18 — Data

Rational self-interest presumes a desire for preservation. Vengeance discards this premise entirely. It is the rapid, uncontrolled liquidation of an asset’s total future value to purchase a single moment of destruction. In this state, the economic actor ceases to be a productive component and becomes a kinetic projectile. It is a transaction where the final cost of the purchase is the purchaser themself.

—Naomi Feld, The Liability of Emotion: Human Factors in Economic Collapse

The chime at the lab’s entrance was an unwelcome intrusion. Sharon had been standing before the main holo display, lost in the intricate beauty of the lethal prion. The simulations were promising, but progress was slower than she had hoped. At least the team in the lab had begun working with improved efficiency as they got to know each other’s idiosyncrasies.

Sharon looked through the holo to the entrance to see DC Hatch come in, Alene and Ari behind him. Her initial thought was that their dynamic had fundamentally changed. They stood near each other, not quite touching, but occupying the same space, as if held together by an ionic bond. Something tightened within her ribs, only to cinch more when she saw the dark bruise on Alene’s throat and Ari’s hollowed look.

“Good God,” she said. “You look—”

“Occupational hazards,” Alene said, her voice a rough rasp. She gestured to her throat. “Apologies.”

“It’s good to see you—both of you.” The sight of Ari, beaten up and cast down, affected her such that she gripped the workbench to stabilise herself. She forced the sensation away by turning to the holo and her science.

“I’ve made progress,” Sharon said, her focus back on the work. “Ari, your idea, it’s more than possible, I think it’s the solution. A bio-dampener to isolate the SA node, and a micro-pacemaker to regulate the heart—”

“Dr Feld, disposal on the failed set?” At the far bench, Mara lifted a sealed culture caddy.

Sharon pointed to a steel door with blinking green status light above it. “Disintegrate it. Full sterilisation cycle.”

Mara nodded and left.

Sharon continued. “Where was I? Right, the heart has intrinsic automaticity. It will keep beating if severed from the brain, but at one unchanging rate. The patient would die from the slightest exertion because the heart couldn’t speed up to match the need. That’s why we need a new type of exertion aware pacemaker—to simulate the variable rhythm the brain can no longer provide. It will work.”

“That’s good,” Ari said, his voice flat.

“That’s good?” Sharon said. “Ari, we did it. Where thousands of scientists failed, we succeeded. We’ll save billions of people.”

Alene took a step forward, partially blocking Ari from Sharon.

Alene glanced at Sharon’s team, then back at her. “There have been new developments you need to know about. Not here.”

Sharon understood immediately. She led them to a small, glass-walled conference room adjacent to the main lab. “Hatch, secure the room.”

DC Hatch nodded. He tapped the control panel by the door, and the transparent walls instantly frosted, turning opaque. The buzz of the lab faded, encasing the four of them in bidirectional noise-cancelled silence.

“What’s going on?” Sharon asked.

“Before I begin,” Alene said, turning to her constable. “Hatch, what you’re about to hear may make you feel conflicted about your duty, but you and I both swore the same oath to serve the CGS. I do that by serving the truth. Do you trust that?”

Hatch looked confused. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve always trusted your commitment. I don’t understand.”

“This isn’t about my commitment. It’s about whether you can stay resolute when the truth may be uncomfortable for you. If not, leave now.”

“No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am.” Hatch stood up straighter. “It’s our job to find the truth, whatever it is. I can face any danger with you.”

Alene appraised him, her hand at her chin.

“Conviction is easy in a secure room, Hatch,” she said. Her voice was low. A warning shot.

She held the silence for a beat longer then lowered her hand. “You’ll do for now. Just keep your eyes open. And don’t make me regret this.”

Ari’s leg bounced under the table while he tapped a frantic, silent rhythm on his other thigh. “Now that we have the constable’s consent, can we get to it?”

“We have evidence that implicates Councillor Herbert as the architect of the pandemic,” Alene stated.

Sharon and Hatch both stared at her.

Hatch spoke first. “Ma’am, that isn’t funny. I can understand if you want to test my conviction, but what’s this really about?”

“She’s deadly serious,” Ari said. “Can we get on with this? Sharon, we need to know…”

“Hold on, Ari, we need to let them catch up.” Alene put a hand on his arm and his tapping stopped. Sharon was surprised by the power Alene had over him.

Alene, gaze steady, continued. “We have a recorded transmission from the same secure channel that Ari previously intercepted. It was her, Councillor Herbert, talking to the same Asian co-conspirator Ari saw in the first transmission. We also found buried committee minutes. The motive is overpopulation.”

Sharon felt the blood drain from her face. Francis? The woman who had been a fixture in her life for a decade and the pillar of the CGS?

“No,” Hatch said, his voice shaking. “That’s madness. That’s, that’s impossible. Councillor Herbert? She’s a hero. She made The Founder’s vision come true. It must be a mistake.”

Sharon’s mind raced, trying to reconcile the woman she knew with the cold calculus of mass genocide. “Hatch is right. It can’t be Francis,” Sharon insisted, grasping for a logical alternative. “Maybe someone is framing her.” She looked at Alene, her mind seizing on the flaw. “Think about it. Why would Francis give me this lab? Give me this team? Why would she fund my research at the highest priority if she was the one who released the pathogen? It’s a logical contradiction.”

“Unless,” Alene countered, “she’s controlling the investigation. Giving you the illusion of progress while containing the outcome. How well do you know your team, Doctor? Are they loyal to you, or to the councillor who assigned them?”

Sharon stared at her. “That’s a bit much. They’re just researchers.”

Ari interjected. “I didn’t believe it either, but I know what I saw. The thing is that we need to prove it either way. Either she did it, or she didn’t. I want to know. I need to know.”

“The evidence will tell us,” Alene said. “Right now, we operate as if it’s true. Which means we need more evidence to corroborate what we know. We have the why, the motive of protecting the CGS’s peace by ensuring that the population is sustainable. We need the how. If Councillor Herbert did this, how was it produced? How was it distributed?”

Sharon’s mind pivoted to the data she had been analysing. The return to the solvable felt like oxygen.

“We need to uncover the delivery method,” Alene said. “How do you infect billions of people?”

“Mass distribution requires a ubiquitous vector,” Sharon said. “Something everyone is exposed to. Injection or ingestion are the most likely candidates for a prion.”

Alene began stroking her chin with her thumb and forefinger. “The Council controls all food production and delivery. It also runs global vaccination programmes. Either one could be the delivery mechanism.”

“Food comes from everywhere,” Ari said, “but vaccine production is limited to only a few regions, I think maybe Scandia, Sertão-Caatinga, and Hindustan. That seems like a better place to start, but the last mandatory global vaccine campaign was what—four years ago?”

“Latency,” Sharon said, the answer automatic. As she spoke, Ari glanced at Alene, quick and involuntary. The gesture stung more than it should have. “Prion diseases can have incredibly long incubation periods,” she continued, pushing the irritation down. “Mad Cow, Kuru… they can lie dormant for years, even decades. We have no way of knowing when the initial infection occurred. It could have been yesterday via contaminated food supply, or four years ago via a vaccine.”

“Your correlating data,” Alene said. “What Hatch sent me yesterday?”

Sharon and Hatch both nodded.

“And what does that mean?” Ari asked. He looked at each of them in turn.

“Using the data I gave Sharon, she and Hatch found a connection between symptom onset and specific clinic visits from four years ago,” Alene said. “It could be the point of infection via a vaccine campaign.”

“If this is the how and Francis had anything to do with it, the evidence would be in her office,” Ari said, his voice suddenly urgent. “She’s meticulous. She records everything on a private RAID array in her office.”

Hatch looked at Ari suspiciously. “And how would you know about her private data storage?”

“Because it was my bloody job, Constable,” Ari said, getting to his feet. “She didn’t trust anyone else with it. Do you have any other brilliant questions?” He turned back to Alene. “It’s the only way to get the evidence we need.”

“Alright,” Alene said. “I’ll arrange for a search warrant from Baron.”

Ari let out a ragged yelp that was half-laugh, half-sob. He took a step towards Alene, his whole body thrumming with a feverish energy. “I’m not waiting for a sodding search warrant! I’m breaking in there tonight. I need to know!”

“Don’t be absurd,” Alene said. “We do this properly or we lose before we begin.”

“Are you all blind?” he shouted, turning to face them, his eyes wild. “I can understand her not seeing it.” He jabbed a shaking hand towards Sharon. “She’s always too busy with her clever explanations.”

“What the hell!” Sharon said. “I’m just trying—”

“Look at me,” he pleaded, his voice cracking. He held out his hands.

Sharon’s anger vanished. His skin was slick, wax-pale under the lab’s neutral light. His hands were shaking.

The prion symptoms were unmistakable.

Oh, God. No, she thought.

She caught Hatch from the corner of her eye, hand half-raised to his mouth.

The lethal protein in her models was in his brain, in the tremor running through his fingers. He was dying. Her throat closed and she gasped for air.

She glanced at Alene. Something bare—grief? anger?—flashed across the DCI’s face, so fast Sharon might have imagined it. Then it was gone. Alene’s expression locked down, her jaw tight, professional to the last cell.

“Ari,” Sharon said in a choked whisper. “When? How long have you—”

“Does it matter?” he shot back, a raw, terrified rage in his eyes. “A day. Two. That’s why I can’t wait for a warrant. If she did this, I want to stop her. Me. I want revenge.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Sharon said, her voice regaining a desperate, sharp authority. She stood, approaching him, wanting to touch him, to anchor him. “You’re staying here. You’ll be the first human trial. We can test the dampener. I can fix this.”

Ari just looked at her, a strange, pitying sadness in his fever-bright eyes. “And what if you can’t? What if it’s all bollocks? Maybe some things can’t be fixed. No. I’m going. I’m the only one who can get into her data storage.”

“Then I’m going with you,” Hatch blurted out, stepping forward. “This is an information violation at the highest level. It’s my duty.”

Alene put a hand on his chest. “No, Constable. You’re not. You have a career, a future. I won’t let you burn it on this. You will stay here to protect Dr Feld and her research. Nothing is more important.” She looked at Ari. “I’ll go.”

For a long moment none of them moved.

“Right,” Alene said. She got up and activated the conference table display. “If we’re going in, we plan it. I need the building schematic—entrances, patrols, sensor radii.”

She pulled up a diagram of the CGS Building, her movements precise, tactical. “We’ll go in through the Council staff entrance on the east side. The first obstacle is the biometric scanner at the entrance. It’s tied to the central server. We can’t bypass it.”

Sharon grasped for the familiar. Work the problem. “Don’t go through the main entrances,” she said. “It’s too exposed.”

“It’s the only way in,” Alene countered, her tone clipped with frustration.

“For people, yes, that’s how they get into a building. Don’t think of it as a building,” Sharon replied, walking to the display. She pulled up a new schematic. The building’s environmental and waste reclamation systems. “Think of it as an organism. It has to breathe. It has to excrete waste. These maintenance shafts bypass all internal biometrics.”

Alene gave a short nod.

“Okay,” Alene said. “Show me the respiration cycle.”

For a moment they fell into rapid exchange, their ideas overlapping. “You can cut through the primary HEPA filters here,” Sharon said, pointing. “Which bypasses the main hall sensors,” Alene added.

“It won’t work.” Ari’s voice cut through their planning. They both turned. He was leaning against the opaque wall. The feverish sheen on his face caught the conference room’s light.

“What?” Alene said, her patience thin.

“It won’t work. Gus, my friend, he’s in CGS security. The entire sub-level is a fortress and all the access points have redundancies on redundancies. Biometrics, pressure plates, patrols. We’re not getting in that way.” He looked up, his eyes burning with reckless clarity. “There’s only one way in that isn’t hardened. Through the dome.”

“That’s insane,” Sharon breathed. “How do you get to the dome if you can’t get into the building?”

“We’ll fly in,” Ari said. He pushed himself off the wall, his body rigid. “But first, I need to eat.”

He turned and limped out of the lab, not waiting for a reply. Alene gave Sharon a brief look of exasperation and dread bound tight together, then went after him.

Sharon was left alone with Hatch in the humming silence. The young constable looked pale, the simple shock of a man in way over his head.

“Fly in?” he whispered, more to himself than to her. “That’s mental.”

He’s dying, she thought. The grief closed once around her heart.

“Constable Hatch,” she said, her voice all business. “We have work to do.”

---

They found an open-air noodle stall in an alcove of the Covent Garden Cultural Zone, a place Ari usually avoided. The nineteenth-century ironwork was pristine, and the cobblestones were worn but perfectly level. Sizzling oil, spice, and ginger rode out of hidden vents while cultural interpreters in period aprons served food made from Sup-delivered ingredients.

They sat at a shaded rickety table. Ari ordered a large bowl of noodles and ate from the paper container with ravenous desperation. The hunger was real, his metabolism burning through him as if it meant to use him up before morning. Alene pushed a piece of broccoli around her plate with her chopsticks.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“You’ve been quiet since the lab.”

“It’s nothing,” she said again.

A tense silence settled between them. Ari’s hunger felt obscene in the face of her stillness. He tried to take another bite, but the tremor was back in his hands. His fingers spasmed and a clump of noodles slipped, landing on the table with a pathetic splash.

What a bloody shambles, he thought, a hot flush of anger, not at the mess, but at his own failing hardware. He glanced at a nearby table, where a family of tourists ate. He looked back at the slick mess on his own table.

Alene didn’t even seem to notice the spill, her focus distant.

“It’s just that, well, you’re probably going to die tomorrow morning, and we’re sitting here eating Chinese food.”

He stopped, the chopsticks frozen in his shaky hand. The statement was so blunt, so devoid of protocol, it momentarily short-circuited him. He managed a weak smile. “I’m the one who’s dying, and it’s ruining your appetite?”

She tried to smile back, but her lip trembled.

“Oh, I don’t care so much about you dying,” she said, her voice brittle. “I’m much more concerned about what will happen to me—I’m going to miss you.”

Near the end of the sentence, her voice broke. A tear traced her cheek. Motion a few tables over pulled Ari’s gaze to a cultural interpreter demonstrating a tea ceremony, every turn of the wrist rehearsed and lifeless. He looked back at Alene. Her tear felt more real than the entire market around them.

Ari put down his chopsticks. The food in his stomach turned to lead. He had no protocol for this. “I don’t see how you can have any feelings for me when you know that I’ll be dead tomorrow.”

“Feelings don’t work that way,” she said, her voice roughening into anger. “But of course you don’t see. Nine years of marriage and you still know bugger all about her, do you?”

“You don’t know anything about us,” he snapped back, “I wouldn’t judge so quickly if I were you.”

Ari shoved his hands deep into his pockets. He glared at the table, but his focus drifted. He saw the cultural interpreter at the next stall holding a light disc over a menu.

A memory from their Mono ride over from Sharon’s lab ambushed him. Simple coffins, grim-faced carriers, and the mourners holding those same light discs.

Clammy sweat broke out on his forehead. He was symptomatic. It was only a matter of time. A wave of dizziness washed over him, the fever pressing behind his eyes, the curated market sounds blurring into a low, digital roar. He braced himself on the unstable table, trying to focus.

He surfaced from the haze to find Alene watching him. Her chopsticks lay idle beside the cooling food.

“The reason I said that, about missing you, the reason this is hard, is because you see me.” She leaned in, forcing him to meet her gaze. “You’re the only person I’ve met who doesn’t just look at things. You see them. The schematic, how the parts connect. You don’t get stuck on the label the world puts on the casing. You see me for who I am, not the man that I was.” Her voice dropped to a raw whisper. “The rest of the world just sees the original error.” Another tear spilled from her eye. “That’s what they tell you. That you’re still broken. That it would be better if you were just replaced.”

He shook his head, a tremor jittering the movement. “No. You fix it. You find the fault and you repair it.”

The words came from an old part of him. Every fix he made hardened the firewall he had put up to protect him from having to accept the one repair he could never make.

A pained laugh escaped her. “Exactly,” she said, her eyes shining. “But it takes a fight. It takes massive courage to say to the world no, I will not be replaced. I am repaired.”

She put a hand on the table, palm up and waited. Ari took one hand out of his pocket and put it in hers.

“So yes, I will miss you, Ari Feld.” She wiped away her tears and gave him a weak smile. “Because I love you for seeing me as I am.”

He stared at her. She held his gaze, tear-bright and furious. Her word, repaired, coursed around in his mind. She was whole in a way he had never managed.

He took his hand back and brought his other hand out of his pocket. With it came the small broken circuit board. He held its corners with his thumbs and forefingers. He had kept this board when the rest had gone in the bin because it came from a personal project, from a machine built to see the mysteries hidden in living tissue.

“Why is that important?” Alene asked.

He didn’t look up. His voice was a choked whisper. “The scope.”

“What?”

“It’s from a cellular imaging scope. Something I built for Sharon.”

That broken board mattered because of what it had belonged to, and because of who had stood beside him while he made it. It mattered because of what was left broken. He fixed the scope but he hadn’t fixed himself. He hadn’t fixed the marriage he had left Sharon to carry for both of them.

Ari closed his fingers around the board, pressing it into his palm until the sharp traces stung his feverish skin. The point of keeping the broken board arrived with the pain, too late for him and certainly too late for Sharon.

He remembered the night he’d told Sharon that he was Narinder Feld, that he had changed his legal name to Ari. He had wanted to use the nickname his parents gave him, not the name of the orphaned grandson of the founder from the official vids of his parents’ funeral. He hadn’t known why they called him Ari, but Sharon figured it out. She had never met his parents, yet she saw the shape of their love at once, the Hebrew name tucked inside the Indian one.

He looked up. Benjamin, Santo, the lab attack, Alene’s courage. All of it had combined to create a breach big enough for him to see what still needed to be fixed.

“Thank you,” he said.

He reached out, his hand trembling, and stroked her cheek with his fingertips. She closed her eyes at his touch, leaning into it for a fraction of a second before he pulled it back. Her own hand rose to her cheek, her fingers brushing the spot where his had been.

“Right, enough of that.” Alene took a single, shaky breath. “If we’re going to break into the most secure building in London, we need equipment. I’ll ring my team at the Yard and we’ll head over.”

Ari nodded and the moment passed. The mission, and his deadline, came back into focus. And he still had one final impossible repair.

“Are you barking?” he said. “You want to break into the CGS Building with police kit?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“I believe I do, but it’s a bit more complicated,” he said.