Elytra 9

Friday 30 June 85AGF 11.45pm

 

It was a small part of a small section of a small branch of the database that served Clara in Canton 5. It started on a small, almost insignificant screen. Slowly, but perceptibly, gaps began to appear in the datastream it displayed to no-one. It started with the positive integers disappearing, first one-by-one and then in clusters and finally their being swept from the datastream in great waves of destruction. As the datastream's integrity became increasingly tenuous, the zeroes followed suit until finally there was just an error message. When the error message itself began to crumble a small, black creature forced its pliable body though a gap in the server's casing and climbed to the top.

It wasn't the heat that attracted them, though it softened their bodies, allowing them to squeeze through tighter gaps, and made the laying of eggs easier as well as incubating them efficiently. It wasn't the heat but the buzz of their prey as contained on the thin slices of silicon they had been designed to eat.

Sitting on the top of the server, the beetle opened its wing cases and extended its wings. As it shot waves of iridescence across the hardened cases it rattled them together until it was joined by another, and another, and another. The clattering became a hum as the first beetle took off and flew directly at the room's single piece of SysEq. It landed directly on the sensor.

In a watcher station in another Canton, the feed to a small screen went dark, and the datastream briefly resembled a waterfall before coalescing around a single line:

 

ERROR_INVALID_DATATYPE

 

 

 

13

Sunday 23 July 85AGF 10am

 

'Steven,' said Francis. 'Steven?' Francis looked at the drug-induced rest the Doctor was enjoying, his face expressionless, if you ignored the wired-in grin that glinted menacingly in the half-light of the chambers. 'Well, Doctor, your appearance seems finally to have caught up with your behaviour.' The Doctor had been sleeping for seventeen hours; Francis awake for fifty-three. The stimulants that he had taken may have kept his body sharp, along with his reactions, instincts, and reflexes, but they gave the edge of his consciousness a slight fuzziness, an out-of-focus quality which drifted slowly towards his self, a sea fret sliding between tower blocks. Autonomy to automation. Perfect for some of the reading he'd been doing, but now he felt the need for answers. He shook his head violently, splashed cold water over his face and brewed some coffee.

Slowly, deliberately, he traversed the chambers, inspecting the shelves and calculating times and dates and processing names.

His eyes came to rest on a file with the word 'Loyola' embossed on its spine. His conscious mind took a few moments to gloss the feeling in the pit of his stomach his instinct had already supplied with a measure of intellectual acknowledgement. One glance at the Doctor's motionless form and the file was slid from its resting place and after a moment's hesitation Francis clicked it open. He was surprised to find its insides consisting not of the usual tablet, but of a sheaf of hand-written papers, organised with tabs, again hand-written. Francis flicked through them until he came to the name he was searching for. He read.

'Steven is a child of undetermined class and exceptional potential. Possessed of a hitherto unknown capacity to bear pain, Steven is cold, calculating and, in the opinion of this System Psyche Assessor, extremely dangerous. His potential is not considered sufficient to offset the risk he poses to the health of anyone with whom he interacts.'

Scribbled in the margin were the words 'Hector is terrified of him.'

Francis scrolled his eye to the bottom of the single sheet of paper.

 

Recommendation: to be euthanised.

 

The page was stamped in red ink with the date:

 

December 72AGF

 

'So much for Steven.' Said Francis, as he snapped the file shut and carefully slid it back into its place. His eyes wandered the room once more, taking time to register details he'd not noticed before. Usually, the Doctor's gaze unsettled him. It was as if he knew things about Francis that he himself was ignorant of. He sat at the Doctor's desk, and ran his fingers over its surface, feeling every contour, every change in texture as he learnt. His fuzziness returned and he began to drift into sleep.

A sharp stabbing pain in the side of his little finger woke him from his reverie. He had collided with what looked like a pointing device made of a flat metal which had one bulbous end with a circular hole in the middle, the other terminating in a point which had been honed until penetratingly sharp. After a short and fruitless inspection he replaced it carefully and turned his attention to the large oblong machine that occupied one side of the desk. It was smooth, with no discernible openings, buttons or screens. Once again he ran his fingers over its surface, though a little more carefully than before. Once again he was none the wiser.

'It's a 4D printer.' The voice pushed its way through the thickly silent atmosphere, freezing Francis to the spot.

'I'm sorry, Doctor, but …'

'Curiosity killed the cat, Francis, but it's the feline within us that keeps us from becoming feeble.'

Francis looked at the box in front of him. '4D?'

'Yes. It prints in four dimensions. The usual three plus time. It was designed originally for reproducing things which required process, things for which maturation is vital but tedious. Fine wine needs to be aged, plants need to grow … it made sense to me to print the egg stage of the beetles, I just needed to work out how to make generic eggs and somehow insert the appropriate DNA before the maturation cycle.'

'Why not just print the beetles directly.'

'Why not indeed?' Said the Doctor. 'I did, naturally, but you can't start the process with complex cells because the printer won't initially print the contents of a cell, and you can't … well, I can't reliably insert DNA into all the cells of a complex organism. So they start with an egg, a single cell into which goes the DNA, which is then matured in the fourth dimension.'

'And that's better than breeding them because?'

'Because I retain control. Plus I only make females. If they bred themselves they would mutate, evolve, and that way danger lies. My way keeps them identical. Predictable. Safe. My way means they only grow as I instruct them to.'

As the Doctor spoke Francis was suddenly lit up by a blue-green light. There was a loud clattering of clickings as the occupants of the Doctor's glass tower of beetles raised their wing cases simultaneously and began to display a series of swirling, ever-changing psychedelic patterns that seemed almost to flow from one beetle to the next. 'Wow!' Said Francis, recoiling slightly.

'Interesting.' Said the Doctor. And fell back asleep.

Saturday 22 July 85AGF 5pm

 

Francis opened his eyes slowly. He'd been awake for thirty-six long and stressful hours, first attending to the Doctor's needs as he had worked through the night, fuelled by the euphoria of discovery, barely a moment's rest before the Doctor's visitation, then supervising Elytra's maiden voyage, so to speak, before finally directing the wiring shut of the Doctor's shattered jaw. Finally, he'd found enough space to sleep. Dreams, as ever, were conspicuous in their absence. He slept. For twenty minutes. He was woken by the Doctor's constricted consonants demanding that he be returned to his rooms immediately.

It was typical that even a man with a shattered jaw managed more sleep than he. Still more typical that, as soon as they arrived, the Doctor's slow and unsteady walk putting an extra thirty minutes to their journey, and necessitating Francis support him much of the way, his charge announced his plan to sleep further.

'I need restful and prolonged sleep. Uninterrupted. And you, Steven, must ensure this.' He opened a stiff leather case and extracted a pair of vials. 'Drink,' he said, handing one to Francis.

Francis tipped the contents down his throat and swallowed, knowing full well that in doing so he had said goodbye to sleep for at least the next forty-eight hours. The Doctor tipped his vial into the corner of his mouth and let the liquid slide down his throat.

'Greater love hath no man that he sacrifice his sleep for another, Steven. Perhaps you might make use of my library to while away the hours. I'll see you sometime on Monday.' He settled back into his chair. 'Goodnight.'

Francis left the word 'Steven?' sitting on his lips and brewed some coffee. 'Well, Doctor.' He said. 'Sweet dreams. You've got to have them every once in a while.' He picked up a book from the shelves and opened it at random. 'And Chicken Licken ran up to Henny Penny ... what on earth?' He said, and sat down to read.