C James - Dome Six

“All full,” she said. Tosh knew her from her very first cohort. Kristen, maybe, or Katherine? “Hey Miss Y.”

“Hey… you,” Tosh said, choosing not to guess. “How are you?”

“Living the dream,” she said grimly, then turned away.

“Favor the outside if you can,” Tosh reminded the kids. It was definitely better to be along the railing. Fortunately, the level was almost empty save for the greenies crowded against the inside railing. Level 24 was zucchini, which grew so quickly you could watch it happen.

Her class crowded into the near left corner. A final count confirmed they were all still there. Dee held Vi’s hand and took Tosh’s with the other. Vi’s mother cut hair and her father worked in the Stores. By now they’d have reached their muster points, but Tosh could almost feel them worrying about her.

She took a deep breath, grateful that she’d gotten her class safely into the Towers. All that was left now was to wait and hope. She squeezed Dee’s hand to reassure her it would all be okay, but she didn’t know that. No one did.

Together with Byron and Owen, they’d become like a weird little family. Owen was across the Agora from them somewhere, breathing the same air as the Authority on 30. At least he and Dee were safe. Hopefully Hideki was, too. But Byron? He was anything but.

“No!” Wade said. “Are you deaf or just stupid?”

Dek caught him as he was returning from the ration tap. The Stores were bustling with activity, but the hallway was clear. Even so, Wade’s eyes darted about him as though someone might be listening.

“C’mon,” said Dek, pleading. “I’m almost out. Just one. One yellow.”

“I said no,” Wade hissed. “I’m not sticking my neck out just so you can trip. Now leave me alone. What’re you even doing here anyway? I heard you got reassigned.”

“That was just temporary.”

Wade smirked, seemingly making the connection between the accident in the FPC and Hideki’s errand. “Ah, yes. Multimeal Maria. Was it as bad as they said?”

“Worse,” Dek replied. The deceased’s name really was Maria, unfortunately.

Dek couldn’t believe how casual everyone was about the poor woman who got pulled into the machine, especially around him. Of course, he might’ve found it funny, too, under different circumstances.

He patted Hideki patronizingly on the shoulder. “Don’t come by here anymore, Dek. Not kidding.”

Wade brushed past him and disappeared around the corner. Dek wanted to call him an asshole but still wasn’t quite ready to burn the bridge. The Authority had come down on the bioprinting lab before. Maybe he just needed to let things settle a bit. Dek knew he could be a bit much. Of course, he still wanted a psychedelic Macro, but he also wanted access to the bioprinting lab’s microscopes so he could take a closer look at the one he’d found.

At first, he thought the tiny worm was red because of the blood, but when he excused himself for a break and carefully rinsed it clean, he discovered it was actually red. Had it not moved it would’ve been invisible. He’d spent enough time around his mother and in the bioprinting lab to know that Macros came in just about every color besides red. That was by design. If something ever went wrong with a Macro that required surgery, you didn’t exactly want it to blend in.

Typically, they would lodge themselves in the relevant area of the body and do their thing, whether it was releasing chemicals or helping lymphocytes consume bacteria. To have one just floating around in arterial blood didn’t make sense, but he supposed it could’ve come from anywhere. As much as he wanted to take a yellow and float off for a few hours, what he wanted even more was to delve into this fresh mystery. He returned to cleaning between the aisles of the Stores.

The whoop whoop of the alarm gave him such a start that he almost fell into the shelves. This particular alarm indicated a low O 2event. His first thought was that it was just an overdue drill, but it was too insistent. This was real. Orange lights along the central corridor flickered to life and indicated the way out.

He shrank back into a dark corner of the shelving and waited. The Stores were climate-controlled, so unless the main doors were open for a long time, any CO 2that pooled along the bottom of the Dome couldn’t displace the air inside. Even if it was a real emergency up top, he’d be safe in the Stores for days.

Everyone was expected to leave their stations and find their muster points in the Towers. If CO 2levels up top became life-threatening, the Stores would be the last-ditch option. He watched from the shadows, leaning on his broom, as workers poured into the central corridor en route to the exit.

From where he stood, he could see the door to the bioprinting lab. No one came in or out for a long time. In fact, at one point he reckoned the Stores were nearly empty except for Wade’s crew. But eventually the small team exited together and made their way down the corridor while the door slowly closed.

Dek stole across the corridor, stretching out with the broom to stop the door a blink before it closed. The door closed the rest of the way and he plastered himself to the wall beside it, hoping no one had seen him. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if that happened. Attack them? Pretend he was tripping?

Fortunately, he never had to decide. He waited for several minutes then, slowly, opened the door and peered down the corridor to find it completely empty. As far as he knew, he was alone now.

First things first .

He stacked his broom in the corner and raced to the drawer where the black-market Macros were hidden. He took the junk out of it and lifted out the false bottom. His heart sank. Empty. Either Wade had moved the stash, or he was serious about getting out.

Pity. He’d been so excited to ride out the O 2alarm propped in a corner like his broom, whisked far away by a cocktail of psychedelics and amphetamines delivered straight to his brain stem. If Wade was truly out of the game, that meant what he had left at home might be it for a long while, if not forever.

But he was here on another errand — the red macro. The lab’s purpose was creating and analyzing bioprinted material, so he figured he might as well get to work.

Luckily, he had a Macro vial in his pocket when he cleaned the woman out of the processor. He dropped it in with the other but didn’t rinse it thoroughly, so the clear solution had turned light pink. It contaminated the sterile solution of the last yellow one he’d been saving, but a little blood wasn’t necessarily a dealbreaker.

He pulled a chair over to a QC terminal and flicked on the lamp. It felt good to be back. He prepped the scanner and eased the tiny red worm into a pipette, then gently let it drip out into a Petri dish. Once he slid the dish under the microscope, he leaned forward into the eyepieces and adjusted the focus until it was tack sharp.

Right away, he knew this was no ordinary Macro.

All Macros were reticulated so they could bend easily and grip tissue. The ends tapered to microscopic needle points that enabled intracellular injection. But there was something else, too — a dark filament that ran through the middle of the Macro’s tubular body, with a tight coil in the center. His first guess was that it was a hybrid organ or neural cluster, but somehow he doubted it. The worm’s morphology was quite complex and required a different look.

When he switched the view to X-ray, he just about fell out of his chair. The filament was bright white, meaning it was metal.

The revelation took his breath away. Macros were made from Cytomatrix, a sort of biogel. They were delicate and soft. This was still a synthetic helminth, but with a cybernetic modification. It dawned on him that the filament wasn’t part of the worm’s system at all. It was an antenna. And to be that thin, it could only be elemental gold.