C James - Dome Six

Unfortunately, her brother Hideki started out in the bioprinting lab where they were made. He learned how they worked and engineered his own. Initially it was just to quiet his overly electric mind, but it evolved into something else. She suspected he was still supplying the black market somehow.

“Vi, she’s only trying to help, okay?” Tosh said, rubbing her shoulders reassuringly. “It’s for the pain.”

“I don’t want it!” Vi spat.

“What’s the problem?” Downing said, leaning down.

“She doesn’t want a Macro,” Tosh said.

“How bad is it?” Downing asked the medic.

“Just a contusion,” she said.

“Then forget it. If she wants to suffer, that’s her call.”

When Tosh was maybe 13, Downing’s wife went crazy and tried to escape through one of the incinerators. It didn’t end well. Some people gave him a pass for that. Not Tosh. She just wanted him to go away.

“Are you sure, sweetie?” Tosh asked. Vi was still shaking. “It looks like it really hurts.”

“Can you do it?” Vi asked.

The medic turned to Downing, who shrugged. She handed Tosh the vial and said, “Go nuts.”

Macros were color-coded. This one was blue, which meant it had anesthetic properties. Taking your first one was scary. It wasn’t technically alive, but even under a microscope it was hard to tell.

“You promise it doesn’t hurt?” Vi said.

“It just feels like a little eyelash is stuck, then it goes away. Okay? You good?”

Vi nodded. Tosh dipped the little pipette into the vial, trapping the tiny blue Macro in a thin column of water, then held the end closed with her finger.

“Tilt your head back for me,” Tosh said.

She carefully held Vi’s right eye open and let the solution drip out into the inside corner. A moment later, the Macro activated and wriggled in between her eye and the pink flesh in the corner.

Vi rubbed her eye with the back of her hand, seemingly having expected something worse.

“It does just feel like an eyelash,” she said.

“Told ya,” Tosh replied with a wink. “It might itch for a little while, but it goes away. One problem at a time, right?” She smiled and tousled Vi’s light blond hair as she rose.

“So brave,” Downing mumbled. “All right, let’s clean this mess up.”

Elements of Downing’s entourage left, then returned moments later with gurneys to carry off the two corpses. After they cleaned off what blood there was, only the broken end of the table and the hole in the ceiling remained. Tosh was cleared to return to class but had no idea how to continue teaching after that.

“Someone will be along to make the repairs,” Downing said to Tosh.

“To the roof or to the crawlers?” Tosh asked.

He bristled and said, “Thank you for your assistance, Miss Yamamura. We’ll handle it from here.”

As much as she wanted to press the issue, now wasn’t the time. She turned and led Vi back across the courtyard toward her classroom.

Wednesday was Hideki’s day cleaning the Stores. Not only was it the easiest area to clean in general, but it took much less time than he was allotted. Up one row and down another with a wide push broom — it didn’t get easier. After passing through security, he practically bounced into the service elevator and hit the down button.

It was ironic that his low station afforded him use of the service elevator. He used to take the stairs like everyone else on his way to the bioprinting facility, where he’d been placed as a 16-year-old apprentice. Considering that his illicit activities earned him a one-way trip to Sanitation, it was a wonder he could still get past security.

The big door slid open and he stepped out into the cavernous warehouse where the Dome’s durable supplies were kept. Bioprinting and textile production were there as well. Rows of colossal pillars supported not only the roof, but much of the city itself. Because it was below ground, and because of the efficiency of the ventilation, it was generally kept at a pleasantly cool 16 degrees C. It was the closest thing the Dome had to fresh air.

When the Dome Project began, service-bots did most of the cleaning. But the way he heard it, they were cheaply made and began to fail barely a decade into the Dome’s existence. By 2100, just 17 years into Cytocorp’s grand experiment, they were all junked. They were still piled into a dark corner of the Stores to gather dust in a bay they called the Boneyard, where tinkerers like him scrounged for parts.

He loved Wednesdays. After a quick visit to the lab, ostensibly to clean, he’d waltz back out with at least a couple freshly printed Macros — sometimes more. Having a friend in bioprinting wasn’t the same as making them yourself, but it was close enough.

Hideki’s apprenticeship in bioprinting started out as most did. He was still basically a kid, eager to please and confident, and the people in the lab were welcoming and friendly. They gave him a long list of menial tasks at first, but after he completed them by mid-morning, they had no idea what to do with him next. He could only look over their shoulders and ask questions for so long, so they gave him a workstation and a slab of Cytomatrix and showed him how to make painkiller Macros.

He’d been doing that for just a week when his parents disappeared.

People didn’t disappear in the Dome without an explanation, but the Authority was quick with one. His brilliant and devoted parents, they said, developed a case of so-called “Dome fever.” They ventured inside the multimeal processor during an O 2drill that they triggered themselves, only to be caught inside the machinery when the FPC fired back up. There was nothing left to incinerate.

Hideki always knew that was bullshit. If his father triggered an O 2drill as a distraction to sneak into the FPC, he would’ve had a damn good reason. He just never learned what it was.

Happily occupied at his station in the corner — and largely ignored by his fellow workers — Hideki started experimenting with different kinds of Macros. The kind that would help him escape the constant wondering about what happened. The kind that could transport your mind out of the Dome, if only for a little while.

Back then, if you knew where to look in the deepest parts of the Cache, you could still find some pretty subversive shit. Recipes for bombs, that sort of thing. Of course, as soon as you found something like that, IDA would rewrite or delete it. So, he stole a few parts from the dead service-bots and made himself a camera. If a page interested him, he’d take his own snapshot and go back to it as many times as he needed to.

He found pages with advanced biochemical formulas, including for powerful painkillers and even psychedelics. Macros delivered microdoses of these chemicals directly to the brain, then dissolved without a trace. If you were in the right frame of mind, you could take a long and pleasurable journey without even leaving your unit. Much of his nonworking hours were spent this way — the shades pulled tight in his tiny unit, enjoying himself.

Once word got around, he did a brisk business. At first he’d trade them for extra water rations, then pieces of whole fruit or spices. Once he had more of those things than he could use, he moved on to other, more personal forms of payment. For a while, everyone got what they wanted.

Until the shit hit the fan, that is.

Around the same time Tosh got reassigned to Education, Hideki got busted. A regular customer of his had tried to exchange a psychedelic Macro for sexual favors from a woman who worked for the Authority. She brought the matter to the Director of Health and an investigation was launched. Hideki’s private enterprise was uncovered and he was stripped of his cushy placement. He’d been cleaning floors and machinery ever since. An anonymous grunt in the Dome’s small army of Sanitation workers.