Book Five, Chapter 41: Mutagen 6

Book Five, Chapter 41: Mutagen 6

We lost track of Bobby and the surrogates as they fled the superbugs, but I knew where Bobby was going. Occasionally, as we followed slowly behind, we would come across one of the mutant bedbugs, and either Dina or I would have to squash it with our feet.

If one came up that was too big to handle, we could always call for Antoine.

Bobby had managed to get the surrogates into his hiding spot at the dispensary.

Dina and I found a communication relay and listened as IBECS fed us their conversation upon request. That kind of convenience was only possible because I had run through all the conversation trees we needed to have to get to that point.

"You tell us what’s going on out here right now," Michael said in a threatening manner to Bobby.

Bobby took a moment to think through his lines. I wondered if Carousel was giving him lines on the script based on the story we made up or if he had to come up with them wholesale—and if that was the case, what was on the script?

"I didn’t do anything," Bobby said. "It was you—all you scabs and KRSL. I had a grant from the government, alright? I was sent here to find a way to feed starving people in space. I did not do this. I was promised this would be a contaminant-free ship and that their onboarding methods were 100% foolproof at detecting and eliminating pests. I should have known everything they promised was a lie.”

There was a pause while the surrogates took in what he was saying.

“One of you tracked a bedbug onto the ship," Bobby said. "They've been feeding and multiplying for a year and a half. And about four months ago, the bedbugs finally made it into my lab. At first, they just fed on me, but then they found my livestock. And after they found them, the bugs weren’t so interested in me."

"Livestock?" Andrew asked. "Are you talking about the protein lab?"

"The same," Bobby answered. "My livestock are humanely grown from embryo to never suffer and to be the ideal candidates for my experiments."

"What experiments?" Michael asked incredulously.

"Mutagen 6," Bobby said. "I'm one of the few who is licensed to experiment with it."

I was curious to know how they were going to respond. There was no such thing as Mutagen 6 on IBECS—not until Bobby said there was, at least.

"Mutagen 6? Are you kidding me?" Andrew asked.

"It’s a safe variant," Bobby answered, "designed to grow food faster and more of it on less supply. I can grow a full herd of beef on nothing but algae in a month and a half, just with a little tweak of genetics and chemistry. It’s perfectly legal and safe."

"Legal?" Andrew said. "It’s legal in that you’re allowed to experiment with it in outer space, but not back in Carousel, where it could get into the ecosystem and start altering living creatures."

"That’s propaganda," Bobby said. "All it does is make the creatures grow and make them resilient to any number of diseases. Or at least, that’s all I thought it did."

There was a pause.

"The bedbugs," Andrew said.

"The bedbugs," Bobby answered. "The pure Mutagen 6 ran through the bloodstreams of those animals at levels we had never experimented with back in Carousel. Once they started feeding on the cattle and the goats, they weren’t so interested in humans anymore. They were hooked."

"What are we talking about here?" Michael asked. "Are they on steroids or something? Because the things I saw... I don’t really understand. One of those things had human teeth."

"Not human," Bobby said. "I believe those were from a cow. No matter. Yes, the mutagen created some offspring of the bedbugs with genetic features of the creatures they fed on."

"I don’t understand," Andrew said. "Once those things started to spread, why did IBECS not register them and take care of them?"

"I don’t understand it either," Bobby said. "I do know that these old AIs are usually mishandled and given protocols that make it difficult for them to overcome circumstances their programmers didn’t foresee."

"Yes, I’ve heard the same," Andrew said. "Makes you wonder why you’d want an AI if you were going to take away its ability for creative thinking. What do you suppose is preventing it from triggering its defensive protocols?"

"My first thought," Bobby said, "was that it whitelisted the animals inside my lab. Or, at the very least, it was told to whitelist them. But then, how would the AI confuse these monsters with cows? No, there’s something deeply wrong with its programming. I’ve spoken to IBECS—it doesn’t even seem to register there’s an infestation."

"It never mentioned anything about it to us," Andrew said. "If it is somehow unable to even communicate about this particular problem, perhaps it has no protocol for a mutated pest."

"Whatever the case," Bobby said, "if we can find a way to initiate its defensive protocols, we may actually be able to get out of this ship before we run out of gas."

"What do you mean, 'run out of gas'?" Lila asked, speaking up for the first time.

"Don’t you know?" Bobby replied. "These things—they’re notoriously fuel inefficient. We’re supposed to fuel up soon, and if there’s no one at the helm to override and make sure it happens manually, well... we’re going to be spending the rest of our lives together."

I grouped back up with Antoine, Kimberly, and Cassie.

"It sounds like Bobby’s doing a good job of getting them motivated to get to the helm," I said.

"Are we sure there aren’t gonna be any more puzzles?" Kimberly asked.

I shrugged. "There might be puzzles," I said, "but the real focus will be on the monsters."

That was one way to solve the puzzle: replace it with a giant mutated bedbug. There was always going to be conflict in a story, but through improvisation, you can choose the conflict—and we chose a fight with mutant pests. That was the magic of reruns. You could learn enough about a story to learn how it ticked and then change things up a bit. Sure, we would be docked points for sidestepping the themes, but hey, at least we were getting somewhere.

Now, when the surrogates had to move forward in the ship, their struggle wouldn’t be against a mind-numbing puzzle that we had to explain to them. It would simply be a fight—one we could help them with without appearing On-Screen.

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Up ahead, Bobby screamed, "There’s a junction where we should be able to pass through!"

"Where’s Lila?" Michael screamed.

She, of course, had wandered off and was hugging her child's baby blanket tightly.

"We can’t leave without her," Andrew said. They started screaming her name. "Lila, where are you? We need to go!"

And, of course, the pattern that had started to show itself in our first run repeated itself here. Lila was going to get one of them killed.

And she would have, except she was Off-Screen for just long enough for me to get to her.

I was in the room, in the darkness, waiting Off-Screen, and the moment I had a chance, I ran up behind Lila, scooped her up by the armpits, set her on her feet, and all but pushed her out toward the door and into the hallway.

"Stay here and wait for them to get here," I told her.

See, what was going to happen was that they were going to go into the storage room where Lila was, and it would be a kill box.

They wouldn’t be able to escape—something similar had almost happened in attempt #3, except with one of the traps/puzzles instead of mutants. But I got her out of there and quickly slipped back into the shadows, where Dina was around the corner, watching as they passed.

Sure enough, as they came across her in the hallway, they grabbed her and carried her forward to the next junction as the monster began overtaking them.

They didn’t even have time to be mad at her about the baby blanket drama.

The junction was the same type of place where the original plasma grid had been, the one they had to solve to get across, but because the battle, in this case, was with the human-looking bedbug, the plasma grid was gone and replaced with a few simple plasma turrets that functioned in the same way.

The four of them ran into the junction, and Bobby guided them to the far right corner instead of running toward the exit.

We had scoped this puzzle out.

"You have to be careful in here!" Bobby screamed. "These things turn on their own when the power fluctuates. It’s not meant for humans to enter!"

The large, humanoid bedbugs followed them in, and that’s where their fate was sealed—the bedbugs’ fate, that is—because far on the right side of the ship, Antoine was waiting to start turning on generators and every single device he could find.

He was using his Playbook ability, which allowed him to know the exact timing of his part in a plan. As he turned on the power over there, the plasma beams would move around in the relay room.

The exact time was when the bedbugs stepped into the plasma chamber. While Bobby and the surrogates hid in the one safe area of the room, the plasma chamber came to life as the circuit started to move around, slicing through bedbugs as they tried to make it across the room.

It smelled like burnt hair, almonds, and fresh lobster.

"Alright, wait," Bobby said. "On my mark, we race to the exit."

Andrew looked at him in amazement that he would know how this plasma grid substitute worked.

"What?" Bobby said. "I’m a science officer. I know things like this. Getting sufficient power to my lab was a pain in the rear. I know these designs like the back of my hand."

A few moments later, Bobby had them running across the back of the room toward the exit.

Now, after the understated Second Blood, all that remained was the Finale, and it was just a straight-up fight.

We followed along, encountering more mutants, making our way toward the helm and the final battle, and being informed of what was going on by Isaac and Ramona.

We were in the final stretch.

"Looks like IBECS is taking his time to step in," Antoine said.

I nodded. "We were hoping for too much. Unfortunately, a deus ex machina doesn't come in until the end. Things have to get worse before they can get better."

It was true that IBECS had told me that if there were invaders, it could step in and help. But at the end of the day, that could never happen at the beginning of the story.

We had to earn it.

It wasn’t our only plan. We had backups, but we were hoping to see it.

As time marched forward, and we were all covered in whatever blood the bedbugs had within them, we eventually found the battle we had been looking for.

There was a reason that Carousel had relocated Bobby’s lab to the front of the ship, connecting it to the network of halls along the spacefaring labyrinth—because it needed to be plausible for what happened next.

"I wasn’t able to go past this point," Bobby said. "That was a month ago. Who knows how infested things are now?"

He must have realized his lab had been relocated because he saw the door to the protein lab.

It was torn open.