The Fourth Layer Page 3

  “Package for Miss Withers?” called out a voice several hours later, startling Hannah out of her head. She had no idea where her entire morning—and most of her afternoon—had gone. She jumped out of her seat to snatch the tightly-sealed box from the courier’s hands, much to his surprise.

  “Thank you,” Hannah muttered, rushing into the laboratory and over to her bench before Dr. Greene could notice her. Grabbing a scalpel, she sliced open the packaging to reveal a tiny, sterile plastic bag containing an even tinier plastic box. She knew the nanobots were inside.

  “What about instructions?” she wondered aloud, just as her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and unlocked the screen, revealing that Rei had sent her a message on their dark web chat room. It contained everything Hannah needed to know to start working with the miniscule robots, and she smiled.

  Time to get to work, then, Hannah thought, retrieving her lab coat from a hook on the wall before grabbing for a pipette and some buffer to suspend the nanobots in. Yeast and fruit flies today, mice tomorrow. Monitor treated hybridized specimens, untreated hybrids, treated unaffected specimens, and untreated, unaffected specimens as controls. Easy. Standard.

  She could do this. This was going to work.

  ~~~~

  It did.

  Two weeks later and Hannah Withers was staring at the fruits of her labor—previously balding, green mice back to their original, pristine, white coats, no longer capable of photosynthesis and no longer sterile (one of them, in fact, was already pregnant). Aside from the creatures being bigger and more muscular than the control group due to their period of time being affected by the bamboo gene they were completely back to normal. Two generations of flies and countless generations of yeast backed up the results in the mice, demonstrating that the effects of the nanobots was permanent.

  Which meant it was time for Hannah to step up her game and move onto the dangerous, insane phase two: testing the nanobots on herself. Which in turn meant…

  Hannah grimaced. It meant she had to eat products made with Walsanto’s corn, or Walsanto corn-fed animals.

  Guess I should find another place that does milkshakes, she thought, just as Dr. Greene made a beeline straight for her and her nanobot report.

  “Are you going to tell me what your next step is, now that you’ve proven the nanobots could work?” he asked, smiling in an entirely knowing kind of way. Hannah knew he was impressed with her research and how quickly she’d managed to garner such results but also knew, in turn, that he now expected her to come clean about everything she’d avoided discussing with him.

  But she couldn’t.

  “I…will have to monitor the mice for the next few weeks to make sure they don’t regress,” Hannah said, careful to avoid looking her supervisor in the eye. “And I’ll need a few more generations of flies to be fully satisfied with the results, too. I was thinking I should branch into other model organisms, too, just to prove that the nanobots are a blanket solution for any plant or animal. That way the FDA can’t possibly say no to—”

  “That sounds like months and months of work, Hannah.”

  Hannah said nothing. She knew exactly what Dr. Greene was insinuating.

  “Well, what else can we do?” she replied. “Even though Rusty himself was the one who wanted us to work as quickly as possible back when we were working with viral vectors, now we’ve been told to make sure everything unequivocally works through the appropriate channels and timeline. I don’t agree with it—we should be trying this out in humans now—but what can I do? Even if I fully believe the FDA must be in Walsanto’s pocket and has no intention whatsoever of fixing the world I have to dance to their tune at least for now, as it were.”

  Nothing Hannah said was a lie, so Dr. Greene believed every word of it. For Hannah would continue her research in model organisms. It’s just that she would test the nanobots on herself, too.

  Her supervisor sighed. “This bloody mess is…madness. You know they’ve been quarantining humans exhibiting symptoms to try and stop anyone from panicking? They’re calling it a bad bout of the flu. It’s only a matter of time before everyone in America is affected by the Walsanto genes. We know cattle and chickens are both largely affected, already, as well as the corn. Pigs are suspect. We have only weeks left before this becomes a human epidemic. A couple of months at most, if we’re lucky.”

  Hannah glanced at Dr. Greene. They were both on the exact same page in terms of the timescale they needed to be working on. She opened her mouth, halfway towards telling him about what she planned to do, before ultimately thinking better of it. Even if the man agreed that they needed to be testing Hannah’s nanobots on humans he most definitely would not condone Hannah herself deliberately ingesting Walsanto products just to use herself as an experiment.

  “I’m going out for lunch,” she ended up saying. “Do you want anything, Dr. Greene?”

  He stared at her long and hard. “I know you’re hiding something, Hannah. Mark my words that I’ll work it out. Better for you to just tell me now and be done with it.”

  “All I’m doing is going to lunch. It’s lunch time. What is there to hide about that? I go for lunch at one o’clock every—”

  “Okay, I get it,” he said, shaking his head in dismay. “You’re not gonna talk. I already have lunch. Thanks for asking.”

  Hannah ran off before Dr. Greene could push her for answers any more than he already had. She hated lying to him; he’d always supported her from the very beginning. She doubted she’d have had the mental fortitude to stick it all the way through her PhD if Dr. Greene hadn’t been her supervisor. Hannah wasn’t the easiest student to handle, after all. But the man was endlessly patient with her, and knew how to temper her rabbit-hole ramblings expertly.

  Maybe I’d still be talking to my mom if she acted like Dr. Greene, she thought, aimlessly heading for whatever supermarket was closest to campus. If she treated me like a normal person who just so happened to have Asperger’s instead of a completely limited, ‘unfortunate’ person who had somehow managed to make her way into university despite her Asperger’s, then we might have had a shot at a proper mother-daughter relationship.

  She laughed bitterly. There was no time left to dwell upon such matters. They were inconsequential now, anyway; in the face of the world ending who really cared if Hannah Withers and her mother reconciled?

  “I suppose I should be the one who cares,” Hannah muttered, wincing when she laid eyes on a selection of high-sugar granola bars that were definitely Walsanto products. She picked up a blueberry and a peanut butter-flavored one, then threw a ready-made egg and watercress sandwich into her shopping basket alongside them. Lastly she added a bottle of orange soda that was full of corn syrup. “If these don’t mess me up then nothing will…”

  “Excuse me?”

  Hannah blinked at the woman scanning her items through the checkout. “Uh—sorry. Talking to myself.”

  The cashier stood back just a little, as if Hannah’s weirdness was somehow contagious. But then Hannah noticed the slight discoloration around the edges of her face just barely concealed with make-up. Her insides squirmed and coiled like a snake. It wasn’t ‘weirdness’ the woman had to be worried about.

  And Hannah was going to willingly put herself into the same position.

  With a wordless thanks she retreated from the checkout, biting her lip when she heard the cashier mutter, “Stupid Goths! Who even is a Goth these days?” to her co-worker.

  Me, clearly, Hannah thought, running a hand through her long, dark hair and fidgeting with the pleated hem of her black dress in the process. I can’t believe people who mock Goths still exist. Why do some adults make fun of other adults for the way they dress? It’s ridiculous. Especially considering…

  Hannah sighed. If she went about screaming that the world was ending, she’d appear even more batshit-insane than she already did. She needed to look respectable. Intelligent. Even-tempered. Nobody was going to listen to a scatter-brained
scientist who thought it clever to experiment on herself.

  The ‘experimenting on herself’ part was something Hannah had to do, no matter what, which meant it was up to her to ensure the rest of her was trustworthy and believable. She glanced at her tattooed forearms.

  “Time to start wearing shirts and pencil skirts, I guess,” Hannah muttered, hating the mere sound of the words in her mouth almost as much as she did the taste of the artificial orange soda she cracked open and gulped down.

  But it would all be worth it. In a few days she’d swab test herself again, confident that she’d test a higher positive by far than she already had been. Then she’d ingest the nanobots and the main part of her experiment would begin.

  Until then Hannah had no choice but to grin and bear the necessary, unpleasant side-effects.

  Chapter 5

  South Carolina

  Clemson’s Forensic Genetics Lab

  One week had passed since Dr. Greene last spoke to his student, Hannah Withers, about her officially frowned upon nanobot experiments. One week since she knew for sure her hypothesis was sound and that it could, quite possibly, work in humans. One week since she herself had swallowed a large amount of the nanobots. During this time, Dr. Greene had not heard a single word from her in complaint about the FDA and its suspiciously strict attitude towards trying to fix human hybridization before it became a global epidemic. No protests. No insults. No ‘do they not know the world is ending?’ He knew something was up.

  But it wasn’t simply that Hannah was staying quiet on the matter. No, for whatever reason the young woman seemed to have foregone her preferred black-on-black outfit choices. Gone were the fishnet tights, biker boots and leather belts. In came sensible, long-sleeved blouses and knee-length skirts in neutral colors that covered her tattoos.

  Doctor Greene had to admit that he had no idea what was going on. And Hannah seemed to have changed her diet, too, if how hyperactive she’d been in the lab lately was anything to go by. He had no clue why she’d started eating so much sugar—perhaps she wasn’t sleeping.

  Why won’t she talk to me about it? he thought on more than one occasion. He reasoned that perhaps Hannah assumed that he would tell Rusty about anything she was up to. That wasn’t strictly untrue, of course, but it wasn’t the whole truth, either. If Hannah was doing something that Dr. Greene could get behind, then…keeping the President’s right-hand man out of the loop—for a while—was something he’d be willing to do.

  If only Hannah would talk to him.

  ~~~~

  Hannah couldn’t be sure the nanobots were doing their job aside from the fact she still felt decidedly herself. If they were failing…well, she expected her skin would have begun turning gray-green beneath the tapestry of tattoos that covered her arms. In any case, the sensible, ‘normal’ clothes she’d begun wearing covered as much of her skin as possible, just in case.

  She didn’t want Dr. Greene—or anybody else in the Clemson laboratory, or the entire university, or anyone on the street, for that matter—finding out what was going on. If the nanobots failed, then Hannah would obviously have to admit to what she had done to herself, but by then it wouldn’t matter, since humanity would be doomed anyway.

  Not for the first time, Hannah wondered if there were any other scientists around the globe who were fervently trying to rectify the colossal mess Walsanto had created. She certainly didn’t know of any, and if Rusty knew of them, he hadn’t divulged such information to his daughter.

  Would he tell me about them if I asked? Hannah mused. Or would he keep silent on the matter, like he’s keeping quiet about whether he believes the FDA are secretly working for Walsanto?

  She sighed. Her heart was hammering against her ribcage at a mile a minute, making Hannah feel as if her arteries were on the verge of collapsing. It was a mixture of all the sugar she’d consumed at lunchtime and the supreme anxiety and excitement she felt about what she was currently waiting on: the results from the lab’s state-of-the-art tabletop genome sequencer.

  Her genome results.

  Hannah had sequenced her own DNA every two days, focusing on the three Walsanto genes. She’d spent the second evening of her experiment throwing up after discovering that all three genes had already integrated themselves into her base DNA. Though she’d expected it to happen quickly based on her previous experiments on model organisms and all of the affected farm animals, it had still horrified her to no end to see the core sequence that made up her so disgustingly modified. Tampered with. Mutated.

  But the last time she’d sequenced her genome fewer than thirty percent of the genome runs demonstrated the existence of the three demonic genes. Hannah needed a read of under five percent to be sure the genes were appropriately excised from her cells. Ninety-five percent homogeneity for her own genome. Once she saw that figure Hannah could be sure that she had essentially been ‘cured’.

  When the tell-tale whirring of the tabletop sequencer stopped Hannah knew it was time. Now or never, she thought, gulping back her nerves as she opened up the sequence reads on the computer used exclusively for the machine. She closed her eyes before she could stop herself, holding a hand to her chest as if it could prevent Hannah’s heart from bursting out of her chest.

  Hannah whistled a breath out between her teeth, willing her body to stop shaking. For what if she looked at the results and discovered that the presence of the Walsanto genes had gone up? What if it was now higher than thirty percent? What if Hannah had failed, leaving her doomed alongside the rest of humanity? What if—

  She opened her eyes.

  Hannah had to bite down on her hand to stop herself from crying out in relief. The sequence reads were ninety-seven percent homogenous for her own genome. Only three percent foreign. Three percent. Another day with the nanobots and they’d be gone entirely, and then there would be no bamboo gene making her cells replicate and grow at an impossibly fast rate; no algae gene allowing her to photosynthesize sunlight and turning her skin green; no terminator gene making her sterile. Hannah had never thought about whether she wanted children or not before. Now she was light-headed with relief, knowing that even if she didn’t want to, she could.

  She couldn’t wait to talk to Rei and Helena over at MIT.

  Hannah fired a message onto the chat board saying she had big news and that she needed to video call as soon as possible. It was another member of Rei’s team—screen name P. Con—who replied.

  Video call somewhere private in two hours? The whole team is with me already.

  Hannah eagerly sent confirmation back to them, saving a copy of her latest genome sequencing results to a hard-drive before grabbing her jacket and laptop and rushing for the door.

  “And just where do you think you’re going? It’s barely noon!”

  Hannah flinched at the sound of Dr. Greene’s voice; she sheepishly turned around to face him, shrugging her shoulders in the process. “Don’t feel well. A bug or something. Don’t want anyone to catch it.”

  The lie fell from Hannah’s lips so easily that even she was impressed by it. Her supervisor cocked his head to one side, regarding her suspiciously, before running a tired hand through his hair and waving her off.

  “Get better soon, then. We need to discuss your research properly over the next couple of days. I’ve given you more than enough privacy to work on it to now—it’s time you brought me back into the loop.”

  Hannah nodded, not trusting herself to be able to lie so glibly a second time, before bolting out the door and into the unusually chilly (for South Carolina) autumn air. Her heartbeat was loud and erratic for entirely positive reasons now.

  She couldn’t wait to finally talk about her experiments out loud.

  Chapter 6

  South Carolina

  Hannah’s Apartment

  Hannah didn’t want to have the video call to MIT from her own apartment now that she’d breathlessly arrived at the place—not least because it meant she had to rush around spotlessly cleaning ever
ything. But she couldn't take the call in public, and the lab was completely out of the question. Doctor Greene was suspicious enough of Hannah already without her trying to surreptitiously have a private video call with a group of nanobot scientists.

  But there was something about having the call in her living room, with the curtains drawn and the windows and front door locked, that made Hannah distinctly feel like she was up to something nefarious. Which wasn’t fair, of course. She was trying to combat something nefarious.

  Having finally completed her frantic clean, Hannah threw off her stuffy, ‘normal people’ clothes and sighed a breath of relief as she slipped on a short-sleeved black dress that fell to her knees and let her hair loose from its up-do to fall around her face. She had half a mind to go through to the bathroom to put on some eyeliner, or dark lipstick, since her make-up was decidedly neutral and pedestrian-looking still. Respectable, as it were. She barely recognized herself these days.

  But Hannah had run out of time. Her video call was due to begin any minute now.

  Settling down onto the sofa, Hannah organized her notes and reports beside her and prepared the camera on her laptop for the meeting. And then she waited, impatiently tapping her fingernails over and over again on her knee. When finally a ringing noise filled the silent living room Hannah jumped in fright, clumsily accepting the call with shaking hands before regaining her composure as best she could in the space of half a second.