Containment (24 page)

V1CC was clearly still vulnerable to the attack, and the program passed all of Arik's tests and sanity checks. The fact that it had failed to derive either of his parents' genetic codes from his own left only one reasonable possibility: Arik wasn't directly related to either Darien or L'Ree — or anyone else in V1, for that matter.

E
very argument has one or more premises from which a conclusion can be drawn. Premises are the underpinnings of an argument, providing it with a solid foundation on top of which the conclusion sprawls, imposing and presumably unshakable. The vulnerability of an argument, therefore, lies in its premises rather than its conclusion. Attack a well formulated argument's conclusion and your advances should be easily deflected and rebuffed. Chip away at enough of its premises, however, and the entire argument will eventually implode, collapsing under its own weight into an unsalvageable pile of nonsense and falsehoods.

Darien's argument had seemed sound to Arik. Parents will do anything to ensure the well being of their children, and knowing the truth about V1 could have endangered Gen V, therefore the Founders were justified in concealing the truth from Arik and his peers. It was a simple argument which, distasteful as it was, Arik had actually managed to accept surprisingly easily. But now the argument's primary premise had been shown to be false. Darien and L'Ree were not Arik's parents which implied that lying to him and the rest of Gen V was, in fact,
not
justified. With his primary premise disproved, nothing Darien said could be trusted.

Arik felt like he was slipping down the side of a mountain that he knew he would eventually have to climb all the way back up. Every time he believed he had regained his footing and could start making progress, the ground beneath him gave way once again, and he found that he still had further to fall. But he had to be close to the bottom now. There was not much more about his reality that could be challenged and exposed as a lie. He already felt almost entirely disconnected from everything and everyone he had ever known. He was mentally and emotionally isolated every bit as much as physically. All that was left was to discover that Cadie and Cam had been somehow using him, as well. On his way down the mountain, Arik had gone over an edge, and his relationships with his wife and his best friend were the final overhangs to which he clung. Should they give way, there was nothing left below him but an endless and unrecoverable free fall.

But he was almost positive that Cadie and Cam, along with the rest of Gen V, were victims, as well. Arik now believed that they were all adopted. He had taken the remains of Darien's argument and started piecing together one of his own. If it's difficult to lie to your own children for anything less than their own well being, it stands to reason that far more trivial lies could only be told to those you felt almost no connection to whatsoever. In order for all of V1's secrets to be kept for all these years, no one in Gen V could be biologically related to the people who raised them. 100 sets of parents could not do to their own children what had apparently been done to Gen V.

The argument was sound. The pieces were starting to fit.

Arik's theory was that Gen V was deliberately and carefully assembled. He believed they were selected from pod systems all over the world specifically for their genetic potential, perhaps even before they were born. It was even possible that they were bred, or had been genetically conditioned. Once they arrived at V1, they were distributed among the most capable members of the population and raised to perform specialized tasks, to excel in areas where V1 was lacking, to solve problems that nobody else was able to solve. They were resources, raw materials to be cast and converted as necessary, thinking machines enslaved by false inspiration.

For all the questions that the collapse of Darien's argument raised, it also managed to answer at least one: Darien had claimed that there was no economy, yet the dark-haired man who helped rescue Arik from the homeless mentioned that V1 paid well, and warned the other man against biting the hand that fed them. However much of the Earth had been destroyed, and however many wars had raged and governments collapsed, some sort of economy still thrived, and V1 was clearly a major component.

It followed that V1's economic interests were connected to its investment in Gen V. Arik had assumed that the man in the van who confiscated the cartridge from the plug gun was simply using the opportunity to appropriate some salvage, but now his motives were much clearer. On a planet that was no longer capable of providing even the most basic of human needs, what could be more precious and valuable than air? And in an economy where air was the most highly valued commodity, what could be more important than figuring out how to produce it as quickly and cheaply and in the largest quantities possible? Artificial photosynthesis, Arik now saw, was modern-day alchemy. But it represented much more than money. Oxygen was power.

It seemed like an extreme conclusion, but it made too much sense to dismiss. If AP was the ultimate way to increase the supply of air, it stood to reason that terraforming was the ultimate way to destroy demand. There was no doubt in Arik's mind at this point that it was far more practical to engineer ferns, vines, trees, and perhaps even algae that could survive the harsh and toxic conditions of Earth than it was to focus on artificial photosynthesis, yet terraforming had been categorically dismissed, ridiculed, and even forbidden. Terraforming had the potential to ruin everything the Founders had worked for.

In some ways, the Earth had been thrust back billions of years to the carbon-rich age that first gave rise to life. It had been ripped apart, torn down, allowed to dilapidate and decay, and now it was ready for a fresh genesis. But this time, it could be shaped, directed, expedited. Rather than requiring billions of years of evolution through more or less random mutation, it could be done with precision and efficiency through engineering and technology. Arik had no doubt that were it not in direct opposition to the economic interests of V1, his grandchildren could know what it was like to exist outside of containment.

Arik thought about what Darien had told him about Rosemary. At the time, it seemed perfectly feasible to him that a woman with Rosemary's passion for learning and admiration for innovative and creative thinking could feel impossibly trapped and suffocated by her life in V1. But now the idea that she would even consider taking her own life was unfathomable. Arik realized that Rosemary hadn't given up on V1; she had been silenced, and Arik believed he knew why.

He brought up the proposed V2 schematics and the water pressure data that Rosemary had copied into his workspace the morning they met in her office. He had been so consumed by his responsibilities at the Life Pod and his terraforming experiments that he hadn't had a chance to review her work as she requested, but he now knew exactly what the problem was. Both the physical and the computer models were using elevated water towers rather than pumps to pressurize the V2 water supply, but the tiny sensors embedded in the physical model were showing more relative pressure than what the computer model was simulating. Arik exposed the computer model's hydrostatic pressure formula and made a single modification to it: he recalculated the value of
g
— the variable representing local gravitational acceleration — using the gravitational constant of Earth rather than Venus. The results immediately updated, and every number was in perfect agreement with those from the physical model.

Rosemary obviously knew exactly what the problem had been. In fact, Arik believed that she had created the error intentionally, then passed it along to him in order communicate with him in a way that he could understand, and that would hopefully go undetected. She knew that the truth about V1 was something he would have to discover for himself — a conclusion he would need to reach gradually, proving it little by little along the way. She also understood the type of thinking he would need to use in order to reach a conclusion which was almost beyond comprehension. Arik now realized that everything Rosemary had ever taught him about problem solving and how to think both critically and creatively was in preparation for solving this one puzzle. He wondered how long it would have taken him to figure out that something which was supposed to be a constant — an immutable, invariable, unquestionable fact — was flat-out wrong. When would he have remembered that the only way to solve some problems was to Question Everything?

Arik knew that all these new premises he was forming led to one unavoidable, unyielding, and very simple conclusion: he would never be allowed to leave the room he was in with the knowledge he now possessed. Even before he had figured out the truth about his parents and Rosemary, it was clear that he'd seen and figured out way too much to ever be allowed to communicate with anyone in Gen V again.

Darien had promised to be there in an hour. He sent Arik a short video message apologizing again for not being able to get there sooner. Once again he committed to answering all of Arik's questions, promised to explain and to stay for as long as Arik needed him to. And then, Darien added, they would discuss options, figure out what was next, determine the best course of action for everyone. But Arik knew that this was no different from any other decision he had ever been presented with. In the end, it would not be his to make. His remaining time and energy were better spent preparing rather than trying to resist.

His top priority was to protect his terraforming research. He knew it would not be safe in the central quantum storage grid, no matter how well he obscured, encrypted, or obfuscated it. He thought about trying to transcribe it to silicon paper, but an hour wasn't nearly enough time, and he knew that a request for a notebook would be met with suspicion and that its contents would be reviewed. Even if he used a cipher, and even if nobody managed to break it, his work would never find its way back to him or anyone else who could successfully interpret it. There was only one place Arik could think of where the data could be safely concealed and that no one would think to look for it: the ODSTAR device that he and Cadie had built.

Fai had blocked Arik's access to all known communication protocols at the network level, correctly assuming that even if Arik were to write a new protocol that the network routers were not able to detect, no other nodes on V1CC's network would know how to interpret it. What Fai had not taken into account, however, were communication protocols that Arik had already written and that other nodes on the network already understood.

Arik had decided to write a custom protocol for transferring data to and from ODSTAR in order to increase its efficiency and simplify the hardware. The process of encoding and decoding data to and from strands of DNA was time-consuming, so Arik wrote a protocol that buffered the data and fed it to ODSTAR as the device was able to process it. Fai had been too proud to ask Arik for any details about how ODSTAR worked which meant he had no idea that the protocol existed and therefore couldn't have blocked it. Arik searched for the ODSTAR node on the network, and found that it was available, ready to read or write data to or from any network node that knew the proper protocol. As a test, Arik queried it for available space, and ODSTAR reported that there was over 600 megabytes of storage capacity remaining in the specialized twenty-forth chromosome that Cadie engineered. During the process, no communication packets had been blocked or dropped.

It took several minutes to compress and transfer all the data, and for it to be successfully encoded. Once Arik was certain it had all been copied and had verified its integrity, he removed the ODSTAR node from the network, then deleted the protocol library he had written to communicate with it. Without the library, and without a specification describing how the protocol worked, it would be nearly impossible for anyone but Arik to read or write data from ODSTAR again.

The last thing Arik needed was a time capsule. He needed something he could bury deep inside V1CC's code base with the truth about V1 encoded in it so abstractly and obtusely that it would be meaningless to everyone else in V1 but him. Since he had to assume that his workspace would be compromised, he needed something he could hide in plain sight, something that would find its way back to him without him needing to go looking for it, something that Fai himself would deliver right to Arik at precisely the right time. One thing the Code Pod loved to delegate to Arik were incoherent and unrecognizable error codes in the shell program. They claimed they didn't have the time to spend on such trivial tasks, but Arik knew that most of them simply didn't understand the shell program's code base well enough to debug it themselves. Somehow Arik needed to express the truth about V1 in the span of a single error code — condense everything he had learned into one line of alphanumeric characters that would baffle everyone in the Code Pod, but speak as clearly to him as a prophetic voice from the past.

By the time Darien arrived, the table was next to the bed again, and the chair was back in the corner. Arik's workspace was closed, and he was lying on the bed with his back to the door. He didn't react when the panels snapped open and the man who raised him stepped in.

Darien stood just inside the room and silently watched Arik for several seconds before he spoke.

"You must have quite a few questions for me," Darien finally said.

"No," Arik said without rolling over or opening his eyes. "I don't want to know anything else. I just want to forget."

Darien nodded at Arik's back. "I think that's best," he said sympathetically. "I really think that's the right decision. I'll go get Dr. Nguyen."

Darien left and the door snapped shut. Several minutes later, Arik felt the air circulation in the room change very slightly, and then he fell asleep. The next time he woke up, his brain was exposed, and he felt tingling in his head.