Codebreaker

Copyright © Peter MacDougall, all rights reserved

Codebreaker is a 6000 word hard science fiction story originally published by Horizons SF.

Below is an excerpt from the story.

Chapter 1

Genesis 2:7

"And the Lord God formed man of dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

He would have to code.

It was dead black inside the garbage bin. Incessant rain pelted the lid and the damp air reeked of bacteria, urine and sweat, his cold sweat. Derek panted quietly, though the metal walls amplified each harsh breath. He had lost the security men, but not for long.

His joints ached and cardboard boxes dug into his weary back and thighs as he struggled to keep himself from sliding down into the fungal soup that swam and clung at his boots. He shifted the garbage surrounding him to get comfortable and then pulled the coder from his jacket pocket.

The coder was little larger than a walkman, streamlined, white and warm. The neon green biohazard symbol on its liquid crystal display glowed enormously bright in the lightless bin.

Derek keyed in a "gene jacket" on the machine's tiny keyboard. He selected genes for darker colouring, thicker hair, and wrinkled skin. Then he hesitated for a moment, his finger hovering over a gene that was simply marked "Behaviour-modification".

He did not know how the gene did what it claimed, nor did he have time to find out, but he knew what it would do. He needed a disguise. He needed to look like someone else, but more than that, he needed to be someone else. GEIG would track him from his old habits that had been so carefully catalogued by their security during the year he worked for them. They knew where he would go and what he would do.

The first time he had used the B-mod, he had been vividly aware of what he was doing and yet completely out of control, doing things he had never dared before. With the B-mod, he could not even trust his own mind.

Yet, it was his own dependable mind that was going to get him caught.

His hands were shaking as he gently depressed the key.

The coder chirped and the biohazard symbol changed to blinking yellow, casting shadows of himself upon himself. The machine gurgled as it mixed viral coat proteins, cores, code, and sub-code. Then the biohazard symbol changed to a steady red.

Derek put the small twin nozzles at the top end of the coder up to his nostrils. He exhaled and then inhaled strongly as the machine shot a vaporized mixture of manufactured rhinovirus, colony stimulating factors, leukotropins and chemo-tactic factors into his sinuses. The scent of licorice filled his nose, throat and mouth.

Derek settled back. He could feel his sinuses swell under the influence of the vasoactive agents in the spray. In fifteen minutes the code would be in his immune system. In as few as 24 hours the gene jacket would be complete.

He patted his pockets looking for his lucky deck of cards, reassured to find it warm and close in his breast pocket. It had always travelled with him.

He lifted the pack his pocket and thumbed open the end. Gingerly, he pulled a torn piece of paper from the deck. He unfolded the pressed scrap, still warm from his own body heat, and read the words scrawled awkwardly across its folds. Over and over again he memorized Joce's new address, hoping, for his sake, that she was not concealed elsewhere or even worse, already dead.

So much had changed so quickly;. a few months ago he was telling his father about his work at the lab and arguing with him about his poor future prospects with such a tiny company. Then GEIG swallowed his employer and made him a human guinea pig. It was all so new and so strange, he did not know how to respond. He had let them usher him along into a whole new reality full of opportunities, never realizing that they were killing him along the way.

Now, survival was his only ambition.