the freezers and finished replacing samples.  He was about to shut the freezer the final time when he saw the odd number of canisters under Big Ben and stopped, frowning.

Big Ben had given sixteen samples before he died.  Dr. Cin had made it a point to make him count them daily, and only them.  Val had taken it for neuroses.  Now he wondered if it was something else...

He began pulling out MC12B16W canisters one at a time and checking their contents.  He was halfway through when he found the one with the quick scribble, a faster hand than the neat, precise lettering Dr. Cin usually used on her specimens.  When Val tipped the canister, something slid to the bottom with a thump.  His heart began to pound as he gently unscrewed the cap and peered inside.

A black rectangular object had taken the place of a semen sample.

Fingers shaking, Val reached in and drew the object out.

At first, he didn’t understand what he held.  He set the empty canister down on the freezer and turned the frigid object over in his hands.  The object, though cold, bent with pressure, and it became clear that the two black coverings could be pulled back to reveal sheaves of pages underneath, Val almost dropped it.

Books, as far as he knew, had been outlawed generations years ago to conserve carbon-based resources.  Now, the only allowable office use of carbon was in reusable report documents, memos, and official summons or requests.  The recreational use of carbon-based products was utterly forbidden.

Val was so unnerved that he almost put the book back into the canister and put it back where he found it.  It was the odd symbol on the cover of the book that stopped him, though.  It showed a globe, bisected by perpendicular lines, overlaid over slightly raised, irregular lumps.

Landmasses, Valhalla realized.  His heart began to hammer, and he wondered if he was looking at a map of Ship’s destination.  The planet they had been looking for all these years. 

Excited and a little apprehensive, Valhalla pulled open the cold outer cover, revealing crisp black pages inside.  The wording was in white, and it said,

Resident User Manual for T.U.C.K.I.G.

Terra’s United Cytronic-Keenian Impartial Governor,

Or

“TUCK”

Valhalla frowned at the page, thinking back to the Crewhost conversations he’d heard in passing.  Several times, he’d heard them mention the name ‘Tuck.’

Curious, now, Val turned the page.  Situated at the top of the page were the words,

In our Mother’s dying moments, we stand together.  One world, one people, one purpose.  Only through our combined efforts will our species live on.

--Ernst Dunkle, UN Calamity Advisory, 2556

In reading, Val felt little threads of cold traveling down his back as he turned the page.  On its ebony surface was printed,

 

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - The Final Days

Chapter 2 - The Creation of TUCK

Chapter 3 - TUCK’s Purpose

Chapter 4 - Activation and Dialogue

Chapter 5 - Simple Commands

Chapter 6 - Intermediate Functions

Chapter 7 - Advanced Interaction

Chapter 8 - TUCK in Everyday Life

Chapter 9 - Troubleshooting For Professionals



His fingers shaking, Val turned the page.

Chapter 1 - The Final Days

With the combined filling of the massive magma chamber within the caldera of Yellowstone National Park and the incoming heavy-metal object affectionately named Black Moon, a rogue planet calculated to an unavoidable degree of certainty to collide with Earth within seven miles of the San Andreas’s deep-ocean faultline, seismologists and astronomers agreed that, once impact was made, if the concussion didn’t simply shatter our planet, whatever was left after the firestorms, acid rain, tsunamis, and poisonous gas clouds would die when the shifting mantle released the pressure building under North America and the majority of that continent exploded in a wash of fire and ash the likes of which our planet hadn’t seen for sixty-five million years...

Valhalla continued, finding pictures of the catastrophe taken from space, the final seconds as Black Moon hit, fracturing Terra’s body into a thousand pieces, a shattered world becoming a long, irregular asteroid belt, frozen and scattered, leaving no trace of what had once been a verdant, growing planet.

Valhalla stared at the three-dimensional pictures of a whole Terra, awed with wonder at its immensity, the crystal blue of endless water, the white swirl of clouds, the green-brown splotches that were hundreds upon thousands of miles of dirt.

Humanity’s perfect world, and it was utterly destroyed within 2.6 seconds.

Valhalla was unable to tear his eyes away from it.  More than anything, he wanted to step onto that planet, wanted to feel the breeze as it swirled those clouds, wanted to breathe the air that smelled of plants and earth, not air purifiers, wanted to walk upon soil that didn’t end a foot and a half beneath his feet.  He wanted to walk along the edges of that enormous ocean, feel the slap of surf against his legs, find little crabs that roamed there naturally, that hadn’t escaped their holding pens in the Ocean Lab.  Valhalla traced the beaches with a finger, trying to imagine what it had been like.

With great reluctance, Valhalla turned the page. 

He read of the Great War, of the people who fought for their gods, the hundreds of sects meeting afield, the ultimate battle to convert Terra’s final generation.  He read of the aftermath, the scramble to rebuild, the frantic efforts to salvage what little society the wars had left them.

He read about TUCK.

TUCK was the last hope.  It was a superconscious AI construct manufactured in Germany and shipped to the U.S. on a secret courier for transport to the 10,000-man Universal Space Station.  Its goal?  To save human life, and to preserve what was about to be lost forever.  TUCK was installed fifty-seven days before the calculated impact of Black Moon, and was immediately given full authority over all nations of humanity.  The entire world waited for its first command.

For three days, TUCK neither said nor did anything.

In the days of quiet that followed, Humanity mourned its failure.  Their hopes had been lifted, only to be dashed by silence.

On the fourth day, TUCK spoke.

Using every structure, every human workhour, every material available to him, TUCK began allocating tasks.  Crews began working night and day, carting resources into space, stripping cities for valuable materials.  It was a revisitation of the thrift of World War II, but to a greater purpose.

On the fifty-third day, the United Terra Mobilization Vehicle began accepting human occupant applications.  Though the wars had slashed humanity’s numbers by half, the world still maintained a population of over fourteen billion.  Genetic, physiological, and psychological admission samples were made to TUCK, and with the same impartiality he reserved for every other task he was given, TUCK returned each decision within minutes.  Fourteen billion was slashed to one half.  TUCK picked the best and the brightest, varying the human gene pool from the nomads of Tibet to the Iroquois of North America to the Wolof of the Sahara to the Maya of Mexico. 

The first big stir ignited when most of humanity’s leaders, including presidents, prime ministers, the Pope, and Arabia’s sheiks, were denied entry to UTMV.  TUCK, when confronted with the minor rebellions they instigated in retaliation, used the authority the human race had invested in him to deliver a thorough, crushing blow.  In a matter of hours, he rounded up the rebels, disarmed them, and, after extracting genetic material from each, executed them.

Upon reading that, Valhalla slapped the book shut.  Staring at the black manual he carried in his hands, he realized he was panting.  The ebony cover flashed in the light, suddenly striking him as to why its image was so familiar.

This is it, he realized, horror swallowing him in an icy wave.  This is the black book.  The manual of black magic.

Sweating, Valhalla once again fought the urge to throw it across the room and run as far as he could get before the Section Guards found he had extended his 4-section pass and dragged him back to Section 16.  What he held in his hands would get him killed.  Instantly.  Hands shaking, he tried to figure out why Dr. Cin would leave it to him.  Why condemn him with something that, should Crewhost so much as find his fingerprints on it, would get him Expelled?  A book that, in all likelihood, had already gotten the doctor killed.

Half of him wanting to take the book to the composter and destroy it immediately, Valhalla decided to tuck it into the cargo pocket of his lab pants and find a quieter place to examine it, instead.  As far as he knew, Dr. Cin had had no special training.  She had been born in the slums of Section 16 just like him.  She had been denied a Crewhost education on merits of bad genetics, just like every other nonessent on Ship.  She had had no access to ancient laboratory reports until she was hired on as an assistant animal caretaker at Lab 16, just like him.  He had always thought she was simply a natural genius, a woman who had patched together the basics of genetics and used it to wrestle herself into a position to reinvigorate an entire Livestock Lab with sheer brute force.

Now, with her odd little black book in his pocket, Val had to wonder.

What if there was some secret stored within, something that had given her the seed to start looking deeper?

What was TUCK, anyway?  Val hadn’t seen evidence of it anywhere.  The book claimed it made Ship to save humans from catastrophe, that it executed millions for resisting its plan.  Why was Crewhost still talking about it?  Did they know where to find it?  Is that why no nonessents were allowed beyond the jet black doors marking Crewhost territory?  Was it in there somewhere, teaching them, leading them, giving them counsel?

Thinking on this, Val went to his office across the hall, yanked the door shut, and locked it.  He sat down in his chair, took several deep breaths, then pulled the book of TUCK from his pocket again.  He turned to the fourth chapter, Activation and Dialogue.

It is the right of every resident of the UTMV to activate and use the resource collectively known as TUCK, Valhalla read.  As every human being upon this vessel is equal in status, power can only be delegated--or undelegated--through TUCK.  All governments, social systems, and religious modes have been put aside until TUCK can locate a habitable planet and redistribute the survivors of Terra.  TUCK, therefore, must fill the gap, distributing knowledge, directing human conduct, and tending to the needs of the whole.  As such, TUCK is available to all, at any time, regardless of age, sex, creed, or crime.

Val paused, trying to comprehend this.  Did the book mean it was Crewhost’s right to activate TUCK?  Was the book something that Dr. Cin had stolen from the confines of Crewhost Sections?  As of yet, he hadn’t come across a single reference to either Crewhost or nonessents.

To activate TUCK, he read on, One must simply alert TUCK to desired interaction using the universal verbal UTMV code ‘attention TUCK,’ then reference one of the sectional codes contained herein.  Once the dialogue is active, give commands as you would any general AI interface.

Squinting, now, Val began reading the list of codes.  There were emergency codes for fire, codes for accidents, codes for hunger, codes for natural death.  There were so-called ‘social’ codes, such as ‘debate partner,’ ‘counselor,’ ‘friend,’ ‘imprinted loved one,’ and ‘legal advisor.’

There were even spiritual codes, like, ‘druid,’ ‘bishop,’ ‘Hindu,’ ‘Dalai Lama,’ ‘pastor.’

The list went on.  Val paid special attention to the group categorized under ‘scientists.’  There were hundreds of them, types he had never heard about.  He scanned them all, imprinting them to memory, then he went back to the beginning to puzzle over the first paragraph.

“Attention TUCK?” he asked, staring at the black pages, willing it to make sense.  “What does that mean?”

In the wall beside his elbow, a young woman appeared and said, “What does what mean, Dr. Genetaker?”

Val screamed and dropped the book as he lunged out of his chair.  He was halfway to the door when he realized it was the same voice that spoke to him when he gave his biometrics to the Lab controller.  He stopped and turned, slowly.

The woman remained embedded in the wall, watching him.  The image was projected so perfectly that it almost seemed as if the woman was part of the wall, a moving piece of metal.

Val frowned.  “TUCK?”

She smiled.  “Yes, doctor?”





Author's Note:  This is only the first 10% of the novel.  If you'd like to continue reading, I'd be happy to send you more!  Send me an email at [e-mail] and I'll send you the rest in segments, as it comes off my keyboard.  For those of you already on my mailing list, I should be getting the first batches out within the next few days.  Further, it's rough draft (as in, what you see is how it came out of my brain).  If you have suggestions on how to make it better, I'm all ears.  :) 



-Sara King

http://www.kingfiction.com

Proud Graduate of Odyssey '08



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